Building a Million $ Business WITHOUT Ads! w/Tori Dunlap
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Social media is land you don't own. You do not own Instagram. You do not own TikTok. These platforms are so incredibly powerful for reaching people, but they're hard to build a sustainable business on. We had this video go crazy viral. I think it got 6 million views in a couple of days. And what happened is off of that one organic video, over just seven days, we saw 100,000 email subscriber signups. I need you to use social media to your advantage and then get people off the platform.

What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today we're here with Tori and we've got a pretty incredible session because

We're going to talk about how Tori's grew a very successful business without ads, which I know probably shocks a lot of you because I'm kind of known as the ad guy. But Tori, welcome to the show. I'm excited to dive in. I'm excited too. Thanks for having me.

So we're going to talk about a lot, a bit about organic, how to monetize social media and specifically one big actionable, which I love and I'm fascinated to dive into is how you turn one TikTok into 100,000 leads. I'm a big proponent of email. I recently did an episode on why email is not dead. And, you know, I've made millions of dollars from email, grew many big lists myself. So really excited for that. But if anyone doesn't know who you are, do you mind just giving a minute overview?

Yeah. So I'm Tori Dunlap. I'm the founder and CEO of Her First 100K, which is a money and career platform for women. I believe I was put on this earth to fight for women's financial rights. So I've taught over 5 million women how to save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses, and feel financially confident. I have the number one money podcast for women in the world called Financial Feminist. I wrote a New York Times bestseller also called Financial Feminist. Uh,

And yeah, this is just my favorite thing to do is talk about money to make money a more accessible topic for women so that we can make more women rich. I love that. I love that. We've done some great female entrepreneur panels and courses and stuff. And yeah, I want to dive in more to some of the bits you've built. But let's start with the elephant in the room, right? I've spent, we were talking about this earlier, up to 300 grand a day on ads a

You've done no ads and built a very big, successful brand. So I would love to know how you kind of came more to the organic route and what you've learned over those years on the organic side.

Yeah, my background is in social media marketing. That's what I did at my nine to five. So I was working in social media and then growing her first hundred K on the side. And when you're first getting started as an entrepreneur, you kind of had two paths you can take. You can go the time route or you can go the money routes. I didn't have money. I didn't have a rich uncle. I wasn't about to raise millions of dollars in VC. So I had money.

to dedicate time to it. And I had to allow the business to grow slowly and organically in order to progress and to hit the kind of goals I wanted to see. So it started as a side hustle. We started in 2016. In 2019, late 2019 is where I felt finally comfortable enough to take the business full time. So 2020 was actually my first year of entrepreneurship full time. And

Yeah, I didn't have the money to spend on growing an audience or growing our products via ad spend or other expensive routes. I had my own time and effort on the side of my nine to five job. And so organic is really where we've been hanging out this entire time. We've grown our audience to over five million social media followers completely organically, which I'm very, very proud of.

And for us, I think it really has equated to a more authentic community, to people who are really dedicated to our mission and to what we offer, and who feel like this community is a true community in the sense of the word where...

They feel supported. They feel encouraged. They've become friends with each other, right? It's a very authentic, incredible thing that I think me and my team have built where women feel safe, they feel supported. And I don't know if we could have done that, at least in the early days, in the same way if we had paid for those eyeballs. Yeah, I think the organic side, if you can pull it off,

it gives you you know the the i guess like the purest form right um yeah but i think it's it's the pulling it off part hard like i i like ads because i mean uh you know they're a little easier to to start and test on low budget and yeah i'm a big yeah i've never really raised money self-funded everything and most of my clients aren't from like silicon valley or vc and uh you know i was teach the key is you're

You gotta get profitable quick and it should cash flow itself. Because like you said, it's very hard. Yeah, but it is, with ads you get a lot of transactional stuff and over time you can really build the community. But it's definitely a tougher battle. But like you say, you sometimes save on the time side.

I grew my first fitness brand in two years to 60,000 members in a Facebook group, super supportive events worldwide. I was very lucky because I think like you, you mastered organic and really shot up there and

I was very fortunate to master ads and now we went back and then in the last two or three years really focused on organic and added that in. And I'm sure at some point you'll do the reverse on the other side. But let's talk about TikTok. Pretty incredible result, right? Taking a TikTok and turn it into 100,000 leads. A lot of people I find with TikTok

And even I've seen this, I've had a lot of clients and celebrities where they have massive engagement and following there, but it's really hard to get them to take an action. So I really love this because you've kind of converted them off the platform into now becoming more in your ecosystem. So can we talk a little about your strategy?

