Why New Entrepreneurs Need a "Just Enough" Content Marketing Strategy

The "Just Enough" Content Marketing Strategy

Do What Works and Ditch the Rest!

Episode 30 with Amanda Laird, slow & steady studio

Content Marketing Works Best When It's Something You Love to Do!

How do new entrepreneurs leverage the power of digital marketing to increase their visibility and get their brand in front of their future customers without drowning in the sea of content creation currently sweeping social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Threads, PLUS SEO searchable content on Google like Blogs, YouTube videos and Podcasts, PLUS email marketing to their email subscribers? 

Oh, and should I mention that content marketing is not enough if you're not pairing it with a clear, systemized sales system? 

Eesh! Content marketing and sales funnels can quickly overtake your entire work day and in the end there's no guarantee it'll convert strangers into happy, paying customers.

Fear not! 

Amanda Laird, founder of slow & steady studio, is coming in with some hot takes on how to do "Just Enough" content marketing to make it count ... including how to focus on only doing what lights you up most!

Powerful Tidbits Belinda Shared in This Episode...

• Beware of bad advice for solopreneurs just getting started on their content marketing strategies
• How not to hide behind content marketing instead of putting yourself out there and getting up close and personal with your market
• Why you MUST start connecting your marketing efforts to a sales funnel or system
• Getting clear on whether you want 10,000 followers or $10,000 per month
• Why you gotta look at your content marketing metrics to know what's working and what's not
• The difference between influencers who get paid to create content and entrepreneurs who get paid for their products and services
• Visibility matters ... but only if you love doing it!
• Why you need to stop conflating Your Analytics with your self-worth
• How entrepreneurship forces us to confront our own enoughness
• There's no one-size-fits-all magic marketing formula (and if someone is selling you one, run!)

Check Out All the Goodies We Talked About...

👉Free Just Enough Marketing Planner!

👉 Heavy Flow Podcast by Amanda Laird

👉Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation by Amanda Laird

👉Real You Real Money Podcast with Ray Dodd

👉The Birthing Business Handbook by Jennifer Armbrust

Taking the Hustle Out of Entrepreneurship!

Amanda Laird is the founder and principal strategist at slow & steady, where she provides business and marketing advice to solo, feminist entrepreneurs doing their own thing. She was the host of the Heavy Flow Podcast from 2017 to 2020 and is the author of Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation published by Dundurn Press and nominated for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction.

👉 Websi

Connect with Lindsay
Instagram | TikTok | Website | Podcast | YouTube

Transcript

I think influencer culture has wreck our brains. Mm-hmm. In many, many ways. But I think business owners misinterpret, influencers that are content creators, their job is creating content.

Right. Yeah. And they make money by partnering with brands, by doing product placements, by making, content for partners that they have. That's how they're making money. Yeah. And so if me little slow and steady marketing studio over here who's selling one-on-one services, the type of content that I need to make is not the same. I am not going to be making long form YouTube videos with step-by-step instructions on how to do whatever. Yes. do you want to have 10,000 followers or make $10,000 this month? What do you, 'cause your content is going to change depending on what your goal is. 

Welcome to the work, less play more podcasts for busy entrepreneurs who are ready to ditch the hustle. Stop burning on busy work and get back to having a life. My name's Lindsay Johnson, AKA The Radical Connector, and I spent the last 10 years teaching first time entrepreneurs, how to get customers and make money.

Listen in, as I chat with other hustle, recovering business owners, as we share our top tips, for you guessed it working less and playing more. Let's do this. Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

How are you doing? I'm good, Lindsay. Thanks so much for having me. I am so freaking excited that you're here. This whole conversation is getting started because you post an Instagram post talking about how marketing is like diet culture, and I'm pretty sure I immediately wrote to you and said, let's do a podcast about this.

That's how it happened. I was thinking about content marketing and content marketing specifically, and just how it's endless, the hamster wheel, right? There's a never ending void for content that we feel like we need to fill.

If I can just get my lead magnet perfect, if I can just write enough blog posts, just do enough live videos or whatever it is, then you know we're gonna break through, right? Yes. And I started thinking about content marketing, and I've never felt like comfortable with it as a solopreneur either.

Not for myself. It hasn't always felt great. And then also when I'm working with clients and coming up with strategies and plans for my clients, I always felt Ooh, what am I like, suggesting my clients do here. And as I started to think through all the reasons why it didn't feel good, I was like, wait a second.

Where have I felt this before? Where have I heard this before? It feels a lot like diet, culture and how, if you can just lose the weight, yeah, then you're gonna be good enough and then you're gonna be happy. And if you can just crack the content code, then you're gonna be enough.

