Episode 128: How to build a 7-figure business WITHOUT ads and social media w/ Karin Carr
But what if I told you there's a way to grow your business to 7 figures without ads or social media?
In this episode, we share the secrets of using organic SEO and YouTube to build a 7 figure business, without relying on traditional advertising methods such as social media and paid ads.
My recent conversation with Karin Carr revealed her firsthand experience in building her business from zero to 7 figures without ads and relying on social media platforms, which can block you/kick you out at any time, leaving you powerless. Tune in to this episode if you want organic strategies to make more sales and get more eyeballs on your business without spending months trying to beat the social media algorithm or paying tens of thousands to ads without a guaranteed ROI.
Here’s What You'll Discover:
How to create genuine leads and customers waiting to buy from you through SEO friendly strategies like Youtube, and building your email list, and why it beats the unpredictability of social media and ads.
The myth-busting truth that impactful content doesn't require high-production value – sometimes a cellphone and a basic microphone do the trick!
The enduring value of video content over the fleeting nature of social media likes.
Strategies for not relying solely social media and paid ads, and unlocking the potential of free publicity for driving business success.
For those who are just starting or are feeling stuck in the whirlwind of social media, I encourage you to explore the power of SEO and YouTube. Always work smarter, not harder, and ask yourself: “are you creating long term assets for your business? OR just doing busy work?”
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
Visit Karin Carr’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/karincarr
Connect with Karin on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karincarr
Check out her website: www.karincarr.com
Additional Resources:
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: Hey friends, I'm Gloria Chou, small business PR expert, award-winning pitch writer, and your unofficial hype woman. Nothing makes me happier than seeing people get the recognition they deserve. And that starts with feeling more confident to go bigger with your message. So on this podcast, I will share with you the untraditional yet proven strategies for PR, marketing, and creating more opportunity in your business. If you are ready to take control of your narrative and be your most unapologetic and confident self, you're in the right place. This is the Small Business PR Podcast.
00:00:36 Gloria: What's up, small business heroes? I'm so glad to have my personal friend, Karin Carr here. Now I've known her for many years and there's so many reasons why I have been waiting to get her on the show. Now she is a many things. So she is a YouTube real estate agent, but also teaches people how to maximize their visibility sales using YouTube. She's also an author of Do It Scared YouTube for real estate agents. But you might be surprised at why I invited her on here. She's gonna share many things about how she's been able to grow her business and help other people grow organically with SEO. So welcome to the show, Karin.
00:01:09 Karin: Thanks, Gloria. I'm excited to be here.
00:01:12 Gloria: We don't have a lot of real estate agents on the platform or on the show, but I wanted to get you on here because you just told me something that was mind-blowing. You said that you were able to basically have such a sustainable, multi-six-figure business without running ads. Can you tell me your whole trajectory of why you decided to not run ads and what happened with Facebook? Tell us the whole thing.
00:01:34 Karin: Oh, my gosh. Okay. Get comfy, because it's quite the story. So my original whole business was built with organic traffic, mostly with YouTube and with my website. And I'm big into SEO. In fact, I just listened to your episode that dropped with Laura Peters. Kindred spirit there. I love organic traffic. I love SEO. I love that it's a long term evergreen strategy. I love everything about it. But I wanted to grow. And I knew I would eventually have to start running ads, but I had such a scarcity mindset about it.
00:02:06 Karin: It was like, I don't want to spend like, is $10 a day okay for my ads budget? And my Facebook ads people would just laugh hysterically. They're like, seriously, $10 a day? That's probably one lead if that. So I baby stepped my way into Facebook ads. My launch method is usually, I do a challenge. At the time it was a five day challenge and it was totally free. I would spend money on ads to say, hey, I'm doing a five-day challenge. You should come. I would do this, five days and on the last day, I would pitch my program and then people would register for it. The more I did that with ads and I saw what the earnings per lead was versus the cost per lead, I got more confident.
00:02:51 Karin: Well, hey, if I spend a dollar but I make $5, then it doesn't matter whether you're spending $1,000 on ads or $10,000 on ads or $100,000 on ads because the ROI is there. So I gradually was increasing my ad spend with every single launch. I think the most I ever spent on a launch was about $50,000. And I was literally just, like sick to think of that number a couple years earlier. I never could have done it. But having all of this data behind me from previous launches, I was okay with that.
