*Resources mentioned during the episode*
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Stop doing more
Transcript:
Hello there. Welcome back to the re-imagining success podcast. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg. And I have an important message for you today. One that might be a little triggering might be giving you a lot of relief. Hopefully certainly if you follow the advice and I think will apply to most of you, it certainly applies to me, to my clients. So here’s the nugget, the sound bite stop doing more simple. Right. But, but let me tell you more. So in marketing, in particular, there’s this, or in fact in content creation, right? And I’ve always been in – as an aside. I like an aside, the, the fan, the content marketing guru. Well, I hate to use the word guru. I’ve always been the ambassador for content “content is king” I used to say back in the day, 10 plus years ago, when that was really new.
And I have content strategies and I’m talking about creating content publishing content. I create a lot of content myself. It’s the way to engage with your audience, build an audience, build your personal brand, build your business, however, all this talk of content and so on and algorithms and different platforms is, oh my gosh. Now I have to do reels because reels get me in front of new people. And oh, now I have to do obviously TikTok any kind of new channel. And for a while, clubhouse was the new thing during lockdown. And I have to do this format and that format. And I have to do a popup product, as well as this other thing I have to do these challenges and launches and calls for, from the business model perspective, not just from content and marketing, I need to do BTC and B2B. So business, consumer, and business to business, I need to have a course.
I need to have a membership. I need to have a programme. I need to have one to one. Look, the thing is, all these tactics I’m going to call them. But even all these business models can work. They do work, but they don’t. If you dabble. And if you overstretch yourself, if you try to do all these things, let’s face it. None of us has time to do that. We’re going to be really shoddy at a lot of different things. That’s not great. I hold my hand up here that I get really defensive when my sister or my boyfriend or well-meaning friend will give me advice. They’ll give me suggestions that, oh, I saw you do doing this on Instagram. Oh, I saw this other person on Instagram. She does this. It’s really good. So I should be doing more. I should be doing it better. And my instinctive response is I’m already doing so much.
I can’t possibly do more. And it’s not about doing more.
Of course, first of all, it’s about being confident and having the conviction that you know what you’re doing, you you’ve chosen the right types of content, formats of content, the right channels, the right strategy. You’re doing it well to a high quality. Although done is better than perfect. So we’re not talking perfectionism here. And then if you are going to add something, you do it with intentionality. You do it because you want to experiment with something and see the results over a specific period of time. You add something that, you know, will be better or more strategic, more targeting than what you’re doing already. And you are then importantly, listened to me now out, taking something else off your plate. We can’t keep adding things on. I’ve talked before about the five big rocks from Stephen co and other people.
We can’t keep forcing stones and rocks and gravel and stuff into our jar. We can’t keep adding balls to juggle. We can’t keep spinning plates, whatever metaphor want to use. We can’t keep adding stuff. One of my coaches in the past said, uh, her new strategy was, oh, you need to do a free challenge every four to six weeks. And that was completely overwhelming to me. I was already doing the challenge since several years. I had been doing different topics. Every time I did listen to her, she advised doing this same topic every time, which I thought was pretty genius because you become known as the expert in that area. You can reuse, hone fine, tune your content, and that’s made things easier. But the idea, my gosh, I’m doing it once a month. No, thank you. So I streamlined from in fact doing five, they ended up being an hour and a half sessions every evening.
I was doing eight o’clock UK time. I tired. And instead I now have the, the current version of this at least is five 30 minute sessions during the day. So for me, it’s one, o’clock, it’s a good time. Energy wise. It works. It works for the kids having naps there at the moment. So that works. And I’m even looking at focusing in on three. So I go through the five pillars of building that a life outside the nine to five. I always found it difficult to get it down to less, but I’m beginning to think maybe. And you heard it here first that the first, third and fifth pillars. So defining success, choosing the right business model and designing your work life integration are the really core foundational pieces that you need, especially when you’re at the beginning of the journey. So possibly I might, I have only three sessions.
Now, when you’re at the start, of course you don’t yet know where to focus.
You’re not, not yet able to understand what you enjoy, let alone what’s working because you haven’t done it yet. So there is an element of experimenting alongside working with an expert. If you’re working with me, I could help you. I could guide you on the priorities where you need to be putting your focus, depending on your objectives, your goals, business plan strategy. And of course what pitfalls to avoid, but still keep things simple. If something is draining you now at the beginning of your journey, when you do it the first or second time, how on earth are you going to feel when you do it for the 10th, 11th, 12th? How on earth are you going to be able to sustain it? You’re not. What if it could be easy?
What if it could be fun? What if you found a way to market to sell, to deliver, to run your business in a way that works with your energy and rhythm works with your personality, strengths works with the way you like to interact with people. And you could then hone in on that, be simple, be focused, be streamlined and not keep chasing your tail, keep chasing what other people are doing. Keep adding things. Oh my gosh. Now I have to do the reels and I have to do this new channel. And I also need to do like stories on there. And then this guy’s posting. You need to do at least a reel a day and, and three lives a week. And, ah, right. It becomes completely exhausting, completely overwhelming and not sustainable. I’m constantly continually experimenting with this. So I went up at 1.2, two posts a day on Instagram.
