Walking you through my CALM, social media-free, marketing strategy

ruticker 04.03.2025 23:47:56

Recognized text from YouScriptor channel The Calm Creative

Recognized from a YouTube video by YouScriptor.com, For more details, follow the link Walking you through my CALM, social media-free, marketing strategy

# Marketing Your Creative Business with Authenticity Let's talk about a calmer form of marketing—marketing your creative business with authenticity, without stress, and without social media. As creatives, we usually don't start working for ourselves because we want to get rich and famous; we just want to do what we love and contribute to the world. We aim to make a decent living while still having plenty of time for life, family, and other creative projects. When we start our dream business, feeling forced into a non-stop, shallow hustle culture can be frustrating. But the good news is, we don't have to play this game, even if it seems that everyone around us is. I've been a creative solopreneur for over a decade in various forms: as a freelancer, writer, startup founder, web designer, artist, and content creator. Many creatives, including myself, are proof that you can run a calm, successful creative business with your personality and integrity intact. ## My Philosophy I want to emphasize that there isn't any one way to build a business; there are as many ways as there are people. This is just my philosophy and my way of doing things. My goal is not to prescribe a formula you have to follow, nor am I guaranteeing quick and easy growth. Most of those promises you find online are misleading. They might have worked for one person or a few people some time ago, but they are not guaranteed to work for you. Building a business takes effort and time, but that time can be spent doing our heart's work and enjoying every step of the way. I believe that's the most sustainable way to build a business—slowly, calmly, and while actually enjoying ourselves. If you agree, let's get started. ## The State of Social Media Social media has felt like a sinking ship for quite a while now, and I don't think it's just a feeling. These platforms are becoming very crowded and oversaturated, making it harder to get noticed. The increasing influence of algorithms dictates who gets seen and who doesn't. Our feeds are overrun with ads, bots, and what I like to call "fast food content"—shallow, fast-paced video clips that maximize watch time but provide little value. Everyone is in a rush and distracted; there isn't much real socializing going on anymore. Most interactions feel superficial, and for businesses, there's almost no organic reach left. Very few of our followers actually see our content, and we have to pay to reach them. It's like a big slot machine. Not to mention the precariousness of relying too much on these platforms—accounts get hacked or taken down all the time, often for no apparent reason, and careers can be destroyed this way. Social media used to be an effective and fun way to build an audience and promote your business, but now it's a game of diminishing returns. Many professional creatives, even those with huge followings, say that social media drives a very small percentage of their traffic and sales. ## The Downsides of Social Media The personal downsides of being on social media are significant. We often compare ourselves to the polished facades of influencers and other creatives who seem more talented or successful. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy and exposure to predatory advertising and scams. Social media just isn't a great place for us or our businesses. But can we really do without it? Do we miss out on anything by not being there? That used to be my biggest fear when I left social media for the first time. I was afraid my business would crash, that I wouldn't get any more subscribers or clients, and that I would lose valuable opportunities or relationships. My experience has shown that we are likely not missing out on as much as we think by not being on social media. The few things we might miss are probably worth missing out on because of the focus, energy, and extra time we free up by not being there. I promise you, you will reach your business goals without social media, and you will probably reach them faster, with less stress, and with your sanity intact. ## A Calmer Way to Market There is a better way—a calmer way to market your creative business. This workshop will provide you with the framework I have used to grow my business from scratch to having a growing list of engaged subscribers and consistent sales, all without social media and in a way that suits my personality and business. **Calm marketing** means sharing your personality, philosophy, and work with the world in a way that lights you up and provides value to others. The key mindset shift we need to make when leaving hustle culture and creating a calm marketing strategy is that more is not automatically better. More followers, subscribers, or traffic don't automatically translate to sales. You can have 10,000 Instagram followers who barely see your content or who follow you casually. You can have half a million YouTube views that lead to very little traffic to your website. Conversely, you can have an email list of just 100 highly interested, engaged people who are prime candidates for whatever you sell. Depending on what you sell, you could make a comfortable living off an email list of just a few hundred people. We have to stop idealizing and striving for large followings, likes, comments, and other online vanity metrics that don't mean anything in a business context. What matters are sales and quality relationships. Today, more than ever, we crave substance and real personal connection. ## Standing Out in a Crowded Market How do you stand out in an environment filled with empty, fake, shallow content? By offering substance and real personal connection in a way that only you can. By growing a small but deeply aligned and engaged audience of your people—those who are here for what you have to say and offer. Building a stable business that grows and makes consistent sales means knowing who we serve—our ideal clients and customers. With a creative hobby, we usually start with ourselves. We have something we love making and would like to sell, and we might make a small occasional income selling what we create. This hobby becomes a business when we shift focus from ourselves to our customers. We start to pinpoint who our ideal client or customer is and brainstorm strategies for reaching and serving them. Not all creative hobbies can or should be turned into businesses. If you feel uncomfortable with the thought of focusing your art on a specific audience, ask yourself if you're truly ready and willing to turn this particular creative