November 19, 2020
Angie Lee is a vivacious marketing maven who’s found her soul’s calling in helping women kick butt as business owners. Angie is a highly sought after marketing mentor, motivational speaker, professional podcaster, serial entrepreneur & author of the book coming soon Ready Is A Lie.
She is the Co-Founder of Soul CBD, Creator of the #1 female personal development & business event in the United States: Pays To Be Brave & Host of the Forbes Top 100 Business Podcast: The Angie Lee Show. Angie’s genius is teaching women how to make friends with fear & make money doing what they love in a motivational, fun & approachable way.
We wanted to have Ang on the show today to chat with us about showing up authentically on IG because she is a woman who does this SO dang well. She is 100% herself, she doesn’t give a crap what people think, and she pairs realness with education and service SOOOO well. We chatted with her about how she got permission to show up as herself, the difference between being truly authentic vs. doing it for sales, curated vs uncurated online content, and how to get over the initial fear of showing up. Ang has some INCREDIBLY powerful wisdom to share with you today. If you’re the person who’s been afraid to show up online being 100% yourself, or you aren’t consistently showing up because something isn’t “perfect” you HAVVE to keep listening. I hope our convo with Angie ignites your soul and gives you the best perspective to start showing up real and authentic in your online business. Let’s get to the show.
In college, Angie didn’t like school, she was very rebellious feeling like she was in a prison since four. So fellow entrepreneurs that are reading this you know how that feels like the odd man out in school.
In college started a health and wellness blog, not intending to monetize it or build a social media brand, market it, or any of those things today. Starting to share her thoughts on health, wellness, and mindset, and women started reading it. Initially, her mom and a few friends on campus and the next thing you know a year or two went by staying consistent with creating content and it started to pick-up.
Fast forward 11 years later and that transitioned into hosting a live event, public speaker, affiliate marketing, starting a wellness line with her brother, and now teaching marketing.
It truly started by women reaching out and asking, “Hey how did you monetize that wellness blog?”, “How did you work with sponsors?” “How did you do coaching online?” “How did you do XYZ?”.
Angie has a natural passion and inclination for marketing and started doing calls with clients. Realizing she loved teaching marketing because marketing is psychology, it’s humans, it’s communication, it’s authentic. It’s how we interact. That became her obsession and niche leading her to more influencer work. It has broadened again and talks more about wellness and business.
It started with a blog and now Ang is a podcaster, speaker, and creator. Hating college, being rebellious, and wanting to leave she ended up quitting after making $100 off her blog and thought, “I’m rich!”. Having that first taste of “oh my gosh a stranger on the internet paid me $200 bucks, that means one day I can make $200,000”. Every digital entrepreneur has that moment of, “Woah this is a thing” and then the rest is history.
Everyone thought she was crazy, but she knew commerce and communication was going to be done via social, like many of us predicted. Sticking with it and realizing she would rather chat with some random girl in her blog comments than her teacher in chemistry class. Accidentally becoming a full-time creator and love expressing creativity. With always wanting to create, not necessarily being a business owner, so now it’s the difficult part of balancing both of those.
This is her favorite thing to help and inspire women with. Is being authentic and the weirdo. Angie’s new saying, “Own your weird”, which means just be weird. Who cares? It’s social media, everyone is doing their own thing.
A few years ago all the marketers were very serious and polished. Wearing suits on live videos while Angie wears her pajamas and shows her weird. It felt so alone, not knowing what to do. Then starting to show her weird and the next thing you know is women started to like it more.
“This is refreshing”
“Oh you make poop jokes and you teach marketing”.
“This is crazy. You act like a 12-year-old but then you are very passionate about business and marketing.”
It’s this weird dichotomy that people weren’t used to seeing and it was refreshing, even though inside it is terrifying. Having this fear of, “What if nobody buys from me again because they realize I am weird”.
Double down on it and love it. If you can’t fully be yourself on social, why do it? We didn’t sign up to be an actress, you signed up to be yourself on your brand.
Having her biggest value as authenticity and got sick of being someone else. Being inauthentic is draining and a lot of times we’re tired of not being who we’re supposed to be. Got tired and exhausted of pretending to be this serious person all the time and cracked a poop joke and the rest is history.
Creating a community that inspires women to be a little kid again. We all want permission to dance and be weird.
People want to see the person behind the brand now. Encouraging other women on whatever that is for THEM online because people aren’t just buying a product anymore they are buying the personality and the person behind the product or service. They want to buy from someone that they could hang out with and is unapologetically themselves.
On Instagram stories, there are three types of people to show up as, or we call them personas.
Whether you are a photographer, network marketer, a business coach, or whatever the heck you are, people want to know that there is a person behind the screen.
Friend content is having no agenda or sale tied to it, it’s purely for connection and storytelling behind the scene. Knowing they can trust. Allowing them to see, “wow they are just like me”. So when you do sell “quote on quote” or sell them on something, they immediately trust you because they have seen you be their friend first.
That is the secret of influencer marketing and anyone who is building a community online. Not being afraid to show those imperfections and who YOU are. Because it is endearing.
People do want to see real, whatever that looks like for you. For you, it might not be funny and weird, it might be something else. Know that the days are gone where people want to see a very polished theater person behind the screen.
Take the three key Instagram content personas and rotate them. A lot of women are really in a sale and marketing mode, but one of the most refreshing things you can do is just show up as a friend. That builds trust because then they will end up buying from YOU instead of someone just selling them something.
