Learn about the importance of making intentional choices and setting specific times to be online to alleviate the pressure to constantly perform from this conversation with Meg Casebolt. We explore the societal shift towards a digital focus and the benefits and challenges it brings. Meg shares her personal experience of taking 100 days off social media and how it affected her mental health. 

We explore the power of genuine relationship building, as well as the pitfalls of transactional networking. If you're craving deeper conversations, this episode is for you. Join us as we unpack the costs of social media and explore alternative marketing approaches that go beyond the superficial. 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Nicole Kalil’s F*ck Social Media podcast episode: https://bit.ly/46lRba9
• The Confidence Code: https://bit.ly/3srbmE4
• The Female Brain:  https://bit.ly/44yccMw

Meet our guest: 

Meg Casebolt is an author, podcaster, and SEO specialist who has spent the last two years delving into the impact of social media on online marketing and its effects on mental health. Her first book, "Social Slowdown," explores the misconception that social media is synonymous with digital marketing and challenges the traditional approach preached by industry leaders. 

With a passion for connecting with like-minded individuals, Meg is dedicated to spreading awareness about the detrimental effects of social media and advocating for a more mindful and balanced approach to marketing. And, if that’s not enough, Meg is also a fellow ADHD-powered entrepreneur.  

Connect with Meg beyond this episode: https://bit.ly/45LmDNU

• Buy a copy of her new book: https://bit.ly/45w6MTQ
• Check out her website: https://bit.ly/45LmDNU
• Listen to her podcast:  https://bit.ly/3R1HzMx

Going, going, almost gone… If summer is a little slower in your business, it’s the perfect time for my  Boss Up Bootcamp short-term options.  Whether you need a Strategy Day, an Accountability Day, or a Brainstorm to Breakthrough intensive, don’t wait. They are only available until September 15th. Kinda like summer camp, but without leaving home or S’Mores.  Find out more here:  https://bit.ly/43XxovI  then, schedule a free 30-minute consultation here:  https://bit.ly/3qrJ9YQ 

My favorite place to connect online is Linked In, click here to subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter: https://bit.ly/3MAalSp

For the time-crunched, or impatient, here’s the TLDL version:

00:04:26 Social media lacks depth, and rewards quick content.

00:09:36 Social media seems free but has costs.

00:14:45 Gaslighting of those seeking success online.

00:22:07 Relationship-based marketing boosts business through referrals and networking.

00:27:38 Society has gone digital and stayed connected online.

00:35:39 Trends: decrease in anxiety, intentional choices, finding clients off social media.

00:43:37 Importance of prioritization and redefining success.

00:51:50 Audience knowledge, clear messaging, specific pain points.

00:58:42 Visualize future self and plan content accordingly.

01:00:25 Simple strategy for creative people's benefit. (7 words)

H: So I'm joined today by Meg Casebolt for many reasons. We are like minded and like brained, we are both entrepreneurs. We are both females, we have both transitioned into working online and finding our space. And Meg's specific space, her specialty, her expertise, her thought leadership is around search engine optimization, either in addition to or instead of social media. Now, If you've been following me for a minute, you know that I am fed the fuck up with how much time, attention, energy, focus, effort, and dollars I have spent on growing a social media audience. And while I've known about Meg for a while, I'm finally at a place where I'm ready to hear her preach why chasing people who are not looking for you makes a whole lot less sense than speaking to the ones who are. So Meg has just published her first book and let's just start with that because the title says it all..

G: Of course, so my first book is coming out by the time we're recording this in advance. But by the time you're listening to this, it will have been released. It is called Social Slowdown. I also have a podcast by the same name. So for the better part of the last 2 years, I've been exploring this, the ways that social media has sort of influenced online marketing and become sort of synonymous with the dual marketing in a way that isn't necessarily accurate, or the best choice for us as creators and consumers and the ways that it's impacting our mental health. And so this is something, like I said, that I've been exploring in podcast episodes for years and having lots and lots of conversations about it.

And in the process of having the interviews and of thinking deeply on this subject, I started to realize that my approach to marketing is very different from what is being preached at a thought leadership level by most people in the space by most industry leaders. And I said, you know what, maybe I should just start taking some of these pieces of content that I've released as podcast and turn them into a format that is more consumable in a linear progression.

You know, I love podcasting. I love having these conversations. I love being able to connect with other like minded like, use it like brain to people. But I don't expect people to go back and listen to dozens of episodes in order to get to the salient points and the best parts of it. So yeah, I took the podcast interviews. I dug through the transcripts. I tried to find trends and I turned it into a book. Yay!

H: Actually, I hope that we have some time towards the end of the interview, Meg, to talk about actually that process, because as a podcaster of three years myself, it's like, that's very appealing. And you're absolutely right, we all have shorter attention spans, those that have an official diagnosis, and the rest of the world. So being able to collect all the information, all the content that you've already created, and put it in a format that people could consume it and, and have that level of understanding fricking brilliant.

