Do You Want to Be Popular or Paid As an Entrepreneur?

On the way home from my annual retreat, I was reminded of something I always ask my clients:

Would you rather be popular--like Instagram famous--or do you want to make real money? What’s your actual goal when it comes to marketing your business?

Sure, it’d be nice to have both. But I know which one I’d rather get, and in this episode, I share my recent experience that demonstrates why.

2:14 - What makes TikTok so valuable and how marketers always ruin marketing

5:22 - The problem for all entrepreneurs who use tactics that ruin marketing

8:09 - Why I quickly got over the many daily likes and comments left on my TikTok video 

9:50 - The conversation I wanted to inspire when I posted the video

14:13 - Another reason why you want to carefully consider the marketing methods you use

Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.

As Mentioned In Do You Want to Be Popular or Paid As an Entrepreneur?

My Spirit Airlines TikTok video

Leave a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Transcript for Do You Want to Be Popular or Paid As an Entrepreneur?

Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.

Hey, party people. Hope you are doing well. I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for asking. Today I want to talk about what is your goal when it comes to marketing your business? Do you want to just be Instagram-famous? Or is the goal really to be paid to make some real money? I always ask my clients, “Is the goal to be popular or do we want to be paid?” I guess it can be nice if you had both. But if I had to choose, I'm always going to choose pay.

What got me thinking about this is actually I've just returned from my annual retreat. It's a planning retreat that we did in Tulum in Mexico. I decided just really quickly that I am a consumer of TikTok videos. Love it. I could spend hours if I'm not careful just watching TikTok after TikTok after TikTok and thoroughly enjoy myself from laughing to crying to oohing and aahing over cute babies and puppies. I can go down a TikTok rabbit hole like it ain't nobody's business.

I have been hearing in these internet streets because you know, I'm selling, I'm marketing as well, so I keep my ear to what people are saying inside of the coaching world and some people were saying they were having tremendous success on TikTok way more than what they saw on IG, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I'm like, “Okay, I consume TikTok, but I really haven't made any TikToks. Why don't I try it out and see what happens?”

Well, here's the first thing that I want to start with is the thing that makes TikTok so valuable—and which is why Instagram actually wanted to purchase Tiktok a couple of years ago—is their algorithm, the speed in which their algorithm adjusts to your taste and your liking is like nothing I've seen on any other platform. But one of the things that drive views (meaning drives popularity on TikTok) that I found out is actually not a new strategy. In the Bible, it says that there's nothing new under the sun. There is nothing truly new that has not been done before.

I always say marketers ruin marketing. If there's a way to market, you can best believe that marketers, professional marketers, I'm going to f*ck that up somehow, they're going to do something that is going to make people switch up what they're doing so that marketers can’t gain the system. Point in case. Back in 2000, it was super popular for websites to stuff their website with keywords, keywords that may not be relevant to what they were selling, but they were popular keywords.

You might be an accounting firm but bachelorette parties is highly searched in your area. Even though you do accounting, you're going to put bachelorette parties in your meta tags and your title tags on the actual front page of your website, but you change the color of the text so that it can't be seen. It’s blended into the background by the naked eye, but hoping that the Google crawlers would see it. There was a term for that. That was called keyword stuffing.

Google got hit to that and guess what, they stopped us from doing it. Because they're like, “Okay, these people are playing games and our reputation as a search engine,” because at that time, remember, Google was trying to eclipse Yahoo as the number one search engine. The only way they were going to do that is by delivering reliable results to those of us searching for things. Marketers f*ck up everything.

We start trying to gain the system, then Google started penalizing us. Even if you were using valid, relevant keywords, they still were like, “Okay, we need to stop this because not everybody's playing fair. Even those of you who are playing fair, we just got to end this. You're going to have to get your SEO up another way.”

Well, fast forward to TikTok. TikTok is doing the exact same thing. You can basically put any kind of popular keyword that they have that's trending on TikTok. If you stuffed that into your video, you're going to get all of these likes, you're going to get all of this engagement, because it's the keyword.

But here's the problem. It's bringing the wrong type of traffic to you. Meaning it's going to make you popular, but it's not actually bringing people to you that would be interested in your services, 9 times out of 10. Let me give a specific example. I was coming back from Mexico to Chicago. When I got to the Cancun Airport, I just happened to look over at Spirit Airlines, their baggage claim area, their baggage check-in area. It literally was lines and lines deep. I'm going to put the link to the video that I put on TikTok in the show notes so you can see the Spirit line. It was insane.

Here I am standing over in Sky Priority® in Delta and there's hardly anybody in the line. All I did was basically say, “I could never stand in a line like this for Spirit. Here's Spirit's line, here's Delta's line. Ain't no way. Ain't no way that I can do this.” I remember the very funny sound, because like I said, I'm a consumer of TikTok videos, so I remember sounds and trends, and I was like, “Oh, this would be a perfect sound to match up to this video.”

Then, when I went to post the video, TikTok suggested one of the trending hashtags, which was like the Doritos triangle challenge. I still don't even know what it is. But I put it on there. Oh, my goodness. That video took off like wildfire and I've been home now for almost a week and I'm still getting daily probably 10 to 12 likes a day on it and 2 to 3 people commenting on the video.

That video has been out for over a week. If you know anything, if you've been marketing on Instagram, you know that that never happens on Instagram. If you don't get traction in the first hour, 9 times out of 10 you ain't going to get traction. Yet every now and then, a Reel or something might pick up traction later on. But that's so rare.

