3 Strategies to Simplify your Marketing

If we are not showing up consistently, we basically become that friend that makes plans with you to like, go have coffee and then 10 minutes before they text you and go, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I can't make it right. We become that flaky friend. Whereas if we are showing up when we say we will for our audience, they are going to build relationships with us and we're building relationships with them. But when you're that flaky friend, you crumble away at that foundation every single time you don't show up when you say you will. And so something that's really important to note for the way I teach marketing is that you don't have to show up all the time, you don't have to show up constantly, but you want to show up consistently. And so you don't have to put out a brand new YouTube video every single week. But if you're going to do it once a month or once every other week, you want to make sure that you are consistently showing up on the first Tuesday of every month or every other Tuesday. Whatever plan you've set for yourself and you've told your audience about, you want to make sure you're showing up when they expect you to so that you continue to really build up that foundation of that relationship with them. Because we buy from people that we know, we like and we trust. Right?

Hey. Hey. You know, there is something so beautiful about the approach of simple marketing. Chasing simple marketing more specifically is what we're going to dive into today with our guests. Amanda, who is a simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist and author of the new book Chasing Simple Marketing, host of the Chasing simple podcast to help creative entrepreneurs uncomplicate their business and marketing. Yes, please. She traded in her classroom lesson plans for educating creative entrepreneurs on sustainably fitting content marketing into their business without it taking over their entire business so that they have time to move the needle, take time off, live the life you dreamed about when you started this business. She's a two time business owner. I can't wait to share with you what her second business is. And she spends her time helping one on one clients, creating content marketing plans and teaching students how to batch their content so they have time to make progress in their business and get that balance. If her nose isn't in a book, you can find Amanda annoying her husband by slipping Disney into every conversation that is a hint or forcing her adorable cats to snuggle. This conversation is so joyful and is rooted in such incredible simplicity. I Can't wait to hear what nuggets you get out of it. To streamline, simplify and get consistency in your marketing. Here we go. Amanda, it is so good to see you. Thanks for being here.

Oh my gosh, Amber, I'm so excited to be here. This is incredible.

Me too. This is gonna be fun. You have ran your two time business owner. What are these businesses? Tell us about your entrepreneurship journey.

So my main business is all about marketing. In particular simplified marketing. Because we all can just suck ourselves right into that marketing hole. Right. Where we spend hours and hours and hours marketing and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I have all these other things to do. Or vice versa. We do all the other things and we stop marketing.

Right.

So my whole mission with my main business is just to help other entrepreneurs simplify their marketing so they can actually fit it into their business. But I also have a little side hustle as a Disney travel agent or a Disney specialized travel agent, I should say, just because I really love Disney and it was a good excuse to get to go more.

That is so cool. I love. You're like, I'm running my own business, doing my thing and I've got a side hustle to my main entrepreneurial hustle. And I'm just planning a trip to Disney for this summer. We're going to be there in July when we're back in the States. And I didn't know, I mean, I know that there are people who focus on Disney, but we are also unexpectedly working with someone who like, knows the ins and outs, knows when we need to book tickets by. It's a little bit of a complicated process.

It's very complicated. It is so complicated. I get asked all the time. People are like, people still use travel agents. And I'm like, well, they do for Disney because it's so complicated and the rules are always changing. They just released a whole bunch of new rules two days ago and it's like, well, now these are new things that I need to learn and be able to tell all my clients.

Oh, my gosh. And speaking of travel agents, I absolutely work with travel agents. Elizabeth Karen helped plan my trip to Morocco this spring. And then, yep, Disney. And you know when you're gonna go somewhere and you want it to be special. And then we've got a lot going on as entrepreneurs. Plug into the experts, right? Yes.

Just let someone else take the, the details off your plate. It's just, it's simpler. Right?

Yeah. Do you find yourself using your chasing simple marketing strategies in The Disney side hustle, too?

Yeah, absolutely, 100%. And it's been really interesting because I've also tapped into the same audience. So a lot of my clients are actually people that I've worked with in some way within my main business. So that's been really interesting too. It's like, oh, it's a side hustle, but my main business also kind of sustains it a little bit.

So cool. You know, I love multiple businesses. I think it is as entrepreneurs, we learn these skills, we know these skills, we have these skills. Why not diversify a little bit and give ourselves a strong foundation in diversified income?