Your business is gonna take off, and then you're gonna be rich and whatever else the promise might be. Lots of similarities The way that my entire body just like tensed up, like with excitement and recognition because isn't that so frigging true? The bottomless pit that is a achieving and maintaining thinness or achieving and maintaining like social media virality yeah. It's and this whole idea of. If I just lose enough weight, I'll be good enough. If I just post enough content, I'll be good enough. And what's interesting is that not only is that rely on us seeking outward external validation it also keeps us distracted from what will actually make us feel good in our bodies, what will actually make us successful in our businesses.

Yeah, exactly. Something I see and a lot, and this is from my own experience too, like when I'm talking about solo service based entrepreneurs, like this is me also. Yeah. I come up against these things every single day. I have expertise in marketing and also I'm a solo entrepreneur trying to like, build business in a way that like, Feels good.

And there's no blueprint for this, so I'm also a fellow traveler, so just also wanted to put that out there that like I am, I face these challenges as well. I love what you just said, that there is no blueprint and I'm a fellow traveler.

Oh yeah. Because there are a lot of people who put themselves out there as experts in social media and just follow. My blueprint. And then if or when it doesn't work for certain entrepreneurs, they internalize that. Again, like the the way this parallels diet culture, if I just find the right diet and every diet guru is saying, just follow mind diet, and then inevitably if it doesn't work or when it doesn't work, we internalize that.

And those experts will gaslight you as well. Yes. And say that you didn't hustle enough, you didn't try hard enough, you didn't use my six point messaging, checklist to the letter and that's why it didn't work. Right. And that too, there's a lot of bad advice.

Yeah. There's a lot of bad advice because Food, like health, like living in your body, what's gonna work for me is not gonna work for you, right? Like we run different businesses, we have different business models, different services, different. Audiences. And also different personalities, different energy levels, different demands at home, like Exactly, yeah.

And we have different lives, right? What I need to, and the amount of money that I need to make is not the same. Like I, sometimes you hear a lot of people talking about like the five figure month or the six figures, or hit seven figures But what I need and the amount of money that I need to make Yeah.

Is not the same as what you need to make. Yeah. And so we need to take a step back from marketing, when I start talking about marketing, I actually start with my clients, not talking about marketing at all. Yeah. Like marketing is actually the last part of the conversation.

First, we need to look at your business foundations, what are your revenue goals? Yeah. What are your products and services that you are offering? Who is your audience? And are the people who are actually clicking by and actually booking your services, are they the same people than this target audience that you are making content for?

Because maybe they're not the same people, right? Yes. So how you actually, find those people and market to them? Could be different, right? Yes. And so do you have the systems and the operations in place to actually sell things to people? Yes. We spend a lot of time.

Fretting about marketing. Yeah. Or even just like way more energy and time into our marketing Yeah. Than we have to. Yes. And I think, and also, can I just say and money. Oh yeah. And money, yeah, exactly. More money, more time, more energy, more fretting. Yeah. Than we have to. And if we can.

Hold back a little bit and focus on having really strong foundations, being really good at what you do. Like you wanna simplify your marketing. The best thing you can do is deliver exceptional. Service and results to your clients. Yeah. Because they're gonna tell everybody about you. Yeah. Yes. Like we should spend less time about the flashy outward marketing.

Yeah. And more time actually on our craft. And in our zone of genius. And that's my goal when I'm working with clients. Yes. I want you to do just enough marketing. Yeah. Just enough based on your business goals, the phase that you're in, because if you're launching, you need a little bit more.

If you're in a maintenance phase, yeah. You need a little bit less, right? Are you in growth mode, right? If you're trying to grow your business, if you're trying to expand scale up, you need different things, right? So what is just enough to meet those goals? And also thinking about your capacity. Yeah.

Your needs, your preference, and what do you already have? If you have 50 blog posts. I had a client that I worked with recently and she was just coming back from maternity leave. Yeah. And so just enough was like the name of the game. She had limited time available.

She's going to be seeing clients in person. So she wants to be doing just enough marketing to fill up her roster. And she already had a stable of 50 blog posts. Yeah. That were good. Solid. So I was like, you're not gonna be writing anymore blog posts. Yeah. You have enough blog posts. Yeah. So sitting down to write blogs, Is not the thing. The strategy that we're gonna come up with is how do we repurpose that content? Yeah. How do we take what you already have and now we can repurpose it for your email list or for social or for, maybe they need to be optimized for SEO or whatever it might be.

But More content is not the answer. Yes. Do you know, this is so interesting, is it's so reminiscent of a conversation I just had with one of my members of my accelerator. And they had in their head that they had to have blogs. They had to have all these blogs and all this content on their website, before they could start going out there and building a business.

Yeah, there's the look, right? And it was like, I'm always gonna say, especially for this person's business model, networking was the key. Yeah. Because they were needing referral. Like they needed to build their referral market. That was their business model. And their, the people who would be referring customers and clients were not necessarily Googling blogs.

