If you guys have noticed, I rarely make any YouTube videos about TikTok, or Instagram Reels, which I know are super trending right now. 

The reason for that is because I don’t use them for any of my businesses. 

And you know what? 

I can still make a combined million dollars in sales across all of my businesses every year. 

If there’s one takeaway I want you to have with this blog post, it’s that social media is not the ONLY thing that can bring your shop traffic and sales.

I am well aware that my channel could be growing so much more and that I’d be getting a lot more views if I was always making content around social media, like around their algorithms, how to get more followers, or how to do TikTok or Instagram Reels. 

Every other business-related channel on YouTube does this. It’s what watchers are searching for. 

Why I Don’t Focus on Social Media

But the reality for me is that I don’t focus on using social media to get traffic and sales for any of my shops, and I still make a lot of sales. 

Here’s why. 

It’s Time-Consuming

Social media is so time-consuming. 

There’s always some new thing you have to learn how to do and you know, learning curves take time and effort to go through. 

And by the time you’re settled in, another new thing happens that you have to learn all over again.

So it feels like this constant hamster wheel that you cannot stop because if you get off that wheel, the traffic stops, and the sales stop. 

To me, that’s not a recipe for long-term, sustainable success that builds upon itself. 

To me, this means you’re still trading time for dollars, and when you’re not posting a reel or story, you’re not making money.

I know a lot of you will resonate with this, especially if you have a full-time job you’re juggling, or you’re a stay-at-home mom, and you have to take care of a family and a house. 

In my case, I don’t have kids or another job, but I am pursuing my other childhood dream of being an actor here in Los Angeles. I have to do auditions and go on shoots and go to classes, and that’s like a part-time job. 

There just isn’t enough time in the day to run your business on top of all the effort social media requires of you in order to succeed with it. 

I’m not saying social media is ineffective. 

But as someone who’s had a business for 16 years now, I’ve tried many different ways of marketing my shop. I’ve tried them all. 

What I’ve seen is that social media is not the best investment of your time, and you get a poor ROI. 

What this means is that for every hour you spend on social media, you get a lower dollar amount back than, say, if you did something like networking in forums. 

I Do Media Outreach Instead

As you may know, one of my favorite ways to grow a business is by using media outreach, so that’s getting your products featured on other people’s social media, on a magazine on a website, or on a TV show. 

If you spent an hour doing that, your time is going to go so much further for your business than building your own social media audience one person at a time. 

I think one big reason I see so many people still doing social media is that it’s the obvious thing to do. 

It’s in front of us every day, and everyone is talking about it so it’s hard to see that other solutions exist. 

But that’s also exactly why it’s so hard to get social media to work. 

It’s so competitive. 

There are 1,159 Instagram posts uploaded every single second. 

It’s so hard just to be seen and stand out to your potential customers and to get the algorithm to favor your account so your posts get shown to your followers. 

That’s a lot of content created every second. Not to mention, it’s easy to feel productive for your business when you’re working on social media. 

But I also want you to think of your time as two separate categories, creating and outreach. 

Anytime you’re spending building or creating something, whether that’s designing a new product or making a reel, you’re not doing anything that’s actually putting your name out there.

Creating content alone is not what will get you eyeballs seeing your work.

It’s the act of outreach, going out there and talking to people about your work, that’s going to get you traffic and sales.

And it’s easy for us creative people to stay stuck in creation mode all the time because it’s relatively easy and more comfortable than doing what you really need to be doing, which is reaching out to people. 

I catch myself all the time; when I find myself avoiding something in my business, I usually default into creation mode. So this is something I want you to be very aware of. 

Social media can make you feel like you’re doing something for your business, but if you look at your numbers and test different ways of promoting your shop, you might find social media is the least effective thing you could be doing. 

And there are only so many hours in the day, and life is short; why spend it on things that aren’t going to move you forward quickly? 

Now, I’m not saying don’t ever do social media, but it shouldn’t be the main focus of where all your time goes. 

If you’re a part of my community, you’ll know that last year, my Instagram account for my jewelry business got shut down without any reason why. 

This happened a few months before the holiday season, which, as you know, is where gift sellers like me make most of our sales, and I still managed to make over a hundred thousand dollars selling my handmade jewelry that year. 

That is such a huge testament that it is very possible to still make sales even if you don’t have a social media account. 

You might be wondering, how did I still make that much money without Instagram?

Word-of-Mouth Marketing Works Wonders

Well, over the years, I’ve done a lot of media outreach, and as a result, a lot of people out there know about my shop. 

I would meet total strangers, and they would know about my business because they saw me on someone’s blog or a magazine or a YouTube video. Or their friend told them about my shop. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing that exists, and outreach is a great way to get this going because it’s essentially the same thing. 

Someone else is telling their audience about your shop and how cool your products are. 

There’s so much more weight to that, and people trust that more, and you’re more likely to make sales from that than the shop owner themselves saying nice things about their product on social media, because which shop owner wouldn’t, when you think about it? 

We’re always hyping up our own products, and customers know this, so they’re less trusting of our word. 

If all you did with your time was media outreach, I can promise you your business will be in a very different place. 

Maybe a challenge for you is to monitor how much time you’re putting into social media every week and then shift that time into doing outreach instead. 

And just like with social media, do it consistently and remember that it’s also a numbers game. 

A lot of people who do media outreach give up after getting one or two mentions and say it didn’t work for them. 

Like, you don’t stop posting on Instagram if you had one or two posts that flopped, right? 

I Invest in Email Marketing

I also invest in email marketing, and this is something I know very few shops are working on.

 It’s so important because, unlike social media, you actually own the list of email subscribers you build over time, and no one can take that away from you. 

But like me, if Instagram decides to take your account away, you lose all those followers that took you forever to get. 

If you’re like me and you’re just not interested in using social for growing your business, I do have a free workshop that talks about all of this in way more detail. 

It’s about an hour long, and you can sign up to watch at the link below. 

One of my students who came to one of my free workshops talking about media outreach grew her business to seven figures solely from doing her own outreach, and she’s just one of the many people who’ve had success with this, so it works. 

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Join the workshop using the link below. Don’t also forget to check out my YouTube Channel so that you can stay up to date on the latest advice for your handmade business.

Thanks for reading!