00:03:24 Karin: And I remember sitting down with my husband and being like, hey, we're gonna do our next launch. My ads budget is $50,000. And he said, cool. Like, which just blew my mind because a couple of years prior to that, he would have been like, oh my gosh, what are you doing? There's no way we can't spend 50 grand on ads. Are you kidding me? So we did the ads. And then one day my ads manager said, hey, I'm trying to log into Facebook and I'm getting this weird error message. I can't get in. And I said, I'm just walking into a yoga class. I'll look at it as soon as I get home. This was like six o'clock at night.
00:03:59 Karin: I get back home, I go to log into Facebook and it says, we need to verify your identity, scan a picture of your driver's license. And I thought that is, really weird. But it wasn't like I clicked on a link from an email. I opened my browser and I went to Facebook.com and that's what it was prompting me for. So I did. And then the next screen said, we have received your dispute. If we find that you did not violate any community guidelines, we will reinstate your Facebook account. And if we find that you did violate community guidelines, within 30 days, we will delete your entire account. And I said, what are you talking about? What dispute? I don't even know what you're talking about here.
00:04:44 Karin: So I tried everything for 30 days to contact them. Just spoiler alert, Facebook has no customer service. Shame on you, Meta, for being a company of this size and you have no way to support the people who are spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with you in advertising revenue and I don't have anybody to call. I never to this day have found out why they did it. They did not delete my business account. They deleted my personal profile that I've had since probably 2007, I think. So all of the pictures of my kids when they were little that I uploaded, videos that I'd uploaded, business assets, anything that I uploaded that was part of my personal Facebook account gone.
00:05:27 Karin: I had a Facebook group that had well over 20,000 people in it that I could not get into. I had my Facebook business page that was my Facebook ads account that I could not get into. It was... When I say that, I felt really violated. And I felt… I mean, I felt like I was so taken advantage of because I didn't do anything. I know that I didn't post anything that would violate community guidelines. I mean, I barely used my personal profile for anything other than just posting family pictures and what I was up to. And we've got chickens. So like, oh, look, my chicken had babies and look how cute they are. It was nothing, nothing violent, nothing racist, nothing that could have possibly been construed as violating their community guidelines.
00:06:18 Karin: They gave me no explanation. I don't know why it happened. No apology, didn't get it reinstated, it was just gone. So for about a year, I had no Facebook whatsoever. I had to find a new platform to host my group and my assistant luckily was still able to get into the group and she's like, okay, we are moving our entire group. It's no longer on social media. It's now on this platform instead. Here's how you get into it. We had to migrate everybody over there. I still had virtual assistants who could post on the business page for me.
00:06:48 Karin: So anything that we typically had planned to just do a social media post that was on the business page, they could do that for me, but I could not get in. I finally created a new Facebook profile, probably about a year later. I didn't put my name on it. I didn't put my photo on it. I was so terrified that as soon as I created it, they were going to see it and just delete it again. Nothing happened. I only used it for being in other Facebook groups. So masterminds that I'm a part of where their community is on Facebook. That's how I was able to get into these groups.
00:07:22 Karin: And as time went by and nothing happened, I finally got brave enough to give it my real name and put my real picture on it. But I have not friend-ed anybody. I've been so low profile because I was just terrified of what if that were to happen again. So let this be a lesson to you. You've got to build your email list. You have to. If your whole audience is built on social media and that happens to you, bye-bye business. So thank goodness that when they joined my Facebook group, one of the questions was, what's your email address? And I will send you a free resource that will help you.
00:07:56 Karin: And I had 25,000 people in my CRM that I was able to email them and say, you're not going to believe what just happened. But boy, did that teach me so much about you can build a huge following on social media, whether it's through ads or organic, doesn't really matter, but you've got to be using that as a way to put these people into your CRM.
00:08:18 Gloria: Yeah, you have to own that data. I mean, that is, I can't even imagine the stress, the sleepless nights that you had going on when your whole business is on it, your groups, your CRM, your leads, data, pixels. That is wild. And so I just want to clarify because there's another part of the story I want to get to you because I know you personally, I remember sitting at a lunch table and you're like, I really don't know what to do. I even, like, try to contact people who worked inside Meta and nobody could help me. And like you sell real estate, you're selling anything that's contentious.