Like they didn't, that wasn't the right strategy, but there was that. Like misconception that unless I have a bunch of blogs, I'm not a valid business and people won't take me seriously. And I was like, no one's reading them anyway. And because they couldn't get past that point. I was like, fine, you have one month, write 10 blogs, put the blogs on your website, and then can we please get back to networking?

And the funny thing that happened was they kind of back peddled the thought of writing blogs. Like it was like all of a sudden we started to see how that was an excuse. Ah, that was a fear showing up and an excuse that they were giving themselves. And for whatever reason, they started to network and all of a sudden all these opportunities and clients started coming in and it was like, oh.

So I'm like, so how many blogs you wanna write? Yeah, no, I don't need blogs. Exactly. Exactly. And so that's to your point of like we, we fret and we don't stop and go, but who is my customer? And how are they finding me? And do what kind of content marketing do I need to do, if I need to even do any, because not every business needs to do content marketing.

Now, in saying that, I actually believe every business does need to, I do believe every business should have a presence online, social media, ss, e o, whatever. It doesn't have to be your full thing. It can be something you spend an hour a week on or two hours a month on and that's it. If that's not how you get clients.

And so I love this like we're definitely speaking the same language here. This again, I am the work less, play more person. How do we build faster by working less? And how do we think strategically before we take action? And I love hearing that. What is your, just enough. Where can you stop fretting and do just enough based on strategically where you're at right now?

Are you in a launch phase? Are you in a maintenance phase? Are you in a growth or a scale or an ideation? Like where are you? Who is your client, and how do you best connect with them? And I'd actually love to define what marketing is for just a second, because I think marketing in itself is this elusive term that means so much and yet nothing at all.

So how, exactly how I define it is marketing is just how you show up in front of the right people and invite them into your world. Like it's just so simple. How do you define marketing? I. Yeah, I usually That's a great, I love that definition. Mine is a little bit more sterile, which is it's promoting and selling your services, right?

Yeah. Because that's the other thing, right? And I know that you're all about this, Lindsay which is like also yeah, we need marketing, but also sales, right? Yeah. People, I'm sorry. At the end of the day, like, why are we marketing? We never show up. Yeah. Just to market our business. Yeah.

That if you are, you just wanna have an Instagram about embroidery or birdwatching or whatever, and do it for fun. That is a hobby. That's lovely. Yeah. But if you are selling embroidery kits or watching retreats or whatever, like the marketing has to connect back to sales. Yeah. And I, I. Especially on social and like thinking particularly around Instagram as a channel, I think influencer culture has has wreck our brains. Mm-hmm. In many, many ways. But I think business owners misinterpret, like people who have large, influencers that are content creators, their job is creating content.

Right. Yeah. And they make money by partnering with brands, by doing product placements, by making, content for their whatever line partners that they have. That's how they're making money. Yeah. And so if me little slow and steady marketing studio over here who's selling one-on-one services, the type of content that I need to make right is not the same. Yeah. Like I am not going to be making long form YouTube videos with step-by-step instructions on how to do whatever. Yes. I wanna, can I share an example of that? Of this? Yeah, of course. So it's so interesting because I have two TikTok accounts.

I have one for Fantastical Fatty, which is Fat Joy activism, fat Liberation. Connecting with fat people and being like, Hey, you can love yourself, right? And then I have the radical or radical lens radical connector on TikTok also, and that's more about tips for building a business. And on my fantastical fatty account, shorter pieces of content, do better outfits of the day, inspirational quotes, videos of me working out with voiceovers.

They do the best three minute videos. Die on my fantastical fatty account, but on my radical connector account, my three minute videos are my most washed and my most engaged with. When I get in there and I talk about your daily dose of tough love from an A D H D entrepreneur is usually what I say.

I'm like, I'm just gonna say it, and there's this appreciation for like calling out toxic. Entrepreneurial mindsets and bad advice and shifting those perspectives, right? Those videos are my most popular. So again, fantastical fatty is more content creator type vibe. Mm-hmm. versus radical lens, which is more.

Business owner, right? Come into my programs five. And so that is such a great point. And again, it's one that I will often say to people, do you want to have 10,000 followers or make $10,000 this month? What do you, ' cause your content is going to change depending on what your goal is. Yes, absolutely.

Like having 10,000 followers only means that you have 10,000 followers. Yes. That doesn't turn to revenue. That's it. Exactly. Unless. Unless you are monetizing your content. Yeah. those brand deals.. That is the only world in which that translates into dollars. Yeah. Is if you are monetizing that.

And and this kind of doves tails nicely into my, just do enough framework, right? Yes. Which is like looking at the business foundations then doing just enough of the right activities. And then also, You gotta be measuring stuff. Yes. You gotta look and see what's working. Like I'm a lazy bitch.

