You Don't Need to be an Influencer for a Profitable Side Hustle
If you want your side hustle to be sustainable, read this.
When you’re building an online business, you need to consider which marketing strategies are going to suit you long-term.
If you already know jumping into social media with both feet isn’t something you can commit to, don’t let the pressure get to you.
Pouring your energy into marketing strategies that don’t feel aligned with you will only leave you burnt out and frustrated.
Instead, focus your attention on the other options you have that are just as effective and just as lucrative.
Not sure what those are? Tune into the latest podcast episode to find out.👉
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers! Welcome to Empathy Rising. So I just watched the funniest reel on... I think it was Facebook, but it was originally posted on Instagram. I don't know. I was just killing time, but okay. It was Giuliana Rancic. If you know who she is, she used to have a show on E a long time ago. She's a celebrity host or a journalist.
Her husband is Bill Rancic, he owns a lot of restaurants, and their family was on Family Feud, and Giuliana is Italian obviously, and her parents are from Italy. And so Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud goes "what's one reason you might break up with a boyfriend?", and the mom in an Italian accent goes "because he spent all the money" and then Steve Harvey, "okay, good answer".
Then he turns to the board like dying, laughing, and then he says "cause he ate spaghetti on a Monday" and then Juliana Rancic was like, "that's not what she said" and he goes, "what?" And she goes, "cause he spent all of her money" and then Steve Harvey dies laughing, and I'm like still beaming from ear to ear. I don't know. Maybe it's something you had to see, but it cracked me up.
Anyways, so today, speaking of social media, I'm going to do a series—not really a series, but I'm staying on this topic a little bit for the next couple of episodes—and this is the one I'm talking about: You don't have to be an influencer to have a side hustle. Like people think, oh, I don't want to do social media. I don't want to be an influencer and all of that. I want to really break down that word today. And I want to talk about how you don't have to be an influencer at all, and you may not even need to use social media at all for your side hustle.
So the reason this came up for me is because the other day, somebody called me an influencer, and I had kind of a bit of a mixed reaction to being called that or being labeled as an influencer. So I want to kind of dissect this word from two different angles because I think what they meant by the word and how I took the word were different.
So what the word "influencer", right, means in English, just the English language, is "to be who's influential". Somebody who has sway over other people. That sway can be used manipulatively in a bad way, or, you know, for good, for sure. But somebody who has influence, somebody who is listened to and somebody who, when they talk, people pay attention or whatever.
That's the way that the person was meaning it. Like, instead of calling me an influencer, I think what they meant to say is you're influential in your space, and I could've got behind that. I could have been like, okay, cool. That's a nice compliment. Thank you. But what I took them to mean was the influencer in the online space and as a job or like a way that people make money online. And what would an influencer is somebody who grows a big, big following on social media, which I don't on any platform, whether Hailey is running it for me or I'm running it myself.
I do not have a big audience on any platform. But with that big audience, they then sell other people's things, right? Like, "oh, I just got this new moisturizer from Clinique and it makes me feel so dew. Go ahead and buy it. Here's my link." And then they get, you know, an affiliate commission or whatever. I don't even know what that voice was, but they get like an affiliate commission or whatever.
And that's the thing that I kind of took offense to because A) anything I sell is my own stuff. I don't sell anybody else's stuff. Once in a while, I'll do an affiliate promotion for somebody that I really believe in. Last year, I did something for Megan Hale. I've been an affiliate for other programs, and I do have people who are affiliates for me.
And so I'd like to break that piece apart because they don't have a problem with affiliate income per se, but the role of an influencer, especially kind of the way that it's made fun of people who are really self-absorbed, people who are really self-obsessed, people who are only kind of like doing self-care or doing like whatever they're doing. It might be for gym or fitness equipment or fitness clothes, it might be for makeup, it might be for beauty products, but they're only really using that product is to make sales.
