 All right, I believe we are live. So welcome, Rebecca, or Rebecca holds you. I know, I think this is my first time on YouTube. I'm scared. No, you've been on YouTube. I've seen your YouTube videos. You've seen me on YouTube? Where? I know, right? I'm like, what? I'm on YouTube? I'm sure that some things have been like, are you perfect? We don't have a YouTube channel. Yeah, yeah, but you've been interviewed several times on YouTube, so folks who like this interview, you can go look up Rebecca Tracy on YouTube and you'll find her other interview. I don't think I've been live on YouTube. Live on YouTube is definitely, yeah, that's just the same as being on YouTube, except we're not editing this thing, so it's going to be really authentic. So all right, we have kind of known about each other for years, I think mainly because of Tad Hargrave, marketing for hippies, you guys don't know, it's a great, great guy, great teachings and things. And how did you, like, you've collaborated with Tad over the years, like a couple of times, right? Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, so that's kind of the point of like kind of like colleagues from that place. And I've always thought, wow, you look like you have a pretty great business and you have a Facebook group of 15,000 people and your team is very active and kind of caring for the members and you have a coaching program, a year long coaching program that's very active as well and a couple of hundred people in there and I was just part of your series. And by the way, folks, we're going to talk about in this video, in this interview, I'm going to be, we're going to be talking about how do we grow a business, particularly in the beginning, because there are a lot of people who are watching this who are either in the beginning, like as a life coach or a nutritionist or a holistic healer, but haven't gotten traction yet or maybe it's been a year or two or even longer and you're still looking for the best ways to get traction in a way that feels authentic or feels good to you. So we are going to be touching on the topic of how do we do that without relying on social media? And because Rebecca just hosted a whole series of, it was like a dozen, no, like 15 or something people, right? Experts who all contributed to this topic of how might we do this without social media? I have to say I was the lone rebel saying, well, I'm going to talk about social media anyway. Actually, a few others did. A few others did. I actually listened to, I think all of them actually. Oh, cool. Did you learn anything new? I did. I mean, it was amazing how there were a couple of common strategies that people were talking about, like going to live events, meeting people and reaching out to your existing people and how people heard about you and having a good offer and things like that. But everybody talked about it in such interesting ways. And so again, right now as of this recording, the series is not available at this time, but Rebecca, you're going to relaunch it in the summer of 24. Yeah, it was such great content. We did it kind of as a time limited thing. And now we're like, well, shoot, we hope all this amazing content that we should reuse. So we are going to do an encore presentation of it, not till August. So it's very far away. Everyone who's watching this will forget about it by then. But maybe they'll be pleasantly surprised when they see us promoting it. Yeah. And, Becca, you already have an evergreen free training on how to do business without, so how to grow your business without social media. Yes, it definitely did not have as many strategies as was in the series. Yeah, but still, it's what worked for you and what you recommend to your people. So I will be linking that below. So those of you watching this on YouTube live, sorry, you got to wait until after I finish this, but you can actually, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull this up because I have your website up here and I just want to make sure that it's already, people can already go there if they want to. There it is. Yay. There it is. This is fun. Yeah. You need to do a website review for me? Oh, well, maybe, no. I'll roast it right now. No, well, let's go to the free. Can you imagine? You start tearing it apart. It's like, you weren't expecting that. So, and then here it is, how to build your business without social media for your training and there it is. So folks, check it out, theuncagedlife.com slash no dash social. And I'm sure it's good. So I haven't watched yet, but. You don't need to watch it. You know the strategies already. Well, hearing how you interviewed the others in the series, I know you know your stuff and the series itself, let me just take a minute to talk about this. Like, it was the most interesting collab, collaboration I've been part of, as far as long as I remember. And I've been here since 2009. Yeah. Because usually when you do a summit, right? And for those of you watching this, if you're thinking of doing collaborations with colleagues and like the traditional way is either to start a podcast and interview, do interviews like this, maybe YouTube live or whatever, Facebook live, Instagram live, the difference and or like create a whole summit where it's like really intense and you have