This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Do you have to be loud to sell your service? Do you have to be, I don't know, one of those people who is always like cold pitching, sending direct messages or making phone calls? Well, I guess that's the worst. Just imagine making cold calls. Some people actually do that. Personally, I cannot imagine. And for somebody out there who is a new side
hustler starting a business trying to figure out, well, how do I get clients? Like I'm excited about the business that I want to start or grow. And I dread the spotlight. I just want to spend my time working on stuff and making people's lives better, creating products and services that are going to serve my needs as well, bring in income. What are the low noise, high trust tactics that actually work basically? Especially with social media these days, if I want to not be so dependent
on systems that are outside my control, what can I do? How can I market without being a spammer, you might say? That's what we're going to look at today. You'll hear the detailed question from our caller and my answer right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Hey, Chris, this is Lena. I've built a small web maintenance service and every article says,
show up daily on social or DM prospects. Like honestly, pushing myself into people's feeds feels fake and salesy. I'm a total introvert and usually end up posting nothing rather than cringe content. I know I need visibility, but I want a method that doesn't rely on hype or constant self promotion. Are there marketing approaches, maybe authority building or quiet outreach that work for someone who hates being loud online? Lena, I hear you. I too am an introvert.
I get it. I don't want to make cold calls as noted. And also with social media, there is the equivalent of cold calls these days. I think it's good to remember that so much that is posted has never actually seen. So if it feels stressful to you to show up daily on social media, you might just keep in mind that there could be no good reason for doing it. In other words, you might
as well just not show up daily on social media for many businesses. There are much better ways to find your customers, especially in a B2B kind of service. If you're trying to serve businesses with this, I think it's a web maintenance service here. A book I would recommend to you is The Referral Engine by John Jans. John's a friend of mine. He published a duct tape marketing and a
couple of other books, a number of other books actually. The Referral Engine is one of my favorites. Basically the whole idea is to set up a system where businesses are coming to you time and time again through a process of systematized referrals where it's not just like asking people for reviews once in a while, but there's actually a process that works on your behalf. Whether you do it that way or another way, the idea is lead generation that comes to you without the daily social media posts. And you could also think about instead of daily posts, write one solid tutorial a month.
Write a detailed helpful article that it's going to be evergreen or at least be relevant for a long period of time. These pages do rank in Google and also with language models like these days, chat GPT and other services are increasingly sending a lot of traffic to websites, kind of challenging Google for dominance in lots of ways. And the way to get indexed well in those models, at least one of the ways is to write these helpful tutorials that don't have a lot of fluff. So much that is published for Google traffic these days has a ton of fluff because of how Google has basically set the whole thing up. So again, helpful tutorials, maybe one a month instead of the daily social. And then just think about like where do customers come from and like where the
customers you've served already or the clients, where have they come from? Like did they see you on Instagram? Maybe, but most likely it was something else. And so think about where they have come from and think about where you can do more of that. I definitely think the solution is not, oh, just try to be loud or just try to work through your introversion and you know, become a salesperson. There's lots of ways to succeed. That's why we published lots of different
approaches. This is episode 3279 in the archives of the podcast. There are many other kind of responses and examples and case studies of how people have gone about finding customers and clients without doing something that makes them too uncomfortable. And I think it once you find the sweet spot of like, I'm making something that has value, I'm really excited about it. And it is helping people. Then you just want to do more of it. Okay. And it does get easier
over time. So keep that in mind. Thanks again for the question listeners. Thank you for listening. Thanks for being out there. I'm excited to come to the end of the year here with you. Of course,
detailed archives always available for free at sidehustleschool.com. Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is side hustle school. From the Onward Project.
