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Hello my friends. I hope you are having a fabulous day and a productive week. I have been in a lot of meetings this week, but also got a lot of content done, so that always feels good. I love my days when I have no meetings and I get to get so much done, and I wish there was a way sometimes that that could be my day every day, but it’s not the reality when you are a leader sometimes and you have direct reports, and I love that part too. I mean, just so much to get done, even though I have a lot of meetings, every meeting is so productive and it’s amazing. This month, we have a lot of goals, this quarter really we have a lot of goals as a company and we’re on track for all of them. And it’s just cool to see it all come together and my team work together in the way that we do. I just get to work with such brilliant, brilliant people and so proud every day to see the team that we’ve built. 

So anyways, today, I guess you’re going to call this a little bit of a rant. I don’t know. So I recently read a book that I’m actually not going to share the title of it, cause I don’t want it to be a direct call out of this author, but it’s a well-known book in the internet marketing space specifically that came out in the last year, and I wasn’t going to read it. It got sent to me and I wasn’t going to read it because, you know, I live and breathe marketing, so it’s rare to find a book about sales funnels and marketing that I get a lot out of that. It’s usually below, it’s not written for me, right? Clearly this person, this author, definitely didn’t write the book for somebody like me. They wrote it for a much more beginner marketer. Kind of like how I wrote my book. Which is fine, but I decided to read the book because sometimes I get something out of it in terms of my own teaching, because we have our Ignite students and sometimes there’s ways that people teach something, or coach, or set up content, or explain something that I like and I get something out of it. 

So I read this book and I have some thoughts after it about the absolute overwhelm in marketing and how there’s a lot of mentors, I guess you’d call them, or teachers, out there who are just contributing to this. So this book, I saw a lot of good feedback about it and people said it was one of the best of the books this author has written, and so I read it and here’s the takeaway. It was a fine book. It was fine. It was definitely written for the beginner person and the writing style was like very basic, which is fine, and so was my book, probably. 

But I was mad as I was reading it because in the book, it’s definitely thorough with strategy that you should do with organic social media, and paid traffic on all the different platforms, and sales funnels, and your outreach, and your networking, and your PR, and your Facebook groups, and all the things, and it’s definitely comprehensive of all those things. Here’s the problem. This author gave all these suggestions with every piece of the marketing, but didn’t really help people determine what they should focus on, and I think it’s doing a massive disservice to entrepreneurs and business owners out there today to teach them that you have to go do everything, and be everything, and be everywhere. 

I mean, this book was like, “spend an hour a day on Instagram, spend an hour a day on Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook messenger, Facebook ads, organic social media, Facebook lives, Instagram lives.” Literally every single thing you could think of, Instagram live, Instagram TV. All the things which are great, but they were saying do all those things. The instructions in the book was like, you should be doing all of these things, and that was just part of it. Then they had Google ads and YouTube ads, and they had Dream 100, and PR, and networking with groups. 

I’m not saying the advice was bad. I’m saying it’s impossible for one single entrepreneur, or even myself with a team of three full-time employees in my marketing department alone, it’s impossible to do all those things and to do all those things well. So while you can give advice, and you can absolutely write a book and say, “here’s the best practices for all of these platforms,” the overall message, which is the message out there by way too many influencers in my opinion, is that you need to be everywhere, do everything, and completely create this overwhelm in your marketing. I think I see a lot of students and potential clients come through our door who are completely overwhelmed and paralyzed because the running around trying to show up on Facebook, show up on Instagram and do their Instagram stories, show up in their Facebook group, write emails, publish a podcast, figure out Facebook ads, all of these things that they are not able to do anything effective. 

So while I think it’s fine to give advice about all of these platforms, that advice should be tailored with don’t do all of these things, make sure you choose some of these things to focus on, and that was nowhere in this book. So if I was a new entrepreneur and I read this by the end of the book, I would have been completely overwhelmed because I wasn’t even doing half, if not a quarter of all the things mentioned in this book, and then maybe I would try and go do some of those things, but it would be impossible. I know that this book was definitely written for business owners who don’t have a massive team, and the person writing the book, I don’t know how big their team is, but I can guarantee you, they have a marketing team of 10 to 20 people that are supporting them in this. 

So this is the problem with marketing, these authors, and teachers, and coaches, will give advice based on what they think is the best and then not take into consideration exactly where their audience is and that they don’t have a massive team. They don’t have all of the years of experience. They don’t have the same product. They don’t have the same audience as the person teaching. And that’s what’s always driven me crazy is there are these courses and things out there that are like, “this is the only way to do marketing. This is the one way to do it and everybody needs to listen to what I’m saying,” when marketing is unique to your business. And so for you, you might show up really great on Instagram stories and just ignore Instagram TV and Instagram live, and even posting on Instagram. I don’t know. What works for your business? What works for your brand? And are you taking that into consideration when you create your marketing strategy? 