G: Thank you, and I think also, you know, there seems to be this idea that we always have to be creating something new all the time. And there's not necessarily the time and the emphasis put onto how can I distill this into something that is deeper and more valuable than the surface level conversations that are happening. And I think, you know, the platform that I'm trying to encourage people to rethink is social media, which even in the 20 years that I've been on social media, which is painful to say this phrase 20 years on social media. I'm 39 and I've spent half my life as a Facebook user, right? Like that's a strange thing to think about, it kinda makes my stomach like, oh, it's a little gurgly.

But you know, like this is now how we're interacting with each other. And so because we are being encouraged to create at a high frequency, but a low depth of knowledge because the educational work that we're doing, the deeper conversations that we're doing are not rewarded within those algorithms and over the past 20 years, they've gotten less rewards for depth and more, you know, we've now moved from like Instagram was a photo sharing platform to Instagram is now a video platform to Instagram really wants you to be 15 to 60 seconds or less like, how can you say anything that is like deep in such a small soundbite.

And, you know, like Twitter moved from 140 characters to 280 characters, how and so you have to do threads. You have, you know, like, it's not a platform that allows us to have meaningful, beneficial, mindful conversations. It's intended to give us the dopamine rush of, Oh, somebody's responding. Oh, I got another like, Oh, somebody shared that, right? Like, it's like fast food, it's like, if all that you're eating is McDonald's, you never sit down and have a salad, then you're never going to feel like your stomach's going to not feel great about it. You need to have some balance around what it is that you do and so, yeah, that's I don't remember where I was going with this argument.

H: ADHD yeah, but you know what, something I caught Meg that I thought, Oh, this is really interesting is that you referred to social media as a platform, and I think we've all been so indoctrinated and conditioned to think of Instagram as a platform and Facebook as a platform, even though they're now kind of the metaverse conjoined twins. And the metaverse and Twitter is a platform and TikTok is a platform and so we're all sort of on this treadmill together, this ginormous treadmill, this hamster wheel and we're thinking, okay, if it's not working for me on Twitter, maybe I need to hop on over to TikToK. Or if it's working on TikTok, then maybe I need to be doing TikTok and reels and YouTube shorts. When if you look at social media as a platform instead of each of these individual apps as platforms, instead of thinking, which one should I be on, you're encouraging people, you're inviting people to a higher and deeper level of critical thinking about whether I should be doing any of this, and if so, I should know why the F I'm there.

Because I don't think most of us know why we're there, other than the fact that we see other people who do what we do there, so we make the knee jerk assumption, well, if this person is doing it, then I need to be doing it too. And if I'm not doing it, that says something negative about me, honey, I got this for you. I don't care if you got a blue checkmark or not, no one's going to notice if you're there or not, and they're certainly not going to make decisions about it that are going to move the needle in your business one way.

G: Yeah, I think one of the things that, especially when you're first getting started in business, there's this assumption that, well, social media is free and it's the place where people are spending their times and my audience is already there. So it's the default way to connect, you know, it's almost like that's the water cooler and people are hanging out at it so that's where I need to be. And, we don't necessarily think about the resource allocation decisions there where it's yes, technically you can set up an account on any of these apps for free, but then you're spending your time on those platforms, not just in the creation zone, but then you're consuming other people's content. You're trying to engage with them. You're thinking about your follower counts your and like I said, you're thinking about it, even when you're not on the platform.

You're spending that mental bandwidth to say, what do I need to create? Did I set my schedule or for this amount of time? And then you start typically people go through this sort of phase where they're like, okay, I built this following and I want them to continue to find me, but I'm tired and I don't have time for this. So I'm going to outsource it and then you hire maybe a social media strategist or a community manager. And now your money is being tied up in what is supposed to be your free marketing. And you still think that it's free because you're not in this, Oh, I'm not running Facebook ads. I'm just paying another person, I have a team member doing it. I'm still, you know, growing the industry and that feels good.

But you're still allocating your resources to grow a following on an app or a platform that may or may not be making a meaningful change in your marketing. And social media is, it's absolutely very hard to measure. I think all marketing can be difficult to measure, but social media metrics are often like What is your engagement rate? What is your reach? What is your follower count? It's not necessarily a direct correlation to like how much money you're making. You know, there are ways that you can look at your email marketing and say, based on my click through rate and the UTM parameters and the tracking tools that I'm using, like I can correlate.

I sent an email and then I made this money. It's not nearly as easy to make a direct correlation between like an Instagram post or a TikTok video and then this person made this action that converted into a sale. There's not as straight of a linear progression from one to another. It's very much like, I feel like people are engaging with me because I have that dopamine hit, but also like the metrics show that maybe 10% of the people who are following you are seeing what it is that you're posting. So it's just become a very kind of murky space for trying to figure out if what the resources are that you're spending on it are actually giving you a return on investment.

H: I almost feel like we could stop this interview right now because that is literally, that's like mic drop moment. And I I'm also thinking, and this is really sad and unfortunate, but by the time you realize all this, either because you have the good fortune to encounter someone like Meg Casebolt or you just gradually realize it. You kind of feel like you're in an abusive relationship with social media because you kind of just wandered into it. You didn't really know what to expect, you didn't consider the long term costs of all kinds, time, money, energy, focus, effort, attention, opportunity cost, all of that, because it's constantly evolving. And the reason why I'm saying it's like an abusive relationship is because when you're in an abusive relationship and you're trying to please the other person, let's say a narcissist, they keep moving the goalpost.

