Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:39 

Hello, and welcome to the show. Today, I’m talking about what posting daily has taught me about visibility. Now, I should probably get this out the way straight away.  If you listened to last week’s episode, you’ll know that I was just talking about getting started, so yes, I am not even a week into this challenge. I’ve actually only posted four face-to-camera videos so far, but oh my goodness, the learnings are coming in hard and fast. And actually, I want to talk about some of the negative reactions I’ve already been receiving and what you can learn about it, because maybe you feel activated by what I share, too.

01:24 

We shall find out. But, um, yeah, there has been a lot. It… I’m so glad. You know, it’s so good. I talked last week about, you know, what is that 10% for you? What is that edge? And what I can gather already from only being a few days in and already being challenged in some regards, in many regards actually, it’s really highlighted to me how I definitely, definitely needed to lean into this.  But yeah, I wasn’t expecting… Funnily enough, the first video I did already seemed to activate people, and even more so, I found myself receiving DMs from people saying, “Okay, but how on earth are you posting every day?” Or, “I would love to do this,” and then I’d look at their account, and I would see that they were not actually doing this.   Or people would say, “I wish I had the capacity to do that, but I’m just coming out of the school holidays.” And I just want to say — this is all so valid, okay? One thing I’ve said to people, like, if you wanna have a fresh start, if you wanna get more visible, if you wanna post more regularly, I took several weeks to build up to the point where I felt ready to start hitting record, and even then, I’ve had my odd wobble since then.  So if you’re not… You know, if you’re inspired but equally not feeling ready, of course there’s the argument that you will never feel ready, but equally there are some practical things to take into consideration. And if one of the things that’s gonna help you feel a sense of achievement is choosing a time where you will have already batched some content so that you can 100% stick to it, then brilliant.

02:54

 I mean, funnily enough, one of the challenges I’m setting myself is that I’m not batching my content, and I legitimately am recording daily, and I am kind of just sharing what feels true and relevant in that moment. So I’m finding that process quite fun. I’m finding that process one that also reminds me of the inherent flexibility of my day that perhaps I hadn’t allowed to be flexible up until now.  It challenges my perfectionism. It challenges my desire to be ready and strategical. And I feel like the unpolished, raw, just true-in-the-moment version of me is one of the reasons why my videos are already being received as well as they are, you know? Are they going viral? No. But am I recording them in a way that they could go viral?  Also no. I’m not thinking too heavily about brilliant hooks. I am thinking about it a bit, of course. Nobody takes the time to record without thinking for a second what will capture someone’s attention or curiosity. But I will say that the content I’m recording at the moment is more geared at my existing community, rather than thinking about new people discovering me.  You know, I’ve got time for that. I’ve got time to refine. I’ve got time to grow. Like, that stuff can come. So I do feel it’s really important to say that my strategy is not your strategy. I have capacity for this right now, and that’s really important. My business is spacious. My delivery hours are healthy.

04:10 

And I have room to work on my business rather than spending every waking hour working in it. And I actually think that’s a really important part of the conversation that we don’t talk about enough. Because if your business is already overflowing with delivery, clients, children, life admin, whatever it is, adding another thing to all of that, you know, another seven pieces of content this week, might not be the answer.  So that might make you think, “Well, then why are you doing it, Polly?” Well, aside from what I’ve just stipulated, because there are a few reasons outside of having capacity. Because as you know, I’m a staunch defender of protecting your capacity once you’ve created it. But here’s the truth. After doing my first public talk, which I also podcasted about earlier this year, I have recognized that my fear of public speaking was getting in the way of actually going after opportunities that could be really fun.  You know, I used to be a TV panelist. I used to have two magazine columns, you know, back in the day, prior to having children. I actually really enjoy all of that stuff. I just find it intimidating. And I decided it was time to let that go. I really don’t think perimenopause has helped, you know, that whole sense of am I gonna forget what I’m saying mid-sentence?

05:29 

Am I gonna forget words? But actually I think that’s all the more reason why it’s important to get visible and speak, because there should be perimenopausal women taking up space. Otherwise, what? What’s the alternative? We all go quiet and hide away, assume that we have nothing valuable to bring because we might occasionally forget what we’re talking about mid-sentence.  Sod that, right? So, um, I want to be getting better at communicating publicly, and one of the ways I know I can get sharper at storytelling, better at engaging my community and developing and growing that community, ’cause that piece is really important to me, is one, bringing more of myself to the table.  Two, allowing you to connect with me and who I really am, and not just my curated thoughts and ideas. But also learning how to express myself in a succinct way that lands. Because I’ve always enjoyed this podcast. Ironically, I’ve always been told that solo episodes should be, like, 10 to 15 minutes to keep good retention, and I’ve always ignored that because my ADHD brain can rarely confine my thoughts and ideas to only 10 to 15 minutes.