to like so much organizing and the difference with how Becca did it was, we did it over voice messaging back and forth. Right. And you didn't use the Voxer app before this, correct? I never used the app. Okay, most other people had, I think it was you and someone else who were like, I've never used this before, but... Yeah, because if I were to do it, I'd probably do it on either Facebook messaging or like WhatsApp or something like that. But it doesn't matter because it worked out well. And what was special about this is when you're in the live interview like this, you have to respond in real time, kind of just off the cuff, right? Like just shoot from the hip. What other analogies can I use? No. So you just have to like say what's intuitively coming to you. Whereas with the messages we were passing back and forth, you know, you were willing to wait an hour or a day before you... Yeah, it was a few days in between some of them. I had to go back and listen. I was like, shit, what did they say again? Exactly. Yeah, so it was great because we worried, but I was like, these are the smartest people I've ever met. Like how come these interviews are so smart? I'm like, oh, that's right. They had time to think. Right. And most of them, you don't have time to think. And this is, I mean, were you planning on this being one of the major factors of why this is different? Or it's just kind of happened that way. It was more that I really like the Voxer. So the app that we use is called Voxer. It's a voice message app. It's similar to WhatsApp, but you don't need somebody's phone number to add them. And you can listen in real time. So like if you were leaving me a message now, I could be listening to it as you're doing it. So it's kind of like an easy way to have conversations when you don't want to get on like a call like this. And so I use it all the time in my business with other business colleagues and friends. And it's just kind of the way that we catch up and keep in touch with each other. And I like it because it's something you can do. Like I'll often be walking my dog and I'll be messaging someone being like, hey, about that strategy we were talking about, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, wow, I do this all the time. And it is where like so many good ideas come from. And it's so different than if I was, I don't, I would never get on a Zoom call with any of the people that I talk to normally on Voxer. Like we would do an interview, but we wouldn't have these kind of like casual conversations like we do in the app. And I was like, that's interesting. And there's something about it. And I liked that you don't have to get on video. And I liked that we're not setting, what actually what I liked about it was that when we were inviting our collaborators like you and everybody else, we didn't have to be like, okay, so we're going to schedule an interview. We're going to do the whole thing. It was like, it's going to happen over the course of these like one or two weeks. And that's pretty flexible. And you can answer whenever you want, if you're walking your dog, doing dishes, sitting at your desk, like, I don't care when you send your answer, it doesn't, it's irrelevant. And so it felt like there was just more flexibility and easier for people to be like, I can do that. I don't have to get ready. Don't have to look video ready. Don't have to be sitting at my desk at a certain time. Yeah. I mean, here on video, like Becca, you had to put on makeup and get a new house to be ready. No, I'm kidding. I was saying I put on the zoom filter today, but yes. No. Yeah, I mean, it's just a different, it's different. Yeah, it was different. And I loved how one of them, I'm now forgetting the name, like she was just waking up and she was like, oh, you know what, it felt so real. It felt so real. People are like, they're like doing, you can hear things in the background, they're like doing dishes. We tried to keep the audio. Shaking in the ears, you know, where you could hear the dogs, you know, shaking around. Yeah, that was me, my dog shaking in the background. Yeah, and like it did, it turned out really well. And I don't remember if I told you this, I did tell a lot of the people I was participating. We might have actually been finished our conversation, but I, in the middle of all of this, I was going through a pretty bad personal playing, a pregnancy loss, yeah, literally in the middle of the interviews. And so it was like, I was like, oh my God, I have to, so thank God I didn't have a bunch of Zoom calls scheduled because I could give myself, and I let people know we're gonna be delayed and I gave myself a couple of days and I was like, I just need some time before you'll hear a response from this. And it still worked, like the interviews, I don't know, probably didn't sound quite as cheery in the second half of the interviews, but I do think that's another reason why I love things that are not done with these scheduled time slots because it really does allow you to have the flexibility of like all the things that are gonna happen in your life. Yes, yes. And you put it into a private podcast feed and one of the people you interviewed was the founder of the private podcast feed software. Yeah, yeah, Lindsay, hello audio. Yeah, and so it was interesting. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that because anyone who's thinking of collaboration and doesn't want to do a lot of video and lights the flexibility of what we just talked about, again, you're just recording messages back and forth with your colleagues. And the nice thing, like I said, is that it gave me time to think. It gave me time to like, okay, what would be a better response? And sometimes I waited a day before I set something so that it would be a better contribution than if I just off the cuff immediately set something. So that was- I will say that as a strategy, it is, I mean, I didn't do the tech stuff because I have a wonderful team that does that, it is more to implement because you have to download every conversation individually. So we had to like figure out how to get ginger into those conversations and then stitch them all together and then actually get them into the private podcast. So there are a couple of little tech things that we had never done before because we never knew to us. It's not a big deal. And I think a lot of people again, who are just starting out, have more time than money. So it's- They got time to figure it out. It's not a big deal to just download these audios and then just use any kind of basic audio editing tool. These days, you go online, there's a bunch of free audio editing online. I'm sure you just piece of it. I don't know how to do any of that these days. Yeah, but these days- Yeah, I love Hello Audio. I would definitely put in a plug for Hello Audio because it's been such a cool tool. We use it for our blogs. So basically anytime I write new content on blog or newsletter, I read it on Hello and put it onto a podcast on Hello Audio. So if people are like, I hate reading blogs but I can easily listen to these 10 minute episodes. Kind of another way to get content in front of people. We've used it for freebies. Yeah, there's all kinds of cool ways that you can use it. That's really great. Okay, I wanna, as promised, talk about marketing without social media, particularly for those who don't have a large audience. Yeah, they can just email their list of 5,000 and then get a bunch of clients or whatever. But they're starting out, obviously they have some friends, colleagues who might be willing to help them out. But what is your, and I know you have a whole free training on this. So maybe kind of give me just a very brief outline anyway of what the strategy is and we'll have a conversation around that. Yeah, so a lot of the strategy is, it's funny, cause in the free training, we're like, bear with us cause we'll get to the strategies. But there's like this preliminary stuff that we need to talk about first. And that is all, a lot of, like that's what my program focuses on. So obviously we're gonna talk about that. But that is really, I think it's a strategy on its own but all of that is like clarity and specificity and clarity of the niche, ability to talk about what you do, specificity in what you do, ability for other people to just easily understand it, not covering it with kind of language and jargon, right? So a lot of it is that those like foundational bits that I could give you the best marketing strategy in the world. And if you can't articulate who you help, it doesn't, the strategy means nothing, right? So I feel like if you're gonna watch the training, know that we're gonna talk about those things first because those things need to be in place. And I'll sometimes have people come to me and they're like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, like I have all that. I just wanna know the strategy like YouTube, this or that. And I'm like, okay, well, I look at their website and I'm like, I don't even know what you do. Like the strategy is I'm not going to help you. And so we have to get these things nailed down. And that alone is a strategy because every single thing you do, every one you talk to, every piece of content you put out, you don't care where it is, is now gonna start to work better for you. So I feel like it's hard to talk about the like, go post five times on YouTube and go do whatever without having that base. Yeah, it's a good point because it's a very good point because it's true. A lot of times, beginners, people who are not super marketing savvy think that just like you said, oh, if you just use YouTube or if you just use Instagram, like suddenly all the clients are gonna start happening and you just need to post, some people tell me, George, just tell us like Tuesday at 11 a.m. you should post here. And then on Thursday at 4 p.m. Which cash thanks? If you just do that, then you'll be fine. You'll be checking all the boxes and somehow crimes will show up. And you're right. It's like, I always tell people like, money comes from, your income comes from other people deciding to spend money. And so they have to decide to spend money with you. And if they don't want what you have or they don't understand what you have, well, then it doesn't matter how much you post. You post five times a day and have a 10,000 person audience. And I've seen that. I've seen social media accounts with tons of thousands and tens of thousands of followers and having conversations with them privately. I'm like, wow, you really are