Social Slowdown Book: Coming July 27th, 2023!

Meg Casebolt  0:00  
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. I’m your host, Meg Casebolt. And I have a new book coming out called Social slowdown. It’s taking all of the 80 plus interviews that we’ve done so far in this podcast series, and turned it into something that’s a little bit more easily digestible. It will be available on July 27 2023. And it’ll only be $4 on Kindle and $9. On paperback. So I would love, love, love, if you could support the podcast by going on Amazon and buying the book. If you preorder it, I would especially appreciate that because that would help us get to a best seller status. Even if you don’t read it. That’s okay. So if you want to get your copy of the social slowdown book, head on over to social slowdown.com/book and get that today. And now let’s get back to the podcast, which is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lip sync, send cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started.

Hey, friends, it’s Meg Casebolt, the host of the social slowdown. And I am here today with a solo episode because I’m still feels a little weird to say I just wrote a book, which is really cool, right? The social slowdown book will be going live on Amazon on July 27 2023, you can pre order it. Now if you’re listening to this, you can get yourself a copy for 399 for the Kindle version of it or 899. For the paperback version, we tried to keep it very affordable, just like buying a cup of coffee. So come by the team a cup of coffee, get yourself the book, we would love that we would especially love if you can pre order the book. So if you’re listening to this before July 27 pre orders are really helpful for marketers, especially marketing books, to get them to show up in the bestseller list. So please head on over to social slowdown.com/book. And it will direct you directly to Amazon where you can pre order the book now in E or paperback. At the time being it will be exclusively on Amazon, because that’s really simple to do through Kindle Direct Publishing. But if you want to buy it from somewhere else, or if you want it to be on Kindle Unlimited, or if you want an autographed copy, like reach out and let us know you can hit us up at support at love it first search.com Let us know what you’re looking for. We can make the marketing plan fit the needs of what you as a listener and as a consumer wants. I’ll talk a little bit more about marketing strategy in the episode that I will record right after this, which you will hear in two weeks. But I wanted to take a couple minutes today and talk about the decision of why I took this podcast and turned it into a book format. And yes, it’s because of it like I’m a bibliophile. Like I freaking love books. But that’s not the only reason. It’s not just for my own ego to say, oh my gosh, I’m a published author, although there is something very exciting about that. But the reason why I wanted to take these conversations and these trends that I’m noticing and put them into a book is because we’re seeing a strong uptick in people who are looking for this information. Y’all know that I am an SEO person first and foremost, before I was a podcaster. Before I started talking about social media all the time. First, I started with Google. And so obviously I take a look at the Google search terms for the social slowdown podcast website. And I’m like, what exactly are people finding us for? What are they looking for? I know a lot of times with podcasting, it can be word of mouth, it can be your guest sharing it, you know, like people hear about podcasts a little bit more organically versus seeking them out. But we did notice that we’re showing up for search terms, like take a break from social media, like digital detox, right? These are terms that people are looking for. And we’re noticing in the search results, that trends for those terms have gone up even in the year and a half that I’ve been doing this podcast, we’ve seen more and more people looking for that information. So very exciting for us as a team that we sort of were able to establish ourselves for some of those search terms. In particular, one search term that we get quite a bit of traffic for because not a lot of people are talking about it are terms that are related to social media and mental health. A lot of people are having some serious questions about how social media impacts our mental health and we did a full series on this last spring in the spring of 2022. I talked to a bunch of mental health professionals, therapists, counselors, executive coaches As trauma specialists, and I think that those conversations are sort of getting lost in the archives, so we know that people are looking for them. But you know, sometimes you just want a quick answer to a question without needing to listen through to, you know, a 45 minute long podcast in order to get that answer. So that’s the first reason to write the book is I noticed that there was a trend of people looking for very specific information about how to market our businesses without social media, and they were finding the podcast. And unfortunately, there’s not a strict conversion way to track, you know, oh, they found it through Google. And then they went and subscribed and they binge all these, like, there’s no correlation that we would be able to track. But we have seen an uptick in particular episodes getting downloaded that are specific on those topics. So I wanted to find a way to make that information more digestible. And we’d seen that trend sort of happening in 2022. And then in January of this year, in January of 2023, we did a six day social float on challenge, encouraging people to take on some of these questions to examine what their behavior is on social media to think about some of the alternatives to put some boundaries in place. And a couple of people reached out to me during that challenge and