06:35 

So, you know, these episodes always tend to be a bit longer than that, even though I try. I try for 10 to 15 minutes. That’s the difficult piece to say out loud. So yeah, this is why I’m focusing on daily posting. It’s my training ground. It’s a way of practicing better communication, better storytelling, conviction, which I am very guilty of, you know, as a recovering people pleaser, perhaps hiding away from sharing my true thoughts and feelings with conviction, ’cause I never wanna upset anyone.  I wish that weren’t the case, but it’s just really true. I will say, as I’ve turned 40 and as I’ve kinda developed a thicker skin, having been in this world a while, I am better at understanding what is mine and what is other people’s, but there is still an underlying people pleaser in me that needs kind of a bit of a shakeup to kind of, you know, really create that content that truly gets under people’s skin.  Again, perimenopausal brain at work, right? It’ll help me with speaking, tolerating imperfection, which oh, yeah, I’m really bad at that. Particularly as an established marketer. That was what the whole of the last episode was about, really, was about me learning to be with the fact that I won’t necessarily be brilliant straight away.  But equally, there’s so many things that, you know, that expanding and growth involves, you know, going outside our comfort zone, and this one feels particularly vulnerable because you’re being so seen. But, you know, that again is another reason why I’m doing this, getting comfortable with being seen, getting comfortable with people not always understanding me, getting comfortable with criticism, maybe even subtle criticism, and learning that that’s absolutely okay, you know?

08:21 

And not needing everything to be absolutely perfect before I publish it. Like, the nice thing about posting daily is I literally do not have the capacity. You know, I occasionally see a brilliant reel with amazingly timed GIFs and stickers and sound effects and music and, you know, my videos have a little bit of that because I like to play around and figure out how to use CapCut.   Like, I’m literally learning on the go. I’m not using YouTube. I’ve had to clawed the odd occasional question about like, how do I make this thing work? But generally speaking, I’ve just been figuring out as I go, and some videos are better than others. But I also kind of like it not feeling overly manufactured ’cause I feel like that’s partly the idea behind the rawness of how I record them in the first place.So yeah, there’s been things to figure out, right? Like even just sharing that now, it was recognizing, well, if I’m sharing a raw hot take off the back of finishing my calls and just swinging my chair around and just hitting record, then also similarly why would it need to be overly manufactured?

09:17 

Like, I want this to feel raw, ready, like I’m just beaming into your living room through your phone, just sharing a little off take from the day. And, um, yeah, and as I get better at it, maybe I’ll also wanna get better at my editing skills, or heck, maybe I’ll hire an editor or, you know, we’ll see.  There’s so many unknowns, but also again, it’s getting comfortable with the unknowns and not needing to know what’s happening 10 steps ahead and just being with the one or two I’m in right now. So yeah, you know, the big realization has been, you know, what happens next? Because visibility is not the goal.  Sales are the goal. Impact is the goal. Getting the right people into my world is the goal, and content is simply just one part of that journey. Because I believe when I look at the average online business owner, that we’ve all become a bit obsessed with the front door of our business, with our visibility, right?  I like to equate visibility with that front door. You know, we obsess over hooks, reels. Should we be doing B-roll or should it be yapping or, you know, should we even be using the word yapping or should it be face to camera content as it was referred to previously? What about our captions? What about hashtags? B What about carousels? What about editing? What about lighting? What about thumbnails? What about trending audio? What about using voiceovers? Whether, you know, should we still be educating people? Should we be more entertaining? Should we be more aspirational? Oh my God, it’s exhausting, right? And I’m not saying those things don’t matter.