And I feel like the algorithms are constantly changing so that kind of feels like just as I was starting to get my groove, now there's one more thing I need to figure out. And it just, it's like you're chasing something and getting just enough intermittent reinforcement. You have one post that becomes really popular, so you try to figure out why that one worked compared to the others, and you try to do more of that, but the bottom line is we are the product, we are not in control of any of this, it actually isn't necessary, even though the sunk cost fallacy will tell you it is, and by the time you're like, I am so fed the fuck up of this, I am so resentful, I don't want to do it anymore, but I don't know how to get out. Oh, my God, that's so painful and there's a lot of people who are there, aren’t there?

G: Yeah. And I think also to your metaphor of abuse, I think that there is also a certain amount of gaslighting happening of those folks who are seeing success on the platform, advertising success on a specific platform or with a specific tactic and maybe you're seeing Facebook ads saying, wow, here's how I grew my Instagram following. And here's how I made a million dollars through Instagram DMs and here's how I did all these things. And if you're not seeing those same results, then you are the one who is doing something wrong because my system works. And I think especially those of us who have been raised and socialized as women internalize those messages.

We don't necessarily have the critical thinking pushback to say, well, what is it about the system that worked for you and let me see those numbers and did you really make those sales from DMs or did you get that person onto your email list and then into the funnel and you know, like we just go, well, it works for them. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me that I can't make that work. But I don't have, you know, the folks who are sending out these Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, you know, all the advertisements, they're doing that because they have the budget to reach us because they're investing that much in these strategies because they have a certain cost per lead or cost per acquisition that they have in mind for these particular, you know, like, it's a very different strategy than what a lot of us think that we want to achieve through organic social.

And honestly, for a lot of us, and I know your audience fairly well, because I am also driven woman entrepreneur, right? Like, we don't need the volume of millions and millions of followers, we're like, I need like five leads a month would be really cool, right? Like I don't need 5,000 new email subscribers every month. I need like maybe five really great people and then I want like half of those to convert into high paying clients or I want to invite people into an intimate group experience, or, you know, like, we don't necessarily need the scale of the people who are advertising and telling us that their frameworks work for infinite growth, you know, like, I'm not trying to 10x anything o why am I feeling bad about myself? Because the folks who are telling me that they're successful have different goals than I do.

H: Because as you said, individuals who have been socially conditioned as women almost from birth have been told by multiple, multiple billion dollar industries that we're not enough and I think this is just the latest clusterfuck. You know, and the saddest part and the part that really makes me quite angry, frankly, is that we're used to being lied to by men in so many different ways, but now we're being lied to by other women, because a lot of the web celebs that you and I are indirectly referring to are women. It's like, I'm going to be safe if I just buy courses from women, if I enroll in courses from women, if I join communities, tribes, memberships, masterminds with other women, I'm going to be safe from being lied to, manipulated, gaslit, I'm going to be safe from having somebody constantly telling me, Oh, okay, so you're doing so well. No, I'm not, but if you want the next level of breakthrough, you need to invest in the next level of program.

I've literally known people who've had their house foreclosed on and even lost custody of their kids to their ex because they kept investing in following these women, we're selling them on a dream. And you know what hey, listen, if you need to do one thing, like get a fricking tattoo on your forearm facing you preferably so you can read it more easily that says results may vary because they absolutely do and that's what we need to remember and the critical thinking. I mean, if you really think about it, social media. If you are a business owner, social media is you trying to distract someone, interrupt them from the actual reason why they showed up.

G: I just want to look at cat videos, I just want to watch Ted Lassner memes.

H: And I don't even like cats. I'm a dog person. But it's so funny to watch them mess with people.

G: Yeah, they are. They're so passive aggressive, I'm not even sure.

H: Yes, but I did not come to the app to find the next coach, consultant, mentor, whatever.

G: I just want to read a romance book. I want a recommendation for what I should read next based on the previous book that I've read like, what are the things that we actually want? I want to know the gossip from my kids elementary school. I know when I want to know the local, you know, performing arts center has a band that I want to see, like, I'm not there. Cause I am like, I want to feel tripped about the amount of money that I'm making. It's just not interesting to me. And if there is something that I want to learn, if there is something that I value, that I will go seek out that information. And there's two ways that I seek out information. One is if I know somebody who has had the results that I'm looking for, or who has worked with somebody that they like, then I will go ask that person for a referral. And if I don't, then I will go to a search engine, right?

H: This is so logical, right? Referrals, I mean, it's almost like there are so many women who have started businesses in the last decade. There have never been more women starting businesses in the history of this country and all the other countries. And it's a beautiful thing but because there's so much to learn and so much we don't know. And the vast majority of us are coming into this with this background conditioning of, I'm not enough. So of course, we think we need help and lots of it. We're going to take advantage of free help. We're going to take advantage of cheap help. We're going to take advantage of all kinds of help.

We're going to get ourselves so much information that we couldn't possibly make any sense of all of it. And then we start paying people and whatever happened to referrals. I mean, the best business leads in the history of business have always been personal referrals. Like, why don't we do that anymore? It's like, we've completely forgotten that that's always been an option and it still is. And if you don't know someone, there's Google and there's YouTube, the other search engine, I mean, but I don't know what I don't know. I'm sure you hear that all the time. If I don't know what I don't know, if I don't know what I need, how could I possibly use search intention to help me.