Okay, wait, hang on. Because you posted a really great, was it on Instagram? Like basically, here's the metrics that you should be tracking. I said these are the metrics that I am tracking. Okay. Because I, there is no the lazy bitch method. I love it. Exactly. Because I'm not going to waste my time doing something that doesn't work.

Yeah. Okay. You wanna simplify your marketing. The fastest way to do that is to stop doing things that are not working. Yeah. The only way you're going to know what's working is if you look now, there's two types of people in the world. Okay. I'll tell you which one I am after. There are the people who are going to look at their stats 17 times a day.

Yeah. Hi, it's me. Okay. And then there are the people that are like, what stats? Yeah. What is that like? I never look at them. And you gotta look at how stuff is doing, right? Yes. Now what you're gonna measure, what you're gonna look at, what you're gonna track, how you're gonna track it, how often you're tracking.

That's totally, there's no right way to do it. Yeah. You need to think about what your goals and objectives are. What are you trying to achieve? And then pick out the most important things to look at and track, right? Because you could fall into a rabbit hole, especially any type of digital marketing, social email, website, SEO, all of that stuff will give you a thousand different data points and you don't need that.

We can apply our just enough strategy here. Look at just enough data. Yeah. Often enough to paint a picture so you can see how you're doing, right? Yes. But if you're pouring energy into social right, or you're pouring energy into blogs and that's not how your actual paying clients are finding you Yeah.

Or what's actually converting, then maybe you don't have to be pouring so much energy there. Yeah. Doesn't mean don't do it. 'cause I agree with you. We do need a little bit of content marketing. You gotta pick something and do it. Yeah. But you don't need to be writing a blog and making a podcast and doing a YouTube channel and posting on social seven times a day.

This is, I will tell you like the amount of people that come into my world, Amanda, that are literally writing a blog a week, doing a podcast a week, making three YouTubes a week, and then I ask them, how much money are you generating from that? And they say, zero. Yeah, so then I come back to are you a content creator or a business owner with a product to sell a program to sell?

Because it's, if you're just trying to grow your following and maybe you wanna monetize YouTube channel, you wanna monetize your podcast, that is different. Again it's so important to understand am I trying to monetize my content or am I trying to use my content as a way to expose me to the right people, to sell them a product or service that I offer?

Yeah. if your content isn't getting in front of the right people and bringing them into your world to then buy from you. What are you doing? Why? That's how you burn yourself out. That's how you deplete yourself. But at the same time, not grow a business or make any money. What? What is the point?

Yeah, Always start off, like I say this on Instagram all the time, or in my newsletters, talk about it with my clients all the time, right? Like marketing feels hard because it is hard. Ooh, I need some more, gimme some more. And not because you're doing anything wrong. Yeah, right? Like marketing is hard.

Okay. We could probably spend the rest of our time making a list of all the reasons why marketing is hard number. Give us just two or three right now. Give us context. Yeah, exactly. Top level attention is it's hard to get people's attention in today's day and age, right? So like we see thousands of ads on a daily basis, right? Yes. But our brains can retain like less than a hundred messages. Yeah. It's hard to break through, right? We have these constantly changing expectations in our media landscape, right? Yeah. Oh, just when you are feeling comfortable with reels, Instagram says, no more reels.

No more reels, and Then also like I, I work primarily with women as well. Not that I think that this is exclusive to women, but I think anybody who has a marginalized identity. Yeah, there's also a little softer bit underneath. Marketing too, right? You might've been socialized to not talk about yourself, to not take up too much space to not talk about money.

Yeah. And then this plays into this, the whole diet, culture thing too, right? If there's something in us, if there's a part of us that thinks I'm not good enough. Who am I to start this business? Who am I to be talking about this? Who am I to be putting myself out there? Yeah. If there's a part of us that feels like we're not enough, right?

Then doing all of the marketing right. Can protect us from confronting that soft tender place that we might, right? Like I feel like marketing feels like a tangible thing. Yeah. That you can tick off, right? So, Oh my God, can I jump in with this? Yeah, for sure. 'cause I thought you were gonna say the opposite.

I thought you were gonna say, marketing can feel scary because it demands that we put ourselves out there. But yeah, that's one of the thing. Yes, that's true. But hang on. Because I think that, again, and this is where we define marketing, we need to define it because there is such a thing as writing a blog.

Or making a carousel on Instagram or putting some money into Facebook ads. None of which requires us to actually put ourselves out there. Exactly. Versus making a YouTube, going on a podcast, making a reel. That means we have to put ourselves out there more. And so I think, again, it's yeah, marketing, you can hide in it or you can use it as a catalyst to get comfortable putting yourself out there.

