The Awakening
After hundreds-of-hours of practice, thousands of dollars on marketing, years of mentorships, attending hundreds of small business events, handfuls of expos, gaining experience speaking at events and dealing with brands, my ideas started to make sense.
The different eras of social media experience gave me a steep advantage at optimizing and using keywords. The fact that I was so mentally detached from opinions and metrics allowed me to be myself in a world where anonymity is optional.
I was uncomfortable and partially confused, which was a giant indicator to do it. I started to think of ways and techniques that I could create content solo for potentially the next few years. At the time, I had a smartphone, a laptop and lots of free time.
When I knew that I was going to have to start doing more things that I wasn’t comfortable with, I started doing them on purpose. This might seem wierd, honestly, it might be, but it helped. I was basically doing it for myself and writing it in a way that could motivate other people. But, it was to loosen me up.
I wasn’t from the 1% club, I never had a group of positive motivated people around, and I was no stranger to being hated or doing things alone. That’s practically the story of my life. What I did know, was that social wasn’t going anywhere.
Before I even got the paperwork ready for my business, I fully embraced the idea that I didn’t know everything and I didn’t have to. I started before I opened, experimenting with social platforms, getting comfortable on video, articulating words, using messaging apps to convert people that followed into sales and having fun on camera.
My first few jobs were non-contract freelance work with pictures and image editing for small business socials. I worked with a handful of restaurants, diners and a few people selling items online. My old methods of client hunting were in the form of printing out 26 pages of value about their internet presence and dropping off the audits in person.
Mostly, I wasted a lot of time planning for years down the road, some of it hasn’t even happened yet. Then, there was choosing colors with psychology, creating a mission statement and deciding on my goals.
Through that time, I was attending courses and volunteering with the American Red Cross Disaster Response, participating in local charity events like 5K marathons registering as my business for public awareness.
The idea that content could be reused and recreated was what attracted me to the field. Quite easily, my captions on social alone could’ve been considered short books or articles. I’ll never forget the days of pounding away at the phone staring into the heat lamp of social with no idea how to convey value.
The experience of creating content I believe can be harder on the mind of the creator than the act of it. If I could put my early experiences into words, I’d describe it as being similar to walking down a hallway in an overly-social way, except it’s forever.