Absolutely. That was my thing, was I was like, you know, I really want. Because my husband's not a Disney fan, so it's just me. And so I was like, I really want a good reason to be able to go more often. A good excuse.

Yeah.

And I was like, I already know how to run a business, and I learned so much in starting my first business that, well, I can just apply all of that and get an even better head start with the side hustle. And that's absolutely been the case. I knew what to invest in right off the bat, how to do what I needed to do in order to get things up and running, what I needed, what I didn't. It's been very interesting.

When you first started your business, did you know that focusing on chasing simple marketing was the focus from the beginning? How did it start?

Absolutely not. No way. It took me, like, three years to get to that point. So I actually started it as a blog about simple living, and I really focused in on productivity and time management and then capsule wardrobes. And so that simplicity area was always there. And the desire to help other women make things less complicated was always there. But over time, it evolved from capsule wardrobes to more so time management for entrepreneurs. And then that led into content marketing, actually, because I created my first entrepreneurship course around content batching and how to batch a month of content in just one week so that you free up all that time. And as I was teaching that live, my students were asking all of these strategy questions. And then that just kind of evolved into, oh, we're actually doing full marketing now. And it's. It took about three years to get to that point, though.

Yeah. This is neat. So one of the things that you talk about are you've got three strategies to help people simplify their marketing to stay consistent. I mean, we can just stop there, take it, period. Whether you got a lot going on in your life or not. It is sometimes hard to stay consistent with marketing, especially. Especially at the pace that things change, at the number of platforms that sometimes people want to be on. So how do we simplify and get consistent? We need to know all of your.

Secrets before we dive into that. I feel like it's important that we hit on why consistency is so important, which is because if we are not showing up consistently, we basically become that friend that makes plans with you to, like, go have coffee and then 10 minutes before they text you and go, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry, I can't make it right. We become that flaky friend, whereas if we are showing up when we say we will for our audience, they are going to build relationships with us and we're building relationships with them. But when you're that flaky friend, you crumble away at that foundation every single time you don't show up when you say you will. And so something that's really important to note for the way I teach marketing is that you don't have to show up all the time, you don't have to show up constantly, but you want to show up consistently. And so you don'. Have to put out a brand new YouTube video every single week. But if you're going to do it once a month or once every other week, you want to make sure that you are consistently showing up on the first Tuesday of every month or every other Tuesday, whatever plan you've set for yourself and you've told your audience about, you want to make sure you're showing up when they expect you to so that you continue to really build up that foundation of that relationship with them. Because we buy from people that we know, we like and we trust. Right?

Yeah. So good. I echo this and I sort of take the same approach. I am consistent over time, but I'm not consistent every day. Every. Like, I've been there for years and it's looked different for years, but I'm pretty consistent. And I definitely get more active in certain seasons based on what I'm going. I went through a season once. This was. Oh, man. I know exactly where I was living because we move a lot so I can, like, anchor around. Where was I living? Where did I. Where is I talking to people? This was 2017 and I'm like, man, I was asking my mastermind group. I've got a big season of change coming up and I am not going to be able to be present live as active and connected. That season of change turned into like many seasons of change, but and they had great feedback. They're like, listen, Beyonce, right, isn't active and present all the time. She goes away. She creates that. Of course, we've seen this in some of her documentaries. And then it's like, okay, we're on the road for the concert. So this ebb and flow. So how do you sort of think about that, those seasons and those shifts and the consistency over time?

So what I tell all of my students is to create your baseline for when you know you're not going to be able to show up as much. So you've got your baseline of I know that in the harder seasons, this is prob all I can contribute. But then you can always add in bonus content. There's nothing wrong with adding in more content. And let's be real, when you're going through a launch cycle, right, you need to show up more than your baseline, but you want your baseline to be what's consistent. And so thinking of it that way, of what do I want to make sure my minimum is? And thinking through what about when I'm in those big seasons of change, or I have a lot of projects on my plate and I'm not going to be able to show up as consistently or as often as I want, what is that going to realistically look like? And how often can I really commit to showing up? And then anything else you put out is just bonus content.

Yep. So good. So speaking of, like, decide on your base. What do you recommend for bases? You know, and we look at strategies and we see so many different things, like, okay, every day, twice a day, like, how, who, how, where. And then do you recommend different things for different marketing channels?