However, All of that to be said, if you're not, as you said earlier, bringing in the sales to your marketing and sales strategy, again, it allows you to hide, right? Yeah, absolutely. It allows you to hide, right? Because it takes up so much time. Like the client that you mentioned before Yeah. Who is, doing all the things.

That takes up so much time. Yeah. So I can't go to a networking event. I can't Send emails. Yeah. I can't get on the phone and have discovery calls with potential clients because I am so busy doing all of my things. Yeah. And it's like busy work, right? That I think that's what you call it, right?

You call it. I do. I'm like, this is not, yeah. ditch the busy work. Work. Yep. And sometimes our marketing can fall into that. And I do this too, right? The thing with marketing, especially social, right? I would say social is the number one, one place, I think where this kind of manifests, right?

Yeah. Which is it's really easy to just make a post on social. Yeah. So when I'm here, and maybe I'm freaking out because I don't have any leads. Yeah. I don't have any potential clients. My pipeline is empty. Nobody's buying my stuff. Yeah. I am feeling shitty about that. I can do a panic post.

I can put something on social media, right? I can put something out there and then it's okay, tick the box. We can check off that we did something. Yeah, we can check off that we worked.

It was hard work. We did it right. And now we can distract ourselves from our fretting. Yeah. And feel productive. So, Hang on. 'cause I wanna again, like I said, the way that this is enraging me because this is what I talk about all the time, is that we hide.

In busy work and then we give ourselves the pat on the back because we think we've done something, but we actually haven't. And this comes back to people who don't check their analytics, people who don't reflect on what's working and what's not. Yes, it's the same with avoiding the scale, avoiding going to the doctor or whatever.

And by the way, I don't want that to mean that we need to lose weight because I'm anti diet. I'm just saying we avoid looking at the numbers, we avoid looking at the bank account. We avoid looking at the, do you know what I mean? We avoid looking at it because deep down we know our pipelines are empty.

There's nothing happening, and so we're reaching for, I love this idea of a panic post. We're reaching for a panic post. I just had a conversation with somebody who a business coach told them that they should be focused on social media and posting on social, and they're posting like literally five times a day.

They haven't had a customer, I think ever because it's not, ah, growing on social media. If you're a service-based business, using social media to grow your business is like the slowest way. Yeah. And especially through posting, if you leverage social media for networking, right? For collaborating.

That's a different situation, but just posting is not gonna build your business. And I know I get frustrated and I don't mean to get frustrated at the poor, misguided entrepreneurs who don't, who literally don't know any better, but the people giving them that crappy advice because Exactly.

They're gaslighting themselves into gaslighting others. Exactly. Or just because, like what you did worked but like also I, sorry. Because when I post on TikTok, I have 20 years of experience and an incredible comfortability on camera and a lot of things to say, and a smooth marketing and sales system behind me.

When somebody who's new posts on social media, who's still nervous, who doesn't have a clear message, who doesn't have a clear offering, he doesn't have a nice sales funnel, like it's a totally different situation. I think another important thing too is do you like posting on TikTok? I love it.

Exactly right. Like you just, you lit up like the sun. Yeah. When I asked you that I could see the shift in your energy. You love it. I can think of nothing worse than, Taking my phone and pointing it at my face and talking into it. Yes. I hate it. Yeah. And I went through this phase earlier in the year where I was like, okay, visibility.

Visibility is the thing. Okay. I know I need to be visible in my business, and so I'm gonna just push myself. I'm gonna fake it till I make it. That was like my thought. And I'm gonna show up in the, in this every day and. I didn't like it. And so do you think it got me clients, like Absolutely not.

 Visibility I think is a bit of a hot buzzword right now. Now I was like, you must dive into that too. Yeah. In business. And I think it's true, if you are a solo service-based entrepreneur. Yeah. Then you are your ip, right? Yeah. Like your brain is, and your energy and your vibe.

That's your secret sauce. Yeah. And so there is something to be said for visibility, but I think we're also conflating visibility again with social media. Yeah. There's other ways to be visible in your business. So for me, as I said before here, I was trying to show up making these dumbass stories.

Which I hated. I cringed and they didn't work. Yeah. Okay. Actually, I lost followers every time I was losing followers because they were that bad. And it's just not genuine. But I you, I love to teach, right? So hosting a workshop, hosting a live event, right? That to me is gonna light me up in the same way that you love to post on TikTok, right? Yes. So I can show up, host a workshop with 40 peeps. Talk about my thing. And that's gonna lead to sales.

Yes. And that's how I'm gonna be visible in my business. That's what's comfortable for me. That's what aligns with my preferences. That aligns with my capacity as well, because, I work part-time. I have caregiving responsibilities outside of my business. I'm very privileged that I live in a household that has two incomes.