They might not actually use it in real life. Or the only reason they've used it in real life is because the brand gave it to them for free so that they would post about it and stuff like that. And there are a lot of people who are influencers that are doing really great things. There's, like, body positivity influencers, and it can be a really awesome profession. But I also think that it's something that can be used negatively. And when I think of that type of influencer, that's not the type of influencer that I want to be, or that's not the label that I want to be associated with.
So often when students come to me to start their side hustles, that's one of the first things they say, like, I'm not interested in being an influencer. I'm not really interested in doing any of that social media stuff. And what I like to do is kind of tease that apart because we can certainly use social media as a means of lead acquisition. If you go back to last week's episode where I was talking about email list building, I kind of broke down the two functions of marketing: the lead acquisition piece and the lead nurture piece.
That episode focused mostly on lead nurture, but today, talking about being an influencer and talking about social media, we can talk about whether you want to use it for lead acquisition, meaning attracting new people to your brand and attracting new people to your funnel. And you can do that if you want without having to be a quote-unquote influencer, without having to act like an influencer, and you can have lead acquisition that doesn't rely on social media at all.
And that's what I really want to kind of break down because sometimes when we think of having that online income stream, we think of having to be social media famous. Right? We think that to make this work, we need so many followers and so many people in our audience, and that's just not true. The number of followers that you have is a vanity metric. It doesn't actually equate or relate to the sales that come in your business at all.
It's very difficult to track the connection between your social media following and your bank account, much less easy than it is for an email list, which is why I really went into that last week. What I want us to look at here is not the social media famous piece, but social media as a tool, and it's a tool you can choose to use or a tool you can choose not to use.
We see this outward expression of people who are making money online and we think we have to be just as extroverted as they are. We have to be just as visible. They are posting 20 times a day to whatever platform to stay relevant. And then what they're posting doing these dances and these... I was going to say jigs, whatever, these dances because they're cool and they're hip and we measure ourselves against that and we're like, well, I may or may not be extroverted. I may or may not want to be that visible. And I may or may not be that hip. Right?
So we start to compare and that's one thing that social media can really do for us when we're starting a new side hustle. And when we're taking this venture into something brand new is that it can trigger comparisonitis in us. We look at people who have been doing it for six months a year, two years, five years, and we look at their following and how maybe comfortable they are, or maybe how social media savvy they are, and where we feel like, oh, we can never be like that.
And the truth is if you want to be like that, you certainly can. It takes practice. That person didn't get where they got, you know, overnight. They practiced and put in the time, and so if social media feels like the tool that you want to use, then start practicing it. Right?
We talk all about this inside of Side Hustle Support Group of how we can use social media to our advantage if it's our chosen marketing modality—if it's our chosen method. But you may be somebody who wants to put down social media altogether to find different ways of lead acquisition, and that's totally valid. Because I think when you believe that you need to build your business just like everybody else built their business—and I say "everybody else" in quotes because we have no idea how they built their business.
They may have social media presence, but we don't know if they paid for it. We don't know if they got it organically. We don't know if they had a following somewhere else that they were able to migrate over to that platform. Like we don't know any of those behind the scenes. Right? We don't know how it actually happened. All we can see is what's forward-facing on the screen towards us. And so when I say "everybody else", we have to take that into consideration.
But what we see is not always actually what happened, but even if we feel like we need to follow the same path as somebody else, that's when we start to get swept away and that's when we start to have feelings about our side hustle, like, "oh, this is impossible", or "it's never going to work for me", or "I don't want it if I have to jump through all those hoops and do all those weird things that I'm uncomfortable with or not even interested in", but the truth is the way that I believe you should build your business and the way that I know everybody who is successful that has built an online business has done it in a very personal way.
There are many routes or many paths to an end result. And so what it really comes down to is picking the path that's best for you. When you rely on your strengths, your talents, and your personality traits, instead of trying to fit into somebody else's box building, your audience is going to be so much easier. And the people that are coming into your audience are going to be authentically attracted to you because you are portraying yourself authentically.