Okay, so this is great because this is actually one of the first of the three ways to simplify, is to show up less often and on less platforms. So whatever you think you need to show up, cut it in half, do way less than what you think you need. I am very anti worry about the algorithm because the algorithm is not there for us. It's there for Instagram to make money, what ends up happening. And we're seeing this for anyone that's paying attention to TikTok right now, right. Is for a long time, when it was in the beginning of its life cycle, you could get on there and go viral and get a huge audience almost instantly. It was no problem. But now it's getting to the place where it's more saturated and they're trying to monetize. And so now it's harder to get as much of a reach unless you pay for ads and it's the same thing with Instagram. It's the same thing for Facebook. Right? They're going to lower our reach and our engagement levels to encourage us to pay for ads, which is a great thing to do if you have the budget and you're ready for that in your business. But if you're not, it's not something. Don't worry about the algorithm because the algorithm isn't there for you. Worry about showing up and using your social media to nurture the people that you already have, nurture the audience you always have, instead of viewing it as a growth platform. But so show up less than you think you need to. You do not. Again, you don't have to be constant in order to be consistent, but then also show up on less platforms. Realistically, if you can show up on a long form piece of content, which would be blog, podcast, YouTube, or if you are really crammed for time and this is like, I have five hours a week to work on my side hustle, maybe your email newsletter is your long form content, right? But have some sort of long form content, that email newsletter and then one social media platform. And if that's all you can show up on, that is way more than enough. What we tend to do is we look at these larger entrepreneurs that have been running their business for years and years and they have teams and we look at the kind of social media or the kind of content general that they're putting out and we're going, wow, they're putting out two podcast episodes a week and also they're showing up on Instagram every single day and they're putting out a email newsletter every single day. But most of these people have teams, they have a va, they have maybe even a whole marketing team within their business and so they're able to put out more content. But for those of us that are solopreneurs or side hustling or you have a very, very small team, maybe you only have a va, it's okay to not put out as content as best practices say you're still going to see growth and you're still going to be able to nurture your people without hitting those levels. So if you can just stick to, I've got this one social media spot to show up on. I've got an email newsletter and then also maybe long form content. That's going to be enough.

Yeah. So good. So good. Where do you like to show up most right now?

It's Instagram. I really was trying to talk for a Long time. And people are mean over there.

You know, I heard that someone I know well during the 20, 20, 2021 seasons, started a TikTok, started a whole business around it and she shut it down in the fall. She's like, you know, I just can't handle it. People are mean. And what people come back with it. It's not good for my mental health.

I bow nope, that. That's exactly what I found too. Even when I wasn't trying to be controversial or like I was trying to be one way and then people took it another, it was just like, this is way too much for me. So Instagram right now is definitely my platform of choice. I really wanted to talk to be it because you can see better growth there right now. But for me, the trade off wasn't worth it. And I was like, you know what? We're going to nurture who we have on Instagram and that's going to be enough.

And you still see good results.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

And not being on the latest, you know, trending space. Yeah.

It really all goes back to those relationships like we were talking about earlier. If you use your stories to engage with the people that are watching your stories. Because I had a client yesterday who was upset because, oh well, I used to get 500 Instagram views a day and now I'm getting a hundred. And that's a big. It's a huge cut and it is frustrating. But those are still a hundred people who are actively and consistently looking at what you're putting up on stories. And so it's really easy to look at what lost. Now, that engagement is harder and harder to get. But at the same time, if we can look at who we still have paying attention, let's engage with them, build those relationships. Because as the economy is doing its thing right now, those relationships are going to be more important than ever.

You know, as we think about relationships, one of the things that I have been reading about and seeing more and more, not just in the business spaces, but in regular media channels, is this idea that we're shifting from a social media type landscape and climate to private. And with the uptick of direct messaging and people wanting that intimacy. And I think that this is with, you know, the ushering in of all sorts of AI. This intimacy is going to be. It's going to be so unique and so special and so treasured and so valued. Do you see the same thing?

Absolutely. The AI is a great point. But then also if we just look at the way the world in general is Moving post pandemic, right? Because during the pandemic everyone kind of sequestered themselves and all of our connections and our relationships were basically online and virtual. But now we all are more so free to go about our life as we were before. And we are really leaning into those in person communities more so than we ever have, which means we're spending less time in those virtual communities. And so those one on one relationships that you can build in the DMs, for example, or in email, those are going to be more important than ever because we do crave those personal connections versus sitting and scrolling on our feet as much as we used to.