G: Well, I would say, first of all, before we get into that, I would say that you, you want to start to think about whether your business and your marketing strategies are relationship based or traffic based and what percentage of your marketing strategies are each. So for my business, even though I teach people how to do content marketing for getting traffic to your website for getting relevant traffic still 75% of our leads for our strategy projects are from referrals. When people fill out the contact form on our website, when they book a call with me, we have a question for every single person who books a discovery call with me that says, like, how did you hear about us? And I would say 80% of the time it's a person's name that's listed there. And 20% of the time it's Google or it's, you know, and sometimes it's like somebody mentioned you in a Facebook group.

So it's networking, but it's social networking, but it's reputation, right? Somebody that I don't know has said, Oh, you're looking for a CEO person, right which is a different level of brand strategy and brand awareness that we don't have to talk about in this particular conversation. So I just want to start from that, which is, if you're running a lower volume business, even if even those of us who literally teach and are saturated in content marketing like me. Most of my leads still come from people, so I want to give you the permission that if that is how you want to market, if you want to build up your network, if you want to go into other people's communities, if you want to go on other people's podcasts, that's like sort of that intermixing of content marketing and relationship marketing is borrowing other people's audiences and letting them borrow your audience and doing things like email swaps. Like there's a way that you can leverage the relationships that you have in order to grow your business and in order to grow your authority and in order to continue to like build out your reputation without necessarily needing to be like, Oh, I'll just do an Instagram stories takeover.

That's not the only solution, and coming back to our point earlier about being socialized as women, like this is what we do best. We become friends with other people and we say things like, Hey, how can I support you? Who do you want to meet next? How can we stay in touch? We may not have been socialized to go, I need to have some critical thinking and get all the metrics behind this person's, you know, ads, but we have been socialized to say, how can I support you? How can I collaborate with you? What does that look like? We don't all have to do this separately and independently and stand on our own two feet. We can climb onto the shoulders of giants by supporting each other. So here's my first answer is like, don't worry about content marketing. Don't worry about social media marketing until you've tapped out the people that you actually know and that you like and that you want to spend time with, you know.

H: And It's absolutely true and I think it's one of the things I'm thinking about the difference between relational and transactional, right? Like podcast guesting and, you know, having you as a guest, having me as a guest on your podcast, it's one of my favorite ways of networking, relationship building and creating content all in one. But, but I'm talking to you because you're someone I want to get to know, not because you're somebody who has X number of followers or, you know what I mean? It's just, there's so much that even when what we're trying to do is fundamentally relationship oriented. I see a lot of people doing it in a way that feels predatory. It feels transactional.

So it's like, I think, you know, knowing like what's actually important to us and why we're doing something is something that I think a lot of us just miss. Because we're conditioned to follow, we're conditioned to look to others to see what they're doing and then do what they're doing. And I think, to me, one of the most important things about deciding to be self employed, whatever you call yourself a freelancer, an independent professional, a creative, an entrepreneur, is you have to embrace a willingness to engage in critical thinking on a regular basis, because I think if there's one problem that I see again and again and again and again, and so many different variations, it's that we're not engaging in critical thinking.

We're not asking ourselves, why am I doing this? We're doing it because it's what's what everybody is doing and what we think is necessary. What we've been told is necessary but if you fricking hate it, It's not sustainable. You're never going to get good enough at it for it to actually work for you as well as something that that's more in alignment with who you actually are. I mean, I don't think we have to completely sell our souls to be successful online but yet it almost seems like that's what's subliminally being taught. And I like forget that, you know, how to make relationships with people.

G: I think also like, because our society at large has become digital because that is the preferred way that people keep in touch now, because our worlds have blown open and you and I do not live in the same town, but we are keeping in touch the expectation is that we are living and performing our lives online. And if we aren't keeping up with that, and if we aren't, you know, I tell the story in the book, I accidentally took 100 days off of social media and it was really great for my mental health. But the reason that I eventually went back is because I missed my friends. I missed knowing what they were up to. I had not developed and I'm still don't haven't fully developed the replacement mechanism for like, hey, I need to text this person. I need to reach out to this person. I need to, you know, it's sort of like, it's the default setting. And so, even without thinking about our businesses, our relationships have gone online and so the expectation is that that is where we are going to keep in touch with each other and then to add the businesses on top of it and say, this is how I'm getting the awareness, the recognition of the hard work that I'm doing the validation that somebody is seeing what it is that I am creating.

There's a level of support that we want to feel. There's a level of like wanting to be seen and acknowledged and noticed that when I worked in a, you know, I worked in nonprofits for a decade before I started my business and I would go into the office and I would meet with staff members and donors and, you know, like various, you know, individuals in the field since I don't have that anymore, I still need that feedback loop and now it happens in Facebook group. So it's become a bit of a replacement for us, so we resent it, but we also feel the need to be seen in those spaces and to have those conversations in those spaces. So it's kind of the strange societal stand in that I don't think any of us have really thought about how we're navigating it in a way that feels supportive versus, but you use the word term predatory or transactional, right? It's tough.

