How to stand out and stop the scroll (even in a crowded niche)

If you have been feeling like it is almost impossible to stand out online because it is just way too overcrowded out there. And there's already so much competition and people doing things that are so similar to you that there is just almost no point in even showing up, then you need to listen to this episode. Welcome to the seen heard paid Podcast, where we believe that success isn't just about what you need to do. It's about who you need to be. I'm your host, Kat Elizabeth. And each week, I'll be bringing you practical advice, honest stories and occasional dose of tough love to help you go from industry's best kept secret to in demand brand. So you not only get paid to do what you love, but can build a platform that creates meaningful, positive change, and inspires the people around you to do the same. Let's get into it. Well, hello, and welcome back. I am so happy to have the honor of entering your ear holes. Again, that sounds really weird. But you know what, we're just gonna roll with this. So today, as I mentioned, we are talking about standing out and stopping the scroll despite just how overcrowded it can feel right now. So there's a lot I want to dive into got some really practical tips for you. But before we dove into that official part of the episode, I wanted to let you know, I'm actually I've been doing some live streaming lately decided to kind of kick back into my free Facebook group, as well as share these streams to my YouTube channel. I've never livestreamed on YouTube before, by the way until two episodes ago and find it terrifying for some reason. I'm over it now. But anyways, what I'm doing with these this series is I'm actually talking about the journey to become an indemand brand. So Episode One was the four phases of building a personal brand or profitable brand, I should say, because it's like anyone can have a personal brand. But is it going to be impactful? Well, that's another story. Episode Two, was about building from scratch. So specifically for you, if you feel like your industry's best kept secret, I've got more coming at the moment, I'm dropping them every Friday. And if you would like to check them out, you can either join my free Facebook group, I'll include a link in the show notes below. You can see them on YouTube, or you can even go find them on Instagram, I'm uploading them to igtv after they're done. And they include captions for accessibility reasons. So I hope you enjoy them. It's obviously it's a live stream. It's not super scripted. But the feedback so far is that it's been really helpful and relevant. And a lot of people are feeling very seen and heard because I'm really diving into some of the challenges that come along with being at those different phases and trying to offer up some very practical advice on where to pour your time attention and energy versus what to avoid at that stage. Because often it's just, it's trying to do things out of order that gets us stuck, believe it or not, it's like yes, you probably know about all the things that potentially you could be doing. Some of them you may even know how to do. But for instance, you know, when you're very like first getting started and you don't have any clients, well, you know, building a really fancy website and creating an over complicated content strategy is not actually going to be the thing that's going to get you the fastest results as you land your clients and put money in the bank. So I'm really trying to just demystify the whole process and really be honest about Yeah, where where you could be focusing your energy and and I will have some, some different things coming out in coming months that are going to help you more specifically at different stages of that journey as well. Because as much as I you know, I adore working with clients one on one, I'm very proud of sainthood paid Academy, they may not be suitable depending on where your business and brand is out. So anyways, that's enough on that. What I will ask you now though, is if you haven't yet taken my personal branding quiz, they watch your expert status quiz. Now it's going to be a really good time to do it to find out what stage of the journey you're at. Because so often I am going to be referring my advice to one of those four different stages. And I just would love you to have the kind of the context know where you're at. It comes with a whole bunch of juicy advice as well when you sign up. So if you want to go do that, and you haven't already head to personalbrandingproject.co/quiz, it's free to do probably takes about 90 seconds and it's just going to add even more context to all the content that I'm sharing at the moment. So that's enough on that. Let's dive in to these five tips for standing out and stopping nervous scroll in a crowded niche. The very first piece of advice I have is for you to only speak to one person when you are showing up and you're creating content. I want you to know their thoughts and feelings intimately as creepy as that potentially sounds. When you're putting out very general advice, telling general stories, speaking to the masses, it kind of just get doesn't get noticed people are just going to skim over it because it just it never feels like it really connects with them. Whereas if you hear someone telling a story or speaking directly to you, and they, it feels like they're inside your head, they're like a you going through these things is this is, you know, the some of the mistakes you've made is, you know, is this the fear that you have right now? you kind of go, oh, gosh, oh, no, that's me. And you tend to stop and pay attention. So one of the biggest reasons people are getting ignored these days is because they are they're trying to appeal to way too many people. The fact is, you do not need, you know, to appeal to 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people I mean, really millions because there's so many people out there, like, really think about it. How many clients do you need to land each year in order to pay the bills and potentially put put some extra away, you know, to start feeling comfortable? You know, is it is