Why Posting on Social Media Won't Grow Your Blog

I got to tell you the truth here. Posting on social media, it's not really going to grow your blog. At least not in the way that you think. In a recent video, I showed you how you could take your entire blog, download it, upload it into Chat GPT, and use a project in Chat GPT to generate essentially unlimited social media posts from the content you've already created. It's brilliant. But I got this question from one of

you, which was, "What's the goal of posting on social media?" And that's where this video comes in. Because the goal of posting on social media, I'll tell you a few things that it isn't. Number one, it's not a play to try to make a bunch of ad revenue on the social media platforms. There was a time with blogging where we could just get enough traffic where we could earn enough really just from ads and maybe some

affiliate products that we could earn a great income really just by getting traffic and we didn't have to have any further strategy beyond that. You could imagine we're going to do the same thing with social media. We're just going to collect the ad revenue, right? Sure, that's going to be a piece, but that's not the goal here. Okay, so it's not that. It's not to try to get the traffic over to your blog so that you

can get a bunch of ad revenue. The goal is not ad revenue. The goal is not views. The goal is engagement. You see, an ad revenue-based business model is really built around entertainment type content. So, if you are creating social media content that's really entertaining and very broadly applicable, if you're the Mr. Beast of whatever social media platform you're on, fantastic. you're going to make a lot of money from ad revenue. But if you're going to

do any sort of deeper dives or you're going to share information and you're going to connect with people, that's probably not going to earn you enough just from ad revenue alone, not on your blog, but also not on the social media platforms. And we're not going to get enough traffic over from the social media platforms to our blogs to make enough money from the ad revenue. At least not like the money that we used to be

able to make. That's because at least 90% of the time, short form content is not ideal for actually sending people anywhere. It's too fast. It's too quick. People consume it. They if they engage with it, they're engaging with a like and maybe maybe a comment. So, what is the freaking point? The value becomes clear once you shift your mindset. And if you look at the social media influencers, all the people that you personally follow, are you

clicking through like almost ever, are you going to their website and reading a blog post? No. Now, if you have a resource that goes with the piece of content that makes a lot of sense, of course. Link to it. Mention it in your video. Mention it in the social media post, of course. But that is not the main goal. So, what is the point of social media posting? That's what we're getting to. But let me give

you another example. And I think that's going to make it really clear to you. For years, there is a creator or really a family of creators that I have seen on my social media over and over again. It's the Holderness family. Um, they're a family. Pen Holderness is a dad like I am. He's a little older than me, so he's kind of just been through the stuff I'm going through just a little bit before me. And

yes, they make like helpful informational content, but most of the content that I've consumed and that my family has consumed are these music videos that he makes. He he like makes parodies of popular songs and sometimes he writes his own songs and they're about things that totally relate to me as a dad and relate to my kids as kids and they're hilarious and they've done a ton about ADHD. He's got ADHD. It's something their family deals

with. his wife's uh very much an introvert. I'm an introvert. And so like the content that they make, it just it kind of takes the stuff that we deal with like on a day-to-day and it makes it funny. It makes it something we can laugh about and then they drive a lot of awareness to ADHD and how it's misunderstood and how your brain works and all this stuff. It's really, really cool. For years, I consumed their

content because it was entertaining to me. It was fun and it resonated with me, but I didn't just like watch them on YouTube, get a notification every time a new video came out because I was a subscriber that rang the bell. What happened was their videos started coming across my Facebook feed and sometimes on YouTube. I mostly saw them on Facebook for a long time. Then I started we started watching them on YouTube. We'd even put

up the music videos on the TV on YouTube. And this has been over the course of quite a bit of time. But because of their posting across multiple platforms, I was able to find them first, not on their primary platform. I found them on Facebook, consumed more of their content on YouTube, saw that they have a book about ADHD and ended up buying the book and then later because I didn't get around to actually reading the

book. I then got it on Audible. So, I bought the book twice and then I listened to the book and it was really, really good. I've done the same thing with other creators. I see them across one platform. There's a woman that I see show up on my Facebook feed all the time that talks about kind of relationship related stuff. And without even knowing it, I ended up getting like a top top follower badge, one of

the top follower badges um on Facebook because I've engaged with I've liked I've maybe commented on a couple videos, but I've done that enough. I've engaged enough that I don't even think I clicked follow, but I became a top follower. Maybe I followed at some point. And then I found like, oh, her primary platform is actually YouTube. I see her on YouTube sometimes, but mostly on Facebook. Do you see what we're getting at? The goal here