said, This is really good. How can I share this more? How can I get this in front of people, and then the bloom was off the rows, I guess that’s the term maybe that’s not the right term for that. But it sort of got lost, right. We had a lot of really interesting feedback and conversations in January, when we were running that challenge live. And I thought there were some really interesting conversations, and I did a lot of research myself on specific topics to be able to put together the live challenge in January. And after that challenge happened, you know, the excitement kind of wore off around the topic. And I thought, I wonder if there’s a way to take this research, to take the fact that people are having positive feedback on this topic, and turn it into something that feels more easily consumable, more easily, findable, discoverable, accessible, and then people can see everything sort of fitting together. And I mean, I guess the last reason why I wrote a book is that after almost 100 episodes, and some very interesting conversations, I started to see consistent trends among my guests, not necessarily the everyone’s leaving social media on mass, I think that there’s sort of an overblown expectation that people are just going cold turkey and ditching these platforms. But regularly, I’m having conversations with people who are like, I really had to reexamine this. And here are some of the alternatives. And here are some of the things that are working in stead for me. And I wanted to put it put it together sort of like a report. What are the alternatives that people are using? Who are these different things working for? I started to see trends around guests who were just mentioning sort of in passing, like, oh, yeah, I have a chronic illness. And that’s the reason why I had to change the way that I market my business, or I am neurodivergent, right, neuro divergent. Yes, individuals or neuro divergent groups of people aren’t neuro diverse. Okay. I think guests who would say, I am neurodivergent. And I, this is why this is hard. For me. This is why it’s hard for me to consume on the platform. This is why it’s hard for me to create on these platforms, this is why I made these intentional choices. And those conversations obviously, aren’t happening on social media, or they’re not being shared on social media potentially. Right. So I was hearing these trends among people that I respected, and having these really interesting conversations. But I mean, after you get to a certain capacity, or you know, a certain minimum number of episodes, I know people aren’t going to go back and listen to 80 plus episodes in order, you know, and even if they did, that’s over 60 hours of audio to dig through to listen through to so I wanted to take some of the takeaways to take some of the action steps that I heard from people and turn them into a format that’s more easily consumable, you know, instead of going to listen to 60 hours of audio, maybe instead, you just want to go read 100 pages, and skim through it and skip ahead to the parts that are the most interesting to you. And then you know, I’ll put links in the book to say if you want to hear more about this conversation, here’s the link to that particular episode. So you can figure out sort of even just skip through the table of contents and be like, What am I interested in here? So that was the reason why I wanted to put this content into a book to distill it into the trends that I had been noticing the conversations I’ve been having the alternatives that people were sharing the the anecdotal evidence that they’re that you don’t have to do it the way that the social media platforms are telling you that you have to do it that you can choose to put boundaries in place, you can choose to make your content more inclusive, more accessible, you can choose to leave altogether or find ways to make the platform’s work better for you. And you can choose to figure out how well your social media is working. So that you can make an educated decision not just like, well, you know, 10, people put hearts onto that image. And therefore, I should keep doing it, right, like, being able to evaluate what’s actually working. So if you do choose to go get the social slowdown stuff, which I would love, if you do at social slowdown.com/book, you know, I’ve got to do that mid real call to action here, here are the things that you can expect, I broke the book down into four parts. So I’m just going to walk quickly through so that we you sort of know, you know, what is included if this is something that you’re interested in. So part one is all about examining your relationship with social media and what social media sort of stands for, and stands in for within our society. So in this section, I walk through kind of the impact of social media on the way that our culture consumes with our, you know, communicates with each other, the benefits of having these communities, but the ways that it can also be a bit of an echo chamber, that you can be shown political ads that are harmful, that content may or may not be inclusive, the ways that it could impact you. Just all of these pieces, you know, social media, as I’ve always said in the introduction to every single one of these podcasts, podcasts, I’ve said, social media is a double edged sword, you know, it’s a great place to connect with new people, it’s a great place to build communities, but it can also suck us in, it can be a time suck, it can lead to doom scrolling, it can lead to depression of systems, depression says, Oh, my gosh, depression symptoms. So it’s something that you need to be intentional about that you need to take care of yourself on these platforms. And that leads us into part two of the book where I talk about setting boundaries, talking about best practices for healthy ways to build your boundaries, to practice good time management skills, so that you can use it not just exclusively