00:08:50 Gloria: So can you tell people about what happened when you actually were blocked from your account? Because guess what? They had your credit card on file. So how much money were they charging you every day automatically for your Facebook ads and you couldn't even go in there to shut it off.
00:09:01 Karin: I forgot that part. Thanks for sticking the knife in the wound and twisting it around a little bit more, Gloria. Yeah, I didn't realize they were still charging my credit card. I think I had set up something that said, you can accumulate all of these bills with Facebook ads until it gets to a total of $900. Then you charge the credit card and start over again. So that it wasn't like every single charge. It was, once it hits, $900 charged the card. I don't even remember how I set that up but it was somewhere in Facebook. And I had not been able to get in for quite some time. And then I looked at my bank statement. It was like $900, $900 multiple times a day.
00:09:42 Karin: And I thought, are you kidding me? I can't even get into my Facebook ads account to turn this off because you've disabled my entire account. And yet you're still charging me thousands of dollars for the privilege. It was, like, so I had to go to my bank and cancel the credit card. That was the only way that I could stop it because I couldn't log in. Even my Facebook ads manager could not log into the account.
00:10:06 Gloria: So how much money were they charging you in total? I think you said something like 9,000 or something.
00:10:14 Karin: It was something like that. Yeah. It was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. By the time I realized that, what was happening and then went to the bank, canceled the credit card and all of that stuff. Yeah.
00:10:27 Gloria: I remember I asked you, I said, this is clearly their fault. And so when you try to file a dispute because sometimes you can win the dispute, what happened? Did you get your money back?
00:10:37 Karin: Yes, we did get our money back. We did win the dispute. But still, think of all the time and energy it takes to file that dispute and like, drive over to the bank because the bank is not right next door to my neighborhood or anything. And hours spent fighting it and trying to figure out why this happened in the first place and not ever getting a resolution, not ever getting an explanation.
00:11:02 Gloria: Yeah. I mean, you have a much bigger business and a lot of people who may be listening. Imagine how crushing it would be for them to be able to just get thousands of dollars and never have any resolution for that. So it absolutely is insane. And honestly, I have my credit card like that too, because that's how Facebook ads work. They just keep charging it up to a daily limit and then it keeps running again. So I have it on automatic too. I assume 90% of people who are running ads are doing this.
00:11:28 Gloria: So now that we've done this cautionary tale, and I think it's just such an insane story. And actually, since we've chatted, we had other people in our mastermind and in our peer groups who have also stepped forward and said, yes, my account was restricted or banned for no reason. I could not get any help. So let's now pivot to why this is a cautionary tale and why people should focus on SEO generating activities. Now, as you know, PR is one of them. So, same as YouTube. So let's talk about that.
00:11:58 Karin: Oh, I love SEO so much. The way that I kind of fell into it was I was a full-time real estate agent back in 2016. I had just moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and was restarting my business where nobody knew me. I had no name recognition, no market share, nothing. And Atlanta is a huge market. So I was thinking, how am I going to get business? I am not going to go door to door knocking on doors. Hey, ever thought about selling your house? I'm not going to cold call people all day. I am too old for all that nonsense, not doing it. And I thought, well, what about blogging? I don't know anything about blogging. But how hard can it be, right?
00:12:35 Karin: And so I would rather sit at my computer and write for half an hour a day than cold call strangers and beg for business all day. And I just started Googling things like, how do you make your blog get found on the interwebs? Like I didn't even know what SEO was. I didn't know what to Google. And I discovered wonderful people like Neil Patel and Backlinko that go into great detail in YouTube videos and blog posts about, This is what search engine optimization is. Here's how you do it. And here are a couple of very inexpensive tools that you need.
00:13:08 Karin: And I was completely self-taught and it started to work. I remember that my first lead that I got was on New Year's Eve at probably nine o'clock. And I checked my email and this man said, I just got pre-approved to buy my first house ever. I am so excited. I've been reading all of your blog posts and I choose you to help me buy my first house. And so I replied to his email and I'm like, it's nine o'clock on New Year's Eve, champagne's already flowing. I'm not going to call you tonight. How about I call you tomorrow in the afternoon? And he's like, that'd be great.
