Sunday 10th August 2014
Yesterday’s post was about making social media a good investment in time.
For me I have serious doubts about my personal ability to make social media a time viable investment.
To catch up with this thread read yesterdays post here…
I realise for some people social media is the number 1 source of targeted traffic. So I’m under no illusion social media works.
But can it work for people like me?
I haven’t had a chance to re-study the WA social media training yet.
But did have some further thoughts on the subject as I awoke this morning.
My wife Susanne made the very valid point yesterday, that I don’t ‘engage’ at all on social media. I have friends of Facebook who post continuously, but I’d nearly always call them rather than posting a comment on Facebook.
Being an ex recruiter I have built a large network on Linkedin, but again I’d always take the business communications to the telephone or in person.
Playing To Your Strengths
When advising people on CV development and interview strategy I’d always recommend that people ‘played to their strengths’ rather than try to shore up their weaknesses.
I haven’t seen this point emphasized any better than by Rich Schefren who is an ex big 4 Management Consultant who has gone online to become the worlds top online business consultant (really, no exaggeration).
Rich is all about advising companies and people who want to develop multi-million dollar online businesses. Real businesses with employees and offices, not actually what I want.
So if I take my experience with Linkedin as a model (Linkedin was a very profitable investment of my time). I actually used paid services to build a network. This large network increased by ‘reach’ (more information about more people). I did not engage at this point.
Once I’d identified people I thought my clients would be interested in I’d usually telephone them directly (I’d have to do a little work here to uncover the contact details) or if the interest was more for the future I’d try and link up with them directly on Linkedin.
However each placement was worth on average £9k so though this all took a lot of time it was well worth it.
I also really enjoyed talking to these people (maybe I can do this social thing after all?).
Parking this train of thought for the time.
Be Careful Of What You Wish For – Plan Your Perfect Outcome Then Work Back
Tim Ferris in his famous lifestyle book ‘The 4 Hour Work Week‘ describes how through poor planning he created a wonderfully profitable business that he HAD to spend 70 hour weeks working or the whole thing would collapse.
This was not his perfect outcome!
The workload led to a breakdown.
The solution to this problem is to be way more specific about what you want.
“A $10,000 a month online business” is nowhere near detailed enough.
I Don’t Want To Ever Retire!
My perfect outcome see’s me daily working my ‘online lifestyle business’ for as long or as little as I want (probably with the help of a ‘virtual assistant’) for as long as I’m able.
I see day’s when I won’t even login.
The work I do is centered around helping people develop their own online lifestyle business (I really believe everyone can have one).
I would like to think that as this WA Challenge progresses I will be able to help others travel this same road (hopefully with a few short-cuts), and that my success and failures can be used for mutual benefit.
How does all this relate to my use of social media?
I’m scarred of biting off more than I can chew. I seriously hate poor customer service (one of my weird personality traits), and hate the idea that I might be the cause of it.
Like Kyle said in his WA training “do it right or not at all”
I’m going to again delay the decision on my social media strategy another day and revisit the training again now.
Objective
To at least complete a 500 plus word journal post.
Add an Amazon affiliate link for The 4 Hour Work Week (I am training to be an affiliate after all 🙂 )
Re-study the WA social media training.
Outcome
730 word journal post
Added Amazon link to Tim’s book above.
Repeated Kyle’s social media engagement training again.
Set up a new @TheWAChallenge Twitter account ooohhh…
Time Taken
2.5 hours (way slower than yesterday) for the post.
2 hours redoing the training and setting up Twitter.