Have you ever wondered why someone that seems new on the scene seems to come out of nowhere to become an overnight success? Or is it just a myth of overnight success?

In this episode, we talk about the myth of overnight success and share some examples of people who appear to be overnight successes in social media marketing, but who really built their skills the old-fashioned way. By hard work.

Episode Highlights:

Here are a few people that Madalyn and Kami watched as they came on the scene and heard people say were “overnight successes.” You can read their back stories on the links to see that they were anything but. They did leverage all of their experiences before, and some were even well known in other industries.

• Brian Fanzo got his start in Meerkat, which was a live stream program that was crushed by the release of Periscope. Brian took advantage of the live streaming technology to get widespread recognition. He was at the right place at the right time, getting seen by all the industry experts. They took notice of him, and next thing you know, he was speaking across the world. Before he broke out on the online marketing scene, he has a successful career in Cybersecurity.
  
• Sunny Lenarduzzi is a YouTube star doing business to business videos starting her career in news media. She started working for a news organization and knew how to be on camera in a good way. Moving away from that, she used Periscope and YouTube to talk to her audience and expanded into the videos she does today. She collaborated with others to do a promo with Applebee’s which was marketed really well and was really successful with over 1 billion impressions. (Related: Listen to a recent episode with Sunny about how to rock YouTube).
  
• Mike Stelzner rocketed to the top and is known as the CEO of Social Media Examiner which is a blog dedicated to social media marketing. He also has the largest social media podcast called The Social Media Marketing podcast. Here is what Stelzner did before he took the social media blogging world by storm. He was known for being the Whitepaper expert, and he helped many companies write these persuasive essays to build their business and wrote books about it. Hard work made it easy to pivot into a new, but closely related industry.

Are you ready to find your path to success like Brian, Sunny and Mike. We went over a few keys to get there, but it probably won’t get you there overnight.

Be Consistent

• If you lose your consistency, you lose your voice.
• Choose your platform and show up every day.
• Check in on your secondary platforms and find a frequency you can adhere to.

Let Your Work Speak for Itself

• Keep your work at excellent levels and people will take notice.
• People are always looking for good content, fresh ideas and things to talk about.

Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

• You have something specific to give. Figure out what that is, then share it.
• Look at your competition, audit them and find a gap that isn’t being covered, rather than compete with them.

Be Head Down and Focus on You

• What can you bring to the table that’s different?
• Take courses and listen to books to better yourself and learn more.

Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate

• Find opportunities to partner up with someone in your network and collaborate on something together. That is how we started this podcast.
• Build on your relationships to find common interests.
• Tap into your network to start a new project, write a blog post or start a podcast.

Tools, links and resources mentioned:

• Audible
• Blinkist
• 10th Annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Take Action

Come and discuss overnight success with us in the Facebook Group. Who do you think of as an overnight success? Do some research and get the backstory and we bet that you will find years of work behind them. 

How to reach Kami:

If you’d like to learn more about Kami Huyse, visit her website at www.zoeticamedia.com. You can contact her by email at [email protected] or tweet to @kamichat.

How to reach Madalyn:

If you’d like to learn more about Madalyn Sklar, visit her website at www.madalynsklar.com. You can contact her by email at [email protected] or tweet to @MadalynSklar.

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