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A few months ago I was sitting there looking at my Instagram insights, and I had one very clear thought. What is the point of this?
Not in a dramatic way. In a very calm, very tired, I-have-been-doing-this-for-over-a-decade kind of way.
Because you probably already know this about me. I don’t love social media. I’ve never pretended to. But I’m a small business owner, so it’s one of those eat your business broccoli things. You don’t have to enjoy it. You just have to do it.
And I was doing it. I’ve got the systems, the prompts, our whole Cash Money Content system that we use every single week. It goes out on time, it’s fast, and it’s good.
And it was still boring. I was bored of my own content. I was phoning it in and I could feel myself phoning it in. And our engagement had fallen off a cliff.
This Isn’t The Beginner Wall
I wasn’t clueless. I wasn’t sitting there wondering what to post. Four posts a week, on time, every week. They were fine. They were competent. They were… beige.
And I could feel it. That’s the part that got me. You can absolutely tell when you’re doing your best work and it’s still coming out flat.
Anyone who’s been creating content for a long time has hit that wall. Not the beginner wall where you don’t know what to do. The other wall, where you know exactly what to do, you’re doing it properly, and it’s just not landing anymore.
My approach to social has always been the same. Maximise it, while it still fits around the rest of our life. The effort has to match the return. And when the return drops off a cliff, you don’t do the same thing harder and hope. You change the thing.
So I Planned A Comeback Tour
Three things, in a specific order, each one chosen on purpose.
The first was rebuilding a fortnight of posts around three freebies I could genuinely have charged for, and then using a trick I’m calling the list loop to make my email list do the heavy lifting on Instagram.
The second was a content series. I’ve tried series before and they’ve flopped. This one is different for one reason, and it’s the same reason it terrified me enough that I almost didn’t do it.
The third is that I stopped praying to the algorithm and started paying it. About a hundred dollars a post, on very specific posts, for a reason I didn’t work out until after I’d started.
Last month we picked up nearly 1,500 new followers, posts are getting seen again, and I’m posting less than I was before.
None of it was about doing more. I didn’t fix boring content by making more content. Every one of those three things was me asking what I’m already doing, and how I make it count for more.
I walk through all three properly in this week’s episode, including the numbers, what I’d change, and the one that moved the needle hardest.
