When it comes to business we often hear the terms “residual income” or “passive income”. That, or we see things from famous business leaders such as the quote from Warren Buffet saying “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
Of course, it makes sense but not many people actually share how they managed to create passive income for themselves. Luckily for us, I had a chance to sit down with Courtney Sjoberg. Courtney is the CEO and Founder of She Social and The Hashtag Files Society, an online Boss Lady Social Media/Instagram Growth Membership site where she helps thousands of entrepreneurs make more connections and sales through social media and hashtags online.
In her first year of business, Courtney was able to scale to over 6-figures in revenue and retire her boyfriend to work full-time in their business. So I decided to learn how she managed to build her business to 6-figures so quickly, enjoy!
How did you get started with your membership site?
“I launched the membership site in February of 2018… from February to August (about 6 months) we had 40 members at our highest point. It was stagnant growth.” Courtney explained.
“It was around September that I noticed how much I wasn’t talking about my site, and how much I wasn’t using hashtags. So I created a webinar that was pure value, I wasn’t talking about how much money I made or anything like that. Just pure value.”
“I would show them how hashtags work, how powerful they can be, and how difficult and time consuming it is to find the correct tags.”
What would you say was the hardest part of doing all of that?
“Getting people to register and actually show up, but once I had a little bit of traction they were telling their friends. Most new business comes from referrals because my hashtags and strategies actually work.”
“I also honed in on one platform, I used to teach a bunch of different social media sites but decided to specialize on Instagram. Which lead to me changing the name from “SheSocialScoiety” to “Hashtag Files Society”. I had a podcast called “Hashtag Files” which is where the new name originated from.”
If you had to go back to the beginning with the knowledge you have now, what would you do differently?
“Run a webinar from day one, and niche down. Even taking the time to find the niche will make things easier, drop everything else and only focus on the membership site. FOCUS ON THE MEMBERSHIP SITE. Talk about the membership site a LOT more. And don’t feel bad about talking about it, it’s not selfish to sell if what you’re selling is going to change someone’s life!”
“It takes 7-12 times of seeing something before people typically buy. So just talk about it often, if someone unfollows you because of it you probably didn’t want them following you anyways.”
What simple changes can a small business owner make today, to boost their Instagram game?
“The number one thing is their Bio. The Bio is prime real estate, and people need to know what you do in 15 seconds or less. If you’re not sure what to change your bio to then try using your clients number one pain point, strike them with that.”
“Number two, use hashtags, the bigger the hashtags the bigger the reach… 10k-500k uses will have the most real people searching through them. There are also over 100,000 banned hashtags that will make all of your other hashtags not work. For example if you use 30 hashtags and one is banned, all will stop working for that post. In our membership site we update our hashtags every month and remove the tags with over 500k uses and tags that are banned!”
My takeaways
Overall it’s always awesome to see someone create success for themselves and I had a few major takeaways from this interview.
First, it’s extremely important to niche down. Become the best at one thing instead of good at everything, this is a theme I see in so many interviews I do. I’ve been personally working on this myself and you should to! Outsource the things you aren’t the best at so you can be laser focused on the one thing you are the best at.
Second, I had no idea there were banned hashtags and that using one of them would make all the other tags on my post useless. Since this interview I’ve noticed posts from people I follow make this mistake.
Last but not least, I’ve seen the statistic that it takes people 7-12 times of seeing something before making a purchasing decision plenty of times… However, it was lost in the back of my mind and hearing it in this interview brought it back to the forefront. I’ll definitely be sharing my business more and using hashtags to do it.