It really makes a difference to start your side hustle in a way that works for you over time, a way that's going to be sustainable for you to show up as, a way that's going to be something that has legs to it that you're not like just trying these strategies and, you know, giving them your all for four weeks and then you just get to this point where you're like I can't do it anymore. It's too much, or it's too out of my comfort zone or it just doesn't feel like me, or I feel like I'm faking it.
None of that's going to be effective for you. What we really need to think about is how you are going to build your side hustle in a way that you're excited and happy and joyful to show up for that feels easy. That feel... maybe I want to say it feels easy... in a sense that it feels like it's full of ease. There are things that are going to be hard about this.
There are things that are going to be challenging about this. You're doing something brand new that you've never done before in an industry you've never worked in before, and so it's completely normal for things to be a little hard or a little challenging, but we want it to be a challenge that we want to figure out that we're motivated and inspired to pursue. Not something that feels like oh, if that's the way that I have to do it, then I don't want it. That's the exact opposite feeling that we're going for.
And the truth is you don't need social media at all to run an online business. For the first three years of this business, this therapist-facing business, I didn't have a social media presence at all. It wasn't until I was making the substantial revenue that I hired a team—shout out to Hailey. Hailey is at Your Content Empire, if you want to go check out what she does and what she offers. But she does my social media. She and her team do my social media.
So if I have any social media presence at all, which I'm still not very good at, even though they do an excellent job, I'm not very good at it. It's because I pay for it, and I didn't pay for it until I started making enough money to pay for it and I had to make enough money without it before I could pay for it. So you see how that works? You don't need social media at all to have an online business.
You might want to set up a profile just to have somebody who is on that platform and they are looking for you, you have a presence, you have something there and, you know, maybe you throw up one post that says like, you know what you're about or what your brand's about. You set your bio up. So it reads like it's on-brand for you, but you don't have to maintain that platform at all.
Anything that you see on the Marissa Lawton Instagram, I didn't do it. It's not for me. I have been... No, I don't even do stories over there. Last year, I did some stories. I was better about it, but I don't even do stories over there anymore. It's just all from my team. So even if you're somebody who wants a social media presence, just think about the fact that you don't even have to be the person who does it if you want to have it.
So going back to the idea of lead nurture and lead acquisition. Lead nurture is what happens when somebody is already in your audience, but how do we get them to your audience in the first place? And if you're thinking well, Marissa, you're telling me I need to get people in my audience for an online business, and I don't need to use social media.
Well, then what do I need to do? Well, the bottom line is what you need is to get people in your audience, but the method with which you get people into the audience can totally be up to you. There are many, many different strategies that I would put into the category of lead acquisition, and social media is just one. In fact, it's a subset of a type of marketing called content marketing. You don't even have to do content marketing if you don't want to.
To think about lead acquisition in terms of getting people into your funnel, into your audience, preferably on your email list without social media, what are a few things that we can do?
Well, one strategy that I really recommend that is in the visibility marketing category is called guesting. You may have heard me talk about this before, but guesting is appearing on platforms that already have an established audience. So this could be a blog with established readership. This could be a podcast with established listenership. This could be a YouTube channel with established viewership.
The host of that Channel platform has done the work themselves to build up that audience. You are introducing and pitching yourself as a guest in front of that audience in order to bring them value. Now, why this works is as the content creator, me as somebody who has to, you know, outline and come up with these different topics for podcasts all the time and figure out what I'm going to say and all of that effort, having a guest on is so much easier.
All I have to do is ask poignant questions once in a while. You know, like, five to 10 questions, and then we've got a whole episode rather than outlining recording, brainstorming all of the other things that go in when it's a solo episode for me. So as the guest, you may say, well, why would somebody want to have me on their show? But as the host, I'm telling you: Because it's a heck of a lot easier to have a guest than it is to come up with the content on your own. So it really does a favor to the host.