Yeah. And so I, I'm not the only one contributing to our mortgage. And so I recognize the privilege in that. But I pick my kid up from school at three o'clock. Yeah. And so posting on Instagram takes a long time. It does. Yeah. so I don't, and I don't have that kind of time if it's not bringing me in.

Clients, I need to be focused Yes. In my limited time, in my 25 hours. Yeah. That I have in a week, which includes seeing clients. Yeah. And actually delivering my service in that time. I am not going to waste any of my time.

Yeah. On any of the activities that are not actually going to hundred percent bring me money and I'm only gonna know what's working if I'm looking at my numbers, the stats. Exactly right. Oh my gosh. I love what you just said because again it's, I feel like this is such a fantastic episode of just as ranting.

When I am working with, 'cause I work in a lot of group settings with people, right? And because again, I need to leverage my time. What is the maximum amount of people that I can impact in the shortest amount of time? Because I don't have that much time because I don't wanna spend my life working, right?

And so when I say to, to a group or to somebody that your business's job is to make money, your job. Might be to have an impact and change the world. That's your mission, that's your purpose. That is important. Your business's purpose is to make money, and so we have to be always asking, I, I have a saying, will it sell more tacos?

I grew up in my family, had Mexican restaurants growing up, and my mom would always be asking us, Is what we're doing, going to sell more tacos, because if it's not selling more tacos, why are we doing it? Yeah, and I think this comes into a deeper conversation around how under late stage capitalism our businesses, Or our work, if we work for somebody else, has started to become synonymous with our dreams and our goals and finding purpose in our work and using our work to fulfill us in some way. And don't get me wrong, that's okay if it does, but. We are so much more than our jobs. We are so much more than our work. And what happens when we decenter our work, our businesses, from who we are as a person? What happens when we decenter?

What is there to discover and experience in our lives? So if we are not checking our numbers, understanding our analytics, understanding what activities work and which ones don't, right? And we're not applying the work less, play more, or the just enough philosophy, we will quickly become consumed by working all the time when we just don't need to be.

Yeah, that's true. That is true. I don't know what else I could say. That's a mic drop there, Lindsay. I think, I would add to that too, is that like we've also conflated like our self-worth with our work. Yes. Right. And that. That's capitalism for you, right? Yeah. That like you're only valuable if you're contributing to a bottom line to gross domestic product.

Yeah. Whatever the measurement that you, you want is Right. And going back to, oh, we don't wanna look at the metrics, right? Sometimes when we look at the metrics, we also confuse that with like our worth. So I don't wanna look at my stats. Because I, I'm gonna feel bad. Yeah. Because I'm going to think it means something about me.

Yeah. When it's no, maybe actually you're just sending your emails at the wrong time. Yeah. Or the subject line needs to be changed or, yeah, exactly. And this is, we talk about all the time is you need to have, you need to look at your business as a science experiment and put on your scientist hat and not take it personally.

You need to look at it as evidence of what's working and what's not. Make those tweaks and I would ask you what do you think is something that somebody can do to get out of taking it personally into looking at it as, analytically as a science experiment? How would you coach your client on that?

I talk about this with my therapist every single week because like I said, I'm a fellow traveler. I will tell you one thing I never look at is unsubscribes. Yeah. I don't wanna know if people un when people unsubscribe from my email because I have attachment issues and it hurts. Okay. And so that's just the HU for me is no, I just can't go there.

But I really love the work of Jennifer Armrest. She runs an organization called Sister, and she wrote a beautiful book called The Business Birthing Handbook. And one of the things that she talks about in her teachings is you are not your business. Yeah. And, slow and steady isn't my first business.

It's not the first time. I've taken a crack at entrepreneurship and one of the things that I did differently as I was visualizing and conceptualizing slow and steady was a lot of work of taking the business outta my body. Yeah. And also de marking it from myself. So my business has its own business spirit.

It is its own entity. I had its birth chart read from the time, date, and time that I registered. Yeah. It with the province of Ontario. And so my business is a Virgo. I am a Libra son. Scorpio rising and we are different. And that really helps, right? Yeah. Because yes, I am working in the business, but the business is not me.

Yeah. My purpose is to live a beautiful life here on earth. And my business's purpose is to make money. As you said earlier, and and they are two separate entities and it, and I have to work at it and I work at it, because when things aren't working, when things don't go as planned, like Yeah.

It hurts, right? I wanna be successful. I joked earlier about losing a bunch of followers, but like it's true, right? That I had followers on Instagram that followed me from when I was hosting Heavy Flow when my book came out. Yeah. Where I was talking about, periods And so now they see me talking about marketing and they're like, yeah, not interested. Oh, that's, yeah. It's totally an audience and so it, it totally makes sense that it's right sizing, yeah. But I resisted. Posting. actually, it took me a long time to start the business because I was scared of losing that audience.