craft into a business. If you're not, that's totally okay—you're no less of an artist for it. ## Understanding Your Audience To build a stable business that can sustain us, we have to focus on our audience—our clients and customers. The more specific we can get when imagining them, the more effectively we can market to them. I recommend visualizing a single person in your mind's eye and writing down some typical characteristics: - What they do for a living - Their background - What their life looks like - What they dream about - What they struggle with - Their sense of humor - Their taste in music and entertainment The more like a close friend this person feels, the easier it will be for you to communicate with them. It might even be a close friend of yours or a previous client—that's even better because you can picture them clearly when you write or speak. It doesn't matter that most of your actual clients won't match this ideal person. They might be a partial match or simply enjoy the voice and personality that comes out in your content thanks to your visualization. Just having this person in mind will help you avoid sounding like everyone else and falling into the trap of bland content that appeals to no one. ## Being Yourself in Marketing Being fully yourself in your marketing will draw your ideal clients towards you like a magnet. This is the first part of our calm marketing framework. But we still need to reach our ideal person somehow; we need them to discover us so they can be drawn towards us in the first place. We do this by reverse engineering the relationship so that we can reach our people when they are most easily reached. Think about what you would do if you were looking for someone just like you and your business. What would you search for? Where would you look? What would convince you to hire someone or buy from them? For example, if I were looking for a brand photographer, I would probably start by searching for "brand photographer" in my area on Google. I would visit the first 10 to 20 websites that came up, look at their portfolios, and read their about sections to get a sense of their personality. If I found someone whose work resonated with me, I would want to know more about their process, tips for getting the most out of a session, and their pricing. If I stumbled upon a blog post or video that provided valuable insights, I might realize I want their help instead of doing it myself. This process plays out online all the time. This is how small businesses and solopreneurs get clients and customers despite not having large followings or ad budgets—by providing substance and personal connection, showing up in the right places, and having a solid business infrastructure in place. ## Building Your Business Infrastructure What does a good business infrastructure look like? It probably includes: 1. **A website** with something for sale on it. 2. **An email list** and some kind of free resource or freebie for new subscribers. ### Why a Website? Your business needs a stable home. It can't be built on the chaotic and earthquake-prone land of a social media platform, where algorithms can change, accounts can get hacked, and you have no control over the look and feel of your business. A website allows you to work with SEO to help people find you and provides a cohesive experience for your audience. ### Why an Email List? Email is the most reliable form of online communication we have right now. Unlike social media, emails are not filtered away by an algorithm. If your email lands in someone's inbox, you have their attention. Email communication feels more intimate, and you own your email list, allowing you to segment your audience and take it with you if you switch platforms. ### Why a Freebie? Offering a free resource, or lead magnet, can boost the growth of your email list. It provides value to new subscribers and helps build trust. This is a great starting point for a relationship, allowing you to continue offering substance and personal connection. By implementing these strategies, you can create a calm, effective marketing approach that aligns with your values and helps you build a successful creative business. # Growing Your Email List Without Social Media Okay, so how do we actually grow an email list without social media? It's not enough to just put up an email list signup form and let it sit there; we need to drive traffic there somehow. For many businesses, the standard approach is to use social media to drive traffic to their newsletter and free resources, which isn't a very effective method, by the way, because most people on social media would like to stay on social media. But it's better than nothing, I suppose. If we want to do better than "better than nothing," what can we do? We can create searchable content instead and make use of other people's audiences to grow our list faster than we could on our own. In my experience, the two most effective ways to get discovered online and grow our email lists are: 1. **Regular content creation** 2. **Getting in front of other people's audiences** that are similar to our own. This could mean getting interviewed in publications or podcasts, or interviewing people yourself, writing guest posts, or doing collaborations with other creators in your niche. How much of either of these you want to do is entirely up to you. You could create some content and then mostly do these PR activities to expand your audience, or you could rely mostly on your own content to drive traffic over time. The best approach is probably to do some of both. I myself am a bit shy, and even though I know my business would grow faster if I did more PR activities, I'm much more comfortable with creating content. So for me, writing blog posts and posting videos on YouTube has been my primary drivers of growth for my email list and business. For someone else, it might be their podcast or just their blog, maybe in combination with Pinterest, which is a search engine, not a social media platform. Your strategy should be built on whatever formats you enjoy creating the most because that's where you can really shine. ## Defining Effective Content So, what does it really mean to provide substance and create good content? It can be helpful to first define what the opposite looks like. **Ineffective content** might look attractive at first glance but doesn't provide much real or lasting satisfaction. It's more about seeming helpful than actually helping. Ineffective content isn't serving your actual intended audience and likely won't even reach them because they're not on the platform to any great extent. It will be lost and forgotten after a few hours or days and likely never discovered again. It relies on quantity to be effective and won't be as relevant in a few years' time or even a few months because