00:13:42 Karin: And when I talked to this man and he was lovely, you know, young guy, was very excited by his first house and he said, yeah, I read all these articles that you wrote and they were super, super helpful. So then I had evidence that it would work and it hadn't been that long. It had been a few months maybe, but it hadn't been, maybe six months at the very most. It hadn't been that long. So I started doing more and more of it. And I loved that the people who would read those blog posts were people who were in the market. They were ready to do a transaction now.
00:14:14 Karin: So compare that to social media posts, I could make some brilliant social media posts and put it on Instagram. But the algorithm decides who's going to see it. And we know it's something like 8% of the people who actually follow you, see any of your social posts. It's definitely a pay to play system. And so you post it, you think it's amazing. Very few people see it. And then of the people who actually see it, even fewer of those people are ready to do a transaction or make any sort of buying decision at that moment in time.
00:14:46 Karin: But if somebody Googles, best neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia, they're looking for a place to live in Atlanta. And if they click on the thing and they read it, they're self-identifying as, yo, I'm in the market. I'm in a buying decision. I'm ready to make a decision soon and probably in the near future. And I'm looking for someone to help me. The mentality behind somebody who's doing that type of a Google search is amazing. And then I thought, well, it takes me a really long time to write a good blog post. Takes me about a week because I want it to be 3000 words long and I want it to have a video embedded. And I want it to have photos embedded.
00:15:25 Karin: What if I just made a YouTube video? Because Google owns YouTube. So could I just make a blog post and record the video, upload it to YouTube, like copy the URL and embed it in my blog post? And that'd be like the lazy girl's way to make a blog post. What never occurred to me was that people would be doing that same search on YouTube. And so you get the benefit of SEO on Google and on YouTube from one essential piece of content. Like you make the video, the video ranks on YouTube, but the video also ranks on Google. YouTube videos show up on the first page of Google search results all day every day. And it's the same strategy as SEO for blogging.
00:16:12 Karin: It's essentially the same strategy of where we're trying to identify what it is that they are doing the search for. We're gonna make a piece of content that answers their questions and helps them and drives traffic back to your website where they can opt in for something and then go into your database so that you can follow up with them. And boy, did that work like a charm. When I started making those YouTube videos, after about 12 months, I was an individual agent all by myself. I didn't have a team. I worked for a brokerage, but I was essentially self-employed.
00:16:43 Karin: And then by 2018, I went to my broker and said, I'm so busy. I don't even know what the heck I'm doing anymore. And I formed a team and by 2021, I had made seven million, or sorry, seven figures in annual revenue. I'd broken a million dollars. So after like four years of using YouTube, I was crossing the seven figure mark. It was insane.
00:17:07 Gloria: That's amazing. That's incredible. And you know, I think, and we talk about this a lot in our entrepreneurship community is like, a lot of times we just do things because it's what everyone does. So post the reel. Refresh, refresh. It's that quick hit of dopamine, but you're not getting in front of anyone that really wants to buy. So like you said, a much smarter way is to think, how can I reverse engineer this? How can I really get in front of audiences? And by the way, this also works for product-based owners.
00:17:30 Gloria: So for example, we just had someone in our program get onto Elle magazine for one of the best skincare oils. So if I'm reading that article, if I'm clicking on that, I probably am interested in skincare oils. Right?
00:17:41 Karin: And I'm going to go buy the skincare oil that you said was amazing.
00:17:45 Gloria: Yeah, exactly. And it's all about being searchable because I don't think anyone here is not Googling first before they work with someone or discover a new topic or look for an area of interest that they want to make a buy decision out of. So it all starts with Google. And I love what you said. It's like go straight to the source. And it's searchable. It's on there for decades. It gives you backlinks. So let's really break it down in terms of SEO for people who don't really understand SEO. It's like, "Oh, it's searchable." Can you talk about all the other benefits of SEO, not just that they're searchable? What are some of the other ways they can think about it?
00:18:23 Karin: Well, longevity is amazing. So for example, I got a lead this morning from a video that I had made in 2017. And that happens all the time. So you spend the time to make the video. Because YouTube is my jam, let's talk about YouTube, but this would work the same way if you were writing a blog post for your website as well. But you make this piece of content, you have put yourself in the shoes of the person you're trying to reach. What is the problem that they're having? What is their pain point? How can I solve it? And what do I think that they would be actually searching for online?