H: Yeah, it is tough and I also think just in terms of the efficiency. I don't want to be a hypocrite here. Here I am talking shit about social media, but in truth, if I can get my need met through the chat function, if I'm dealing with some sort of a tech issue on a platform that I'm using for my business and I can get my need met in the chat function, I would far prefer that to getting on the phone with a real human because of the efficiency. I haven't been in a mall or most actual stores in a very long time because of the efficiency of being able to order online. I also like asynchronous communication. That's why I like Voxer so much because I can leave a message, send a photo, you know, text, voice, whatever, when I'm thinking of it without any pressure for the other person to be available to listen and engage at that time, they can get to it later. I very much like those things because, you know, ADHD, I have a thought I have to share it immediately. I just have to offload it. It doesn't have to be responded to. I mean, responded to later or not at all.

G: I’m a millennials so I don't even like a phone call, like, give me a text message any day. If people call me, I'm like, what is this garbage? What rock are you living under come on. We've gotten so accustomed to being able to check in when it's convenient for us, but then we also have these platforms and these apps that are saying, no, but now is the time that you need to check now, now, now, now they're sending us all of these, you know, notifications and every time you get a notification, it not only gives you that dopamine boost of like, Ooh, somebody's thinking about me, somebody's engaged with my content, somebody's written something interesting that I need to go hit, but also like that FOMO of, Oh, but I need to go check it out now, otherwise I'm going to miss it. It's not great.

H: It's so true, and we're all hooked. It's very addictive, and like all addictions, it's never going to feel as good as it did in the beginning. And the beginning is actually not when you start creating content for social media. The beginning is when you first believe that it's going to help you. It's like you get infatuated with the idea of it. It's like, oh, this is going to be this has worked for so many people. I've joined this great program. It's going to be easy, fast, fun, passive, lucrative. It works for everybody, this is going to be awesome. The idea of it is the thing that we keep trying to get back to and like any addiction, like the longer you're engaging in it, the less satisfaction you get from it. I don't know if, you know, Nicole Khalil, but she is part of my network and she released an episode on her podcast. I will link to it in the show notes, after she released her book last fall, she had a very strategic campaign for 6 months where she went all out, she was working with someone.

She went all out on social media for six months. It was extremely effective, her audience size blew up, she got lots of speaking engagements. And the episode she released was “I fricking hate social media”. So this I think is a really important point and I know it doesn't come as a surprise to you, even though you didn't know what I was going to say. It's not just that we can hate it or resent it or feel like we're in an abusive relationship with it when it's not quote working, but we can feel that way when it is, which is like. That's, I don't think anybody would consider that unless someone like Nicole said, actually, maybe the reason that you're feeling so shitty about this is not because it's not working. It may have nothing to do with whether it's working or not. What are you wanting to get from this? It's not just the numbers. It's a feeling and it may not be capable of giving us that.

G: It may not be we're chasing, you know, chasing rainbows are we ever going to get there.

H: Chasing the fields. Now, your book is called Social Slowdown as well as your podcast, we'll be linking to below. I love the podcast because it was almost when you first started producing episodes on this podcast, I thought, this right here is permission. Now, I know it's part of your business. I know you do SEO, not social media, but it's like, maybe you don't need to break up. Maybe you don't need to break up with social media. Maybe you break up with 1 platform and not another, or maybe you can just slow down. But especially for those of us who have fast brains and are very energetic. I think slowing down on anything intentionally is always going to reveal something to us that we're not aware of when we're just going, going, going, going, going. What are some of the things that you have seen people become aware of develop insight about reflect on when they do slow down with social media, that probably wouldn't have happened.

G: And I think, there are several trends that I've seen when I've talked to people about this. One is a decrease in that kind of anxiety and the fear of missing out and maybe even to zoom out a little bit from there. Not necessarily the anxiety, but the recognition of how much of our brain space is living online and thinking about who have I not heard from what do I need to create? You know, I was in that DM conversation and that was asynchronous but if I go too long, then maybe I'll lose a sale. You know, there's a lot of mental capacity that goes into spreading ourselves, especially if you're on multiple platforms. If you're trying to be, you know, DMing on LinkedIn while also posting on Facebook and being in all the groups for the different programs you're in and like, it spreads you really thin.

And I think when people make the decision of like, okay, I'm going to, even if it's like, I'm going to batch all my content, I'm going to write it on a Monday and spread it out so that way it gets scheduled. And then I'm going to check in twice a week and make sure that I'm not missing anything. And here's the time of, I'm going to do this you know, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 am. And then I can still go online at night, but I'm not going to check my DMs. I'm only going to look at TikTok because I don't have a business TikTok account. I'm going to just use that for my memes and whatever. You know, like having some intentional choices makes a huge difference in terms of not feeling like you need to be on and be performing all the time and that can feel very much like creating more white space in your calendar.