Typically, if you haven't gotten traction within the first hour, you aren't going to get any traction. To see how quickly people started responding, liking, commenting, all the things, my mind was blown. But I quickly got over the likes and the comments when I saw that the people weren't even engaging with the question that I had asked.

Yes, I showed the Delta and the Spirit line and said I would never fly Spirit. But the business point that I was talking about is that there's actually a strategy in marketing for a certain type of budget-friendly customer to give them a low price on the airline tickets. But Spirit charges you for everything.

There is no such thing as a free carry-on bag. Typically you can get a free carry-on, most airlines are now charging unless you've worked your way up with points, mileage, that sort of thing. Most of them are charging you for check-in bags. They might give one free but you definitely will pay for the second. That sort of thing.

But they would never charge you for a carry-on bag. Delta would never charge you for carry-on. It would only be for check-ins if you have to pay. Spirit is going to charge you to actually bring a carry-on and it's more expensive to bring the carry-on bag on than it is to check it in. It's little things like that. They're charging you for that if you need to do some type of change with your ticket or Delta would be like, “Okay, that's not a big deal. Sure. We'll give you a credit. You can do whatever. No extra fee.”

Spirit is going to charge you for that. Spirit charges for every single thing. The point is they operate their fares like a loss leader. A loss leader is a marketing and sales strategy. You've experienced this before yourself. This is my favorite example to explain a loss leader strategy. It's like when your grocery store puts grapes on sale for 49 cents a pound, that's just an amazing price for grapes. You're like, “Oh my gosh, that's so cheap. Let me go in here and get these grapes, girl.” You go in there and get the grapes. But while you're there, do you just buy grapes? Hmm. Nah, you buy other sh*t when you're there too.

Here's the thing, those other things are marked up to the full profit percentage. The grocery store is taking a loss on the grapes, but they're making up for it in the other items that you buy. They're using a loss leader, meaning they're leading with that loss on the grapes to get you in the store because they know once they get you in the store, they're going to make up that money because you're going to buy other stuff.

Spirit is doing something similar. They know that if they put out a $79 round trip flight to Atlanta, people are going to be like, especially budget-conscious travelers, “Oh my gosh, that's a great price. Let me get it.” But then they know they're going to charge you for all these other things that by the time they get through charging you for the extras, you could have just spent a few more dollars and had a much more comfortable ride on Delta.

My question was, do we realize that this is actually a strategy? Number two, do you have different types of marketing and sales strategies for different types of clients who you might sell to? That was really the conversation that I was looking to open up and to get people thinking about using sales strategically.

I don't think that one person, and to this point now there are hundreds of comments on this video, I don't think one person read that caption and engaged with the question. They were arguing with each other if Delta or Spirit was better.

Then people start trolling me saying that I was trying to flex on people spending money I didn't have and spending my money wisely because both of the planes were going to get you to the same place. All the stupid stuff. That wasn't even the point. While I was popular, none of those people are coming to spend any money with me.

I just wanted to put this out here as a discussion point as a small-business owner where you are wearing so many hats already, we have to really be wise about where we're spending our time online, what are we doing, and is it really getting us the type of results that we want and desire for our business?

It's real easy to let our egos run the show because that's what it is. When you're chasing likes, shares, or engagement, that's your ego that's in the driver's seat. All of us like to be celebrated. “Gosh, people like me,” we all want to be affirmed in that way. We're wired for that. But as a business owner, we have to think that we've got limited time and what's the best use of our time.

I'm not here to sh*t on TikTok. I'm not here to say, “Oh, my gosh, don't spend any time on TikTok,” but I am saying, “Do you have an objective? Do you have a goal? Do you know what success looks like when you're marketing on these channels? If it's literally just clicks and no one's converting, you might want to rethink how you're spending your time.” For me, I'm not on the internet to be liked. I'm on the internet to serve. My service has a price. I don't want to throw my pearls before swine.

I don't want to throw my pearls before people who aren't interested or the right fit for what I'm offering because you can always get money back but you can't get your time back. I just want to admonish you to be thinking about any vehicle you're using, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, the thing that's coming out next week, does it really make sense for you to show up in these spaces?

Because here's the other piece of it. You guys know I talk about energy a lot because it's so important. Energetically, that TikTok was wearing me out. I'm like, “I don't do well with a lot of dings and pings on my phone rapidly. It distracts me.” These days it also makes me anxious.

Like I said when I was on the flight, it was cool. It kept me entertained for a two-hour flight. But once it was time for me to get back to work, all of that pinging, wondering what trolls are saying, “Is my character being attacked? What's happening?” was a distraction energetically.

If you start the day with a bowl, and let's say inside of that bowl, there are 10 balls in that bowl, and that's all the energy you have for the day. If you spend eight of those balls arguing with trolls on TikTok, you only got two balls left to do the things that really matter in your business.

I really want to admonish us as small-business owners to think about how we spend our time and also more importantly, to look at how we spend our time as an investment with any investment just like with your mutual funds, your 401(k)s, all of the things you expect a return on your investment.

This week, I want to encourage you to take a look at where you're spending your time online and if it's getting you the type of results that make a difference in your business. Are these things pushing the needle in your revenue? If not, I encourage you to find vehicles that do. Alright, my loves. Use your energy wisely. Focus on the main thing. Let's keep the main thing the main thing, which is running a profitable business.

Next week I'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about the retreat that I held in Mexico and just share some of the key learnings from that retreat in the hopes that you'll learn something from it and maybe I'll even see you on one in the future. Until next time, my loves. You stay great. I'll talk to you soon. Grace and peace.