10:43 

They do. But I’ve started thinking about this in terms of my business house and my business front door, okay? Funnily enough — little detail about me. If you were to ever come to my house in Brighton, which is a rental, my front door, because we’ve had various Halloween decorations hanging on the front of it, is a bit scrappy.  And I forever say to my husband, like, “Do you know what to do with the front door? Can you sand it down? Can you paint it for us?” And he never does it, and I’m just not willing to spend hundreds of pounds on something that we are renting. There’s always that thought at the back of my mind as to, we’ll do that, and then we’ll leave a few months later.  What’s the point? Let’s save it for when we have our forever home, right? So the front of my house — I mean, it’s not abysmal, but it’s not what I would like to represent to the outside world. However, once you come in through my doors, everything is so intentional. The lighting, the little kind of gizmos…  I mean, just everything. I’m really proud of the inside of my house. It just feels exactly how I want it to be, and, you know, we have, like, tables that were made for the space that they’re in, and things like that. Just things that are really important and meaningful to me, like every throw has been carefully considered.  I’m quite minimalistic, so the few things I have are really important to me, and that’s because it’s where I actually live. That’s where I spend my time. And I think in business, we can get this completely backwards. We can become so extraordinarily obsessed with the amount of time and money, and I guess money is time, right?

12:16 

On making our front door amazing, making our visibility amazing, okay? So someone’s got to your front door, and they’re walking through it. And then they get inside, and they have absolutely no idea where to go. And I genuinely believe that is what so many of us are missing in business, because you shouldn’t need to get to 10,000 followers to see sales coming through.  You shouldn’t need another thousand followers to get two more one-to-ones. You should be able to make more sales with your existing content just as it is, and your existing following just as it is. I mean, bonus of course that when you do things well, those other things tend to grow alongside them. But equally, it doesn’t need to be at a rate of knots.  You don’t need to be focusing on being the next person in your niche who goes viral, okay? Um, because, you know, your visibility is your front door. It’s how people discover you. It’s how you get attention. It’s how somebody looks at your content and goes, “Oh my God, she gets me. That’s exactly what I’m dealing with right now.  Oh my God, I want what she’s talking about.” Okay? They’re at your front door. They’re excited. But what happens after somebody discovers you? What happens after that moment of, “She gets me”? A lot of people understand content attracts attention, right? But what a lot of people don’t understand is that beyond the attention, we also need to maintain that interest.   We need to create trust. And beyond that trust, we need to then be tapping in more deeply to that desire that then creates an action that leads to a sale. And those are very different things, and we’re not gonna do them all within a reel, okay? So let’s say I discover you today. I see one of your reels and I think, “Oh my God, she is talking about me.”

13:56 

And then I click on your link in bio. What happens next? Do I know who you help? What you help them achieve? What you actually sell? Why I should trust you? What the next step is? How I can work with you? Where I can learn more? What happens if I’m interested and not ready to buy today? Or similarly, what happens if I’m interested and I wanna buy from you today?  I think that last question is the one that people underestimate the most, and they create way too many obstacles to someone being able to just buy from you the moment they are activated and excited to buy from you. And so instead they might just think, “Oh, you know what? I’m just gonna watch another reel,” and another, and another.

14:39 

And then the algorithm will serve them up the reel of your competitor or somebody who’s talking about the same themes, okay? And then the challenge is, if they see that and they go click on their link in bio and their house is a full house, then you’re in trouble, okay? Because I think this is the challenge.  The conversation around content has become slightly distorted. People think, “If I could just get more people to see my content, I’d make more money.” And sometimes that is true, okay? Sometimes visibility genuinely is the missing piece. One of my most recent clients, I was like, “Look, you have your whole house in order.  You just need more eyeballs on it.” She’s now running ads, and that is the best thing for her business, and she’s already, like, doubled her mailing list and, like, you know, she’s ready to meet that demand. People just didn’t know she existed. But most people aren’t like that. You know, they don’t have a visibility problem.  They have a what next problem. You’ve got people paying attention, but there’s nowhere for that attention to go. You’ve got a front door, but you’re not signposting inside the house that they walk into. You’ve got people walking in, and they can’t even find the living room. So if we’re gonna continue this house analogy, the front door is essentially like your visibility, your content, the thing that gets people into your world.

15:54 

The hallway could be your positioning, okay? Once they’re inside, they need to understand, who is this for? Am I in the right house? What problem does she solve? Why is she the person to solve it? Like, that’s the experience they’re having there. The living room is, like, your core offer. What can I actually buy?  What does working with you look like? What transformation am I buying? And most importantly, is there a wait list to join, or can I buy straight away? Like, what is happening then? Like, don’t have that as a dead end. If they’re excited at that point, make it easy for them to move forward. The furniture is like the proof, your testimonials, your case studies, your results, the evidence that says, yes, this works, okay?

