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Welcome coffee powered systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merten.

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Hey, friends. Welcome back. Coffee powered systems. And if you’re new here, welcome to Coffee Chat. This is a casual conversation about basically anything that I am thinking of at the moment, and I haven’t done one of these in a long time. It’s been probably last year sometime right around the whole George Floyd stuff. You can probably find that episode way back when in the beginning. And so I figured now is a great time. It’s a new year. I hope you had a fantastic New Year celebration. I can’t believe it’s 2022 already.

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So I want you to grab your favorite drink, pull up a chair and cuddle up and listen to this chat. Let’s chat. I don’t have a coffee right now. It’s late and I’m actually having a bourbon and ginger rail because it’s almost the end of the week. But I wanted to chat about social media. I took a break over the holidays, as many people do. I took two weeks off of work and I also took that time off of social media. Just a little scrolling here.

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And there one of my TikTok binges where you get on TikTok and you lose the time and 2 hours go by and the person pops up and says, Why are you still watching? Don’t you need a break? So the shame Tik Tok person came up once, maybe twice. And it actually felt really good to take that break from the rigid social media of business. And I got to thinking, Can I do business without social media? Because truth be told, I am an Ambovert leaning introvert, which means basically I can be mostly an introvert, but I can be an extrovert when needed in situations or going out.

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And I prefer to actually be in and after big events. I need that wind down time and I am not super into putting myself out there and being on social media all the time, posting videos, putting content repurposing. And although I like connecting on social media, it feels like a job most days and I’ve got enough jobs. I’ve got clients, a mom. I’ve got my other business activities to do and focusing on social media and putting out more and more content. It’s like the content turn it’s a lot tracking your traffic, looking at numbers.

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I’ve got almost 8000 followers on Instagram and like, 5% of my followers see me at a given time and it’s kind of frustrating. And then Facebook, as we all know, is even less. I’m pretty sure like, 2% of people see me whenever I post anything on Facebook, so it’s kind of like when you put your stuff out there and it’s like crickets and you’re like, is anyone even seeing this? I posted five videos this week or a combination of different types of content, and it’s frustrating.

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It’s like, Is it worth it? There’s so many different platforms now I can’t keep up. Clubhouse keeps expanding their features, and I can’t keep up. It started out very simple. It’s like live audio. You show up if you’re there, you hear the audio. If not, you missed it, you get FOMO. Now they’re adding all these other new features. And every time I go in there now, it’s something new, and I can’t keep up with it, breaking everything up and repurposing everywhere. It’s exhausting. If you are with me, let me know.

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It’s so tiring. By the end of the week, you’ve spent hours doing all of this content. And then once you go back and look at all your numbers and you’re like, I got a couple of messages and 100 people saw my stuff, even if you’re putting out stories all the time, and then you see who’s viewing the stories. That’s sometimes fun. But still, it’s a lot. So truth be told, I don’t get most of my business from social media anyway. So is it worth the hassle?

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Is it worth the hassle of doing hours and hours and hours of work? But then again, you think it’s a double edged sword, right? Because how can I connect and grow my business without being seen and being out there all the time? I know Jenny Blake continues to grow her business, and she’s not on social anymore. She even actually did a podcast about it last year, and she continues to do her thing. She’s actually got a new book coming out called Free Time that’s going to launch in March.

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And so I’m interested to see what she’s got to say about how she’s running her business and what exactly Free Time is going to entail. But funny enough, most of my website traffic comes from organic Google search or direct traffic or Pinterest, which doesn’t involve me putting my face out there all the time anyway, which actually makes sense because two of my top places are coming from search engines, organic Google Search and Pinterest. And my business is about helping people. So people search when they need help.

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And that’s probably where my website traffic and everything is coming from. So that makes a lot more sense to me than putting content out on Instagram and Twitter. And I don’t even use Twitter anymore. Really, not for business. I go on there personally just to keep up with trends. But if you’re like Facebook, Twitter a little real Instagram TikTok go on there for my type of business, looking for stuff. People are going on to get entertained. They’re going to start conversations, relax and unwind. And I feel like when people need help and especially with what I do my business with systems and technology, people are searching those things on Google.

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People are searching those things on Pinterest. So what should I do in my business is what got me thinking about it? Am I wasting my time doing social all the time? So should I be running ads? Should I be doing tiny offers? I know that Facebook and all of those social media, big players and big tech, it’s all about putting your money you got to pay to play right. Put your money where you want people to show up. And so what I have decided to do after I’ve gone inside and tried to figure out what am I going to do differently in my business this year?

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How am I going to show up differently? How am I going to get people in the door, so to speak on the website? So I am going to show up consistently. I actually joined a mastermind this year and I am looking forward to getting deeper into learning. And one of the things that the first thing that they’ve suggested is show up consistently weekly to your people. That doesn’t matter, I guess for everybody’s business that’s going to look different. So for me, showing up weekly on this podcast and showing up weekly for my newsletter subscribers because those people are already warm, right?

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They already know who I am. They got on my list for some reason or another, so I should start showing up every week for them. They came there for a reason. They were looking for help. So that’s going to be a big driver in pushing sales for the rest of the year. So turning my email newsletter into a blog post is going to help as well, and making sure the SEO is within the blog and putting that onto Pinterest as a search engine. And then of course, if my podcast has a video like an interview podcast, putting that on YouTube, YouTube is also more of a search engine than it is social media.

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So those are the biggest things that I want to do in my business instead of focusing on the social media rat race this year. And of course I will be on social connecting with people by commenting, reading comments, going into other people’s comments and posts, getting into DMs but not necessarily posting all the time. I’ll let people know about podcasts, put some tips up there, but the whole I need to repurpose this one piece of content into 15 different things is not for me. And I noticed that when I got into that whole cycle, it stresses me out more than makes me feel happy.

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And I’m not about that life. Okay. We are not about the strategy, especially in 2020. And I want to use my website traffic to get people to my mailing list. And that is where I want to focus on getting sales, getting sales from my people that actually want to hear from me, which is what I want anyway. So feeling like I need to be on all the time is too much. And my theme for 2022 is actually ease. And so I have already taken steps earlier this week, working with my clients to figure out what we can all do to ease the transition, make business better, make everything smoother, put everybody on automatic invoicing and just making things super simple and easy.

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And so for me, it starts here with this simple change and not focusing so much on the social media rat race. And I will do a follow up coffee chat later this year to let you know how this tactic goes. Who knows? Maybe I will crash and burn, and it will be a big old flop, and I’ll be like, okay, so seriously need to get some social media and repurposing and all the things back on deck, but I think I will want to go ahead and give it a try.

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So what about you? Where are you showing up differently in your business this year? You can start a conversation with me, start a conversation with me. Hit me up. I am on Instagram at Miranda Merten, and I know I just told you that I wasn’t going to be all over it, but I might not respond right away, but I will respond, and that is all I have for you today. So I will see you next week.

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Thanks for listening to coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the website at Miranda. Merten.Com.

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If you enjoyed this episode rate and review it in itunes or where you enjoy listening so others can find it too. And join me here next time.