I think also one of the questions that I ask people, I've asked pretty much everyone who's come on the podcast, which is how do people find you? How are your clients discovering and typically the answer that I get from people is borrowing other people's audience or people are searching for me. And then they come over and they follow me on social as a way to sort of keep in touch and stay top of mind, but they're not finding me on social media. They are hearing me on podcast interview and then coming and listening to my podcast or they're finding my book on Amazon and then they're reading my book and then they're going and listening to my podcast, and then they're ready to hire me. Often, the methods that actually lead to the clients are not necessarily on social.

You know, if I go and look at who came to my last sales webinar, it's typically, I heard you on a podcast, I saw you in an online summit, and I joined your email list, and I've been on ever since, or somebody told me that I should come do this program. They may have been following me on social media, but that wasn't that first point of contact. And if you can start to reverse engineer where your best clients are coming from, it may or may not be on the platforms where you're spending the most time. And that might give you the permission to go, wait, if more people are finding me through referrals, maybe I need to spend some more time on Zoom calls, or I need to do better follow up, or I need to, like what is the actual thing that is working versus what is the thing that you think is working and there's always a bit of cognitive dissonance in that question.

H: And do you find that when people realize, Oh, actually I could do a lot less of this or maybe even an experiment with none of this, and it might not only not hurt me, it will free up the time, energy, space, dollars for me to spend more time doing the things that actually do work. Now, logically, intellectually, cognitively, perfectly clear. Makes perfect sense when they start implementing that, it's a lot harder. This is where the former shrink in me is like, Yes, Matt!

G: Intellectually, people can say, yeah, I should totally be spending that hour writing a blog post instead of writing 20 tweets that will all disappear by the end of the day. I should totally be doing that because, you know, the, the lifespan of a blog post is 1.9 years versus 18 right. Like we know we can get that information into our heads, but does that information move into our hearts, into our guts, into the decisions makings that we're, the decisions that we're making? Probably not.

H: Okay because my belief about human behavior is this, very basic, human behavior is we are resistant to change. We are change resistant organisms. Now, this is less true for those of us with ADHD. We do have a tendency to like change, but we can get hooked. We can get addicted to things just like everybody else. We have FOMO just like everybody else. So do when people do decide to start making these changes, let's say, okay, I'm spending all this time and energy on social media. And I think what I really need to be doing is more in person networking, more getting in front of other people's audiences and actually starting to make use of SEO and search intention for people who are already looking at what I do.

When they start doing that, when they start implementing, do you find that it's like, well, I know I said I was going to do it and I set up the schedule for going to do it. And I told my team, this is what we're doing but when they actually start to make those changes, do they get scared? Do they second guess? Do they like, what, what do you think? Cause I think it's kind of like weaning yourself off of something that, you know, isn't benefiting you. But it has come to feel so necessary that's really painful. And it wouldn't it be great if we could just be like, I'm done with this.

Like, I think when, well, like if every bad thing I do and have ever done, if I could just be like, this is dumb, we're done. I'm not doing this anymore and then just like fricking stopped cold turkey. But that's not human nature. We have to be in enough pain. It's either pain or pleasure, baby. We have to be in enough pain to say I literally cannot do this anymore or pleasure or the promise of pleasure something so much more enticing than continuing what we're doing has to be presented to us in a compelling way and you and I have talked about this like SEO it's not an overnight success story.

G: It is not a sexy strategy, to answer your initial question.

H: It's not instantaneous.

G: To answer your question of like, once people start to move in this direction, once they start to see results, is there sort of an acquiescence that something needs to change. You know, I would say 3 to 5 years ago, I was exclusively teaching SEO without thinking about it in terms of a larger comprehensive digital marketing conversation and I felt a lot more resistance from my clients, from my students because what I was saying was, here's something else to add to your to do list. Here's another thing that you need to do. And in that, like, Eisenhower matrix of what is urgent and what is important it felt important, but not urgent, but there were so many other things that are either right.

But you know, I could make the case that it was important, but it wasn't urgent. It wasn't something that I need to do today, I need to do right now. There wasn't like a drive to make that change and so that was something that I felt like I was constantly bumping up against is people saying, yeah, I know this. I know that I want to do this, but like, it just keeps falling down my to do list. The task just, for months, I would have people join my program and go months without even like watching a video or anything like you're paying for it because you know, you want it, but you just haven't made the white space in your calendar or the prioritization in your brain to make this something that is important to you. And that's okay like, it doesn't it's not the solution that works for everyone.

But then I would feel like I'm a failure because I hadn't convinced them of the importance versus, you know, the relative importance of everything else happening in your life. And once I started to talk about the opportunity cost, you know, what I just said, like you could spend an hour on a blog post that can be found for two years or on Twitter posts that can be found for 20 minutes. That sort of started to resonate with people when I started encouraging people to look at all of their performance metrics, you know, not just what's the traffic to your website? Or what are your keywords? But also, like, what is your social media engagement? What is your organic social reach? What is your open rate on your email? What, you know, like, let's take a look at all of these things within a larger context and then start to think about what is the best use of your time.

If you're planning to do this for five more years, what is the best use of your time right now? What does future you want? You know, what does Diann in a year want to be able to say to Diann now? Hey, I'm really glad you did that thing. That's a very difficult change to make and I find that if I can get people a quick win and say, great, in three months, I can have you ranking for this term, or I can have this page that's bringing in new traffic. If I can start to have a bit of a shorter window on the ways that I'm teaching things and those first, you know, almost like to gamify the process and make it into a quick win where it's not going to be, Diann is known as the coach, right? Because it's not a keyword that would work for you and it's too competitive.