Mm, interesting. How are you building the messenger spaces into your marketing strategies and flows?

Honestly, it really just comes down to putting up engaging stories on Instagram and then encouraging people to engage with it and then when they do, making sure that I engage back. So what we tend to forget is that we'll put up a poll and we think that's the end all, be all. If someone votes in the poll, that's it. That's our goal, is to get people to vote. But actually we want to take it a step further and go, okay, let me ask you another question based off of what you answered in this poll. So, for example, just yesterday I put up a poll about AI tools and whether or not people were using them in their content. And I had yes, I use it a lot or I use it occasionally or I'm not using it at all. And so I then went back to everyone who responded and said, I I'd love to hear your favorite ways to use it or why aren't you using it yet? And so then we're building a conversation that doesn't have anything to do really with what I offer, but it's a way for us to make connections and have those conversations within the DMs.

That's so good. Okay, I have two spinoff questions from this number one, what are you finding people are using? Or what are you using right now?

So I just responded and asked everyone, literally before we hopped on. So I don't have an answer for what other people are using. I'm mostly using it for research and then outlining and that's kind of all I've really dove into, mostly because it feels disingenuous to use it for a lot more when people pay me to make their strategy and their copywriting. So I don't use it for the actual any of that. But you can, and I know people who are and that use it Often and they're getting great results from it. But I'm mostly using it for. This is what the podcast episode is going to be about. Help me outline it to make sure that I'm not missing pieces. And then also if I don't understand something in particular like, okay, well, tell me what this is and give me a look. To me, it's better than Google for understanding and researching.

Yeah, I love this. I use sort of the written AI platforms. Jarvis AI is one that I've been using actually for a long time. But again, not lifting the copy entirely. Like, okay, that's perfect. No, not usually. I'll like, okay, good. I'll brainstorm or I'll. Okay, what about that headliner? What is another word for this? And I'll just sort of plug things in to generate ideas. So I'm not just sitting in my room brainstorming with myself, but. Right, of course I'm engaging my team. But it's just another brainstorming research. To your point, very similar to how I would use Google. Definitely a little chat GPT on that, brainstorming back and forth. I also use it for, like, when I'm doing deep research around very specific topics and I want citations, I will ask questions and ask for references and references to the references like, and just sort of dig deeper into that. And it's been very helpful in structuring those, those concepts. But there are a couple of other unique things. Like Otter AI is something that's been out there for a while to do transcripts when, you know, if we were recording, if we were in a meeting, we could have it doing a transcript for us right now. But the cool thing I've seen it do recently is capture notes and then the action items from the meeting. And I didn't have it turned on. I don't have this turned on. But I was in a meeting and one of my colleagues had it turned on and it sent me the notes like, well, that was pretty gosh darn good. I do like those notes. Like the summary. Like, here are the key points from the meeting. That is exactly what I needed. So that was pretty cool. And then the other one actually I just learned of recently from the team at Funnel. Gorgeous is too long, didn't listen. It's an app for Voxer. So Voxer, for anyone who doesn't know, do you use Voxer, Amanda?

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

So for anyone who doesn't know, Voxer is like walkie talkie, back and forth message. You can hear things real time while Someone's talking. You can text or you can hear it after if you're not there listening real time, but too long, didn't listen that I think it puts the text in there and I think it summarizes, if I'm remembering correctly, like the feeling and the tone and the mood. So you can even get like, okay, this is what they said. This is what their tone was like, weird. And so there are all these ways that. But as I think about people who, oh, this is going to be me soon. Who, like, can't see their phones well, like, turn my eyesight. There's glasses. Glasses. It's happening. But, you know, right. Can't read or I'm not in a place to read or it's whatever. There's so many different ways that we could use this technology to augment that is beyond, like, the writing. And it supports us in so many cool ways to brainstorm and be creative. I have also tested images. Have you tested any AI imagery?

No, I have not done that.

That.

That one scares me. Oh.

Oh. I didn't put myself up yet. I have seen the route where people have these beautiful new headshots from AI, But I tested just like plugging in, can I get a picture of a dog running through a yard? And mine weren't very good. What I got back, my prompts needs to be better.

That's what I need. I need someone to curate just a whole list of props for me.

This is out there, I'm sure, because.

I feel like there's so much we can use it for that would drastically speed up all of our processes.