in the 10s is in the hundreds, like be realistic about what kind of a loyal following you actually need. And trust me when I say if you start speaking very specifically to that, that person who really needs your help right now, you are way more likely to end up with a following of superfans, and when I say superfans, I've mentioned this before, but it's like these are the people who don't just work with you and pay to work with you and then come back and work with you again, they tell all their friends as well. So speaking to one person actually ended up speaking to more people than buying trying to speak to everyone as counterintuitive as that sounds. So that is piece of advice. Number one, and you may have heard this before. And maybe like Yeah, yeah, one ideal client blah, blah, blah, but like, are you really doing it? Like the questions that I want you to ask yourself, when you sit down and you piece it, you know, create a piece of content is, okay, firstly, who exactly am I speaking to? I would love it if you would give them a name and even just in your head, so that you can remember, you're speaking to another human being you're not just on a platform speaking out to nobody or to everybody. Okay, then I want you to ask yourself, what do I want them to know, feel and do from this piece of content specifically. So not just speaking directly to one person, but also having one goal for that piece of content is going to be a game changer for you. So I'll just leave it at that one. For now, let's not overcomplicate this, let's keep it simple, one person, one thing you want them to know, one thing you want them to feel, and one thing you want them to do, and get into the habit of checking yourself every single time you go to share something. Tip number two is use stories, your stories, your client stories, even stories of things you've ever heard, to make your client your ideal client feel seen, heard and understood. You know, it's one thing to just shove advice down people's throats or statistics or be like, you should just be doing this. We learn through stories, we also learn from making painful mistakes. But the thing is, we're more likely learn from you from someone else's mistakes, if there was a story attached to it, which then therefore connects us to the emotion of what you experienced. So I don't want you to just be like, Here are five things to do. If I would love it, if you could pull it back in to something that happened to you something that happened to somebody you know, so that you can then segue and say now the reason I'm telling you this story is because you need to know this. And then whatever it is that you share after that story, hopefully they connect it to the story, okay, and it sticks with them. But it is a proven thing, that we retain information better when it's shared with us in a story than when it's just a standalone statistic or fact. Okay, so stories are honestly of the key to just about any kind of communication if you want it to be meaningful, but it takes time to build up that habit. And a lot of the time I found that you never seem to have a helpful story, when you need to share one, like they're not available on demand. It's like you have these great ideas. When you're in the shower, when you're on the treadmill, you know, when you when you're having a conversation with someone and you are not near your notebook, and you're not in content creation mode. So the one thing that I will say to help with this, keep notes, like keep yourself a little bank of stories like become that person who walks around with a notebook Notepad, or has the Notes app on their phone at the ready and anytime something pops into your head. And it doesn't have to be just store related, anything to do with content collected all in one spot. Okay. In time that's going to build up and you're going to have this whole Bank of stories and ideas that you can refer to instead of sitting there with a blank page and a cursor just blinking at you just going oh my gosh, there's gonna be something I have to say. And then not being able to find it. Okay. Alrighty, let's move on to tip number three. And I hope these are proving helpful By the way, if they are, I'd love to know what your biggest takeaway was, once you're done with the episode come send me a message on Instagram at I am Kat Elizabeth, and tell me what was the most helpful and what you want more of. But let's move on tip number three, have a content strategy that positions you as an expert. Now, when I say content strategy, I am not talking about that $27 pack of, you know, pre made templates, where you just fill in a couple of blanks, and off you go. That is not a content strategy. Those are caption starters, those are templates, those are swipes those scripts, whatever you want to call them, that is not the same thing as having a content strategy. Now, yes, it can feel like a really wonderful, quick win, when you get access to one of those tools. And you're like, Oh my gosh, it's just like paint by numbers, just taking all the pressure off my content. But I'm gonna throw some tough love at you here and say that you don't need that. The reason you may not be feeling confident in showing up consistently is one, you haven't put the time into really thinking about what that strategy should be, you know what your content should involve. And to like, the inconsistency often comes from a lack of systems, and workflows and support to ensure that you just keep showing up time and time again, you know, they kind of really serve as accountability for you. So I'll bring it back, I always bring it back to my self belief strategy and support that three pronged approach. You need all three in place, if you don't like if you're just missing one, that there's the wheels already broken, like you can't make a turn. I'm just trying to picture like a really wonky wheel, like you've sliced the you know, like picture wooden wheel and you've like sliced part of the edge off, so that it's kind of smooth, and suddenly there's a flatbed and it goes clunk. Okay, so that is what's going on if you do not have all three of those things in place. So when you get those fill in the