But if I could have you be found for coach for female entrepreneurs who want to be less anxious, yeah, I can get you found for that, it's probably only 20 people a month who are searching for that term, but I can get you to number one for that term. So let's get more specific, right? Like, so getting people to think differently about what success looks like, both the things that we are actually tracking and measuring as well as the outcomes that we want to get out of the time that we're investing in this. It's a totally, somebody, people have asked me before, like, who are your competitors and I'm like my competitors are not other SEO people, my competitors are people's brains.

H: It's you well, because as we've talked about everything in our culture has been telling us that we need to keep up. We need to do what everybody else is doing. We can't step off the bus. We are all being indoctrinated to immediate gratification, our ability to manage our emotions while waiting for our desired outcome is no kidding. And it's like, but what you're offering as an alternative actually works better, more reliably with less stress, and you're not making business decisions based on feelings, you're making them based on facts.

G: I do facts and feelings. That's another part of it for me though, is like, I'm very much like, yes, let's look at the metrics, let's look at the data. You know, I'm going to be the analytics person, but I'm also going, if you hate this, you're not going to enjoy it right.

H: That’s true, there has to be some feeling of enjoyment going into this.

G: And so if you're like, ah, I don't want to do SEO because I don't want to blog, fine. Do a podcast and optimize the podcast, fine. Do a YouTube video and optimize that, fine. Like get some links from other people's websites. Like there's so many ways that this doesn't have to look like the, I mean, there's no one right way to do any of this stuff but finding or, you know, double down on one specific content group and outsource it and have someone else write a bunch of stuff for your website that's going to get the right people to your website. Like, it doesn't have to be you doing all this writing. So, but I think another piece of the puzzle coming back to how women and those of us who were raised as women have been socialized, it's like, Oh, it's too technical, I can't do that.

And a lot of the tutorials that are around the internet are highly technical because they're not made for people who are fearful of technology. And so one of the things that I feel very strongly about is like, I, you know, my dad was an engineer. I understand how the internet works in a way that, that nerds understand but that doesn't mean I have to talk about it that way. Like, why can't we simplify?

H: It would make you unrelatable for a lot of women.

G: I think it doesn't mean that I have to dumb it down. It means I have to simplify. It means I have to come up with alternative ideas and visualizations and explain things in English what, and a lot of people don't do that. There's like, well, I want to get featured in search engine journal so I have to speak to other people who know this stuff already and the curse of knowledge is real. So there's certainly a lot of fear that I also have to help people overcome beyond just what do all these, you know, acronyms mean, but like, no, really you can do this and it doesn't have to take forever. There's a lot of resistance in my marketing, I think for everyone there is, but you know, in particular, I've chosen a field that can be a little bit intimidating.

H: You know what, I find this with a lot of the women who have brains like ours, Meg, is that we have a tendency to be attracted to things that are gritty, more complex problems, but we also tend to have a gift for taking complex problems or complex solutions and simplifying them and streamlining them to make them more accessible to others cause not everybody wants to obsess at the level that we do. When I'm hearing, and I think we're going to obviously have to talk about how you convert a book or a blog, a podcast or a blog into a book another time. And that would be a great opportunity for you to come back.

G: Whenever you want.

H: What I'm thinking about right now is, I think what I'm really wanting to ask you right now is when someone has made this realization and made this decision that I really need to start moving in this direction, do they tend to be, are you finding that people need to be at a certain either level of sophistication in their business, a certain length of time into their business? Like I'm always thinking about like the tipping point. It's always interesting to me that some people can get there much quicker and other people it takes. You know, maybe that has more to do. We were talking about pit bulls earlier and their pain tolerance. Some of us have greater pain tolerance. We are able to struggle for much longer without getting fed up. But do you think you are now able to really reach, teach, lead and serve maybe a more established or more sophisticated or more experienced business owner, or can people like get on the bandwagon earlier in their entrepreneur?

G: Yeah, I think it's not necessarily about, you know, years of experience for me. I think it's much more like, how well do you know your audience? How clear are you in your messaging because if you have a very clear value proposition, you have already figured out your product market fit. Even if you're starting a new business tomorrow and you're like, I just want to get found in search for this thing. I don't even want to bother with these other marketing strategies. I can get you on there, we can find an approach to it, but you have to be willing to get specific and then you have to be willing to create doesn't have to be infinite creation. It can be, you know,10 blog posts, but like a very targeted message to a very particular pain point.

I think that the problem that many people have is that SEO used to be like, oh, I'm a lifestyle blogger so I have to talk about every single piece of my life in order to be found. And that's just not how the internet works anymore. I think also one big change that I've seen in the last, I mean really post pandemic, but I would say in the last 2 years is it used to be that people would come to me and say, I really want to figure out how to do this myself so I can get really good at it. And in the last year or 2, what we've seen is people going, I don't want to learn one more goddamn thing, just tell me what to create and how to create it and I will do it or I will outsource it. But like, I don't want to have to know how the sausage is made, just give me the plan.

