In December 2018, my husband Hamish and I were broke. Some weeks we couldn’t afford the basics, let alone little luxuries. One morning, I was scrounging around the backseat of my car, trying to get enough change to buy a loaf of bread.
It was in the shower one afternoon when I had an epiphany – it was the ‘aha’ moment that led to me finally pursuing my dream of becoming a confidence coach. Unfortunately, my big ‘aha’ moment dropped into my brain at the worst time ever.
We’d just had our second baby three months prior and I had a toddler. We’d moved into a bigger house to accommodate our growing family – one that we couldn’t really afford – and I’d decided instead of going back to my corporate job, I was working a casual job from home and supporting my husband with his business, a gym, which was on the decline.
I listened to Gary Vaynerchuk’s audiobook Crushing it and there were some tangible lessons that led to me building an incredibly connected community of raving fans, who helped me create impact and financial freedom. Here’s how I did it:
Just show up and create content
I made a commitment to getting my story and my message out there instead of waiting for someone to “discover” me. I created a daily vlog that I showed up for 45 days straight on YouTube. I commited to hosting a live weekly show on Instagram called Q&A Tuesday, where of course, no-one showed up for weeks… until they did. I just kept talking to no-one as if there was an audience there! I started my podcast on an app Gary recommended called Anchor. The podcast was not fancy and was recorded in my car. Now 2.5 years later, we just hit 1 million downloads.
Care about your audience
This was THE most important part of the whole growth process. I showed up every single day and spoke to my audience. I said (and still say) good morning! I take them through my day, I show them the behind the scenes of my life as a mother and business owner, I let them into the good, the bad, the awesome and I say goodnight. So many businesses forget to humanise social media. I don’t call them followers, they are real people who are in my community because the work I do has helped them and I treat them with love, respect and care.
Run live events
People LOVE live events and although Covid has made this a bit difficult, if you are able to do this, the return is incredible. Not only because of ticket sales and upsells, but because humans desire connection and what better way for your clients and prospects to know, like and trust you than by spending a few hours or days at an event with you? I ran live masterclasses every second month and created amazing experiences for women to be with other like-minded women, where I’d teach and serve, and at the end I’d invite them to work with me. This led to me being booked out pretty quickly.
Give clients results ahead of time
Whether on the podcast, at my live events or in Instagram posts and videos, I make it a point to give my clients results with my free content. I want to be the one who gives the most, the one who genuinely helps them achieve results. This makes our events sell out, because the word of mouth from women sharing, tagging me on social media and telling their other female friends about our work helped us grow our audience even more. When people can change their lives with your free content, they realise: imagine what can happen when I pay you for your services?
Focus on one thing
So many times we want to do many different things. We are confused about who we serve and we’re confused about what we offer. When you feel confused, you can guarantee your customers and prospects are confused. We chose to go down one area and target an ideal client who was in need of my offering, who was ready to work on herself and who was accessible to me. By doing this we dominated the Confidence Coaching space and we were able to prove our consistency and our commitment to this work.
To this day, now on the verge of celebrating our third year in the business, we have women joining our courses and programs globally off the back of our social media and podcast presence. In our first full year of trading, we turned over $160k (from $0 the previous year). In the second year, during COVID, we made $554,000.
When you share your story and humanise social media, you can create raving fans who will not only KNOW, LIKE and TRUST you, but they will also share your business with their audience. Which is why I truly believe the key to success is a commitment to showing up. To be consistent, no matter what. And to understand that social media is social – this is all about the old school way people used to do business; building relationships!