Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:05]:
I am your host, Shannon McKinstrie. Welcome to Good Content, the podcast where I remove the never ending content creation guesswork and overwhelm so that you can actually enjoy being on social media again and growing your business with what has always worked, good content. Quick warning, I'm gonna get a little intense on today's episode, but we are gonna keep it short and sweet like usual. I know the last couple episodes were a little longer than normal. But I've got really exciting news to share with you, and I also will be giving you some quick win ideas as always. But I wanna talk about this epic sale that I just had for The Reels Lab and why it means so much to me that it worked. But real quick, I think I'm feeling a little feisty because I just got back from the beach. I feel so relaxed.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:55]:
I feel like I've taken such a big, deep breath in recent Months, obviously been with help from my coach and just really making sure, 'cause you know, I get imposter syndrome daily. Like, let's keep it real. Uh, I'm also someone who really, I like to say, you know, gives a shit. Like, I really, really care about helping people. So when I get DMs from you guys all the time saying like, I'm a little nervous to join The Reels Lab, I've been duped, or I joined this thing, I bought this course, I took this thing. And it didn't work, or, or it overwhelmed me. And now I feel like I'm more behind than ever. It literally breaks my heart.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:01:34]:
I literally have like, I have to take a deep breath and hopefully transfer it through the DMs because I just feel so bad and honestly sick because this is what I've been hearing forever. Now, when I had a small following, I was hearing it too, but like, I couldn't really get it out there. So now that I can talk to more of you, I feel like it's something we just need to talk about. So today's episode is one about, it's going to be about a few things, but definitely imposter syndrome, how to have a crazy, ridiculous cash day like I did. And again, the secret to marketing in general. Okay. First things first, I, when we started the Reels Lab a couple of years ago, I was like, I will, I will never put this thing on sale because I already priced it at a price that is In my opinion, I feel very comfortable doing it at that price because I know what else is out there and what the prices are. And mine has way more one-on-one support, way better stuff.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:30]:
I just, I stand on that. That is a hill I will die on because I used to charge Reels Lab. It was called Red Carpet Reels and it was $5,000 for 3 months. So to help more people, I dropped it to $297 and Here we are, right? Because I knew it worked with a smaller group of people. And of course, smaller group of people, more support, $5,000 for 3 months. But I was like, this is too good. And the results were so good. I was like, I've gotta scale this thing.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:56]:
So I created the Reels Lab and it's been a huge success. You know, it's made over $2 million and I, it's changed my life, my family's life. And I'm one of those people who money, I don't like to talk about it. I feel gross even saying that I make what I make because I, my first job I made $23,000. You know, my last job before this, I made $50-ish thousand a year. I just thought that's what I would make the rest of my life. So it just feels, but I'm saying this to say what I love and why I love talking about this stuff now openly is to make sure that you know what's possible because it is. And again, I was a B-minus student.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:31]:
Um, never on the honor roll, you know, was definitely not the book smart girl. I still don't know how I got into Virginia Tech. I think it was my essay. I don't know, guys. Uh, by the grace of God, right? But yeah, I want you to know whatever ceiling you've given yourself, blow the roof off this. Now I say this to say, when we finally did, we did a Black Friday sale last year. I was like, okay, let's do a little coupon code. I was like, why not? You know what? Let's do, let's do a sale on The Reels Lab.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:58]:
Fine. But you know, we didn't have a lot of like a funnel behind it. It was just like a quick little Black Friday and we got a lot of people in. But of course, as you do sales like this, usually people They leave, they come in, they get what they want and they dip out right now. We had about half of the people that joined stay, but I was like, we, this, we need to do the next sale smarter. So we didn't do a major launch. We had an email sequence that went for 4 days. I think there was 1 email a day and then 3 on the last day.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:24]:
My email list has, let me go look just so I don't make up numbers. Let's see. My email list has, I have 26,771. Subscribers. So not huge, but, and then I did not push this sale on a post or a reel at all. It was emails. And I did a few Instagram stories because guess what? Your girl was at the beach, which is why I'm feeling refreshed. And now I'm all feisty because I'm feeling like my brain is going because I had a break.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:50]:
I posted on stories. I think actually, let me tell you how many stories I did. So we started the sale on August 5th, which was a Wednesday. I mentioned it on stories twice. So 2 stories on Wednesday. I didn't mention the sale at all on the 6th. And then I mentioned it one time on the 7th, one story. I usually post about 5 to 10 stories a day.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:05:14]:
And then on August 8th, I shared, I didn't share about it at all. And then on August 9th, I said, hey, last, this is it. So 1, 2, 3, 4. 5, 6 stories total that I mentioned the sale and my story views. Can I see the story views on these? Uh, I can't see the numbers, but my story views range. Sometimes it's 5,000, sometimes it's, but they're not, they're not very high. We all know story views are, I forget the average, but it's, it's pretty low.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:05:39]:
So if your story views are low, actually, let me look it up. So, you know, I just Googled it. It says 6.5% for small accounts down to 1.2% for large accounts. So if you have under 10,000 followers, It's saying, uh, your view rate is about 6.5%. So I'm at over 200,000 followers. So my view rate is like 1.2. Um, so yeah, about 3,600 views. So I'm very happy when I get over 3,000, but sometimes they're 2,000.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:05]:
Um, so again, that means on average 2,000 to 3,000 people saw these stories. And so 6 stories, 7-ish emails over 4 days. And we ran ads and I just confirmed Just now with our team, total number of ads, because I'm not a big ads person. I just, oh, I don't know. Again, and highly suggest running ads in your business. Um, but again, you don't want to, you want to run it off content that's already working. That's already converting. That's one big, but, um, definitely hire someone in ads.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:35]:
It is such a complicated thing, guys. Whew. So anyway, we spent $593.37 on ads. That was our ad spend. You ready? For how much it made? $141,756. That is insane. And the membership makes about $80,000 a month already. So that's on top of, and members that are already members that upgraded, 'cause we, and this is what we did.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:59]:
So we took $100 off for the first month, meaning you can come in for $197 for the first month, grab everything you want and dip out if you want. Don't advise that because— I don't advise that obviously, but if money's tight and you're like, I just need to learn as much as I can for a month from Shannon. I'm not mad at you. And then if you lock in for the year, it's $197 a month, but they pay in full for the whole year. So current members were like, oh wait, we want to upgrade. So member upgrade of current members was 25 people. So, um, and that was really, really exciting because I love my people and I'm like, oh yeah, they're ready to go a full year. So those are the numbers, right? And it's a digital product that was already existing, so didn't have to spend time.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:07:40]:
It was just emails and some stories. But I say this to say, the reason I love helping you guys understand how much money there is to be made is because I know, and I hope, I at least hope, but I just know I meet, I've met so many of my people in real life. And every time I do, I'm like, y'all are truly my people. You are good, kind-hearted people who wanna use their money for good things. Right? I always joke that like one of my favorite things about what we've been able to do is one, buy our beach house, which right now my friend Autumn and her boyfriend and family are there right now. I like the fact that I'm able to be like, oh, my friend wants to have a summer vacation. Hey, go, go for a week. Here's the lockbox, right? That's one of my favorite things in the world.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:08:24]:
And, you know, obviously giving back to charities and being able to invest in other entrepreneurs, right? We have Julia who comes over every week and meal preps for us. We have I have a house manager who helps me just make sure things are in order around the house, right? Because my husband and I both work from home. It's just chaos. We got the kids, we got 3 pets. It's, you know what I mean? I'm able to invest in other people. I'm able to help other people pay their bills. And in the Reels Lab, I'm able to help people change their lives with the content they create. And it's ethical content.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:08:55]:
So this is where I'm gonna get a little feisty. So I, after some conversations with people. The reason I reduced the Reels Lab, because again, like I said, I don't like doing sales because I do, I really do feel like it's already priced very fairly. And actually when you get in the Reels Lab, you get all of the previous month's content. So it's like you technically get a month free, but the reason I did it, and I hope that's not coming off nasty. Um, I just know even if someone were to come in at full price for a month, they're still getting 2,000 to 3,000 dollars worth of value. But this is what I was hearing for the past few months, and it was breaking my heart. For the past 2 months, actually, lots of DMs.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:09:34]:
I was duped. I invested in so-and-so, and it was completely overwhelming, and I don't— and I'm kicking myself. Everyone I talked to felt ashamed on top of just feeling already behind on Instagram and feeling like they can't get any traction. They can't— they're struggling. They can't do it. They're already panicking because they need this to work. They've now been duped by a coach, expert, et cetera. And for that, I was almost close to being like, you know what, let's give everyone a month free.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:04]:
But, um, I just feel like, I don't know, this is not fair to the people inside and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I am trying to think of something. I mean, I do offer something for free. I have my Hooked Up freebie and my, my masterclass and all that stuff too. But basically I ran the sale because I just love my people so much and I was like, I feel Horrible that that happened. And let's do it because I know as a marketer and as someone who creates content for a living, but creates content for other people as well, if you can make people feel safe and seen and heard, you've got them in a good way, in an ethical way, right? There's a lot of people who do marketing really, really well, but that doesn't mean they're good at what they do. They're just really good marketers. And I see it a lot in my world.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:47]:
In the fitness world, in the real estate world, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's in your world. I know you're going, mm-hmm. Like, raise your hand right now. I know I can't see you, but like, raise your hand if you've been duped. And I think it's because I, I really try very hard because even when I was a baby social media manager in 2015 and coaches were up in my DMs being like, join my mastermind, join, it's $6,000. And I'm like, we were paycheck to paycheck.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:11]:
We were maxed out. We were in medical debt. 'Cause of the traumatic birth I had with Camden. Um, we were renting this tiny apartment. Then they would say things like, you'll never make money as a social media manager. You need to become a coach. And I saw all the social media managers in my field switching to coaching. And guess what? I don't think a lot of them are still doing what they do anymore 'cause it burned 'em out.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:32]:
They followed people who pressured them, made them feel guilty, shamed them for doing what they like, even if it didn't make them a lot of money. Did I make any money in the first 5 years of my business? Heck no. LOL. Okay. I loved it. And at the time, now, do I always say now invest before you're ready? Yeah, but not if you have to open a credit card and go into debt over it. I would never, and I've never ever pressured anyone into buying anything that they bought from me. And do you know how many refunds I've given over the years? Someone's just like, ooh, I actually thought it was the, uh, here, here's your money.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:05]:
There's so many people out there like me, you guys. Read their terms and conditions, go to their value statements, ask people. I, people will be like, hey, can I talk to someone that's in the Reels Lab? Yeah, here you go. Here's 5 of them. I don't want you spending money and ever regretting a darn thing because I've been there and it does, it feels embarrassing. It makes you sick to your stomach. So I'm telling you right now, that's why I did the sale. And I think people could feel it.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:30]:
And I think that's why it was so successful. It wasn't because I did Gimmicks. I didn't do, right? And like, you're gonna, you're gonna be so behind if you don't do this. I did it because I want y'all to win. So trust me, you will never get any shame from me. And that was the way of selling many, many years ago. But we know right now people are in a panic. There's a lot happening, right? And you're just like, it's content.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:55]:
And like, I love to tell y'all, it's not that deep. You don't need to take a course. You don't need to And in fact, don't, because the course you'll take right now, it's probably obsolete. You need someone who is in marketing, whether it's you, you hire a content creator, a social media manager, you hop into my Reels Lab. You need someone who is on top of it and giving, literally just handing you, here's what to say, here's what to do, here's the hook to use, um, to make it unique and you. So just know if you have a feeling in your gut that it's not right, and even if it was me and you're like, I don't really know. My teaching style isn't for everyone, and that's okay. But just know, if someone is making you feel like you have to do things one way, run, sprint, because I don't teach that way, and neither do any of my friends in this world.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:43]:
Like, like if I was in the hospital for like a month, there's so many people I would know that I'd be like, here, I'm gonna have her handle it because I fully know that they will not mess anything up. Yeah. Um, and then there's ones in our field that aren't like that. And I hate that because a lot of them are really good marketers, but doesn't mean they're great teachers. Doesn't mean they're great business people. Just be careful. And I know sometimes you just got to get burned to know what it feels like. I also want you guys to know with this, like, enjoy the climb.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:14]:
That sounds so whack. Like, who am I, Miley Cyrus, right? Like, it's the climb or whatever. But like, if you're in the trenches right now, I want you to document it because that reel a year or two from now where you're like, me 2 years ago, me now, you're gonna be so glad you have that video to look back on. So with that said, a tip for you for quick win. This is what I want you to create this week. I want you to start sharing your values because I truly believe this is why I made $141,000 on a weekend that I was at the beach with my kids and barely on my phone. Because if, when people trust you and whether it's 1,000 followers or 10,000, trust is everything, guys. Trust is something once you have their trust.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:56]:
It's hard to break it unless you do something unethical, right? And this is a perfect example. Her reel just says, and it's a video of her at the library with her kids reading a book, simple B-roll. I think the library is cooler than Target. And under it as a little sub-hook, 3 seconds later, 3 library perks I can't believe are free. Right away, you know a lot about this woman. She barely said a thing, but you already know she's more into price sustainability, being present, low screen time, right? What are your values? And if you don't have a value statement yet, I'm begging you. You need, like, I always love to tell people, like, I don't care. All are welcome.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:15:31]:
Everyone's welcome in my community. Kind people only, ethical marketing, no gimmicks, no sleaziness, right? Like that, these are the things I stand on. It's why I've grown a lot slower, but I won't do it any other way. This is to show you, because doing what I've known to always trust myself has gotten me where I am today. So we'll end it with this. And for me, if I were doing this reel, I would say, I think posting whatever you want is cooler than following a content calendar, something like that. Right. And then I would say like my favorite hooks for people stuck in 300-view jail.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:16:06]:
Incredible. I kind of want to ask her like, how many followers did you get from that? Um, cause it looks like she's kind of newish creator, but yeah. So, but it looks like very high compared to her other content. It looks like this is really like one of her really highest. And then everyone in the comments, you make me feel seen. Love the library. Can't wait to do this with my kids one day. Cheaper too.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:16:24]:
The public library is the best, hands down. You are inviting people into your world. Social media is inviting people into your world again and again and again and sharing what you stand for. Start standing for something. Share your values, even if it's something silly and simple as you like the library more than Target. If that makes sense for what your account is about, say it. So take that, think about it, and I'll talk to you next week. And make sure you've looked at the post, 'cause this is, you're listening to this on a Tuesday.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:16:54]:
Make sure you look at my post from yesterday with the hooks, 'cause they're fire. If you can't afford my stuff yet, don't worry. Like, that's why I've got this podcast. That's why I share this stuff on Mondays. They're the, you know, the full thing on Mondays. That's why I have my free masterclass. Grab everything you can. I love you, and I just hope this inspired you today.