The Business Landscape Is Changing


February 4, 2022

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The business landscape is changing.

Heck, it’s already changed a ton over the last two years as people make moves due to current world circumstances.

While I don’t believe social media is going anywhere anytime soon, I do think it’s becoming less of an asset to business owners. Especially new businesses, or those who didn’t get enough traction before all the algorithm changes started heavily reducing reach. Even some of us who had great traction lost it!

It can be scary when things start shifting.

But part of being an entrepreneur is knowing when and how to pivot.

Truth be told, I saw this coming a few years prior, as many marketers did.

But just the same as many marketers, I didn’t do much about it. 😅

Completely changing strategies during a really full and chaotic period in my life and work felt exhausting, and I was moving along steadily enough. But, as I’ve learned repeatedly in my personal life, I’m reminded how important it is to trust my intuition immediately and quickly take action around those insights.

So now it’s time to change strategies.

Honestly, I’m excited about it.

Social media is noisy and oversaturated. People don’t see most of the content from the accounts they follow. It stopped being fun sharing online a long time ago, right about when the algorithms started forcing us to post endless selfies because that’s what gets engagement. Or now, forcing creators to make reels and tik tok style videos when so many people don’t want to or hate watching them.

My relationship with social media continues to shift and evolve.

I quit for a little bit this fall.
It was magical and healing and ramped up my creativity.

I came back and mainly started distributing content.
This drove traffic to the site and confirmed it still has some use.

Now I’m playing with a new way to approach social media, which I’ll be rolling out soon. The short is that it will be about using it as a tool for this next chapter of my personal and professional growth and focusing less on using it as a marketing tool (except for YouTube because that’s still a powerful search engine and place to build an audience). I’m grateful for the breaks I’ve taken from social media, that I’ve basically given up Facebook altogether, and that I’ve been able to unhook from the unhealthy aspects of my relationship to it all.

The big thing I’m focused on is going back to the basics:

  • Creating content.
  • Optimizing for search engines.
  • Prioritizing visibility and relationships.

These will always be the most critical things to build our businesses and get our work out into the world. I’m grateful I never stopped blogging or creating content, building and nurturing my email newsletter list, and taking aligned visibility opportunities when they showed up. I did, however, slow down on cultivating relationships because of where I was at personally in my healing.

Here’s what I’m doing right now…

1. Creating content.

Obviously. I couldn’t stop if I tried! But more specifically, creating content around the keywords and topics I know my audience is searching for. Creating content that is supportive, in-depth, and answers their biggest questions. That means doing a lot of research on what those keywords are, what’s already driving traffic to the website, and what questions people are asking in spaces like Quora, Reddit, and other communities. Right now, we publish three new articles each week, and we may bring that back up to five, plus video content we’ll be producing once or twice a week, and the second season of our Tales from the Journey podcast that drops in March! It’s a lot, but content has always been king.

2. Optimizing for search engines.

There are a lot of parts to this, and it starts with the content creation, as noted above. Beyond creating posts that will rank in the search engines, we’re doing a ton of behind-the-scenes work to optimize the site, pages, and content. And I mean, a ton of work. We’re moving off of Thrive Themes drag and drop builder* and completely custom coding the entire site with as minimal code as possible. People love drag and drop editors because it makes it easy to build and design your site and pages, and that’s often what we do for our website and branding clients at their request. But the more code and fancy functionality or movement in your theme, the slower your site loads. The slower it loads, the lower it ranks.

So we’ve begun the arduous process of recoding this site from bare-bones WordPress functionality, which will take some time to do well and right and in a way that makes it easy to update content in multiple places… but I’m really excited about it because I know it will help us load at lightning speeds and rank better.

Beyond the theme, we’ve merged all of our blogs together… Your Passion-Based Business pages and posts have already been merged back into this site, and we just pulled over the 400+ blog posts from Call of the Void. Now that everything is merged, we’ll be going through and optimizing, combining, deleting, and redirecting to ensure no outdated or unrelated posts derail our rankings.

3. Prioritizing visibility and relationships.

Visibility and relationships have been a cornerstone of my success in prior years. Whether it was guest posting, podcast and video interviews, being a guest expert in programs, or sharing on summits, getting in front of other people’s audiences served me well as my business first started growing. Additionally, it led to incredible opportunities to contribute on major websites, which helped my rankings and traffic because of the backlinks (I still get traffic, new subscribers, and clients from Huffington Post articles I wrote a decade ago!)

I needed a time-out from relationships and networking when I moved to the mountains three years ago. It’s just where I was at, trying to figure out myself, my life, and my work after a traumatic and exhausting few yearsI’m so glad I took that time and space for so many reasons, and it’s time to refocus my energy on relationships. Personally and professionally. One way I’m doing that is through our podcast interviews, doing outreach to be on other shows, networking, and I’ll be attending some safe/outdoor events this year.

The business landscape is changing, but that doesn’t have to be scary.

It’s not always the easiest thing, but it’s 100% navigate-able.

I’m so sure of what needs to happen to shift into this next business season more seamlessly, and I’m working hard to lay a solid foundation this year.

If you’d like to chat more about how to navigate these changes in your business, click here to book a consultation with me. I’m offering a variety of coaching and strategy packages for various budgets!

*We’re a proud affiliate of Thrive Themes, and clicking our link will give us a small commission if you decide to purchase the software for yourself. It’s a wonderful tool that we’ve used for our sites and client sites.


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