Yeah. And this is applicable regardless of what platform we're talking about. We could be talking about TikTok. We could be talking about Instagram. We could be talking about LinkedIn or Pinterest. Right. We can we can talk about any platform here. The important thing about social media that is often gets overlooked. The sexy part of social is the going viral. Right. And then maybe even taking it one step further and getting followers. And that's very exciting.

And that can lead to a very big business, especially around like brand partnerships and straight influencer marketing. But if you're trying to build a sustainable business that you have more control over, that you are not dependent on, you know, the ebbs and flows of the algorithm, the ebbs and flows of marketing budgets and how comfortable brands feel paying influencers, you have to use social media as your top of funnel.

and get them off the platform as soon as possible. Social media is land you don't own. You do not own Instagram. You do not own TikTok. We have been dancing around a TikTok ban in the United States for like four years now. Instagram changes their algorithm, it seems like, every other week.

These platforms are so incredibly powerful for reaching people, but they're hard to build a sustainable business on. And even for us, we have 2.4 million followers on TikTok. But the algorithm has changed so dramatically in the last year that we've actually spent a lot more time on Instagram. But I'll tell you the story of 2021.

So, before we had even posted this video that ended up going viral on TikTok, I was starting to realize that we, you know, we're having these viral moments, we were having a lot of traction, we were even getting, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers.

But we had very little to show for it beyond, you know, maybe getting them to sign up for affiliates or, you know, engaging with them again on a brand deal side of making money that way. And I just saw the writing on the wall of, okay, this growth can't last forever. And also, I just want to be able to better market to these people in particular. So what my team and I did

is we spent a good two weeks of our time building a quiz funnel. So it's a free quiz. You can take it. It's still up in its current form. You can go to herfirst100k.com slash quiz and you can literally see how this works.

Is we ask for your money personality or we help determine your money personality by the questions and the answers we get. Things like, do you have debt? How stressed do you feel about your money? Are you starting to invest yet? And using that information, we can offer you a free personalized money plan that shows you our free resources, but also our paid resources, our affiliate links, etc.,

So what happens, of course, is that in order to get your free money personality and your personalized plan, we exchange that for your email. What happened was when we built this, when we built this funnel, we then had the ability to send people who discovered us on social somewhere.

that we owned. So we had this video go crazy viral. I think it got 6 million views in a couple days. It got picked up by a ton of media outlets and publications. It got reposted on other accounts. And what I did in the caption, as I said, take the quiz in our bio for a free personalized money plan.

And what happened is off of that one organic video, over just seven days, we saw 100,000 email subscriber signups. That's not even people who visited the page. That's people who went all the way through the quiz and actually gave us their email. So...

We still have those email subscribers. Like we have over 750,000 email subscribers now, largely due to that quiz that is still running, even though we built it three, nearly four years ago. So,

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool. It's what we use to build our business. And also, I need you to use social media to your advantage and then get people off the platform and onto land you own via your email, via a website, even subscribing to your podcast. That way you can better control your audience and you have better access to them as opposed to trying to play the algorithm game. Yeah, it's funny because, you know, we haven't...

Kind of solidified exactly what we're going to talk on today. And I every Monday at 1130, which is two hours before recording this live, I host a weekly training and my training happens to be this week, 15 ways to monetize your online presence. And it was...

different ways you know everyone spends so much time trying to build their socials and go viral and grow a community because that's the sexy stuff right like that's the exciting stuff is being able to say I have five million Instagram followers and like that's fun um and that is you know so great but I especially saw because you know we blew up when TikTok was at its heyday in 2020 2021 and I was the person I had so many like TikTok influencers reaching out to me and going like

okay, how are you making money off of this? I have 4 million followers here, but I'm not seeing any money. So I want you to have something to show for all that hard work. Like if you're posting every day, if you are, you know, growing this community and especially an organic community, give them another place to go, add more value to their life, but also make sure that you are better guaranteeing the success of your business in the long term. Yeah. Yeah. I think

Like I've always grown. I've never kind of I kind of became slowly an influencer. I've always grown brands. So I've like come from the other side of it where we, you know, use a lot of influencers to promote. And now we have a whole celebrity division where that same thing, you know, even a list celebrities.

they're getting paid 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 grand for a pose, but they don't have a real brand of themselves. And they're starting to realize that, you know, that it's kind of burning their audience out and now they need to start a real brand.

And it's crazy, like some of the A-lists I have that I work with have 50 million, 60 million followers, but they don't have an email list. It's just, you know, it's wild. So I love how, you know, the basic concept is,

Um, it is obviously getting them in different places. Emails are obviously a great first step and an obvious first step. You know, I've been a big proponent of low ticket offers, which is something I kind of classify as sub 50 or a hundred dollars. I always think buyers take way more action too. So a lot of what we do is not only email list, but getting them into some sort of a challenge or some sort of a paid product. Um,

And that generally makes them a better customer and a more committed customer. But I would love to ask you now, you know, we talked about this viral video to a quiz funnel, but there's obviously different ways to grow an email list, right? Like lead magnets, cheat sheets. What other tactics have you used and found that you're starting maybe to test or have used in the past to grow that community off the social platform?