struggling, aren't you? So, and then on the other hand, I've also known people who have no social media presence whatsoever, but they're kind of like a best kept secret because what they do is super helpful for people and people know exactly how to refer people. Or referral based. Yeah. So it's not enough, right? Is it not enough to say, I'm a life coach and I can help you with anything because my life coach will allow you to. Yeah, and I think I've just had that too where I've had people come to me and they're like, I am like, took a course in social media. I even hired it out. I hired an agency and they're doing all this work and I look at their social and it looks great. I'm like, oh, this is really pretty and I start poking through, but I'm like, you're not saying anything. Like there's nothing in here. You're not, first of all, you're never selling. There's nothing in here that's telling me that you have a service available. And it's a lot of like quotes and memes and images and like nice ideas, but like it's not, it's not something that's gonna make me click over and be like, holy shit, I need to pay you money right now for this. And so it's too bad because I feel like people who do that, like people are trying hard, right? New business owners, no one is sitting, most new business aren't sitting around being like, well, I hope the clients just come in. Like they're really trying to implement these strategies, at least the people when they get to me and probably when they get to you. And so it's sad to see that it's not working. And so I'm such like, just like I'm constantly beating the drum of this message of like, it just has to be niched in and it has to be clear. And it's not something to be taken personally. If people don't like what you're selling, it doesn't mean that you're not good at what you do and you're never gonna have clients. It just means you're not articulating it well or you haven't identified exactly what the thing is that they wanna pay for. And that's what the work is. There are so many problems in the world that people have so much pain that people are going through, so much healing that they want to do, actually, and things that they want to achieve that there's more than enough clients out there for everyone if we could only just offer them what they want. So one of the points I've been making, I like being a rebel as you know, and I'm curious what you think about this or whether we can agree to disagree. But I tell people, listen, if you're having a really hard time like taking all of your multi-talented, multi-passion stuff into one niche for your entire professional identity, I say, hey, listen, maybe you can let go of niching yourself, but you do need to niche your offers. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think what I've seen though is then people are like, okay, well, and they create like a bunch of different offers that are totally unrelated, but then try to sell them from kind of one home base. And I'm like, mm, it's fine. I think I agree. I totally think you can have a niche didn't offer that's super narrow. I think everyone should have that. And you spend the time marketing it and you sell it out. And then it would almost be like you're moving on to then switching all of your marketing, all your messaging to like this different offer, which is fine if it's just a lot of work. If some people want to do that though, I totally think it's fine to play around with different offers, but not at the same time. Like you can't be selling five different offers in different niches in an effective way at the same time. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, but even then I don't think it works. Right, I think that's reasonable. It's the whole thing of, you chase two rabbits, you catch neither one. Right, yeah. So it is sort of like if there's a momentum being built with your audience, your network, remembering you for this, and then you switching gears and offering this other thing, it's just gonna, it's possible, it's just gonna take them, you know, adjusting their minds. Like if they have to build up again for the new thing, which is fine if you want to do that. And every time you do it, you learn how to do it better. Right, so it is like you, if you're really great at marketing, you can actually do that more effectively. The problem is it takes people some time to get really great at marketing enough to be able to do that. Yeah, so then this clarifying of the offer into something that people actually want to buy is one of those, maybe one of the foundations or the main thing that your coaching program helps with. Yeah, like a lot of my students will come in and have kind of a, even if they have a niche, they'll be like my niches, you know, life, like life transitions and grief, you know. Oh my gosh, I hear that a lot. The loss of a job, or getting divorced, or loss of, or moving cultures, or death. And I'm like, right, so they have what they feel is sort of like a theme, or they think it's a niche, it's really more of kind of a broad theme. And we just like work to get it to something so specific. Because I'd much rather somebody niche and offer and sell that out than stress about finding like the perfect niche for their whole entire business forever. Because, yeah. Yes, now, okay. What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I don't like, I don't know how I would say this, like it's almost like they're saying, I don't like being concrete about it, because the work I do is so much deeper. I don't know if you've heard that. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot to say to them. I mean, I will usually, I understand because I have been there, most of the people we've worked with have been there. And I think what, I will usually articulate all the reasons to go more narrow and remind them that like when you get in the door, when you get a client in, even in this narrow niche, they are still a client sitting in front of you with all of their problems. And so like, you still get to do the deep work. I'd argue you get to actually do deeper work when you're niched in because you can really get into it. Whereas if you're working with 10 different people, with 10 different, completely different problems and different niches, then you never really get to develop your skills around like that particular niche. So I do think you get deeper with your coaching and your skills when you niche in. And then I let people kind of choose. I'm like, great, like if you, I definitely have had students who are like, nope, I don't wanna do it. I'm just gonna stay out here and stay kind of broad. I'm like, great, go on to our next module, go on to the next steps, see how it goes. Like, I'm not here to tell you it's not gonna work, like maybe it'll work. And so we go on, they test it out. They almost inevitably come back and are like, okay, it's too hard. We're like, I'm finding everyone kind of wants this one thing. And so then it's like, okay, so maybe we like nudge a little bit more that way. So I think sometimes you do just have to experience it. Like any coach can tell you to niche. And if you're just resisting it, you're not gonna do it. So I do like to allow people to kind of find it on their own through taking the next steps versus trying to force them into something that's just not gonna feel good from the beginning. It usually feels good by the end. When they start to see, they're like, okay, I'm just gonna try this one narrow area and then clients come in and they start getting paid and they start being like, whoa, this work is like, I'm actually getting to do the work. They usually are like, okay, this is good. This is a good decision. But sometimes it just takes time to get there, which I totally respect. Yeah, and clients who come for this one thing, one specific thing, like you said, once they like your energy signature, I call it, I mean, they're much more willing to, it feels natural to talk about other things and you could start presenting other possibilities to them. But I'm actually glad we focused on this because marketing on social media, well, there's a whole free training that you offer, which we will link to. But this thing is so key that if you don't get the offer right, I mean, if you do get the offer right, let's say, it's not like it sells itself because you do have to still tell people about it, but it's like the telling people about it, it's not rocket science. You could literally write a list of 20 supporters in your life, friends, colleagues, class, fellow classmates or whatever, and then get their opinion about it, get their feedback. But it's like, if people light up and go, oh my gosh, I can think of, oh, this is very clear. Oh, I can think of this, oh, it's very, I can definitely imagine thinking of people that to refer to you, that's such good news. And then the marketing part of it becomes much easier and it becomes like a mission, I think. Because once you start helping people and you're like, oh man, I'm really good at this. Like people need my help. And then it's like, of course, I mind what people know. I feel like when you stay broad and you're kind of like still trying to even articulate what you do and you can't even get anyone in the door because no one really quite understands it, it's like you're not even getting to do the work that you set out to do. It's like you're just stuck in this marketing shipstorm where you can't get anything, right? Like you niche in and you get clients in and it's like, oh, okay, I was so resistant to niching, but niching is what's actually allowing me to work with people. And do I wanna focus on marketing being so hard because it doesn't make any sense or do I wanna actually work with people? And I think once people get in and they're actually doing the work, it's almost like they laugh at how hard niching was for them because they start to see it's not that big a deal. It actually allows you to do what you wanna do. And there's still wiggle room within the niche and there's room to go deeper and there's still room to pivot as you go. It's just so much easier to get started. Yeah, that's really good. And it's nice that you have a coaching program focused on that because you've got a couple hundred people in there that there's this kind of momentum that's built and people, members probably feel safer and more supported to actually take these steps, which is great. So I'm really glad you're offering it. I'll be sure to link that below as well. And my goodness, the time is already flying by. So is there anything else you loved