on social media, but to know that you can use this on all of your marketing, and make sure that your time and your energy and your resources are being used effectively and efficiently. The third part of the book is figuring out how to measure how effective your marketing actually is, like one of the reasons that we get onto social media is because it feels good, right? We like that connection, we like that feeling of being part of something bigger, we like being able to express something about ourselves, and then have it have other people react to it in a positive way and in a fast way. But it’s not always the best way for us to achieve our business goals. So you have to make a decision, as the reader or as the listener, as the marketer of like, is the feedback that you’re getting, and the dopamine that your brain is producing, when you’re getting that feedback? Is it worth the societal pressure of feeling like you always need to be online that you always need to be consuming? And, you know, what if there were options that took less time? And gave you similar results? What if right, are the ways that you’re spending your time on your marketing, the most effective, and again, this doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. We’re just doing an evaluation and trying out new experiments. If there’s anything you know, from listening to this podcast with me, it’s that I see everything is an experiment, there is no clear black and white here, we’re all navigating in the dark a little bit. So you know, figuring out what are the things that work for you for your brain for your values for your team for your business, for your energy, that may or may not be social media, you may leave you may not but what are the things that you should be doing? And how do you make sure that your marketing is effectively working to bring in new leads, and new sales. And then the last piece of the book is the alternatives. So if you’re like, Ah, man, I, I want to stay on social but I want to just spend less time on it, or I want to move people so that way, if the social media platforms change their algorithms, I won’t completely lose that audience. Or I want to, you know, be in charge of owning my own marketing assets. That way, I’m not always creating for someone else’s platform, whatever that looks like for you, or you’re just like social media is cool, but wouldn’t it be great to do something else also, in part four, I will be sharing 17 alternative marketing strategies that can either replace or reduce your dependence on social media and they can work with with each other. So if one of the things that you want to do is go guests on other people’s podcasts, then that can be social media content in your feeds to where you’re promoting those episodes. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be like, exit social media and replace it with these other strategies. It can be supplemental to it, but also allow you to be found to gain people’s trust, to make more sales, and to take better care of yourself in the process. So if that all sounds good, I would love if you could head over to social slowdown.com/book that will lead you directly to the Amazon page where you can order and or pre order the social celadon book. Again, it’s like four bucks on E nine bucks on paperback. Even if you’re never going to read it, we would still love if you buy it, because it’s really it’s a great way it. I’m not just talking about me here, y’all. If you have friends or colleagues that have written books, you don’t have to read the books, it just helps to support them. And so instead of having, you know, a Patreon, where I asked you to give five bucks a month, or to pay for a cup of coffee, like I would just love if you could support the podcast with your four or $9 and go purchase the book over at social slowdown.com/book I will be back in your ear holes. It’s always such a weird phrase. I’ll be back next week in a conversation with my friend Lacey Boggs about the process of actually sitting down and writing the book. So after that January challenge, I hired Laci to help me take that challenge and some of the Mental Health episodes and some of the the episodes that leapt out at me as being good thought leadership content and put it into an outline and writing a first draft. And then once Lacey get handed off that first draft to me, it has changed.

I wouldn’t say it’s night and day. But I would say I kept about 30% of what Laci wrote, and then built from there. But talking about that process of what ghost writing looks like, and how to decide what goes into the book and how to decide what doesn’t and what all those steps are. And then I will be back again in two weeks to talk about the book creation and production process. Because I’ve learned a lot from, you know, trying to decide which platforms to be on and how to market it. And do I want a street team and do I want all these Oh, and by the way all if you want to be on the street team, shoot us an email at support at Lovett FirstSearch DICOM we’d love if you could buy the book we’d love if you can promote the book. If you have a podcast and you want to have me on to talk about the book or about anything on this, like, please reach out to us. We will absolutely accommodate you. We want to we want to talk about this and spread, spread the gospel of not sacrificing your mental health when it comes to marketing your business.

I feel like I just interrupted myself and I don’t remember what I was trying to say. So

I’ll be back in two weeks to talk about the book production process. And then the new book will go live on July 27. I would love if you could grab that. So please head on over to social slowdown.com/book. And thank you so much. I’ll be back in yours next week. Thanks. Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then

Please forgive any typos or errors, as this transcript was automatically generated by Otter.ai