00:18:58 Karin: If they go to Bing or Google or Yahoo or YouTube, and they do a search, what are they typing into the search bar? And you get some sort of keyword research tool that will tell you this many people are searching this exact phrase on a monthly basis. And this is how many pieces of content there are on the Internet that are using that same key phrase that you would be competing against. So you're looking for something that gets a high amount of search volume, but a low amount of competition so that you are not competing against these huge websites where you're not competing against CNN and Fox News. And if you're a real estate agent, you're not competing against Remax and cold bank or... and Keller Williams and all these huge websites.
00:19:45 Karin: You are competing for something has a lot less competition, but it still indicates what the intent of the searcher is. And I know a lot of real estate agents love to make videos where they review restaurants. And I must have this argument at least once a day with somebody. And I say, so you just made an amazing video about like best place to get shrimp tacos in San Antonio, Texas. That's great. How did it do for you? And they're like, "It got a lot of views". I'm like, "Great. Did you get any clients from it?" "Well, no." And I say, "Right, why not?"
00:20:21 Karin: And then they finally come to the realization, oh, somebody who Google's best place to get shrimp tacos does not mean I want to buy a house. It means I want to go get shrimp tacos. I'm hungry. So we need to be making the content that actually indicates what their true intent is. And I don't know why realtors love to do all these restaurant reviews. It's like, it's the dopamine hit, right? It's the vanity metrics of, I got a thousand views on this video. Look how awesome I am. I'm really cool. Yay me, I get to pat myself on the back. But that's not really why we're doing it, right? We're not doing it. I mean, I'm not doing it because I wanna become an influencer and be a full-time YouTuber. I'm doing it as a way to reach the client that I am trying to get to hire me. This just happens to be my most effective platform. And if I only get 300 views on the video, but 10 people hire me, that's a big win for me. That's a huge success.
00:21:24 Gloria: Now, I know that while you were talking, there's so many people saying, well, of course you can do it. You have a team and you have fancy editing software and can you just break that down. Like what is the level, the barrier to entry? Because I know that people always like to make problems before we get started.
00:21:40 Karin: Everybody loves to make problems, don't they? Listen, when I started making these videos, I was using my cell phone and at the time I think I had an iPhone 6 plus. So it was not, it was an iPhone. It was the latest iPhone, but it did not have the camera that the iPhones have now. I now have an iPhone 14. The camera is ridiculous on that thing. So your phone will be just fine. The microphone. I asked for a really nice podcasting microphone a couple of years ago for my wedding anniversary because I said to my husband like, "I don't need any more jewelry. I hardly wear the jewelry that you buy me. Can you get me a microphone instead because I do all of these Zoom calls every day?"
00:22:20 Karin: And it's an expensive microphone, but in the end it's like, I don't know, $300. It's not crazy, outlandish. However, a $30 microphone would work just fine too. So the microphone that I started with was very inexpensive. My light, you want to see how fancy my light is? This is my light. It is literally like four inches by three inches with a big clip on it. And I just clip it to the top of my monitor. My camera is the webcam on my computer. This is a fairly low budget operation. So, you know, the computer is just computer that I use for business every day. The light was $30.
00:22:59 Karin: Yes, I have a nicer microphone, but again, a $30 microphone would work equally fine. You don't need all of the fancy stuff. As far as my backdrop, people ask me all the time if that's a fake backdrop. I'm like, no, that's my couch. I could go sit on my couch. And the only reason that I chose really dark walls with the lights on them, they don't look as dark as they are, but they are super dark navy blue. I only did that because I'm super fair and my hair is white. So I stand out against the back. But Gloria, you look great with a white background because your hair is darker and your skin is darker than mine. And so you pop against the background.
00:23:38 Karin: Just be mindful of what's behind you and how can you stand off from it. And all it cost me was a gallon of paint. I painted the walls. I have some really inexpensive LED lights back there that are behind the couch that shine on the wall just to make it look brighter. But if I turned them off, it would just be navy blue walls and that's fine too. It's really nothing terribly fancy. And that's not why they're watching your video. Nobody comes to my YouTube channel and says, "Oh, I love your channel because your walls are really nice looking. I think your bookcase is very aesthetically pleasing." Nobody says that.
00:24:16 Karin: They watch the videos because I teach them something. I'm now a coach for real estate agents and they watch these videos and they say, oh my gosh, this was so inspiring. This was so helpful. If you were 55 and you can make videos, then I can too. They all think that they're too old, that they're too fat, they have too many wrinkles, their voice is annoying. Has anyone ever fired you because of how your voice sounds? Why? Why do we get all, you know, worried about stuff that is not an issue? Like we create problems where there are none.