Yeah, well, and this is the thing. So I'm curious what your take on this is, because you have a lot of experience in the simplifying and as we streamline our work efforts. Right. Marketing, streamline some work activities, brainstorm a little bit faster, like, leverage some of these platforms to accelerate. How do you spend your time outside. Outside of business marketing, as you streamline? I mean, we know you've got side hustle for your hustle.

Yeah. You know, it's funny because in the last five or six months, my husband has shifted to a schedule where he has a full week off every single month. And so I'm working significantly less than I ever have this year, which has been a learning experience, but it's been really nice. So we're just, you know, we spend a lot of time together and travel and honestly spend a lot of time outside coffee and then going to the pool when it's warm and things like that.

I love this. How is your husband getting a week off per month? What does.

So he's on a shift schedule. So it's like this. Never change, always changing. Like he works a few days and then he has a few days off and then he works a few nights and he has. And so it's just like this constantly changing schedule where he's working a lot of weekends. And so just the way it works out is that they're able to have a week off each month.

So you adapt with that. That's really beautiful.

Yeah.

How does that impact other areas of your business, client conversations and your workflow?

I at least check communications twice a day on the days where it's a typical work day. But he's off. So I'm gonna also technically be off. But then I'll go in, you know, earlier in the morning and look at my email and all my slacks and voxer and then I'll also do another check in the afternoon. So I'm able to, to be there for my clients and students still as they need me, but I'm not actively working in the office on those days.

I love this. Very cool. Speaking of ebbs and flows in life, there are ebbs and flows in our business and in our marketing too. And depending on the type of business we have, actually, maybe it doesn't matter.

Right.

If you've got a launch model business, you've got, we're launching and there's revenue coming in and we're very busy. Okay. Or not. And then there's that ebb and flow. But there can even be seasonal ebb and flow for a retail or E commerce business or my photography business, we absolutely have had ebbs and flows due to inflation and just changing external variables. So how do we structure our marketing so we don't feel like we're in a feast and famine cycle?

Okay. So the best thing that you can do for yourself, and this is going to go back to the second way to simplify, actually, is to be a broken record. And what I mean by that is always, always, always, always talk about your offers and talk about those main points around your offers. What we tend to do is we get bored talking about the same thing over and over again. Right. And so we want to come up with these new fun and fresh things to talk about. But in reality, if you look at the numbers, our audience needs to see us and hear us talk about something seven to 10 times before it's even going to click and take action. And so if you look at the amount of content you're putting out and if about the same topic seven to 10 times, which you're not even going to get to that without feeling bored, to be honest. But you put it out seven to 10 times. Great. Most people probably didn't hear all of that or even half of that. And so you need to do it again and again and again. And so really just by talking about the same thing over and over again. And stop trying to come up with new things to say because what ends up happening is that you're confusing your audience when you're hopping around from top and topic to topic to topic. They have no idea what you do and they have no idea what offers you have and how you can serve them if you are not telling them over and over and over again the exact same things.

It's so true and to your point, right? 7. You may put that message out there, share that story seven to 10 times, but chances are I didn't even see it all of those seven to ten times. I'm only seeing like every third or fourth post you put up, maybe. So it's okay to keep coming back to it because I'm not on all the time and we're going to miss them then other stuff's in the feed anyway. So I think this is a really good point and I know that I struggled. I'm like, I am a broken record. Exactly what you said. And then eventually, oh, it clicks and people recognize. And one of the things that I know and that people in general, as we think about human performance, is we do well when we are getting feedback and we might not get that feedback or that affirmation until 7, 10, 20, 27th post. Because now people just started to realize because they just saw it enough for it to resonate like, oh, this is what she does. This is what I refer people over to this business for. Oh, I remember I saw these. Like, it's not going to click and stick. So yeah, you're so right. Like seven to 10 times, we're going to be tired of it. But go further, go further and you won't get that feedback until.

Well, if we think of it like this way, what we tend to do is we talk about an offer and then we hear crickets and we're like, oh, this offer sucks. I don't know what I'm doing. Nobody wants to work with me. Right? We internalize that silence. But in reality, every time you mention an offer or you mention something that you do, you're just planting a seed. And then the next time you mention it, you're watering the seed, and then the next time you mention it, you're watering the seed and how many times you have to water a plant before it actually comes to life. Right. And so that's the same thing with our offers. You have to talk about it and tend that seed over and over and over again in order to harvest it. And then each time you're talking about it, you're planting a new seed too, because there's someone who's seeing that for the first time. And so every time you talk about an offer, you're tending seeds that have been planted and you're planting a new seed and it just continues to grow this garden then that eventually you will be able to harvest. Right. But it's not always going to happen the first time. And it's usually not going to happen the first time.

