So now we’re up to the present moment! Yes, I’m still running from side to side on the rowboat, but I’ve got it more under control than it has been up until now. You may remember I’ve also got my other business to keep running while I get this new one off the ground. Of course, at the start I thought I’d be able to be superwoman and keep it going at the same pace as always, but I have to admit that it did suffer a bit from my attention being divided. Luckily I have an amazing team that helps me with that business and we’re now seeing it come back to something resembling it’s ‘pre-Nicki’s-bright-idea’ self- yaay! Now one of the things I wanted to show in this series of musings is the behind the scenes and not-so-great stuff. So to be honest, keeping an established business going while being a key person that’s required to be in it every day AND starting a new business singlehandedly alongside the other one has been really hard to do (my team know that they definitely have a place in this boat as well in the future, but that will be later when I start actually making money from it). I don’t regret making that initial decision to birth this new business baby for a moment, but there have definitely been times where I’ve lain awake in the wee hours of the morning wondering what the hell I was thinking of when I first thought this was a good idea!

And now- where’s that social media thing at you ask? *Queue Jaws theme in background*

So…

That.

Right.

This week I threw my toys. Well, more like sulked internally for a few days. After all, I’d been posting consistently on social media for two whole weeks and I was getting ZERO traction- and I was pissed off!!! I’d been working SO HARD on this I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting anywhere!

Even writing that now makes me feel a bit daft- two weeks is far too short a time to measure things over, but I had believed in the ‘build it and they will come’ fallacy all my life. Just in case you share that belief, let me dispel that myth here and now: Kevin Costner looked mighty fine standing out in that field, but when it comes to business, it’s bullshit.

Think about this for a moment: It doesn’t matter how good your offering is, if people don’t know about it, how would they be buying it?

You have to get it out in front of people so they can figure out that it’s something they want!

Anyway, back to my sulk. So I did what I always do now when I’m out of my depth- I ask for help. (Yes 30 year old me, I can actually do that now, thanks for asking 🤨) There’s a really important thing to note here though- I ONLY ask people who I know can speak from experience about the issue that I’m having, and that they also have a genuine reason to help me. (It may be that in some cases that’s because I’m paying for their advice and that’s fine!) So I put the question out to a few people and the answer came back as I more or less expected it to- that I was doing too much and I should focus down. But the thing about advice is that sometimes it causes you to look further into the issue than you had before. The reality is is that the way I'm doing things, cutting out one channel won’t mean that I’ll do anything more in the others, because I think what I’m doing there is already enough (I’m posting on average 6 days a week to social media and weekly to YouTube, newsletter and blog). But what I did do was go and look at my analytics (which should have been step one but we live and learn and are kind to ourselves)- and I saw the start of a tiny spark of life. What looked on the surface like no comments or likes or full views, actually showed up as tens and in some cases hundreds of % increases in impressions/engagement/etc over that 2 week period. It showed that my first YouTube video was crap, but when I improved the thumbnail and title on later ones, they got shown to WAAY more people.

And then something came back to me from one of the people whose advice I’d asked- she’d said something in passing that I hadn’t understood how significant it was at the time- that I needed to spend time engaging with people on social media, so that they would either directly engage back, or the various algorithm gods would turn their all seeing eyes in my direction and realise this little spark might be worth showing to other people, because apparently there was some life here. (And in hindsight she’s not the only one that I’ve heard this from, but sometimes the universe just decides it’s funny to see how long it can take you to hear the message it’s sending!)

So, I spent some time over the next couple of days searching out conversations I could add value to (not just ‘liking and subscribing’, but actually using my knowledge to answer questions that people had asked), and I discovered two things pretty fast. One- once I figured out how to find these questions fast, I was having heaps of fun helping people, and two, within a day I was seeing new people following me on all the channels I’d been doing it on! So, lesson learned- don’t just stand in a room and shout a message in random directions, from now on I’ll walk up to people and start conversations- which seems kinda obvious now 😉! (I’m mindful that this isn’t a strategy I’ll need to or even be able to follow long term, but it’s the right one for this stage of my business right now.)

So what’s on the agenda for next week? Well, as usual, I’ve got a list 3X longer than the time to do it in, so it’ll be a case of going through and prioritising: either what will make the biggest differences or cause the biggest issues if they don’t get done. And of course, something will no doubt come along to make life interesting… stay tuned to find out what it was!