00:24:46 Karin: I guarantee you nobody is going to fire you because of the way your voice sounds. So and in fact, they may hire you because of you if you have an amazing accent. Right. Like I could listen to British people and French people talk all day long just because of the accent. Maybe that's why they would hire you.
00:25:40002 Gloria: They may hire you because you're a real person because we don't want perfection. We're so over the filters. And another thing is like, raise your hand if you're not actually watching the video. Like we have it on 2X speed, we're folding the laundry, we're driving. So like, let's just make the barrier to entry so much lower. No one is focused 100% on anything these days. So just get it out there. I always say done is better than none. So now that you've solved that problem of setup, another problem comes up, which is, well, software or… I don't know what to say and I'm not a great writer. All of these problems that prevent people from ever starting. So how can we solve that problem of people saying they're not great on a video or they don't know what to say or they have to make this complex script and hire a script writer?
00:25:43 Karin: Oh, you so don't. There's so many different ways to film a video. I typically do talking head style because that's what's easiest for me to produce, which is I am sitting at my desk, I am looking at my webcam, I hit record. I'll record directly into Zoom, even though I'm not talking to anybody. Nobody else is there, but I'll open up Zoom. I immediately start talking. If you're super self-conscious about it, you know, you can go into the Zoom video settings and it says, touch up my appearance and you can slide that little bar a little bit if you really want on to. You don't need it. You don't need this filter that looks like glamour shots from 1985.
00:26:18 Karin: But if you want to slide it just a tiny little bit to make yourself feel less self-conscious, that's cool. And then when you're done with your Zoom call with yourself, it's on your computer. And now you can go to Fiverr.com and say, I would like to hire you to edit this video for me. All they have to do is take out all of the mistakes. Maybe they'll add your name across the bottom in a lower third. Maybe they'll put a little bit of background music. It does not need to be an Academy Award winning movie. It's just an educational, inspirational, hopefully somewhat entertaining video. That means when they click on it, they're going to watch it to the end because they enjoyed it. It doesn't have to be anything fancy.
00:26:57 Karin: As far as writing the script, there's this awesome new tool out there now. You've probably heard of it. It's called Chat GPT. It's freaking amazing. You go to Chat GPT and I will put in a prompt such as act as an expert YouTuber. I have an audience of real estate agents. They are GenXers. They want to use video for their business. They are very self-conscious. They don't know exactly what to do. They tell themselves that they're not very tech savvy. They're afraid to be on camera. They don't know what to talk about, da da da da. This is the person I'm trying to reach. This is my area of expertise, and this is what I talk about.
00:27:33 Karin: Give me 25 ideas for video topics that I could make for this YouTube channel. It'll spit it out in 18 seconds flat, and you can say, oh, number seven is really good. Okay, give me more ideas like number seven. And then you can say, okay, that's awesome. What keyword would I try to rank for? What could the title be? Write an outline for what I would talk about in this video. I mean, you can use Chat GPT as much as you need help for, but I don't have it write the script start to finish and then just read it because you always sound like a robot. When you're reading from the teleprompter, it's like, "Hello, my name is Karin Carr and I am a coach for real estate agents." And it just sounds so stiff and awful.
00:28:18 Karin: So don't read it into the camera. Just have it written down and like glance at it and say, "Okay, that's what I was going to talk about next." And then look back at the camera and kind of wing it. And if you don't like it, you just say, "Okay, that wasn't very good. Let's try it again. Okay. That was better. Let's use that one." That helps when you sit down to edit it. So, you know, I said the same thing three times in a row. The last one was obviously the best one, so I can delete the previous two. I don't even need to watch them again.
00:28:44 Gloria: Oh, I love it. Just busting myths left and right. So we talked about the myth of equipment. You say that you were able to just record with your iPhone 6 on Zoom. Now that we have chat GPT, there is literally no other excuse. But what are some of the other excuses of people still holding on to their resistance to getting started?