Yeah, one of the incredible things we've been seeing on Instagram for the past year, year and a half is, and I'm sure you are familiar with it, but a tool called ManyChat. Being able to, you know, talk to people in the DMs so you don't even have to ask them to take another step of going to a website or going somewhere else, but literally getting their email, converting them that way. Just, you know, going down in Instagram DMs. So we have DM funnels for every product that we sell, for every product

free webinar that leads into a paid product for our affiliate links. So we're not just making money by sending them a link, but we're also getting their emails so that if they don't convert or if we want to offer them value or sell them on something else two months down the line, we have their email to be able to do that. So I think we've gotten an additional 200,000 email subscribers from those tactics. And we have about two, just over 2 million followers on Instagram. And

And I have been seeing both for myself and other entrepreneurs, just crazy amount of success being able to monetize their Instagram audience. And again, have it happen in Instagram DMs automated. So you don't have to even think about like converting them and getting them to go to your website or somewhere else.

Yeah, I was actually one of ManyChat's beta users like eight, nine years ago when it came out. And we use it a ton in my fitness brand. And back in those days, you know, it was the Wild West. Back in those days, you could send anyone a Facebook message at any point too. So you imagine how crazy it was. Now you have to like, you can only blast them like if they replied in the last 24 hours or something, I think. Yeah.

And then recently, you know, we actually, uh, the last few years I grew a big office, um,

And we actually had several customer support people we had automated, but then we actually did a lot of custom stuff too. So trying to create custom conversations with our most engaged followers has worked really well. And one other one that maybe you'll start testing when you run ads is there's a lot of great ad targeting around people that are the most engaged, right? So people that are like your top.

We've had a lot of success, you know, using it to filter out who are my most loyal fans and then sending them to some sort of a community or a low ticket or a webinar or another paid product. So next question, then we we've kind of hovered around TikTok. But one thing that's important, you know, grown millions of followers across many platforms.

And I, you know, we bring a lot of people on here that have grown amazing communities and followers. I would love to ask you some more broader principles. Like if you could go back to your, you know, younger self and talk about social organic growth. A lot of people listening on today's show are,

brand owners and trying to grow organically. They're probably doing some paid ads because they've followed me for a while and now they're adding in organic alongside it. What would be like three lessons you could teach anyone trying to, you know, grow their first 10, 20, 30,000 followers?

Yeah, I have an entire workshop on Instagram that I'll have you link in the show notes if you wouldn't mind that goes into this even more detail and talks about our entire strategy for social. Three things I'm always thinking about. One, I need you to serve before you sell.

So many people think that they're going to create communities and they're going to get followers by creating a kick-ass product. And that usually is not the case. It's usually not the, you know, selling and then converting into a community. It's getting people who want to see what you have to say because you provided value to them. You've built trust with them. And then they have a built, you have a built-in audience that way.

So we are really focused on providing somebody value, making sure that we serve them before we ever try to sell them on anything, not just sell them a product, but, you know, hey, give us your email, even follow us, give us your follow. We're really focused on providing value to that person, building trust with them so that then when we do make that ask, it

it feels way less icky and it feels more authentic. And we've also done all of the work of actually building a relationship with that person. So please, especially organically, think about how you can create content that actually provides value to people in your niche. So for us, it's personal finance content, right? It's teaching people the strategies around paying off debt. It's teaching people what the difference between a traditional IRA and a Roth IRA is. It's

um showing them the power of a high yield savings account and how it can make you more money right so serving before you sell is just really crucial and that's one thing i just like want to tattoo on my forehead second thing trying to be everything to everybody makes you nothing to nobody

So what I mean by that is so many people, especially when they're first starting out, whether that's on their website or on their social, they want customers. They want an audience. And so they think whether, you know, consciously or not, I'm going to be broadly applicable to everybody.

The problem with that, though, is that someone comes to your website or someone clicks on your Instagram and reads your bio and they have no idea if you're for them or not. They're like, I don't really know what this person does or like if this product is something that I need. And it doesn't allow them to read.

interact with you further. You want a visceral kind of reaction where either someone's like, oh, hell yes, this is 100% for me, or this is definitely not for me. Because I would rather have followers, even if they're less, I would rather have less followers that are fully committed and fully get what you're trying to do than people who are apathetic about you or who don't understand. For us, we have a very strong brand voice.

I run a podcast called Financial Feminist. If you have a problem with the word feminism, you're not going to like what I do.