Yeah. Even though we know, okay, we know that followers don't mean anything. Yeah. It only means followers. And like people are either gonna buy from you or not. Is the other piece. I love Ray Dodd. She does a great job on her podcast. She talks about this all the time. People are gonna buy or they're not.

Yeah. And if I'm not for you, you can go. Yeah. But that takes practice. And I really resisted up in this business that I knew was going to be my, like it was gonna. Make all my dreams come true. All the lifestyle that I wanna live. All the kind of work that I wanna be doing because I was afraid that it was gonna turn people off me.

Yeah. Who were following me for something else and like I had to do a lot of work to let that be okay. Yeah. Entrepreneurship is going to demand a massive amount of radical self-acceptance. Which I underestimated that. Yeah. I talk about enough a lot, right? Like the, just enough marketing, right?

That's my philosophy, do just enough. But I really underestimated how much entrepreneurship was gonna confront my. Enoughness me as a person and also me as I think that this is an important conversation to have too. Mm-hmm. All the celebrity entrepreneurs that are out there, they're talking about building a six figure seven figure business.

And. That's something else to contemplate and to confront what is enough? I don't need a seven figure business. Yeah, do I want that? Would that be nice? Maybe. But is that what I'm pursuing? I. No, I'm pursuing enough to, yeah. Pay my kids' daycare. Yeah. Pay my mortgage. Maybe go on vacation and eat at a nice restaurant.

And that's, I think that's something that also we don't talk about a lot is,

Some of us start a business because we truly just wanna be self-employed. We just want to have the equivalent of a job except that we are our own boss and we work our nine to five, and when it's done, we close up that laptop and it's done for us. We're on to other things in our lives. Some of us start businesses because we want to have some sort of empire where we have diversified revenue streams and we have that sort of entrepreneurial celebrity, and we have that influence and that expert status.

Some of us start businesses Simply as a stepping stone to something else or an an in, in-between step. And I think. It's so important that we acknowledge that not everybody's goals are the same. And if you don't want to be an entrepreneurial celebrity, that's okay. If you don't want to have diversified revenue streams that's okay.

I look at some of the bigger entrepreneurial celebrities out there and I think I don't wanna work that hard and I don't want that level of stress in my life. Full stop. Full stop. Yeah. I don't wanna work that hard. I don't wanna work that hard. My daily mantra is make a lot of money, have no deliverables.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm definitely a person with where my diversified revenue streams and I wanna have more than one business. I'm starting with my other business now, fantastical, fatty. I love that because I love. Diversity, and I love different things. In this world where things are changing rapidly, Five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you can get a marketing plan and you could stick with that for quite a while.

Now, your marketing plan is changing multiple times a year as trends change. And so I like that. I like the freshness of it. I like the challenge and the learning that comes from that. I think it's really fun. But if you get someone who doesn't like that like again the diversity in our marketing and our sales strategies are just as diverse as our own needs and goals and wants and preferences.

And there is so much diversity in the way that we build a business and approach business growth. And I don't think that's talked about enough. I think that there's too many one size fits all. One dream fits all, one strategy fits all. And I think that has to be challenged a lot more because our business and the way we spend our time doesn't have to look our neighbors.

Oh, absolutely. I say to clients all the time, there are no secret, magic formulas. There's no secret, magic formula. That you can just follow. Yeah. Okay. That is like a gross oversimplification. Yeah. Because I do think that there are like repeatable things like building relationships.

Yeah. And things that we wanna be repeating and systematizing, but there's no magic formula to it. Where I can say Follow my six point system. And if somebody is selling you that, yeah. You're being ripped off. somebody's personal business model is what they're selling.

Yes. You gotta be running in the other draft. It is it's it, we call it the me too. Follow what I did. And it will work for you, right? Yeah. I am a person who does a step-by-step, I love breaking down complex ideas into simple step-by-step actions. But within those, There are multiple years of experimenting I might say something like, networking is the number one business building activity you should do in the first three years. Okay. But not all networking is the same. Yeah. And I think that's what we're saying here there's general rules. There's general principles, there's things that work and things that don't.

Your job as an entrepreneur is to test them and figure out as quickly as you can what works and what doesn't for you. Mm-hmm. And there is a fair amount of customizing that is required. And the only way to do it, Is to do it. Not think it. Not guess it. Not hide behind making another carousel on Instagram, writing another blog.

You have to get into the action of your business and into the connection that's required in building a business to figure out what's working in what's not. And you need to know your numbers. Yeah, exactly. At the end of the day, if you were to take one thing like. One actionable tip. Okay. Yes.