00:29:02 Karin: I don't have the time. It's gonna take too long. I figure, okay, listen, we make time for what's important. I know that I should go to the gym and exercise. I know that it would make me healthier. I just don't care that much, because if I really cared that much, I would get my butt to the gym. So I know that it's just not a huge priority for me. Instead, I know that video is a huge priority for me because that's what will grow my business. And I'm telling you, it will grow your business. I mean, I went from being a brand new real estate agent in town, having no clients at all to making almost $1.1 million four years later. I know that video works. I 100% believe that it works. I will make time for it. So how much time does it really take?
00:29:47 Karin: Well, what if I do one YouTube video a week? I have to come up with an idea for what I will talk about. I have to write an outline and then I have to actually film it. And then I can either edit it myself or I can pay someone else to edit it for me. I highly recommend you just outsource that and have somebody else do the editing for you.
00:30:04 Gloria: It's not expensive.
00:30:05 Karin: It's not. I mean, like 25 bucks, 50 bucks tops to have a video edited. If you want to do it yourself, it's cool. Just don't get to the point where it takes you 25 hours to edit this video because you're being such a perfectionist about it. Just go to Upwork or onlinejobs.ph, Fiverr, hire somebody else to do it for you. They'll be way faster and it's you're going to pay them a lot less than you would pay yourself. Assuming that you're the CEO of your business, figure out what your hourly rate is.
00:30:34 Karin: And then if you're making like $300 an hour in how much money you're making every year divided by the number of hours you work, would you pay a video editor $300 an hour to edit your YouTube video? You better not. That is not a good use of your time. You just outsource it. So to come up with the idea for the video and then write the outline and film it, what does that take? Two hours maybe? Can you devote two hours a week to something that has the potential to bring you money and business and clients for years and years and years to come. And that's why I like it so much better than social media. In fact, Laura Peters and I had this conversation about how social media is really a hamster wheel. The platform wants you as the creator to come and post your content and then stay there and answer all of the comments in real time for hours to keep driving engagement. And you do that so you've posted it and now you're there just typing away like a banshee for hours afterwards. And then now I got to go do it all over again multiple times every single day. I don't even get me started with Instagram stories.
00:31:44 Karin: I've heard people say that you need to do five to 15 a day. Are you kidding me? Who has time to do 15 Instagram stories a day? Do you actually have a business or is that what you do full time? I have no interest in that. Can I make one video a week? Yes. Yes, I can.
00:31:59 Gloria: You know, it's funny when you said that is we're basically doing unpaid labor for the social media platform.
00:32:06 Karin: Oh my gosh. Yes.
00:32:09 Gloria: We're doing, we're their engagement people and we're attracting more people and who are attracting more people so that the advertisers can, so that they can then sell the ads back to us who we are the ones that are driving the engagement. So it's this vicious cycle where we lose all the time. That is absolutely wild now that I put it in that metaphor.
00:32:27 Gloria: Oh, and you know what's so funny is the most successful entrepreneurs who are making the most profit, people like you, you're really not on social media. Like all the coaches that we follow, they are never using social media as their main platform to find people. And in fact, the coach that we've been following for years, who we learned from, not really even on Instagram. So that just goes to show.
00:32:47 Karin: I know because you get on and then you just you look up and two hours has gone by. And you also I was talking to somebody yesterday who... She googled herself and found a Reddit thread of people that were talking smack about her. And she just went, felt so terrible about herself. And if you're if you're on social media and you're constantly posting and you're trying to get this validation from other people in order to feel better about yourself, that's a game you're not going to win indefinitely.
00:33:20 Karin: They might love you now, but eventually something's going to happen where maybe they don't. And then you see all of the things people are talking. I don't even want to be a part of that. I wasn't terribly active on social media prior to this whole fiasco with Facebook. But then after that happened, I was like, "Oh, I'm done. You can just take your platform."
00:33:39 Gloria: So how can people actually grow their business without social media, without paying Facebook ads? I know you talked about YouTube and email list, but I remember you had a whole list of ways how you were going to beat the beast and you were saying, I'm not going to give Mark Zuckerberg a penny of my money. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. Can you just run through that list of creative ideas, brilliant ideas that actually worked without ads, without social media?
00:34:02 Karin: Yes, I have done a ton of podcast interviews just like this. And I went to a bunch of the people where I've been a guest and said, "Hey, your audience is the same audience that I'm trying to reach. Could I sponsor one of your podcast episodes? And how much would you charge me?" And they said, yes, you know, we'll charge you this number of dollars. And I can either do a single podcast episode, or you could do it for three or four consecutive weeks. And you just record it, send it to me, and we will play it at the beginning of the podcast as a sponsored ad, essentially on the podcast.