I didn’t have an issue with the actual content in the book. I thought it was basic. It was accurate, but also there was nowhere in the book that was like, don’t do all these things, you need to focus your marketing. So of course there’s all these people completely overwhelmed, and then what happens is six, nine, 12 months goes by and nobody makes any progress, and they don’t get their funnel launched. They’re not seeing leads and success because they’re doing everything 10%, running around like crazy. 

The other thing that really leads to overwhelm that bugs me, is this specific book was talking about how when they described their daily social media strategy, I read it and I was like, “that sounds absolutely terrible as an entrepreneur.” It was like, “do 10 to 50 stories a day throughout the day, take a photo of, take some footage of your kid, of you like on a meeting, of like you doing this, and then make sure you engage in a group for 15 minutes.” It was like crazy, the plan. And they literally put it in a plan with a table and was like, “this is what your day should look like.” It kills me that so many people who read that book are going to go follow that to a T. 

And again, the information and the advice was not bad, but it’s not doable for a new entrepreneur, or even myself. I don’t even want to do that. I don’t want to run around and do 50 stories a day. I’m gonna create my podcast and make a massive impact with my podcast, and that is going to be the generating of all my content and the foundation of it. I’m not doing Instagram stories, Instagram live, Instagram TV, Facebook live, Facebook groups, posting on Facebook, posting on Instagram. Running like that’s crazy, and I have a full marketing team. So it kills me that other entrepreneurs are going to read that and feel like they’re completely failing because they’re probably doing less than 10% of what’s being recommended. 

So again, the information was okay, but it needs to be caveated with don’t do all of this. If you do all this, you will get nothing done, and the importance of focus. Also, if you don’t want to be attached to social media a hundred percent of the time and plugged in like that because you value growing a business where you can think deeply, and stay focused, and make a huge impact in that way. That’s my own personal goal. I have not had social media on my phone in the last month, and I just did a podcast on this, but I was like, I’m not doing stories. I’m not going to document my entire day and lose track of actually living my life with my kids and even in my business, because every second I do something, right, I feel like I have to show the behind the scenes of what I’m doing or it doesn’t count. It’s ridiculous. You don’t have to do that. 

There are so many real business owners, real entrepreneurs out there who have created a ton of success who don’t do that. I’m just tired of this being the image in our industry is that in order to be successful, you have to be everywhere, you have to be on every social media platform, taking every opportunity to connect with your audience. And it’s going to cause complete overwhelm, and it’s not effective. It will not result in quality leads, quantity leads, and sales, because there’s no way for even five people full time to do it well. Somewhere the quality is going to get sacrificed. And that was my problem, and that is why I can tell that in the marketing industry, that there is so much overwhelm because it’s constantly in our face, “here’s the new thing! Messenger bot,” I mean, there was everything in this book, “messenger bots you should be doing,” and like, “now jump on this, and how about this new thing?”

And while yes, the marketing world is changing quickly and new things are introduced quickly, and there’s lots of opportunity out there for you to connect with your audience, also, you don’t have to do everything. As much as you can choose to say no is just as powerful as all the places that you can choose to say yes. The things that you say yes to commit to, you should be able to give 110% of your effort and create that quality end result. 

So in my opinion, this looks like choose one main platform you’re going to show up. YouTube if you want to create YouTube videos. Facebook, yeah, Instagram, they’re kind of piled in one, but then with that, you don’t have to do Facebook lives, Instagram TV, Instagram live, Instagram stories, and posting on both. You don’t have to do a Facebook group. So those were all the things in this book that were like in a calendar saying you should do them all. You do not have to do all of those things, and you shouldn’t do all of those things unless you have a massive team who can help you do all those things. And yes, there’s opportunity in every single one, but not if you can barely get them done, not if you’re doing it to cross off a checklist on a pre-made calendar by this book, or by somebody who told you this is what you should do and it looked cool. 

Choose one platform and one way you’re going to show up. Maybe that’s Instagram stories for you. Maybe that’s really powerful Instagram posts. Maybe that is your Facebook group. Maybe that is Facebook live or Instagram live once a week. I don’t know what it is for you, but whatever it is, choose one, at least one, that you know you can go all in with, you can give 110%, you can create valuable content. For me, it’s actually my podcast. It’s this, and my podcast drives our emails that we send, it drives our social media posts and drives my Instagram stories. I am not on social media. So what’s cool is I’m trying to prove on my social media that you can have a presence, and you can have an authentic, organic behind the scenes presence like I try to have, because I have my assistant who’s here supporting with getting content. I meet with my content manager and give her things to write about that are real about my life, but it’s not requiring me to be on 24 seven because I don’t want that. That’s not a goal for mine.