Like just ask your clients how they found you. Yep. Like that is the bare minimum. That is the very base level Yeah. Of measurement, right? Yeah. If you can't bear to look at the numbers, right? If you don't wanna see what your open rates are, you don't wanna look at click throughs. You don't wanna look at retention or unsubscribes or whatever.

Okay, that's fine. You're not there yet. Just. Ask your clients how they found you. Yeah. And that's going to give you a clue because you're gonna say, I met you in this Facebook group. Yeah. Or, I met you at an event, or I follow you on social media, or Lindsay said I should check you out.

Yeah. And then you send Lindsay a beautiful thank you note. A lovely little gift card to their favorite coffee shop. Exactly. And I would say too not only how they found you, why they chose to work with you, why they chose to buy from you. That's the other part. It's because you also need to know, not just that I'm showing up in the right place, but I'm saying the right thing.

Yeah. Yeah. What do I need to be saying? Oh my gosh, Amanda, this was freaking brilliant. Oh, we like got into it. Ooh. So as we wrap us up here I would love to hear for somebody who is listening to this and going, okay, Amanda, I hear you loud and clear. I need to do just enough. I need to stop fretting.

I need to focus on. What's working and what's not. From a strategic marketing perspective, maybe you can give us a, some questions people need to ask themselves before they just start throwing that proverbial spaghetti against the wall.

What are some strategic questions people need to ask before they start with their marketing, their content marketing? Yeah. I think it seems almost too basic, right? But taking that step back and saying okay, what am I trying to do here? What is the goal? What is the short term goal? What is the long term goal that you're trying to work towards?

And maybe the answer is something obvious oh, to get clients right? But like also you need to be a little bit more specific, right? Okay, how many clients do you need a month? A quarter a year to make your revenue goals. I don't think that it's as simple as breaking it down into a formula.

Necessarily that we need oh x number of followers for X percentage conversion rate on our email list or whatever. I think that's a little oversimplification, but just asking yourself, what am I trying to do? What are the goals? Those basic questions like who, what, when, where, why, how, who cares, right?

Like those are important questions. Yes. And so I would start there and then if you have been doing any type of marketing for any length of time, yeah. Doing an audit, right? Sitting down and saying, okay, here are all the things that I do. And asking myself like, what feels good? What feels good? What's hard?

What is successful? What is bringing me clients? Where are my clients coming from? And being super honest about it. And if there's things that you don't like to do, stop doing them. If there's things that don't work, don't do them. Yeah. And Listen to that part of you. What, when I asked you, do you like posting on TikTok?

And you're like, yeah, I love it. And I love teaching workshops, live workshops. So where's your kind of delight? Yeah. That's gonna delight you. Because I like it is a valid reason to do something. Yeah. And then, Once you have done an audit to see what works like how can you keep doing that in a way that is sustainable and is effective and is going to keep getting you the results that you want?

Brilliant. I love it. I love it. If you don't like it, stop it. Yeah. And if you like it, keep doing it. And if you like it and it's not generating business, find a way to get more strategic. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. I love it. Amanda, do you have a freebie before us? I do. Let's hear it. I do. I actually have a clarity worksheet that will help you.

Answer those big questions. That will answer the who, the what, the where, and it'll help you get really focused on what you are trying to do. And it's great because you can use it to paint a big picture to if you're doing like a. Big vision marketing kind of plan. Or if you have something that you're launching or an event or a one-off kind of thing, you can use it to make a mini marketing plan within your marketing plan.

I love it. Oh my God, I am a sucker for a good who I wear what, how. Yeah. That's it. And I have it as A P D F that you can fill out or. For my notion babes. It's also a notion template that it's like you can duplicate and fill it out. So I love it. Amazing. Thank you so much. Where is the best place for people to connect with you?

On my website, slow and steady.studio and subscribing to my newsletter. 'cause that's where I focus my content marketing. So I send a newsletter every week with some tips. With some stories about being a fellow traveler and case studies and all that good stuff, also my favorite links that I find.

Yes, week. So lots of goodies in there. I also love a, I love a good resource newsletter that shares, shares all these things. There's so many good. Tools or like people to follow or books to read or events to go to, and we can't possibly know them all. And so I love when someone helps distill that information.

Brilliant. Amanda, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. This has been such a fun conversation. Thanks for letting me rant with you. My pleasure, anytime. Awesome. All right, friends, remember that all of these links will be on the show notes page, so you can go check out the radical connector.com/podcast to access all the links, all the juicy bits, and of course, check out Amanda's website at Slow and Study Studio.

Bye everyone. 

Friends, thank you so much for listening in. You'll find all the links to all the resources we discussed over on theradicalconnector.com/podcast.

If you are ready to work less and play more, get on my email list or contact me directly and let's talk about how we can get your business working for you so you can build the life of your wildest dreams and get out there and change the world. Happy connecting by for now.