isn't necessarily that we're going to get them all funneled over to our our website. Yes. Ideally, at some point, we'll give them a strong enough reason to click over there and maybe with a lead magnet, get them to sign up for our email list and get them really into our system. But a lot of people are never going to do that either. So, what are we doing? We're treating each of these social media platforms and those

followers there as kind of also many email lists. We're engaging with those people. These are touch points. These are opportunities for not only people to find us, but for people to engage with us regularly. And the cool thing is is most of the content that you create for one social media platform, you can just cross-ost all of the others. And as you build this relationship with your audience, wherever they are, as soon as you have a

product that makes sense for them and you launch it, you're going to announce it to your email list and you're going to announce it on all your socials. You could post about it on your blog and almost nobody's going to read it. But because you're going to post across your socials, you're going to you're going to send out an email to the people that have subscribed to your email list because they read your blog because they

came over from these other social media posts. Yes, we are we are going to send some traffic over to the website, but the goal isn't to get back to 100,000 or 200,000 page views a month and be able to make our ad and affiliate revenue. That's not the goal. I've been saying for over two years now, you need to shift your mindset. If you see yourself as a blogger, it's time to change. You're not a blogger.

You're a small business owner. You need to think about what value am I providing to my audience? If the value is just information, maybe you're still making some money at that. But in the age of AI, we've been in the information age for a long time now. Information is becoming easier and easier to access. And in the age of AI, nobody's going to pay for information. It's not going to be long before almost nobody is paying

for just information. You need to give them an experience. You need to give them a product. You need to give them a tool. something that solves a problem for them or that maybe just entertains them, but in some way it has value to them. It solves a problem. It saves them time, makes them money or saves them money. Those kinds of things especially are going to be the most the easiest sell when it comes time to

provide those products. That doesn't mean you can't create courses and communities. Those are fine. But you need to make sure that if you have a course and a community, it's not just information that you're providing. You need to be providing an experience. And you need to be selling them on how their life is going to change as a result of the course that you're selling them. So the goal is not short-term traffic. The goal is not

viral social media content. The goal is brand building. Sounds familiar, like something we talked about like 3 years ago on this channel. Build a brand. I don't care if you don't have a product now, but that's where we're headed. So, as a blogger, what should you do? Stop identifying as a blogger. Identify as maybe a creator, an influencer, but mostly as a small business owner and think about what value you can provide to people that they

would actually be willing to pay for. And in a future video, we're going to talk about products. So you don't have to be worried right now about well I don't have a product idea. I you know what I had that this conversation just recently where I was like I I've wanted to get into physical products. I don't know what to make. And a little bit later it was my it was actually Jim. We were talking and

he got back to me and he was just like well here's a couple. And he just cuz he's been doing this now for he's been doing physical products in his business. And because that his mind is there, he had ideas. He had ideas quickly and it was and it just opened up my mind to a whole slew of possible things that I could create for my other channel um that I could sell as physical products. All

it's going to take is for something to trigger that thought for you and it's going to be easy for you to come up with products. We'll talk more about products in our next video, so make sure you watch that as soon as it comes out. But in the meantime, I want you to think about your social media strategy. We talked about how to create lots of social media posts. We've talked about a lot of things in

this series that we've been doing on the channel, and I'll link to that here at the end of this video. But just know as you create these social media posts from your blog content, it's going to make it easy to do. But you want to create the kind of posts that are going to be the easiest for people to engage with, for people to remember, for your brand to become recognizable to the point where like some

of the creators that I follow without even necessarily clicking the follow button, whenever I am scrolling and I see one of their reels or one of their shorts pop up, I stop because I recognize the person and I know the content is content that I want to consume. become that for your people and you're going to start getting a lot of engagement, a lot of brand awareness and it's not going to take thousands and thousands and

thousands of followers. It doesn't take a very big audience before you can make a tremendous income from a product because we're not depending on hundreds of thousands of views to be able to make enough ad revenue to get by. We're building something real and something that's going to be sustainable even as social media and content changes over time. So, I hope you'll join me on that journey. If you haven't watched the other videos in this series,

you're going to want to go watch them because they're essentially going to walk you through a lot of ways that you can take advantage of the work you've already done creating a blog and how you can now shift that toward this business that you're creating and toward ways that actually drive real traffic and real conversions. And that's going to build you a far better business than you ever had, even as a blogger. So, check out the

other videos in the series and we'll see you over there. [Music]