It all started out with my own online side hustle business, in which I bought and sold social media profiles. At the time the platform was just starting to get attention, so the profiles sold pretty easily to small businesses and private buyers. I got this idea from a friend of mine.
The process was simple: buy an account, grow it a bit (using the growth methods I had learned though experience, studying and testing), then sell it for a profit. This simple process very soon started generating me more then minimum wage…
My main focus was on Instagram at the time because I believed it to have the most potential.
This give me a ton of practical experience and showed me the journey of growing a online businesses using social media. The idea of starting my own marketing agency was in my head for a while.
Some time went by, and after being in the industry for about 4 months, I felt it was necessary for me to go bigger and start offering Instagram growth services to businesses. So I finally took the leap and started my own agency
After about 2 months of reaching out and trying to get clients, I had no success, I was about to give up. Businesses just weren’t seeing the potential and would rather put their advertising dollars elsewhere.
So I decided to do something special, something different and unique. I decided to provide value first, I did this by approaching businesses and telling them i’ll work for FREE. The idea was simple, I knew I could get them results, I just had to prove this to them within the first month…
And if I did that, they would obviously agree to paying me for the upcoming months, and possibly even refer me to their other business friends.
I spent the last bit of 2015 reaching out using this exact strategy, most businesses still didn’t take me seriously. But I knew all I needed was to get one client on board…
Once I was able to get a business called ProjectVanlife to agree with my “I’ll work for FREE” strategy, things really started to kick off. In fact, all the credit of my success goes to this one simple method, in which instead of being selfish, I provided value first…
This created almost a snowball effect for my newly started social media marketing agency. Since I was in fact able to deliver on my promises,.My business started growing pretty quickly. Here’s the simple yet effective process I followed:
1) I work for free and bring results
2) once the client is satisfied, compensation is inevitable
3) the client will begin to refer me to his/her friends
Everything was working out exactly the way I had imagined it. So much so, that I eventually had to start turning down clients in order to keep up with all the work.
Obviously I didn’t like doing this, so I knew the next step was to hire a team. I didn’t want people who were just in it for the money. Instead I wanted a team filled with people who were passionate, interested in such an industry, and willing to innovate, expand, and more importantly learn.
It took a while but I eventually found those people. Not all of them knew about social media marketing, and that didn’t matter because they showed me they were willing to do whatever it takes to learn. I invested time into my team and would teach them everything about the industry. After about 3 months they were ready, and it felt good knowing they had my back.
By the end of 2016 we experienced a bit of a downfall because I was investing a lot of time into teaching and perfecting my team. But, this meant we were ready to tackle 2017 and the upcoming years as well. So, it was indeed a good idea when you look at from a long term perspective.
This is where the market began to get saturated, everyone was diving in face first and this meant more competition. In order to keep up, we decided to start offering more services. Up until now we were only providing social media marketing on Instagram.
This had both advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage was that we were able to perfect Instagram, and provide amazing results for it since it was our only focus.
However, the disadvantage was that our clients would go to other agencies for other services and platform management.
We didn’t really like this, mostly because our clients as well preferred getting all the services from one agency instead of having to run around.
So it was time for yet another change. together me and my team quickly got to work and began learning how we can bring our clients results with all the other social media platforms out there. It didn’t take long to figure it out since we already had so much experience, and after 2.5 months we were ready to start offering these services as well…
2017 was a exciting year filled with learning, challenges, and growth.
Now almost everyone started becoming an “entrepreneur” and starting their own online businesses. This didn’t concern us since we’d already built up a pretty stable foundation beforehand.
However, this meant that growing on social media would become harder due to all the competition. We quickly started noticing that the tactics which we used for growth before, were no longer as effective.
This is nothing new though, platforms get updated all the time and change their algorithms. We’ve experienced this several times before and were still able to bring results despite the changes. So we expected to do the same this time.
We began testing and testing and testing…
Our goal was to figure out which variations of our old growth tactics still works today, what are new ways to grow, etc…
Again, it didn’t take long for us to figure it out. But this time social media was growing so fast that we had to constantly do research and adopt to the changes in order to stay ahead. Luckily I had a team which was willing to do whatever it takes, and because of that we kept learning and adopting. This is something we do till this day.
2018 thought us to be more innovative…