There are entire courses dedicated to teaching people how to get more Facebook likes, more Twitter followers, more Instagram followers, etc… Hell, you can even buy 10,000 fake followers for $10. (And you thought that guy who had 50,000 followers was sooooo cool, “wish I could be like that.”)
If you can believe it, people are sitting there, wasting hours a day, trying to learn how to cater to other people “liking” them. Or they’re trying to boost their image so that they look more popular.
Huh?
Instead of working to perfect their product and sell as much of it as possible, business owners get caught in the trap of learning how to become better people-pleasers.
What’s the point?
People who chase likes, clicks, and followers are approval junkies. They’re stuck in an endless quest for external validation. They’ve allowed their insecurities to contaminate their business, at the expense of a real problem they could be solving or real value they could be creating in the world.
The only thing you should be “chasing” is sales…which translates into cold hard cash. Otherwise, why are you in business?
Yet people are constantly learning all kinds of useless shit…in the name of “business building”…while avoiding the hard work of figuring out how to get sales. Then they wonder why their biz isn’t working.
Hey, I’m guilty of this myself…I’ve wasted tens of thousands of dollars on trainings that produced zero money…because I was seeking approval. “Bad news insights.” That’s why it’s so easy for me to spot this behavior in others. As long as you stop the behavior, you’ve got some chance of turning things around.
Right now, Facebook has a massive con job going on. They’re playing off EVERYBODY’S need for approval. Business owners are smitten with the false idea that they need to be spreading the word about their products via Facebook.
“More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook to connect with what matters to them, and more than 900 million visit every day,” says Facebook in a slick maneuver to get people to hand over advertising dollars…Then they expect you to study their 1000-page advertising policies, and dampen your own creativity to fit their guidelines. Sorry, but they’ve conned you.
And even if you did meet every single one of their guidelines, they could still ban your ads if your content goes against their biggest advertisers. That’s how they roll.
How much time have you personally wasted, posting stuff on Facebook (or any social media site, for that matter) that didn’t result in sales?
How much money have you flushed down the toilet by paying someone to post stuff on Facebook that didn’t result in sales?
There’s a better way to achieve your end goal…and that’s to go directly to the people you’re targeting. Leave out the middle man.
Leave out the third parties, AKA the social media sites that are more than happy to take your money for campaigns that lead to no where. They’re playing right in to your deep-seated need to be “liked.”
How far has that gotten you?
When you target your audience DIRECTLY instead of fumbling around with indirect routes, you can achieve great things…like generating $119K in 30 days.
Target your audience directly — through email and physical mail — and communicate your message so clearly, that people stop what they’re doing and begin to alter their life in a profound way, based on the information you’ve just shared with them.
That’s Anti-Marketing.
It’s not for everybody! Only for the success-minded! Follow this advice at your own risk, as you WILL start to pile on sale after sale. (If you’re allergic to money, this is not the strategy for you.)
P.S. I’m a big fan of going directly for what you want…even if it makes the “people pleasers” around you uncomfortable. Show the world you’re not wasting any time…and that you don’t care who likes you, or not.
Michelle Lopez Boggs is a copywriter, copywriting mentor, and author of "The Anti-Marketing Manifesto: How to Sell Without Being a Sellout." She's helped her clients sell millions of dollars' worth of products and services online by using the MEI(S) principle — motivate, educate, and inspire, and sell. 