The hardest step is the most frequently ignored. It is the fact that you have to work very, very hard. There is a certain romance around running a small business these days. People seem to think it is the next big way to become rich. Once upon a time, it was the lottery, then getting famous, then cryptocurrency, then becoming a social media star, and now it is becoming a small business owner and earning millions overnight.
If you are not willing to work very hard for at least the next ten years, then your first step is to find something else to do with your life. If you are willing to work harder than you have ever worked before, then here are the steps towards becoming a profitable small business using social media marketing.
Step One – Fail At Creating Content
Start on your journey to creating good content. Honestly, you need to learn to fail faster because most of the content you create nearer the beginning will be pretty bad. It takes a good long while and a lot of work to become good at creating high-quality social media content. Do not fall into the trap of taking two or three months to create your content because it will still be bad. Learn, but learn fast, and fail fast so you can move on to your next piece of content. Work to perpetually improve after each post, and you will become better over time.
Step Two – Paying the Social Media Companies
Here’s the thing, as a business, you are going to have to start paying the social media networks eventually. It is simply impossible to gain a large following as a business if you are not paying the social media networks for their promotions and ads. The social media networks won’t let you grow too big because if they allowed businesses to be successful on their networks, then nobody would ever pay for social media ads. Start learning how to use the networks and start small with small daily budgets and short(ish) campaigns. Not only does this drive a nice trickle of traffic, but it isn’t too expensive and you gain valuable experience with the networks that will come in handy later down the line.
Step Three – Buying an Audience
There are three types of audience buying you can do. You can buy bot likes and follows, which you should avoid unless you are trying to use social proof to sell a promotion. Otherwise, buying bots makes it harder to rank up the social media network search engines because they use user data to judge your content (and bots offer no user data).
The second type of audience buying is using those follow-you follow-me services, but they are simply too unreliable and are quickly blacklisted. The third way to buy an audience is to buy somebody else’s account using https://fameswap.com/. It is just like buying somebody’s website, but you are buying their social media account too. You get to see their following before you buy. Pick some reasonably priced ones and promote your primary accounts to the new audience. Market your services and products too them too and see if you can create a few conversions.
Step Four – Try All The Social Media Networks
Try Twitter and GettR. Try YouTube and Rumble. Go for Pinterest and Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and all the other popular and semi-popular networks. You can often re-edit content from one account and post it on other social media networks. It is true that many business types suit various social media networks, but you need to try them all. You may be running a fashion label, and they often have lots of success on Instagram, but you may find more traction with Deviant Art and Twitter. You don’t know if you don’t try, so try them all.
Step Five – Get Experience Before Taking Advice
This is a tricky one to explain, so consider this. Imagine taking tips on how to swim, but you have never been in the water. Now, imagine going in the water quite a few times, you flail around, you are not very successful, and you then take tips on swimming. Now that you have seen and experienced the water, you are more receptive to good and bad advice. You need to become a bit of a self-taught social media expert before you consider advice from other people. There is a lot of bad advice out there, like telling you to cut up other people’s larger videos and use them on your own accounts. People telling you that faster content is better content. This may be true, or it may be devastatingly untrue for your business. You are a better judge after gaining your own experience through personal trial and error.
Step Six – Conversions Are All That Matters
Do not be clouded by the fog of likes, follows, hearts, thumbs up and so forth. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get, or how many views, or how many followers and subscribers. All that matters is how many people convert from lookers to buyers. You can gain followers via a wide range of tricks, and you can fool people into following you. But, all your efforts are wasted if you are not converting people from viewers to buyers. As you run various different social media marketing campaigns, you can think about things like brand awareness, but the only true measure of success is how many sales you made. These are the only metrics, the only analytics that count.
Step Seven – A Mix Makes a Profit
It is possible to create a profit using just social media advertising platforms. It is possible to work out your costs per click and to create a sales ratio where you turn a profit, but this is intensely difficult because of all the competition you have out there. A good campaign and a good methodology overall is to mix up your marketing methods.
Try a few flash sales, try influencer selling, try marketing using other people’s purchased social media accounts, and try to build a following yourself and promote your goods and services to them. A mixed and varied approach leaves you the widest number of opportunities to make a sale, convert a customer and turn a profit