00:34:36 Karin: It was emailing your entire database. It was doing some co-branding stuff. So I teach real estate agents how to make YouTube videos. I know some women that have a program of teaching real estate agents how to use Canva to make all of their social media graphics, all of their slide presentations, all that kind of stuff. I could go to them and say, we have the same audience. We do not compete. We have very different programs, but we're trying to reach the same people. Could I pay you to have a sponsored ad in your weekly newsletter that you send out to your database of 100,000 people and vice versa?
00:35:12 Karin: Like there were a lot of things that we came up with when we were brainstorming of besides running ads to get people to come to my three-day challenge, how else could I reach people? And those were some that were incredibly effective.
00:35:26 Gloria: It's crazy how when you get yourself out of that lane that you've been in, a whole ocean of opportunities open. And I say that with my PR students too, it's like, they only think they can talk about this topic, but there's so much more. And that's what you've been able to do for yourself. And the pivots that you've been able to make. And after spending hundreds of thousand dollars on Facebook, still to this day, not using Facebook, having an even more profitable business, it just goes to show it's all possible. We just need to reframe it for ourselves.
00:35:53 Gloria: I could talk to you for hours, Karin. I think that I'm going to have to have you back because you have so many amazing organic strategies to help people grow their business, especially in the early phases. But what is something that you want to kind of leave our audiences with? Something to ponder, something that maybe you've learned from the years of building your business?
00:36:09 Karin: Do you want it to be about YouTube or about anything in general?
00:36:14 Gloria: It could be about anything.
00:36:16 Karin: Let's see. So what I've really been spending time with now is growing my email list even more because the last launch that I did, I did not run any ads to get people. So I did the three day challenge, but I did not run any ads to get people to sign up for the three day challenge. I only posted about it. Community posts on YouTube. I mentioned it in a YouTube video. I emailed my entire database. I think I posted on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram a couple of times saying, hey, I'm doing this challenge. If you want to come, this is what you're going to learn. You should totally sign up.
00:36:51 Karin: So it was a small group of people. I think we had about 150 people attend where back when I was running Facebook ads, I'd have like 2500 people register for this challenge. Since I wasn't using Facebook anymore, it went down, but it was still usually around maybe, I don't know, 300 people or so by doing only organic marketing this time. The group was smaller, but each day, the first day of the challenge, my show up rate was 58%. That has never happened to me ever, ever. In fact, the last challenge that I did where I paid for ads prior to getting the ax from Facebook, my show up rate was like 18%.
00:37:31 Karin: It was pretty abysmal in my opinion. So to have a 58% show up rate was crazy. And then we had a 28% conversion rate of people that attended the challenge and ended up opting in to buy my paid coaching program. So every single person that joined that program was 100% profit because we didn't spend any money on ads. So now we're concentrating on, okay, how do we build our email list? How do we get more people into the email list so that I can drop value on them week after week after week after week?
00:38:03 Karin: And then when I say, hey, I'm doing a three-day challenge, you should totally come, it's $27, they're much more likely to sign up for that because they know all of the value that I've been giving them all along, asking for nothing in return.
00:38:16 Gloria: Ooh, that is so good, I love it. Let's all, I think this episode, yes, it's about YouTube, it's about SEO, but I think you're reframing the power that we have as small businesses, the agency that we have to make decisions outside of what the status quo is, and we're all about disrupting the status quo. You've given us so much to think about. When all the odds are against you, you're just doing something differently and you're still so wildly successful. So may this interview, may this podcast episode inspire other people to maybe step back and look at their business differently, and maybe do something that's a little bit different than what we've been told.
00:38:50 Gloria: Because it is absolutely 100% possible to still have a growing business when you are not following what everyone else is doing. So I love that so much. Where can people find you and learn more about you? You've given us so many gems, so I wanna say thank you for that.
00:39:03 Karin: Oh, thank you. Well, my YouTube channel is youtube.com/KarinCarr and my website is karincarr.com.
00:39:12 Gloria: And it's K-A-R-I-N.
00:39:15 Karin: Yes. Thank you, mom.
00:39:16 Gloria: Thank you so much.
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