Yep. It's so true. It's a good reminder. Always, always keep going, keep talking about it. You might be sick of you, but we are not sick of you.

Absolutely. And it's a disservice to your people because they need to hear that message, even though you're sick of it because you know it and you keep talking about it over and over again, but your people still need to hear that message. And so if you're not sharing it, it you're doing a disservice to them. And I know that we all want to serve our people well. So be that broken record.

Be the broken record. Oh, yes, you have a new book coming out. Is actually at the time someone is listening to this, at the time you are listening to this, this book is likely already out. Amanda, tell us about your book.

It's called Chasing Simple Marketing and it is basically a crash course in content marketing for saving time, growing your business, thriving within your marketing. It's for the entrepreneur that maybe didn't anticipate being an entrepreneur that doesn't have that MBA in their background. Right. They didn't go to school and decide, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. They either started a hobby like photography and then kind of fell into this entrepreneurship thing, or they were like me and they went to school for one thing, and then decided they were going to start a blog and a business randomly one day in the middle of February. You know, like, like there are so many of us that come into entrepreneurship, especially in this online space, that didn't plan on it. And so we get into it and we realize, oh, marketing is totally up to me. And marketing is one of the most important parts of owning a business. Because if no one knows about me and they don't know about my offer, they can't work with me. And we have no idea how to market. And it's confusing and it's overwhelming and it's vague. And so this book is basically an entire crash course on here's what marketing is, here's how to use it in your business. And in particular, I go through the three different phases of entrepreneurship in your business journey and what kind of marketing you should be focusing on in each phase so that we're not sitting here going, well, I'm a brand new entrepreneur, but I see Amber doing, you know, she's running a podcast and she's speaking and she's, you know, you're doing all these things and we look at these entrepreneurs like, I need to do that, but you don't need to do that yet. You're not there yet. And that's okay. Here's what we focus on as a creator. Here's what we focus on as a foundation builder. Here's what we focus on as an established entrepreneur. And then within that, I also break it down into nurture strategies versus growth strategies and how those work together. So if marketing is frustrating or overwhelming, chasing simple marketing was written for you.

Oh, my gosh, I'm loving this. You mentioned the nurture strategies. Was it versus growth? Is that what you said? Right, Versus growth? What, what is this? Nurture versus growth?

Okay, so when it comes to your marketing strategy, there should always be two parts to it. You've got to have the nurture strategy and you've got to have the growth strategy. The nurture strategy is what you're doing to build those relationships with the audience you already have and the audience that you're bringing in. And so that tends to look like having a podcast where every week or every other week or once a month, your people are able to say, oh, I'm going to get new information from them, I'm going to learn from them in this way. And you're nurturing those relationships. Social media is a great way to nurture. It's anything that you can do to say, here, I have this for you and I want to further our relationship. Growth strategies are what you do to bring in new audience members. Nurture. And so that's looking like putting up your lead magnet on Pinterest, right? Or going onto someone else's podcast and sharing your message. Anything where you're able to get in front of a new audience and potentially bring them back into your own audience. To then continue those nurture strategies and nurture them. But if you're only nurturing, you're not growing. And so every time you put out that offer, well, they've heard it, right? Every time you launch, if you've launched something four times and you're not growing your audience, your ROI is just going to continue to dwindle because they've heard it already. You've got to constantly be bringing in new people. But if you're only growing your audience and you're not nurturing them, no one's going to want to buy from you either, because they don't know who you are and they don't have that relationship with you. So you have to have both parts in order to really work together.

Yep, that's good. As you think about sort of the cadence or the frequency of nurture, grow. Nurture grow. Do you have sort of a recommended flow for how often you're talking to the different audiences?

