If you guys have noticed, I rarely make any YouTube videos about TikTok or Instagram Reels, which I know are super trending right now. And the reason for that is because I don't use any of them for any of my businesses. And you know what? I can still make a combined over a million dollars in sales across all of my businesses every single year. Hi. My name is Mei Pak, and I help makers, artists, and designers create a profitable handmade business without relying on social media. If there's one takeaway I want you to have with this video, it's that social media is not the only thing that can bring your shop traffic in sales. I am well aware that my channel could be growing so much more and I'd be getting a lot more views if I was always making content around social media. Like, around their algorithms or how to get more followers or how to do TikTok or Instagram Reels. Every other business-related channel on YouTube does this. It's what watchers are searching for. But the reality for me is that I don't focus on using social media to get traffic in sales for any of my shops and I still make a lot of sales. Here's why. Social media is time consuming. There's always some new thing you have to learn how to do and, you know, learning curves take time and effort to go through. And by the time you're settled in, another new thing happens that you have to learn all over again. So it feels like this constant hamster wheel that you cannot stop because if you get off that wheel, the traffic stops and the sales stop. To me, that's not a recipe for a long term sustainable business that's successful that builds upon itself. To me, this means you're still trading time for dollars and when you're not posting a Reel or a Story, you're not making money. And I know a lot of you guys will resonate with this, especially if you say have a full-time job that you're juggling or you're a stay-at-home mom or a parent and you have to take care of a family and a house. For me, I don't have kids or another job, but I am pursuing my other childhood dream of being an actor here in Los Angeles, and I have to do auditions and go on shoots and go to classes and that's like a part-time job. There just isn't enough time in the day to run your business on top of all the effort social media requires of you in order to succeed with it. So I'm not saying social media is ineffective, but as someone who's had a business for 16 years now, I have tried many different ways of marketing my shop. I have tried it all. And what I've seen is social media is not the best investment of your time and you get a poor ROI from it. What this means is, say for every hour you spend on social media, you get a lower dollar amount back, then say if you did something like networking in forums. Now, as you may know, one of my favorite ways to grow a business is with using media outreach. So getting your products featured on other people's social media or on a magazine or web a site or TV show. If you spent an hour doing that, your time is going to go so much further for your business than building your own social media audience up one person at a time. Now, I think one big reason I see so many people still doing social media is because it's the obvious thing to do. It's in front of us every day and everyone is talking about it, so it's hard to see that other solutions exist. But that's also exactly why it's so hard to get social media to work. It's so competitive. There are 1,159 Instagram posts uploaded every single second. It's so hard just to be seen and to stand out to your potential customers and to get the algorithm to favor your account. So your post gets shown to your followers, right? That's a lot of content created every second. Not to mention, it's easy to feel productive for your business when you're working on social media. But I also want you to think of your time as two separate categories, right? There's creating and then there's outreach. Anytime you're spending building or creating something, whether that's designing a new product or making a Reel, you're not doing anything that's actually putting your name out there. Creating content alone is not what will get you eyeballs seeing your work. It's the act of outreach, going out there and talking to people about your work. That's going to get you traffic and sales. And it's easy for us creative people to stay stuck in creation mode all the time because it's relatively easy and a lot more comfortable than doing what you really need to be doing, which is reaching out to people. I catch myself all the time. When I find myself avoiding something in my business, I usually default into creation mode. So this is something I want you to be very aware of. Social media can make you feel like you're doing something for your business. But if you look at your numbers and test different ways of promoting your shop, you might find that social media is the least effective thing you could be doing for sales. And there are only so many hours in the day and life is short, so why spend it on things that aren't going to move you forward quickly. Now, I'm not saying don't ever do social media, but it shouldn't be the main focus of where all your time goes. If you're a part of my community, you'll know that last year, my Instagram account from my jewelry business got shut down without any reason why. This happened a few months before the holiday season, which as you know, is where gift sellers like me make most of our sales. And I still managed to make over a hundred thousand dollars selling my handmade jewelry that year. That is such a huge testament in my opinion that it is very possible to still make sales even if you don't have a social media account. You might be wondering, then how did I still make all of that money without Instagram. Well, over the years, I have done a lot of media outreach. And as a result, a lot of people out there know about my shop. I wouldn't be total strangers and they would know about my business because they saw me on someone's blog or a magazine or in a YouTube video or their friend told them about my shop. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of marketing that exists. And outreach is a great way to get this going because it's essentially the same thing, right? Someone else is telling their audience about your shop and how cool your products are. There's so much more weight to that and people trust that more and you're more likely to make sales from that then the shop owner themselves saying nice things about their product on social media because which shop owner wouldn't when you think about it. We're always hyping up our own products and customers know this, so they're less trusting of our word. If all you did with your time was media outreach, I can promise you your business will be in a very different place. Maybe a challenge for you is to monitor how much time you're putting towards social media every week and then shift that time into doing outreach instead. And just like with social media, do it consistently. And remember that it's also a numbers game. A lot of people who do media outreach give up after only getting one or two mentions and if it didn't work for them. Like, you don't stop posting on Instagram if you had one or two posts that flopp, right? I also invest in email marketing. And this is something I know very few shops are working on. It's so important because unlike social media, you actually own the list of email subscribers you build over time and no one can take that away from you. But like me, if Instagram decides to take your account away, you lose all those followers that took you forever to get. If you're like me and you're just not interested in using social media for growing your business, I do have a free workshop that talks about all of this in way more detail. It's about an hour long and you can sign up to watch in the link in the description below. One of my students who came to one of my free workshops talking about media outreach grew her business to seven figures solely from doing her own outreach. And she's just one of the many people who've had success with this, so I know it works. Join the workshop using the link below and if you enjoyed this video or if you found it eye-opening, which is my hope, then give this a thumbs up.