From former CPA and EMT Responder to full-time digital creators ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ป๐จ๐ผโ๐ป that built a 7-figure online business that all started with a small health and wellness blog. โก๏ธ Join 30,000 others and receive our Blog Launch Challenge to learn more about how you can start and grow your own online business from scratch! ๐ฅ
Growing Social Accounts From Zero: My Experiences
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Growing social accounts from zero sucks, am I right? You have great ideas and you invest a lot of time into your content... only to get ZERO eyeballs on it. I'm feeling that right now. By the way, Noah has been writing our emails as of late, but today, this is Lauren speaking! ๐๐ผ I just started a new business with my brother two weeks ago and the zeroes are weighing heavily on us right now. So much so that I POURED over Reddit threads looking for some validation on my experiences... to make sure that they were normal and par for the course. I want to share some of my initial results from posting content for the first few weeks on a few platforms and give you my thoughts in hopes that this can help others out who are starting from zero. First of all, you aren't alone. The creator economy is BOOMING and only growing. So while it might feel disheartening in the beginning, know that this is the path that many others are taking right now and the only way forward is through the BS/tough beginning stages. My New BusinessThe new business I started with my brother, Dale, is called Mindful Max, and it all revolves around our YouTube channel. With Mindful Max, we wanted to create a space to help others (and ourselves) be more mindful. It can be hard to carve out time for ourselves these days. Time for ourselves. Time to connect meaningfully with others. We live in a world increasingly driven by other peopleโs behavior on social media. Everyone is doing everything and getting everything and being everything all the time โ and we're reminded about it every second of the day. We believe that we all already have everything we need to live our best life tucked away inside our beautiful brains. We just need to tap into it. Mindful Max exists to encourage personal growth and a greater sense of fulfillment by simplifying the science behind psychology and mental health. Here's one of our YouTube videos to see more of what we're about: Our Current Content Creation ProcessHere's a quick rundown of what we're doing and how we're doing it...
ToonBoom is really our only expense at the moment, but it's a big one at over $100/month. Traffic Results From First Three Weeks of PostingNow what you're really interested in... Here are some of my results from the first couple of weeks of posting. Just to preface this... I started all of these social accounts from zero just three weeks ago. Up until these shameless plugs in this email, I had no existing "leverage" to get started, other than the usual "tell family and friends." I had no advantage in any way, which will be obvious when you see how little traction we've gained in 3 weeks. P.S. Speaking of shameless plugs, if you want to monitor my journey from zero or you're interested in mindfulness, feel free to follow us on any or all of the social channels I'm about to share: 1. YouTube (the main show)Our YouTube channel has 41 subscribers in the first 3 weeks. I hazard to guess that maybe 4 or 5 of those are random. The rest are friends and family ๐ซ
It's VERY clear that YouTube is prioritizing shorts, so I will continue creating 3-4 shorts for each long-form YT video that we create to help YT get used to who our target audience is and hopefully gain some new subscribers. It's hard to watch your videos get fewer views with each posting, but after pouring over Reddit threads, this appears to be normal. Many people say that some of their initial "dead in the water" videos actually take off a bit after 2-3 months, so we can hope. 2. TikTokThe TikTok account has been the most successful so far in terms of views, although we only have 4 followers (and 2 are my brother and I):
These are the same videos that I post on YT shorts, so there is no extra work involved here. I'm satisfied with this initial success, although it would be great if the followers started reflecting the success. 2. InstagramThe Instagram account has been pretty abysmal, although I'm not too surprised.
Again, same exact videos posted here, but they are clearly getting 20-40x the reach on YouTube and TikTok. Instagram is a popularity contest and we're only participating because brands and sponsors care so much about this platform. I'm not sure it's going to be worth our time in the end. Right now, I'm dedicated some time to creating additional posts for this platform, but I will probably let that go if it doesn't pick up at some point. My thoughts are that it might not be worth it to dedicate any extra time to it beyond reposting the videos that I'm already sharing on other platforms. P.S. I also created a Threads account and posted twice, but I don't think we will do anything with this platform at this time because it seems very community-oriented and just isn't our style at the moment. Maybe later. 4. Google SEOWe aren't sure if Google SEO is something we will dedicate much time yet, but here is my process so far:
Right now, we aren't "going after SEO" beyond that. Just getting the basics covered and making sure it's optimized in case it goes anywhere. We aren't going after backlinks or doing any outreach of any kind at this point. It's only been 3 weeks, so of course our domain rating is still 0 and we have no organic traffic. 5. PinterestโPinterest is also pretty slow-going with only 100 impressions and 0 clicks, although I've only posted 6 times so far. I'm not sure how this kind of content will perform on Pinterest, but I'm giving it a try to see if it will go anywhere. I haven't joined any group boards or Tailwind Communities yet because I'm waiting until I have some more content established on the account. If any of you are in the mindfulness space and have a group board, let me know ๐ Trudging ForwardSo, what now? Dale and I keep reassuring ourselves that the slow growth is just part of the game and we need to JUST KEEP POSTING. Even though he and I have both grown multiple YouTube channels from scratch over the years, we're humble enough to know that they game changes often and we may still have more to learn. We've both watched many YouTube videos on getting started and the best advice we've got is this:
As Mr. Beast, THE most successful YouTuber of all time, says: "If you create 100 videos and improve something with every single one, you won't fail." This is our mantra at the moment and I do think that it's all that matters in the YouTube world, so we will keep at it. We have a few ideas for monetization that I can share in a different email, but for now, we're focused on subscriber growth FIRST, and monetization later when we've hit at least 1k subscribers and we have more consistent growth. Follow? Subscribe? ๐Again, if you want to monitor my journey from zero or you're interested in mindfulness, feel free to follow us on any or all of our social accounts: Also, let me know if you found this interesting at all. I can post another update at 2 months, 6 months, etc. if you find it helpful. I will also definitely share any "hacks" or other growth tips I come along that end up making a difference in our journey from zero! |
Create and Go | Launch Your Blog Biz
From former CPA and EMT Responder to full-time digital creators ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ป๐จ๐ผโ๐ป that built a 7-figure online business that all started with a small health and wellness blog. โก๏ธ Join 30,000 others and receive our Blog Launch Challenge to learn more about how you can start and grow your own online business from scratch! ๐ฅ
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