Yes. And this brings us back to the third and final way to simplify your marketing, really, which is batch your content. If you are not batch creating your content, you're not going to have time for growth strategies, because you're only going to be focused on that nurture marketing. Because what ends up happening is we get caught on that content creation hamster wheel and we are always, always, always creating. Or we've burned ourselves out and we're not creating and we're not doing anything to market. Right. But we get stuck on this content creation hamster wheel and we're constantly putting out content. But if you can batch your content and create a whole month's worth of content at one time, you're going to spend one week a month creating content that will then get scheduled out and will continue to nurture your people consistently for the next three weeks. And during those three weeks, you can work on those growth strategies. Whether it's pitching yourself to be on podcasts or pitching yourself to write a guest blog post or working on your Pinterest, you've got that time to work on those things. If you're batching out your content so that you're not on that content creation hamster wheel.

So good. Okay, so I am a bit of a bachelor, but I don't do it all in one week for a full month. You mentioned the one week versus the month. How is it all week? Is it going to take 40 hours? What do you see in sort of. How do you break that down a bit?

So what I teach is that especially for solopreneurs, and those that are newer in their business. Whatever time you have within, if you work five hours a week on your business, your batch week should be five hours. It should not be a typical 40 hours. I need to figure that out so that I spend my whole month creating content right now. The purpose of it is to be able to show up consistently, which means you've got to go back to that show up less often. Right. If you can only have five hours a week for your batching, well, how much content can you create in five hours? That's your month of content right there. The purpose is to remove yourself from that constant hamster wheel. And so however much time you spend working in a week, on average, that's how long your batch week should take. As you grow a team, you're able to do more and spend time on it. At this point, you know, I outsource my podcast editing, and I've got a VA who does most of my scheduling. And so I spend probably, if I was to sit down and do it in just two days, I probably spend two days actually working on my month of content. But when you don't have that team set aside a week each month, and it sounds extreme, no one ever wants to do it at first. But when you do it and you realize how much time you were spending on content each week, waking up on Monday morning and recording your podcast episode and then writing the email for it, and then each day trying to figure out what to post on social media, that time really adds up. And it's amazing. I mean, we can spend hours and hours and hours a week creating content. And then what happens when you get set sick, or someone in your family gets sick, or you just want to take a week off? If you aren't batching out that content, you're not able to fully step back without the guilt. But if you are, you can just disappear and go on vacation and not do anything and nobody knows because your content is scheduled and will keep going out for you.

Yeah, this is really good. I love the reframe that you put on. We're not. Basically what I heard is like, how much? Okay, I asked the question, how much time should we spend on this? And you said, let's scale it back. How much time you have to spend is how much content you're going to create? Because so often, how much. How much should I publish? How much should I post? Okay, now I've got to figure out how much time that's going to take. Where am I going to fit that? And you just Totally reversed it. How much time do you have? And that's going to drive how much time we spend producing and potentially the frequency of content and how much content we're, we're putting out in distribution.

Absolutely. Because what ends up happening almost every single time someone goes through my course is they go, okay, but I'm gonna just do two weeks out of the month. So I'm still not creating all the time. And I'm like, no, don't do that. One week. Whatever you can put out is plenty. It's a great starting point. Over time you'll get faster. Over time you'll grow your business and you'll be able to hire, help put out what you feasibly can manage within a one week time period of a typical work week. Don't add in 80 hours for one week just to get batch week done right. What's a typical work week look like for you? And then it may take some time to figure out what's realistic and how much you can actually get out. But work within that time frame and what you can get done in that week, that's how often you should be putting out content.

Okay, Amanda, what are we missing? Is there anything like, ah, don't forget this or do this when you're marketing? Anything that comes to mind?

You know, I feel like we covered so much. I want to reiterate though that you do not need to figure out what the algorithm wants and you don't need to follow best practices. Don't go to Pinterest and say, how often am I supposed to be posting on Instagram? Don't do that. Don't follow best practices. Follow what's feasible and realistic for you and your business and you are still going to be able to see growth. If you're doing that, a lot of times we think, oh, I have to figure out what the best practices are in order to have a great podcast. And that's just. It's not the case. You can see growth and you can grow your business by spending less time marketing and simplifying, but putting out quality content instead of a ton of content.

Oh my gosh, I love this. And where do people find you to dig in more and fully embrace this Chasing simple marketing approach?

Well, I would really recommend that everyone goes to amandawarfield.combook to get their copy of Chasing Simple Marketing. That's honestly going to be the best thing you can do to get a full look at the entire marketing system that I use and that I recommend for all of my students and clients.

Oh, good. Amanda, thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you so much for having me. Amber. This was so much fun.

Loved it. Loved it. Love you. Thanks a lot.