blank templates, like, it feels good, because it gives you that kind of self belief of like someone's told me that these are going to work, these are proven, so I'm just going to use them. But they're not actually strategic. And they don't necessarily solve the problem of you not having systems built out like an actual content workflow. Okay, and something else. So kind of tying into the strategy piece that's missing, like, anyone can show up and share basic tips with their audience, and kind of on the surface look like an expert. Like, it's easy to pretend to be an expert, if you have pretty enough templates, and you share a whole bunch of like how to content. But true experts, those go to experts in in the niche. And in demand brands that I talk about. They walk the walk, like they're living their talk, their content is not like, you know, their content, you recognize it. It's unique. It has its own angle. They're sharing stuff in a way that no one else has ever shared it before. Okay, when you read it, you're like, oh, wow, that made me really think you didn't just go Oh, yeah, I'll save that for later. That's Yeah, that's great. Okay, so I want you to have content that wows your audience. And wow, in your audience does not happen when you have fill in the blank templates. Because the fact is, there are other people out there using the same templates. So how are you going to stand out if someone else in the same niche as you is saying the same things on social media. But coming back to the confidence piece, like, you actually don't need this, because when you when you are guided into showing, like if once you were taught how to create a strategy for yourself, once you see that, you know, all the pieces that you need is understanding your audience. Understanding how you want to be seen, like what you want to be known for. And then knowing how to build out a content hierarchy, like you know, your content, pillars, your topics, and then post ideas with different angles. It all comes together and you realize, oh my gosh, like this was just as easy as fill in the blank template. Only the difference is, this is going to be meaningful, like the stuff that I'm putting out is is going to get me closer to establishing myself as that in demand brand. So to segway really effortlessly into my little announcement. I've been kind of teasing this for a really long time, and I'll be honest, it's taken me a lot longer than planned, because I put a crap ton of work into this. I finally finished my first mini course. I call it a mini course it's actually pretty epic but compared to like for instance, Seen Heard Paid Academy it is mini. It's called Expert Status Content. It is literally like my my tagline my promise for you. It's the only content strategy course you'll ever need to do. And in it, we tackle the self belief, the strategy and the support. So we're going to, you know, make sure that you avoid the content mistakes that are keeping you feeling really low in confidence that might make you feel like you're failing, then we dive into a very thorough content strategy, the one that I use myself and that I use with my one on one clients, where you build out your expert strategy. And then it comes with an actual content hub, I pre built system inside of air table, which is my like, favorite software in the world. so obsessed with it, where I've built out the system for you following the framework that I've created. So you plug and play. So plug and play, not like fill in the blanks. But you basically fill in the columns using the guidance that I give you to create that strategy. And you fill out this system and you create a workflow based on this complete holistic strategy. And it works. It's not specific to like Instagram, or LinkedIn or email, it is high level content strategy that can apply to any kind of content that you're putting out there. I love it so much. And I poured a ton of time and energy into this, including testing, and trying other other systems and really sort of being my own guinea pig and using my clients as guinea pigs to create this, I'm going to stop ranting about it as you can tell, I love it very much. And if you want to go check it out, you can head to personalbrandingproject.co/content. And that is where it's living. If you're on my email list, I will be sending out some more information to in in sort of like over the next week or two. But if you're not on my email list, then that's how you're going to find it while I'm not sort of like promoting it in a really big way. But enough on that, let's move on to point number four, which is get your people off social media and onto your email list so that you're not a slave to the algorithm. Because the fact is, social media is only going to get more crowded. Unfortunately, it's only going to get worse to be on. You know, there's going to be more things like feeling pressure to have to, you know, for instance, do reels because if you don't do reels, then Instagrams not going to show your content. But even if you're doing that you're still only reaching a very small percentage of your audience. You don't have control over who or how many of them or how often or when. So this can lead to a lot of stress, a lot of frustration, a lot of fear, because you're like, Oh my gosh, how can I predict anything if I have no control over who I'm reaching. So if you really want to stand out and stop the scroll, don't be communicating with your audience only on social media, get them into your email list, know that you're going to be able to reach them on demand whenever you like, and know that that relationship there is also going to be a lot more intimate than it is on social media. You can show up however you want, you don't have to feel like you need the like the perfect sexy carousel posts to really like well, them, you can just show up as you Okay, there are no real rules, you know, except once to like not break to get put in the spam folder, you know, email is incredible. And it's definitely not going away, it still brings huge returns, I believe, like the most recent stats that they pulled is that you basically get a $40 $42 return for every dollar you spend on your