I went down to one a day late to Friday. In fact, in the past, I think I even had a Saturday, Sunday post going out. I’m now going back to more or less Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I don’t really see a difference in the performance metrics that I’m tracking. And I am adding a few reels in, but I don’t beat myself up when I can’t do them. I’ve seen amazing results because the reels at the moment, at the time recording, at least it are really getting in front of new audiences. And that’s one of my objectives. I enjoy them when I have an idea, I record it. It takes 20 seconds. Add a little sound boom done, right? But I wouldn’t at the moment at least spend a day, spend hours sweating over doing 50 reels and making sure it’s three times a day in whatever that doesn’t work for me.
I, I have my one podcast episode that goes out every week. Consistency is really key, but as I’ve shared before, I also layered these things on one at a time when I started. And in fact, I was pulling together a training the other day on my ecosystem. It can look really overwhelming if you look at someone who’s 10, 15, 20 years into the business, right. Even five years, three years. But when you strip it back, what I had at the beginning was a website. I want to say while I was blogging on the website, that was my main content piece. And then gradually I added a monthly newsletter that became then fortnightly and ultimately weekly. I added a Facebook group, started posting more. LinkedIn actually took me a long time because of the nature of the message. It was hard to talk about escaping the nine to five on LinkedIn, although it’s a great place to do so.
And, and again, even within each channel, you know, Instagram reels is the, a new thing, obviously as well. So I’m not saying don’t do these things, but again, you can’t do them all at once. I think I’ve even done an episode before and certainly they’re experts who recommend doing, you know, one client, one programme, one channel for one year to really focus in on that. And once you’ve really nailed that, then you add another one right now. That’s hard if you’re multipass and again, if you don’t yet know what the one product, one channel should be, that’s really difficult, but that’s the direction we want to go in that focus. At least, I always say for three months, look, focus on selling this service, focus on this client, focus on really nailing LinkedIn. And once you’ve got a good flow on LinkedIn, then perhaps you can add in messaging on another platform.
And there are ways of course, to repurpose and there are ways to even use the same content across channels and so on just with some tweaks to make it relevant to that platform. But again, ask yourself what if this could be easy?
What would that look like? How could I design this to work for me? And importantly also of course my audience, where they’re active, how they want to learn how they want this service delivered and so on than being swayed by what people are telling you. Now you need to add into the mix again, whether they’re friends, well, intentioned, friends, or experts for that matter, telling you simply must add this particular funnelling. You need a 12 step email sequence for the welcome messages. You now need to be doing, you know, three posts a day in the Facebook group. You need to be going live on LinkedIn and posting it these times and all these things.
I mean, I focused quite a bit on the content today because that’s where I feel like it’s going a bit outta control at the moment, but it’s true everywhere, right? You don’t have to do, you can’t do everything. You certainly can’t do everything at the same time. Well, you certainly can’t do it all well, right? So again, again, it comes back to what’s your definition of success. What’s the business model, the marketing strategy, the content strategy, the way of delivering your products and services, that’s going to work for you. And again, of course, ultimately deliver the best result for your clients. Those are the questions you need to be asking yourself. So stop doing more. If you don’t know, what’s working, take a breath, take a step back and look at your metrics. Look at what’s happening. Now. I, I don’t recommend chasing, you know, likes and engagement metrics and so on, but if you really have no idea, have, have a look because if you find you’ve spent the last six to nine months doing lots of crazy stuff on Instagram and the followers and engagement and hasn’t budged, and you’ve got no clients from there.
Maybe you could take your foot off the gas a bit and not do those 18 reels and posts and lives and things, right? On the other hand, if you’re doing a few things that are working really well, let’s say on LinkedIn, then why not lean into that and see, could use the other tools available in LinkedIn and how you can really multiply the effects of what you are already doing. And that’s, you know, it is a little bit of that cliche device works smarter rather than harder, but you certainly need to know what’s working. What’s not. And if you don’t again, take a moment, take a step back, look at what’s working. What’s not, if you’re just starting out then by all means experiment, but experiment with a couple of things at a time. So you can have the time and energy to actually do it well to monitor the results and give it enough time to potentially build momentum and have some results.
Because if you do it once or twice, it’s not enough. So again, stop the dabbling, stop the manic, running around, trying to do everything for everybody everywhere and do things with intentionality. Do it with joy. I guess as Mary condo would say, bring that kind of energy and really tap into how it feels for you, how it’s going to feel if you keep doing this for months and years to come, and if it’s not feeling good, then you know, let’s see if we can find another way to do it. Whether again, it’s content ration or delivery or marketing or sales, or actually giving the training, doing the thing, teaching the, if it’s feeling Ugh, so uncomfortable and you’re getting a migraine every time you go live, or, you know, you’re just hating it and feeling resentful that probably isn’t the best strategy to follow.
So stop doing more, do less. If anything, strip it right back. If you’re like me, if you’ve gone, especially if you’ve been in business for a while and you’ve just been doing way too many things, take a step back, look at what you’re doing. Look at what’s working. Look at how you can streamline reduce, optimise. Especially if you want to add something, make sure you’re taking something else away. And again, if you are just starting out by all means experiment, but do a few things at a time, maybe one thing at a time, if you can, if you’re a better person than I am and monitor it intentionally with purpose, understand why you’re doing it, understand how you’re going to assess if it’s working or not, and then be ready to change. If, and when you find that it really isn’t getting traction, or if you’re not enjoying it, it’s not working for you. So stop doing more. That’s the mantra of the day. Looking forward to your thoughts on this one, see you back in next week.
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