Digital Ambition

I noticed that days where I was most successful with my online business were fostering a mindset that's very destructive to overall success. Now, when I have successful days and notice this kind of thinking creeping in, I refuse to allow it. Tune in for just a few minutes so I can relay this valuable lesson to you.

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The power of your online business is directly related to the power of the infrastructure you put together for it. Because the internet is still in its infancy, there's a lot to think about when assembling that infrastructure. Here are the pieces --- the apps --- that allow me to create and grow my businesses.

A lesson about sales and people's readiness and willingness to buy.

Follow me behind the scenes as I build Six-Figure Grind, Website Cheetah, and Keyword Cheetah on my YouTube channel.

I’m not the guy to talk to when it comes to building a big audience on social media. I’m not a social media person.

I do study a lot of the people who have very large social media followings, though, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a few things you need to do be a killer on social media.

I’m going to share them with you, but I’m not sharing these points to help you. I’m going to share them with you so you understand why I don’t pay much attention to building social media properties…

Okay, so the first ingredient to success is to be a masterful curator of your life. In other words, you have to be great at manufacturing certain parts of your life and documenting that.

You have to turn yourself into a shiny magazine that serves a specific audience. It needs great pictures and great stories, most of which would never happen to you if you weren’t trying to get people’s attention on social media (don’t underestimate the importance of this point).

Now, to avoid being accused of highly curating your life and coming across as fake, you have to develop what I call “exposé-style content.” This is content that exposes “secret” and perhaps even “slightly undesirable” aspects of your life. Doing this showers you with “social vulnerability points.”

Make no mistake, though, what seems like vulnerability for almost all the top social media players is just more highly curated and planned content. That’s why I put “secret” and “slightly undesirable” in quotes.

Social media “glimpses” are really no different from scripted reality television “segments.” Nothing is ever shown that isn’t “relatively safe” for public consumption. No matter how vulnerable these people seem, you’re never seeing any of their real baggage.

What’s next? Consistency. You have to be very consistent. You have to post multiple times a day on multiple channels. It’s a form of self-promotion that requires extreme diligence and you have to constantly find new ways to self-promote without coming across as blatantly self-promotional.

When you’re stuck and still *need* to post something to fulfill your daily quota, that’s when you rely on the obligatory selfie paired with some “deep life insight” that was most likely inspired by a Pinterest inspiration search you did 60 seconds earlier.

Okay, so that’s the core strategy. Now put all the stuff I just mentioned on repeat for months and months on end. But…

…Only do that if you’re at least tolerably good looking. If you’re ugly, there’s a fairly low ceiling on your potential unless you’re also either [A] legitimately fucking brilliant (see: Neil deGrasse Tyson — not saying he’s brilliant, he’s just perceived as brilliant) [B] entertaining/interesting as fuck (see: Casey Neistat) or [C] willing to make bank on letting other people mock you (see: Backpack Kid).

Now, if you’re hot and willing to flaunt that, definitely leverage social media because you have a huge advantage. Just know that most of your popularity and influence will be superficial (I really love seeing hot “social media experts” give advice as if all their success has come from their social media marketing brilliance — it’s like listening to someone who lives off an inheritance give business advice).

So that’s it! Are there outliers who break this analysis? Of course. But this is the vast majority of what’s going on with social media and it’s precisely why I just use social media casually and don’t focus on building a massive following to leverage for business.

I really have zero fucking interest in this kind of game.

This post is brought to you by Website Cheetah – Affordable Custom Web Design Packages for Small Businesses, Solopreneurs & Bloggers.

This episode is brought to you by Keyword Cheetah – Get More Traffic, Leads, & Sales by Outranking Your Competition on Google, Bing, & More.

First thing I want to say is...props to anyone who has the balls to build something online and monetize it. Most people can't even get off the freakin' bench.

While that means they'll never make stupid monetization decisions, it also means they're a meaningless wantrepreneur. Don't let that be you, okay?

With that said, here are five of the monetization strategies I hate. Listen to what I have to say. Learn from mistakes I've made. And if you don't agree, tell me you don't agree – that's fine.

By the way, there are more than just these five. I'll save the rest for a round two version of this topic.

Business is fundamentally about solving problems for people. But there is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and choosing certain product and service strategies might make your life a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

In this episode, I'll share with you my own personal business experiences and how I've been prone to fall into this weird trap that makes selling your products and services much more difficult. It also makes it more difficult to retain the customers you get.

Now, I'm not suggesting there's anything *wrong* with this model or that this particular model is a bad model, it's just something you need to be aware of and something you definitely need to take into consideration when planning things out.

I'm also going to share an alternative example with you – a service I just launched – that creates a completely opposite situation for my clients (and yours if you take a similar approach).

Mentioned...

https://websitecheetah.com – Need a Killer Website, Landing Page, or Sales Page Fast? You Need Website Cheetah.

https://articlecheetah.com – Grow Your Traffic with Content Marketing & SEO (Even If You’re Not an Expert).

You've gotta hear this. In a way, it's embarrassing. In a bigger way it's humbling, inspiring, and deeply motivational. Most important of all, it's 100% true and the fact that I'm able to share it with you makes me genuinely happy. I hope you like it, but more importantly I hope you do something with it.

Note: The website/online business I reference throughout this episode is not SixFigureGrind.com or SixFigMedia.com. Both of those brands are less than a year old. The site I'm referencing was my very first six-figure online property.

Someone recently asked me to review their lead magnet and funnel and it only took me 2 minutes to figure out what the problem was with the lead mag (the rest of the funnel was a mess too, but we can't get into all that).

What was el problema?

The lead magnet was too much. It was too much value. It was too in-depth. It required too much work.

Stop giving people so much value for free!

They don't deserve it. Why? Because people, by and large, don't take action on free stuff. You're wasting your time.

It's overwhelming. Even people that would have taken action might simply feel overwhelmed and do nothing (something that they'll miraculously find a way to overcome if they actually dish out some scratch, by the way).

For the small percentage of people who do take action, it's going to give them too much to do for now. That means means your follow-up messages are going to fall on the ears of people that are already focused on something else.

If you want to be more successful with your lead magnet funnels, make your lead magnets ultra-focused, short, and actionable. They need to create a very quick, small win. And that's it.

The high value stuff that requires work and a longer term focus must be guarded by a paywall. Not because you're greedy, but because people only take things seriously and get real benefits when they have skin in the game. It's just a fact of life.

If you currently (or plan to) use published content in the hopes of gaining organic traffic, this episode is a must listen. You're most likely making one or all of these 3 critical mistakes that are causing Google to ignore your website and if you fix these 3 mistakes, you can 10x your traffic in the next 6 to 12 months (not blowing smoke).

If you want to know exactly how to execute on what you heard in this episode, you can enroll in my Six-Figure SEO course at http://sixfigureseocourse.com or you can have keyword research and content planning done for you for a very affordable monthly subscription via Article Cheetah.

The audio recording from the first Six-Figure Social live event that I held on Crowdcast. If you're interested in connecting with me and other like-minded entrepreneurs every week, join us free by registering at https://digitalambition.co/sixfiguresocial/ – You only have to register once and you'll be registered for all of them.