email list. Now I know that kind of random statistics, yeah, but I didn't spend any money on my email list. But really kind of see that, like, let's say, every subscriber you put into your email list could potentially end up being worth $42, you know, to you, which doesn't sound like much, but then when you get to, you know, an email list of 1000 of 5000, which again, it may sound like, how is that even possible? Trust me, it's possible. It's not not as as complicated or overwhelming, as you know, as you may think. But when you can do that. That is when you start having confidence knowing that if you open up a waitlist or if you open up bookings for your service, or you're about to launch a course, you know, you've got that many people on demand, who are going to see your content, and you have more confidence in being able to sort of predict conversion rates for whatever it is you're selling, which is a really big deal. So highly recommend that if you don't have one in place already, you set up some sort of email list system, you know, just pick a service provider, you don't need to overthink this kind of thing. And just start emailing your list and make a habit of sending people from social media to your email list. So it's not all just about scroll stopping. Okay. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details because already kind of like a longer episode than I'm planned. But I've actually launched a second course at the very same time as expert status content and it's called expert status email. Da da. Because honestly, I've I've been looking at and listening to my clients and my audience and the things that just keep coming up over and over again. And I was like, Okay, I need to be able to provide some really specialized support in the areas that get people the most tripped up without you necessarily having to sign up for an entire, like 12 month program, or coaching or anything like that. So I won't go into all the details. But essentially, it's the same kind of thing as experts status content, where we tackle the self belief, strategy, and support really looking at your essentials of what you need to, you know, create an email strategy, but then also a massive masterclass on writing kick ass emails. So if you want the details on that, head to personalbrandingproject.co/email, and hot tip, if you buy that at the same time as expert status content, you're going to save$50. Okay, cool. So that's Tip number four. Final tip, tip number five, for standing out and stopping this scroll, experiment, play, and figure out how to show up as you as possible seriously, stop looking at what everyone else is doing. And start looking at yourself. Okay, what makes you unique? What is your favorite way of showing up? What are some ways that you love communicating? You know, how could you just share in the most kind of relaxed, authentic way possible without trying to tick all the boxes look like the person next to you have all the perfect templates and the perfect feed. And instead just like, throw that out the window for a minute, and just have some fun. And trust your instincts, trust your intuition. Listen to inspiration, you know, kind of double down on and when you are feeling creative, when you have that energy, often it comes in waves or bursts actually listen to it instead of second guessing yourself on your own now, but that wasn't the plan, or, oh, is there any strategy behind this? Does that actually make sense? Like you're allowed to experiment. And that experimentation is what's going to lead you to finding your voice and to becoming so unique and really better developing your style of branding and marketing. Okay, it doesn't come from sitting in a bubble. And just just taking in course, after course, after course, learning all the theory and never putting it into action. Like at some point, you got to go call. Okay, I think I know enough for the time being that I can at least take some messy action, throw it out there and see how it goes. And then use those results. Use the feed feedback, you get to adjust and then move on whether it's doubling down on something that it's working, tweaking something that's not quite there, ditching it completely if it feels horrible and out of alignment. Okay, so give yourself permission to just be messy, be imperfect, and show up, not for the sake of getting a result having a particular outcome, but just just because you can. And because you never know where it's going to lead. Okay. I hope today's episode has proven helpful. Again, as I'd love to know what was the most helpful, and I'd love to know where you're the most stuck at the moment because honestly, I'm really in a stage of my business where I'm just trying to I'm listening more and having more conversations and using that to guide my next move, rather than trying to be a total control freak, and have everything planned out for the next five years, because I've just realized that it doesn't work that way for me, but it's different for everyone. And I'm really excited that I'm about to be kicking off a new series where one of the first episodes is going to be with someone who I adore, who was amazing, who's played a role in helping me understand myself better so that I can better design my business to suit. And it's really helped me realize just how different we all are and how our businesses do not have to fit particular molds that we get to really create the mold ourselves and the mold should fit who we are as people first. So I cannot wait to share that episode with you, as well as the others in the series. If you are listening to this, you find my podcast helpful, I would be so grateful if you would take a minute not even to head over to Apple podcasts and leave it a written and five star review. It really makes a huge difference in getting the word out. It's like honestly, it's one of the only ways that Apple is going to promote it to anyone else and to help me find new listeners. So I'd be really grateful if you would do that. And just thank you as always for listening, and I hope to maybe see you around the tracks. Maybe I'll catch you over on Instagram. Alright, have a great week. Bye for now.