it relies heavily on current trends or events. It's completely devoid of your personality or is only about you and not about your intended audience at all. It just scratches the surface of a real concern, leaving a feeling of confusion and dissatisfaction, or it oversimplifies the problem and solution to fit neatly into 30 seconds of video. **Effective content**, on the other hand, is truly helpful—not just the same top 10 tips that everyone else is spewing. It's original, has your personal touch, your perspective, your opinions, and your voice in it. It's searchable and evergreen, meaning it will be relevant and discoverable for years to come. It relies on quality over quantity. A few questions I like to ask myself when I'm planning content are: - What resource would I really have wished to have found when I was in my ideal client's situation? - What is the advice that I would have most needed to hear when I was in my client's situation? - What would be a resource that I could keep sending people to for years to come that would answer some common questions or help them do a certain thing? ## Leveraging Other People's Audiences Now, let's talk about leveraging other people's audiences. This is a great way to kickstart the growth of your email list if you're a new business owner. Once you have your business infrastructure set up—and not before—because if something you do gains traction, you better have a website and email list there to capture the influx of new people checking you out. Once you have that in place, start mapping out some relevant places, publications, channels, and collaborations that might suit your business. Who else out there already has an audience similar to the one you're trying to build? What could you offer that person and their audience? Maybe a new perspective, a powerful story, or some helpful advice. If you sell services, some powerful drivers of business growth for you might be: - Guest posting - Being a guest on podcasts - Doing public speaking - Asking previous clients for referrals - Networking at events - Simple word of mouth from doing a really great job If you sell products, it might be: - Going to markets, fairs, or events - Licensing your designs to companies - Getting your product into stores - Getting your art into public places If you're not sure where to start or what to focus on, think about where your ideal person is most likely to discover you and arrange your options by order of importance. Go for the most impactful one first. No overwhelm, no need to hustle—this is calm marketing, where we have a long-term strategy and work slowly and deliberately in that direction. ## Quality Over Quantity How many lists have you read with 133 ways of marketing your business without social media? Do they alleviate your feeling of burnout? Because they don't for me; I just tend to feel even more like I'm not doing enough. It's important to remember that just because we don't use social media doesn't mean we need to use every other strategy to grow our business. In fact, we can do fewer things but do them better—more effective, more deliberate things to get better results. If you're feeling overwhelmed in your marketing, remember that: A. You don't need to do all of these things—you shouldn't. B. View your marketing as something you set off maybe one to two days a week for, and then forget about it the rest of the time. Focus on your work and your craft. There are too many businesses out there that seem to think it's all about being seen, and as long as they're seen, the actual business will take care of itself somehow, which is not the case. We have to remember that our work, our craft, our art comes first. That's the stuff people buy, and being really good at what we do is a form of marketing in itself. ## Creating Your Calm Marketing Plan There is a workbook companion to this video that you can download below. In that workbook, I lead you through the process of pinpointing your ideal person, figuring out the best places to reach them, and crafting your own calm marketing strategy based on the activities that you enjoy and that you are the best at. My current marketing strategy consists of making content regularly in channels where I can get in front of new people. I call them my **Discovery Channels**. Then, I nurture that audience via email once a week. My Discovery Channels are my blog and my YouTube channel. My blog posts and articles bring me traffic from search engines, and YouTube has organic reach and traffic built in since it's a search engine too. The content I create will continue to get discovered and seen for many years to come, and it acts like a snowball—the more of my stuff is out there, the quicker my audience grows. What works for me might not work for you or even appeal to you. You need to find your own way, which usually entails doing some amount of experimentation. Don't be afraid to try something out for a while and then abandon it; there's no shame in that. It's the only way we can figure out what works for us and what doesn't. I recommend choosing one main Discovery Channel—some kind of outlet where you can share your work and have it be discovered by new people—so maybe a blog, Pinterest, YouTube, podcast, etc. Then, choose one nurture channel, which is usually an email list but could also be something like Patreon, as long as you have control of your contact list and there's no algorithm between you and your audience. Develop a weekly or monthly rhythm of doing your work, creating your content, nurturing your audience, and doing PR as much or as little as you want. And that's it! That's what calm marketing can look like. You get to decide the pace, what you work on, what you create, and the rest is just patience and persistence. You will know your marketing works well for you when you are enjoying doing these things and not dreading them. When it feels like you are steadily building a body of work as opposed to running in a hamster wheel, and when every week, some new people discover you and subscribe to you or maybe even write to you saying thank you for something you have shared. I know I've just scratched the surface of some of these topics like email marketing, web design, and content creation. There just isn't enough time to delve into any of these things too deeply in an overview like this, but I hope that this has been helpful for you. I hope you can relax in the knowing that you don't have to build a huge audience in order to make a good living on your creativity. You can safely leave social media behind, and the workbook will lead you the rest of the way to creating your own customized calm marketing plan. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I wish you the very best with your creative business!

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