And so we've changed our service offerings from being more about education and training into more let me just, Diann, here's who you want to reach, here are the problems that they have. Here's the 10 podcasts that I want you to create. Here's the keywords that I want you to optimize for we come up with that entire plan for our clients now. And then if they need help with implementation or support or whatever, we're there on the backend. But like really for us, it's thinking through what's the easiest, what's the lowest barrier to entry for somebody to see success. Which is a very different thing than let me teach you everything that I know on this topic because no one cares, no one cares.

H: But what we used to care and we used to think that was necessary. And it was one of the biggest barriers that I see with the women that I work with who literally come to me after struggling for years in their business. Because they kept finding one more thing that they became convinced was necessary for them to have a successful business. So it's like, okay, I'm going to have a successful business once I've mastered. So now I have to learn how to build websites. Now I have to learn how to launch and edit and upload a podcast. Now I have to learn SEO now and it's like the success that you say you want just keeps being pushed further and further in the future because we keep inserting other things we think we need to learn and master before we can be successful.

G: You know, like, it's that same idea of like, if you have a job description that's like, here are the 10 things that you need to be able to do, and men can do five of them, they'll apply, but women have to do nine, and then they're still going to doubt themselves. You know, like, it's the same thing where, you know, mediocre white men will put themselves out into the world and consider themselves experts, but women have to have fucking PhDs, and still then they're like, well, it's the same thing with the way that we market, with the way that we sell, with the way that we provide our services to our clients. So much of this is not even necessarily a skills gap, it's a confidence gap.

H: Yes. One of my very favorite book recommendations is The Confidence Code because that and if you want to have a double and I'm not talking in and out The Confidence Code and The Female Brain when it goes to the female brain confidence code is Shipman and Kay and the female brain is Dr. Louann Brizendine. In The Female Brain, just go to the chapter that describes the female brain at your particular agent stage like the mommy brain, the menopausal brain, whatever and it's like, Oh my God, like the truth is you don't need to wait for shit. You do not have a skill gap. You have a confidence gap because confidence is not a reward for good behavior head pat.

Confidence is a decision. It is a choice. It is a skill. It is a habit and you can learn it and start flexing that muscle. You don't have to wait for anyone. You don't have to play mother may I with yourself for the rest of your fricking life thinking I'm almost there. I'm almost there. No, you are. One more certification. Stop today. One more, one more, it's like, Oh my God, one more certification, one more degree, one more, whatever. It's like, no, please stop, stop immediately. Do not buy another course. Do not enroll in another program.

G: I have three degrees behind me in this room right now. I mean, only one of them's mine.

H: I do too and let me tell you something. I took them all off of my wall and I even took them off my website and they are now hidden behind a link on my about page that says if you care about credentials, here’s mine

H: Look at your pedigree, darling. Look at your pedigree, it's like you have the DNA of smart, strong women who are willing to share their brilliance with the world and that's a great reminder. So before we wrap, if someone's thinking, okay, I'm so ready to drink all this Kool Aid, just tell me what I need to do. I don't want just people to just jump on your podcast and join your group and all that stuff. What I want them to do first, because, you know, ultimately the best outcome comes from the best input. So what is the thing or things that someone who's listening needs to ask themselves, am I ready to get serious about search?

And I thought about SEO with every single one of my podcast interviews and every single one of my videos and every single one of my blog posts. I went, what would people be searching for if they wanted this information? So it doesn't have to be, I go look for the key words and then I build the plan and I do the strategy. I mean, nothing wrong with that, that's what we teach people to do, that's what we do for them. But like, if you're already creating content, instead of saying, what's the clever thing that I can do to get people to click through or what's the metaphor that I can talk about here? Just start to think of everything that you're creating as, if somebody was looking for this, what would they search for? What is the phrase that they would use and then include that information somewhere in your content. That's a really good place to get started.

H: It's a simple strategy that will immediately start to move the needle and I think especially for creative people to that little extra bit of intentionality. And also the reminder that all of this stuff is going to live on so you might as well be like, it's like nuggets for the, like archeological, the future archeological dig. You want to make sure your time capsule has the really good, easy to find stuff in it. That's not hard at all. It's one intention that you need to do consistently, that's awesome. So we want people to buy the book, read the book and benefit from the book and obviously listen to the Social Slowdown podcast. Now this may have started off sounding like major shit talking about social media. In fact, it was, but the point is not just to feel shitty about something that you've spent a lot of time and energy doing, but to point the way to an alternative. Or at least something that can live side by side with what you're already doing because you are working far too hard not to get maximum benefit.

G: Totally and in the book, I start part one saying, like, social media has changed and maybe you haven't recognized that the promise of it and the premise of it have changed and here's how it has changed. And here's what it actually looks like in our society and then I do a section of if you want to stay on social media, here's how you can create some of these boundaries. And then I start to talk about how to measure your marketing and what some alternative solutions are. So it's not just let me go shit on social media sorry bye. I really do want to have a larger conversation about digital marketing as a whole in the role of social media within that and when it is, and isn't beneficial for us as entrepreneurs.

H: And being intentional, because the truth is our time, our energy, our effort, our emotional energy is not unlimited, so we need to make better choices about how we invest at truth.