saying to those folks who are in the beginning-ish stages of growing your business? Oh my gosh, I think a big piece of it, especially like with the conversation around niching is like being willing to let go of what you thought it was gonna be. Cause I find a lot of people come and I did this to where I was like, I had this concept or this idea and I was like, I'm gonna start a business around it. And once you get into it, it's like you start to realize like this is my idea but your business is actually about other people. Your business is actually more about other people than it is about you. And so being willing to like take the feedback and do the market research and take what they are telling you and shift your idea. Cause I find it's people who get her so rigid with like, no, it's gonna be this thing and are not willing to change it that just end up spinning in circles. And so I just think you have to have that flexibility where it's like, it's your idea and it's the market. And then like, how do we mesh those things together? I think that's the thing that I see my students coming into my program will often ask me like what's the difference between people who are successful in the program and people who aren't. And one of my first answers is like, you have to be willing to just move with what you're seeing and not get so hung up on the thing that you came in with. I love that. Yeah. This is, I think the danger of, well, ironically people, they might even come in thinking they've niched themselves. Right? Like they might even done the work with other programs or other coaches or whatever. And so they get, I call it like they get so ossified into one identity and it's painful to let that, this is me go. And this is why I soften the message by saying, you don't have to niche yourself, but do niche your offer. And you can have a thousand offers in your lifetime, a hundred offers in your lifetime at the very least. I certainly have. But if you want to make money sooner rather than later, or like you said, business is more about other people, if you want to be about yourself, then it's a hobby, which is fine. You could keep it a hobby and do it for friends. You can do it for yourself. I've said that cold hard fact to people too, where I'm like, do you want to make money? And of course we're not just saying, do you want to make money at any cost and throw out all your ethics and all the things, but like, do you want to make money or do you want to have an idea that you're kind of just going to try to play with because the way to make money is to go in this direction, the way to make money faster. And I think that's really important when you're new because the thing that makes people burn out is going for so long and not seeing any traction. And so I want to prevent people from doing that. And it's like, just get some money coming in from one niche offer. And then you can totally change your mind, I don't care, but like you need to see that positive feedback and that positive return, literally like in your bank account to have the motivation to keep going. So like, let's get that happening. And then we can talk about like the thing over here and all the other ideas. Yeah. And I mean, it's fine to have kind of two tracks in your efforts. One is, all right, this is going to create a livelihood sooner because I'm really solving people's painful problems or their most intriguing goals that they're willing to pay for. And then on this side, parallel, I'm doing my hobby and this might turn into a long-term audience who's going to buy anything I want to sell, that I feel like selling. But that is a long-term pathway. But yeah, so I'm grateful that we are talking about this because that really is like 80% of the way there whereas the marketing, social media part of it is way smaller. Honestly, to me, I'm like, that's so easy. Here's 12 ways you can go market your business. Like any of them are fine, they can all work, play around, see which one you like best. But like when the messaging is solid and the niche is there and there's like a compelling offer, it's any of them, I don't care which one you do. I feel like I'm like marketing model agnostic. I'm like, go on YouTube, go on social, don't go on social, network. It doesn't actually matter, all of them work. Yeah, yeah, this is great. Thank you so much. And by the way, the Facebook group that you manage, your team manages, 15,000 people is also a good place to go do market research. Yes, yeah, we sort of turned into like a market research hub which I'm okay with because I'm like, people are like, where do I ask people? And I'm like, go into the group, there's 15,000 people, it doesn't matter if they're in your niche, they're gonna know someone who's in your niche. Yes, yes. Yeah, so it's definitely great for that. And a great place to potentially find collaborations as well because a lot of people in there are growing and they're learning a lot of this stuff. So I'll be sure to link that below as well but you can also find it on Facebook, it's Uncaged Business. Uncaged Lifers is the free. Uncaged Lifers, L-I-F-E-R-S. So okay, well I'll link those things below. Yeah, great. Thank you so much for showing up. Yeah, thanks, it was nice chatting with you face to face. Yeah, for sure, it was great.