16:32 

And the signpost in your house, which yes, admittedly most of us don’t have, but let’s pretend this is a mansion for a moment, is how people know what to do next. This is the bit I think many people haven’t thought through properly enough, okay? So the question you need to ask yourself, and I dedicated a whole podcast episode to this in the past, is if 10,000 of my ideal clients discovered me tomorrow, would my business be ready?  Not could I create enough content for them, ’cause that’s — there is a cap on your hours, right? Not would my reels go viral, because I’ve had so many clients go viral, and unless you’re bringing in exactly the right kind of person, that can just be a whole load of noise and busyness, and actually damage your reach for bringing in people who aren’t a match for who you actually want to attract.  And instead of thinking, you know, what hook should I use next? I want you to be asking, would my business be ready? Could those people easily figure out who I am, what I do, whether I’m for them, what I sell, why they should trust me, and what to do next? Because if the answer is no, I don’t think you need to spend all your money and, and so your money, your energy, which is funny I said money, ’cause essentially it’s the same thing, creating more content.  You need to actually make sure the house is ready, okay? I also wanna be clear about this. As you can probably tell by the fact I’m prioritizing content right now, this doesn’t mean I’m anti-content, okay? I’m anti-content as a business strategy because content is a marketing tool. It’s not your entire business.

18:06 

This is the same way I regularly say to my clients, you know, marketing is not the same as selling. What are the sales activities that you are doing in your business? ‘Cause so often early on in business, we conflate the two with one another, and we assume that marketing is selling and vice versa, and it really isn’t, okay?  But that, again, is a whole other podcast episode I’m pretty sure I’ve recorded all about the difference between marketing and selling and the importance of doing both, okay? But this is where the advice you just need to post more is just utter BS, to be honest with you, in the majority of cases. And oftentimes the reason why we’re not posting more in the first place is because we don’t have that initial clarity over why.  What is your mission and vision? What is the impact you’re here to create? What is the community you wanna be speaking to? Who is it that you want to hear from you today who’s gonna feel ready and excited to buy from you? What do they need to know about you that’s gonna enable them to feel excited and happy and ready to buy from you, or for you to be that personal brand that they trust, okay?  Okay? I want you to be honestly thinking about your business and not how do I keep Instagram happy, okay? So yeah, so far daily posting has actually taught me that visibility is a skill, and I think it’s worth developing only because visibility, you know, becomes valuable when there’s a business behind it that’s ready to convert that attention.

19:27

My business has a scalable offer. It has a website. It has landing pages. It has mini offers. It has all the things that can nurture somebody once they engage in my business. I have ads that will be retargeting them when they engage in my business, inviting them to an upcoming workshop. I have all the things working so that my visibility when I post a face-to-camera reel, that is working so much harder for me than it would the average person because of all the other pieces I have working in the background for me.  bSo if you’d like to come along to that workshop, it’s actually called Beyond the Content. It’s not the content, it’s the what next, and I will be helping you understand what happens after someone sees your content, because that’s the bit I think we need to spend more time thinking about. How do you create a simple client journey? bHow do you move somebody from, “Oh, that’s interesting,” to, “I trust her,” to, “I want this,” to, “Okay, what’s the next step?” Without needing to manually sell to every single person, without needing to constantly launch, without being chained to your phone, without needing to post seven times a day, without feeling like if you stop creating content for 48 hours, your entire business will collapse. This isn’t a training that’s about how to create better content.  There’s enough of those already out there. This is about looking at the architecture behind the content. We’re gonna be looking at where your content currently sends people. We’re gonna be looking at whether the next step is actually obvious. We’re gonna be looking at how your offers fit into that journey.  What happens to people who aren’t ready to buy immediately? How you’re building trust beyond a single post, where people might currently be falling out of your customer journey, and how to create a simpler path from I found you to I want to work with you. Because ultimately, your content gets someone to the front door.

21:11 

Your business needs to give them a reason to come inside and a clear path to buying once they’re in there, okay? And that is what we are gonna solve in my next training, okay? Aimed at wellness practitioners, at therapists, at coaches, at psychologists, okay? It’s gonna be ruddy brilliant. I’m really, really excited for this one.  This is a brand-new training, obviously built upon the many premises that I’ve already shared with my clients, but delivered through a different lens, and one that I think is hyper-relevant to where we are at right now. What I’ve been learning through being visible daily is that visibility is not the destination.  It is an accelerant. But if what you have behind your business doors is not happy, healthy fire, then you really need to work on that piece before you even think about the accelerant, okay? Uh, so yeah, I am really excited. It’s gonna be on September the 16th at 1:00 PM. There will be a replay if you’re not able to join us live.  I would love to see you there. Um, come along and join us, and let’s make sure your business is set up to make sales with ease so that you can really capitalize on this final quarter of the year.