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Do you feel at times you’re trying to force business growth? In a way, it does make sense to create more content with the goal of growing faster.
But when it comes to organic growth, more doesn’t always equal better. When we’re creating content for our audience, we need to create from a place of quality, not quantity.
Organic growth is something that takes time and consistency. Having patience is how business growth happens in the long term.
When it comes to growing an online business, it can be easy to overlook putting in too much time or overcommitting yourself to the point of burnout and frustration.
Slow growth for a successful business should be our main goal for the long term. I know how hard it is to stay consistent with something and not see fast results from all the time spent building your business (I too have gotten impatient waiting), but success is something that can’t be forced or rushed.
In this post, I’m addressing 3 lies (and truths) about organic growth and growing an online business. And I’m also going to share 3 tips for organic growth.
How Business Growth Takes Dedication & Consistency
Building an online business at first is so exciting. Have you ever been so excited about something that you can’t sleep? It feels kind of like a honeymoon phase.
Planning, preparing, and the initial work it takes to start is motivating. It’s just like having a new project to work on. The real work begins when you have to start repeating weekly tasks to grow your business.
The part where it takes being consistent and committed, regardless of the results or organic growth. You could’ve had such a good feeling marketing the perfect product or service you thought was going to sell like hotcakes to your audience and it turns out to be a dud.
So you start asking yourself, what happened? It’s hard to know what the answer is.
Since social media coaches are so good at selling instant gratification, we immediately get discouraged when we don’t see the results that we expected.
Instead of testing and making minor tweaks to see what’s going to work, we decide to scrap the whole thing and start over. Or, maybe give up altogether! Successful things take time, dedication, and patience, and a successful, thriving business does not grow overnight.
The Truth About Social Media Marketing & How Business Growth Doesn’t Thrive Using It
I’m probably about to make some people mad, but if you’ve tried social media marketing, you might be familiar with the somewhat sleazy social media tactics.
If you’ve ever invested in a social media coach, you might have been told to create so many reels a day, join Facebook groups where your audience is hanging out and start requesting members as friends, which side note, is a big no-no in a lot of groups and start DM-ing random people to start fostering “friendships”.
The strategy is to friend them, get to know them, show interest, build that like, know, and trust with them, and when you’ve earned their trust, pitch the sale.
I’m callin’ it for what it is, friends. It’s a manipulation sales tactic. If you out of nowhere receive a friend request from someone you don’t know and they start liking your pictures and commenting, it’s part of the sales strategy.
You’ll eventually get a DM that starts with, “Hi [name], so glad to connect, how are you?” They don’t actually care about cultivating a friendship with you. It’s purely to get you warm to buy.
Networking is a great way to grow business relationships, collaborate, and in a way, how business growth thrives.
But when selling becomes a sleazy sales pitch and you’re showing up in someone’s inbox without permission, it becomes disrespectful.
There’s a time and place to pitch a sale, and it’s not by invading someone’s inbox. Not to mention, the 10 or 20 people you are DM-ing daily (or even weekly), you could easily be reaching a much wider audience with blog content using SEO.
Organic growth means business growth is going to take time. Organic growth is something that can’t be rushed or forced and see instant success.
How Business Growth Relies on Long-term Strategy
Here are 3 lies that sell and 3 truths and tips for growing an online business with a solid, long-term, organic growth strategy.
Lie Number 1
Instant success is the real deal
In order to grow a successful business, it takes some time to build that traction factor and to get the attention of your audience. Organic growth means getting your audience to trust you, and that does not happen overnight. Hustle culture only teaches us to grind ourselves into social media oblivion.
The reality is that the hustle mentality isn’t a sustainable way to grow an online business. If you want a demanding way to show up, you need to be sure that you will be able to maintain that level of consistency.
You might be okay with the hustle initially starting your business because it’s kind of like a honeymoon phase. But when that excitement wears off, you’re not as motivated and you have to decide to keep showing up whether or not you see progress.
You won’t see organic growth overnight. Growing a business is not a get-rich-quick influencer kind of lifestyle.
SEO works on its own. That’s one marketing strategy if done correctly works without you even being present for it. You show up, write the content, optimize it for search engine and ranking, and the search engine will start favoring your content and send you traffic. That’s one automation strategy for marketing.
2 Factors for How Business Growth Thrives
From the very beginning, you MUST be consistent. Yes, there are going to be days where you don’t get content published in time, or you’re running behind on your promo schedule.
But when you post consistently for 3 weeks and ghost for 2 months, you aren’t going to grow your business that way.
You have to decide to show up to educate, teach, nurture, and give abundant value. It takes some thought creating valuable content.
If you’re creating content at the last minute because your schedule is so chaotic, it’s not going to be valuable content. Create a simple work schedule you can show up for consistently.
Whether you decide to market your content once a week, twice a week, or once a month, make it consistent.
Choose a marketing strategy that you can automate right off the bat (without having to bring someone on to outsource). SEO is one part of your marketing strategy that is automated.
Lie Number 2
Be EVERYWHERE. Literally.
Maybe you’ve heard somewhere that if you’re active on all platforms, your audience would grow faster. But, you can’t show up everywhere and provide value to the best of your abilities and run your business. It’s not a realistic goal.
Choose 1 – 2 platforms to show up and deliver value regularly. Wherever you decide to show up, do it consistently.
You have to remember that aside from your business model, whether it be blog content, podcast content, or vlogging, you aren’t only delivering consistent content at the same time, but you are providing value to your audience where you are showing up too. So, you not only have a content schedule, you have a promo schedule and misc tasks. Be practical with your schedule and give yourself grace.
Organic Growth Means Creating a Consistent Promo Calendar
Create a content calendar specific to your schedule. Choose which day or days you’re going to be publishing new content and marketing it and write those dates into your content calendar.
Then you need to schedule what you are going to market the other days between you publishing new content, like your opt-in, services, products, etc.
Lie Number 3
Grow your business on social media!
While it is true that you can grow your business on social media, it takes four times the effort and twice the amount of work. Definitely not the best way to utilize your time strategically.
Social media content has a shelf life of 24 hours. Reels can live longer, but that’s if your posts are getting engagement. The algorithm plays a huge part in how far your content reaches people.
Blog content can be repurposed, updated, and live for years. You don’t have to keep constantly recreating the same piece of content for people to see it.
Marketing on social media works. But if you want to save time and not have to crank out content daily and want to be on social media less, relying solely on social media to grow your business isn’t how business growth is going to benefit you.
Organic Growth Means Crafting an Evergreen Marketing Strategy
Choose an evergreen marketing strategy that is going to help you grow your business organically where you aren’t at the mercy of an algorithm.
An evergreen strategy would be writing blog content or podcasting. Either is a great way to grow your audience organically.
Evergreen content has the potential to live for such a long time, and the same piece of content can keep bringing you traffic to your website.
Choosing which evergreen route you want to go depends on what you prefer doing more. If you prefer writing, show up and provide valuable blog content.
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