It’s so refreshing to not see a perfectly curated feed. If it feels good and valuable, POST IT and show other women that it is okay. Give them the permission slip to just show up. Because B+ work is better than no work at all. Just show up, even if it is a little messy because most people are not posting at all. They aren’t showing up at all because it doesn’t have the right filter or we get so caught up in the algorithm. Caught up in the parts that don’t matter.
The best engagement is in the moment. It’s real, from your iPhone, and makes others think, “I can do it too!”.
You want a balance between professional photos and real. Then decide what your brand ethos is. For Angie, her cornerstone in her brand is authenticity, but if your brand is more systems and structure than cool that is who YOU are. Once you have self-awareness of who you are and the type of women/or men you are trying to attract you realize it doesn’t need to be as perfect as you thought.
It’s cheesy how people are pretending to be authentic. They will pretend to be authentic but that is not their life. This is really where it comes down to don’t do it just for sales, don’t do anything just for sales. Do it because it is sustainable and true to you.
Anytime Angie has done something just for sales, it has never ended well. It’s not sustainable, you cannot keep up with that. Her whole game is if she is going to be in it for the long haul, better start being honest and real about stuff now because they are eventually going to be on this ride with her and see all this.
Ask yourself what is sustainable?
If you are wanting to show people you without makeup, you gotta start doing it. Eventually, you cannot fake it. Inauthenticity is just so exhausting to the soul. Eventually, it ends up biting you in the butt.
The moment you allow yourself to be weird, you’ll feel free. If there is a girl out there that doesn’t resonate with you, that’s fine. She can go follow someone who knows XYZ or what she is looking for. You don’t and that’s okay.
Anytime we can show little bits of it’s not perfect or easy, will be refreshing for people.
The trendy thing to say is, “Well girl you’re Uncle Ted is not paying your bills, so don’t worry about him, screw him!”. That is easier said than done because we do care.
We’d all be lying if we said we didn’t care. We do care what people think. It can be the hardest part of your career. What you have to do is put your mission and your servant’s heart before the women/man you are speaking to before any of that.
Keep showing up and think about that ONE person that needs to see it. If we don’t focus on that then we let others opinions matter and hold weight but the most embarrassing thing we can do in life is dying with our dreams inside of us and not pursue the thing inside your heart.
We’ve all heard the saying “If you do nothing with your life you will be criticized and if you try to do something great people will still criticize you”. Either way, you might as well put yourself out there and do what you love.
What is my truth? Am I letting my ego get in the way? Versus who needs to hear this message today? Who is this post or podcast for? When we are more selfless it is easier to show up because we don’t make it about us. Dude, there is always going to be someone who thinks what you are doing is ridiculous. And 9 times out of 10 it won’t be someone remotely close to what you are doing, it is rare to be criticized by someone else in the same field or arena. It’s always someone not in the arena. We’re afraid of criticism that isn’t in the same field as us.
It’s easy to get selfish. It’s easy to let our ego take over and think “this is about me and what I look like today”. Reality check- this energy is not sustainable. This is about the service and the women/men you are speaking to. This is not a popularity contest it does not matter at the end of the day. That’s all we can do. When we make it about us, it doesn’t end well.
Stay even keel. Just keep going and serving, you cannot ride the up and down Instagram makes it be about how cool we look and the popularity contest. It’s toxic.
It takes courage to say I am enough, that doesn’t matter, tune out the noise and just go. Just create.
In the beginning, planning helped, but now it’s almost all organic and intuitive. Making sure a week of teacher content, a week of friend and thought leader. Angie calls it the TFT model and would evenly rotate these three on her page and throughout the year.
Now intuitively rotating them and plan out stories of funny behind scenes (friend), reviews (teacher), and then some swipe up of list building. It’s a nice little dance of not coming on there to sell or not coming on there to show my life and the ham sandwich you had for lunch.
Bring value.
A balance of I am your friend but also the teacher. The best balance to sell is the friend teacher balance and if you can do it well it’s game over. I think it’s kind of the little secret one-two punch.
Go in seasons as well. If you are in a launch season go a little more ham on the teacher and pitching. Go with the seasons of your content. It is healthy to have a season where you are not selling at all and are more their friend. Then when you do sell, own it, and don’t be afraid to sell. If we can dance that dance, that is influence. You can’t always be selling or always being a friend.
Authenticity and self-awareness of who you are and wear that. Everything is this balance and there are seasons to your business.
Everything is seasonal.
A lot of women are trying to work in one mode with their business and their content. They become super burned out. Marketing isn’t constantly pushing all the time, it can’t be, it’s not sustainable. It’s a flow.
The secret is that there is no ONE secret. Thinking that there was one and asking “What do successful people know that I don’t?!”, tell me!
Realize everybody is just showing up, messy, and imperfect. It’s the ones that are brave enough who say “I am not ready but I am going to jump in and try my best and keep showing up”, that wins. It’s the most beautiful thing you can embrace is throwing away perfectionism. Not smart enough, good enough, whatever enough. Showing up because that is where the clarity will show up because clarity always comes from action. Whenever you have waited too long you become more afraid and will sit in the fear too long. You won’t get anything done or take action. But when you go for it even if you are afraid and start messy, it will end up working out okay. You just have to show up.
We know perfectionists are reading this and like “AHHH NOO!!!”, but if you wait for it to be perfect you’ll probably never start. The person that is consistent wins. Create every day, it doesn’t have to be Picasso, it just has to be done.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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