But if you get it right, the girls that get it, get it. The girls that don't don't. The people who truly get it are all in. They love what we do. They are so aligned with it. And, you know, there's millions and millions and millions of people who identify with the word feminist. So it's not like, you know, it's such a niche audience that I I couldn't sell or that I couldn't make money. Right. So trying to be everything to everybody makes you nothing to nobody. And

And finally, my third thing with social, again, is that we need to focus on using social media at the top of the funnel. How can we use these tools to our advantage? And then how can we think strategically about getting them onto a platform we own? Don't get caught up, again, in the vanity metrics. Those are fun. Those are exciting. You can make money off of that. But just because you have 2 million followers on Instagram does not mean you have a profitable business. I need you to not have to...

you know, run your business depending on how the algorithm performs that week. I need you to be able to have more control. So get them on an email list, get them to a podcast, get them somewhere that you actually own.

Yeah, level three of those. And probably in many ways, you know, other experts and myself, but I think we've taught very similar concepts and it always comes back to the basics. And, you know, I often teach like when you start out, you want a niche, but not too small, but not too big. There's some like sweet spot there where,

Um, you can stand out a little and, and I've had a, you know, being a kind of in the marketing influence space, I have a lot of what I call edgy friends and controversial friends. And I think that's important for social media too. Like I started, um,

trying to please everyone and not be polarizing and I came from a sports science background and as a scientist you always say well it depends you never know maybe you learn as a scientist to not be definitive and that's really the worst thing for social media because the people best have like one side you know so a lot of great stuff in there so last few questions rapid fire format for you if that's okay

So first one, and we already mentioned it a little bit, what's your most controversial belief that upsets people around business success and money marketing? I think my biggest one is that money is political. That pisses a lot of people off. But when it comes down to it, the way you manage money and the way you view money and the way you pursue money has everything to do with

everything that you have had to deal with in your life when it comes to systemic oppression and circumstances. I say in my book and my show that, you know, the personal finance equation is about 20% your own choices. How well do you manage debt? How well do you navigate that? And about 80% all of the things like the minimum wages and the student loan crisis and racism and sexism and ableism and homophobia, right?

So that pisses a lot of people off. But if you do two seconds of research, money is 100% political and it's way more based on your systemic challenges than it is on your personal choices. Great. Second one, biggest success or most money made from a launch product or biggest success in business that you're proud of?

Oh, I think that 100K email subscribers off of one TikTok was a fun moment of just realizing like what I've built is really, really working. Hitting the New York Times bestseller list is always going to be a really, really fun thing. We worked really, really hard to make that happen. And the book's continuing to sell like it came out yesterday. And there's something so incredibly cool about walking into a Barnes and Noble anywhere in the world and being able to sign your book.

Yeah, I've kind of always slacked on books, regrettably, but I had a couple of friends do New York Times, and I've heard it's no joke. Congrats on that. It's intense. Yeah, it's intense. Yep. Biggest mistake or failure you've made?

I think that it was actually early in my career when I was running the business as a side hustle. I think it was taking a job for the money. I actually talk about it in the intro of my book, but I was able to negotiate 20% more in a job than they wanted to pay me. And I didn't trust my gut that something was off, something was wrong. Intuition, I heard as the greatest definition for it. It's you know something without knowing how you know it.

And I just knew that job was not right for me. And I knew that situation wasn't right for me. And I will say every time I've gotten myself into hot water, either in my personal life or professional life as a business owner, it's because I didn't trust my gut. I hired the wrong person or I made the wrong deal. And my gut was very, very obviously telling me to not do it. And I just didn't listen. So trust your intuition. Listen to your gut. It's never wrong.

I agree with that one for sure. Okay, last one, which is my personal favorite question. If you could go back in a time machine and give yourself one to three lessons to help you be way more successful way quicker, what would they be? It's the advice I give past me, present me, and future me, which is honestly just to worry less. And I know that's not super precise, but I have spent so much of my life wondering if things were going to work out.

I spent so much of high school wondering if I was going to get into the right college. I spent so much of college wondering how I was going to get a job. I spent so much of my early career wondering how can I navigate this and run a business. I spent so much of the business wondering, you know, just I just really am trying to focus, especially this year, on just being really, really excited where I'm at and understanding that like it's worked out before.

Even if it felt like it didn't work out, it ended up working out. So just trying to enjoy the process a lot more. Love it. And final kind of question. You've already talked about it a little bit. If people want to learn more about you, I know you're hard to miss. You're everywhere, which is great. And that's why you're here today to share how you got there. But where do people find you if they do, if they're inspired by today and want to learn more?

Yeah, Her First 100K is where you can find me. That's herfirst100k.com or at herfirst100k. I'm probably most active on Instagram, so I would love to come see you. Come say hi. And Financial Feminist is the name of my book and podcast. Great.