In this episode, I’m talking about a film I watched recently called Contagion.
Spoiler alert! The film is about an illness, a virus that has spread very quickly and lots of people met their maker by catching this virus.
I was watching this film and the film isn’t great if I’m honest. While I was watching this film, I kept thinking about how it can be applied to business.
02:11 – I kept thinking that this contagion virus was very similar to some of the things that we see in the online space and in business.
02:22 – A couple of vlogs ago, you might have seen me vlogging about how everyone was shutting down their Facebook groups, and then we had a vlog about copycats.
02:45 – What tends to happen is that one industry leader will create something, they’ll make a change, they’ll do something differently. And then it spirals, and suddenly everyone’s doing it.
You find that it becomes diluted. Whatever the action was, whatever the massive change was. It becomes diluted and almost ineffective because there are just so many people doing it.
03:22 – A few months ago, when I decided that I was going to delete people from my Facebook group. I made a couple of livestreams about it in my group and said that there are lots of people who don’t engage and haven’t probably posted in forever. Then suddenly tons of people started doing it. SO then it became an “in thing” to do a Facebook group purge.
04:21 – I’m seeing that people are getting tired of it. When group owners threaten to remove them from their Facebook group, people are like, “Okay.”
04:48 – It’s become ineffective because people are saying that they’ll do it and then they don’t. That’s what I keep seeing in the online world.
05:49 – In your own business you get to do it your own way. The method that I was using to sell didn’t necessarily matter as long as I was actually getting the right traffic in front of the right offer and then people will buy.
06:17 – When you think to yourself, “Am I trying something new in my business because it feels really authentic to me, and because it feels good to me, and because I know it’s going to best benefit my audience, and it’s going to really help my clients. It’s going to position me as an authority in the market.” Or are you doing it because XYZ famous business owner did it and it worked out pretty well for them so you’re going to do it too.
07:00 – We talk a lot about building a business around our life. About building the business that we really want to build. But honestly, the online world has sort of become this miniature pyramid scheme of people learning a skill, teaching it to other people, who then learn that skill and teach it to other people.
07:53 – Obviously we know that when things are different, controversial, or hugely transformative, they work. But it can be difficult to do them. It can be difficult to start that chain reaction.
08:20 – What I’m urging everyone to do is to look at your business and look at the way you are running it. Is it a business that you are happy with? Are you consistently doing things that are challenging you and your audience? Or are you falling into that piece where you are doing “innovative things” but really they’re innovative because you know, XYZ industry leader just did a challenge so you think that a challenge would be the right way to go for you?
09:00 – For me, if I’m going to run a challenge, a webinar, go through an experiment, it’s because it’s something that I believe whole-heartedly is going to have the best impact on my audience, make the biggest change to them, and help me spread my message in a way that feels good for me, and is easily accessible to my audience.
09:52 – It’s all about the impact that it’s going to make for my audience, on my clients, on my time, and ultimately on my bottom line.
If you are running your business to the tune of somebody else’s horn, please stop. Please think. Please look at what you want to do and the message you want to share, and pick the best medium for you. Not just what you see working in the market.
I promise you, you can sell in any way, in any medium that you want, as long as it feels good for you, as long as you’re happy doing it, as long as you have the right traffic and the right offer.