However, as the guest you're at somebody else's house, right? So you have to play by their rules. If they invite you for a party and it's like, you leave your shoes by the door, then no matter if you wore your... this makes me think of Sex in the City. You wore your brand new favorite high-heeled shoes. You still have to take them off at the time, okay, because it's not your platform, it's theirs, but it's still a great way to get in front of a solid captive audience that's already interested in your subject matter. So guesting is a really great opportunity and you don't have to do any social media for that.
One type of marketing that I would consider, network marketing, gets a bad rap because it's so wrapped up with like MLMs. But we can consider this in like "who you know" marketing, let's call it. That is collaborations and joint ventures. So if there is somebody that you have made a relationship with that's in your niche, and let's say that they have a membership site that they run and they bring guest experts in there, or they have a group program or a mastermind and they bring guest experts into that program.
You can collaborate with them and do an appearance within their paid program and introduce value to their students you can teach a lesson. You can teach something that is helpful for them. Again, the benefit to the host. That's one week or one month or whatever that they don't have to come up with a topic. So it's lovely to have somebody take that over for them. The benefit for you is this takes it a step beyond guesting because now you're in front of not only a group of listeners or viewers, you're in front of a group of buyers. These are people who've paid to be in that program with the host, and so it's even better for you.
Another option that's in the same kind of category going with who, you know, and who's in your network is JVs. Joint ventures. So this is where you and another person come together to sell a product or product. So this can be done. One of two ways you can bundle your products together and sell them as a package deal, or you can sell one product and somebody gets affiliate revenue for it. So like I said, I am not anti affiliate income at all. I am just not necessarily interested in like the influencer way of earning affiliate income.
Another option, if you don't like people so much is SEO. SEO is a great option to get new leads and to acquire people into your funnel without you having to do any kind of social media. Of course, the one thing about SEO is that it is going to take longer because it takes longer for Google and other search engines to index your content or index your site. And for them to, you know, see it as a valuable resource that they want to recommend and put on the first page, there's search resources or search listings, and there's the maintenance aspects.
So just because you're on the first page, you still have to stay on the first page. So SEO takes effort, but if you are a behind-the-scenes person who, you know, likes to follow checklists and it's like, do this, put this in the right spot, make sure this happens. And this happens and I get a result. SEO could be a great option for you and you, then you don't have to play around with social media or with algorithms changing or anything like that. Actually, that's not true because SEO algorithms change, but social media algorithms.
And then this is one of my favorite strategies to lean into, and I teach this a lot. I teach it a bit in Side Hustle Support Group, but in my mastermind, we go into this even deeper, offline strategy. Just because you're running an online business doesn't mean that you can't be doing offline strategies to grow that business. People who are in your membership site could be in your same neighborhood. They could be in your same town. They don't have to be across the world.
What's great about online business is they can be, but they don't have to be. So are there wellness expos in your town? Or in your city, the next city over in your state, right? If you're teaching boundaries or if you're teaching healthy communication, healthy relationships, I'd say that's wellness, right? So if there's a wellness expo, you could certainly set up a booth at that expo or that trade show or whatever.
And people could sign up to your email list to get more information right from your booth at that trade show. We can take this another step further and go into like conferences. At conferences there's a couple of different options. You can purchase an ad in the program of the conference. So you could be a sponsor of the conference. You could have a booth at the conference.
When people are kind of walking between the breakout rooms or it's like, you know, a 15-minute break between presentations that people are kind of mingling, you could have a booth. Or you could be a speaker or presenter at that conference, and often conferences have different levels of presentations. They might have panels, they might have breakouts, they might have keynote speakers. So you don't have to only go for like, oh, I want that keynote speaker spot.
You could be on a panel or you could do a breakout session, which could still be a really great way for you to get in front of people offline, in-person, and capture them into your online business.
So all of these are examples of how you can build an online business without using social media at all, and even if you do choose to use social media, you don't have to go the influencer route.
So I hope that this has been helpful for you to open your eyes to the great big wide world out there. And just because your business is run online, social media and influencing does not have to be a component of it whatsoever.
Alright, we'll be back next week and until then, keep on rising.