So choose one main platform that you can create this valuable content. For me, I put most of my content creating effort into this podcast, and I love it, and my audience loves it, and that’s what’s right for me. For you, like I said, it could be YouTube videos, it could even be Pinterest, or something like that. Choose one main platform and show up, give it your all, create quality, and build those really strong relationships through that. And then saying no to everything else. Have power in saying, no to everything else, because that is just as powerful as saying yes to all these other opportunities. And then choose one funnel, and one offer, and get that converting. Get that to a million dollars, get that scaling as fast as you can, and then build in something else after you’ve done that. You don’t have to have a challenge funnel, and a webinar, and an evergreen webinar, and a live launch, and a video series, and all of these things. You do not have to have them to be successful. In fact, they will probably take away from your success. 

Marketing overwhelm is real. It’s being clearly promoted, because I can’t imagine the thousands of people who read this book and then literally take the suggestions in there and try to go replicate it, and then 30 days later feel like a total failure because they can’t keep up with all the recommendations, because it’s impossible. And it is just a massive disservice that more coaches, and creators, and authors are not, in the marketing space, in my opinion, are not speaking to this importance of focus, and instead follow these shiny object syndrome strategies of like all these cool things that you can be doing. Which yes, again, they’re cool. They’re valuable, but not if you’re trying to do 15 other things at the same time. That marketing overwhelm is created from that.

So make, maybe sit down and make a list and say, “what are all the things that I’m committing to in my marketing strategy?” And then really look at that list and say, “can I do all this well?” And then have a list of, “what are all the things that I’m saying no to?” I intentionally said no to Clubhouse recently, and I was like, I’m not doing it. I know for a fact that I could go on Clubhouse, and I could go into these rooms, and I can hold a room or whatever, and I would get leads and I would potentially get clients. I know that, but I also know that my time, where it’s going, that’s not going in Clubhouse right now is more valuable to me, and I’m making that conscious choice. 

So it’s not saying yes to every opportunity that’s going to bring you leads and sales. It’s saying yes to the opportunities that are going to move the needle the most, and consciously choosing to actually not pursue certain marketing strategies. I know that there’s this constant noise out there of like the new thing and you don’t want to get left behind, but I promise you there’s a lot of power in really focusing in on the best way you can connect with your audience, the best strategy, complete marketing strategy you can create and execute, and go and run. I think also. as I was reading this book, this specific author has definitely attracted a lot of business owners who think it’s easy, who think that creating an online business is like just create a funnel and then it will work really well, and it’s easy, and you don’t need to have a real business, you don’t need to build a team. Guess you don’t need to build a team if you don’t choose, but it depends on how big you want your business to. But really just believing that it’s like one big game. I think that this has been attracted because of that shiny object of like, look how easy and cool this is, I just launched this new thing, I just tried this new strategy, I’m on this new software and I’m going to jump over here and do this. 

And I saw a lot of these entrepreneurs actually like going on Clubhouse, which is fine. Like again, I have friends who are choosing to be on Clubhouse and I support them and I think it’s great. They’re seeing results from that, and spending that amount of time for them is worth it, and as long as it’s a conscious choice, that’s fine. But I saw some of these entrepreneurs, even the one who wrote this book, on Clubhouse, and I was just, I’m just thinking I was there in this room with a thousand people and it’s like, what are you, what is your time worth at that point that you are willing to go and just sit there and give that time? And to me, it’s not. 

I want to see more of creating a real business with a plan, and a direction, and intentional strategies. Like we are either intentionally going all in with Instagram and Instagram stories, or we are not. And we are either going all in intentional with Facebook ads or we are not, or YouTube or we are not. And again, there’s just the power in saying no. I am not on YouTube. I am not on Pinterest. I’m not on Clubhouse, because I do not have the bandwidth to be everywhere. And that has allowed me to create a really impactful, powerful, engaging Instagram feed and podcast, and email lists that I can connect with, and that’s my choice. 

So choose one main platform, show up 110% on that platform. Choose one main funnel, one offer, and go all in with that. You don’t have to succumb to this marketing overwhelm that’s making you constantly feel like you’re missing out, constantly feeling like you’re not doing enough, because I promise you it’s not real and it’s not what leads to success. I’ve seen plenty of behind the scenes to back that up. I know for myself too, that if I ever get distracted, and it’s easy to be like, “shoot, well, I’m missing out on this money, or I’m missing out on this opportunity.” I felt that myself on Clubhouse. I’ve even had a few second thoughts of like, “did I make the wrong decision not going on Clubhouse?” because I have that FOMO. And I know I didn’t make the wrong decision. I know I did make the right one for myself. So saying no is just as powerful as saying yes, if not more powerful, and you don’t have to give into this marketing overwhelm that’s in this industry. That is my soap box. Thanks so much for listening today, guys.

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