Beyond the Scroll: Long-Term Strategy & Self-Preservation in the Age of Noise

This drop unpacks a core business and energetic truth: if your visibility depends heavily on social media, you don’t have a strategy, you have a placeholder—and one that may increasingly risk your mental health too, oof. From deleting apps to hitting major press, I break down how long-term strategy is a form of self-preservation and leadership—and why it’s the first pillar inside Fire of Transformation™. I share my favorite email tool (Flodesk), how to diversify far beyond the algorithm, and why real leaders build infrastructure that outlives the scroll.

As mentioned, here's my Flodesk affiliate link to get 50% a year unlimited before they end the unlimited option in November.

If you desire long-term strategy that includes energetically sustainable marketing beyond social, in lieu of your livelihood being entirely Instagram- or equivalent-dependent, DM me on Instagram for an Intensive or apply to join us inside Fire of Transformation™ mastermind where we hold this as a value.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Business Priestess Activation, audio drops for mystics in business where entrepreneurship is ritual, strategy is soulcraft, and expansion is inevitable. I'm Elizabeth Rowan, spiritual mentor, yogi, and business priestess. Here, we don't do formulas, we do fire. These transmissions are potent activations to ignite your long-term strategy, self-leadership, energetic mastery and embodiment, and lasting legacy in the world. Because your sacred work isn't just business, it's business and being. Let's begin. Welcome back, Priestess. I have no doubt that you have noticed that lately on social media it has reached a fever pitch of noise, chatter, completely jarring transition or lack thereof from say content perhaps you were enjoying to some unsolicited in your face latest horror. This, as you well know, as your nervous system is for alarm firing, is not sustainable. Which is why I'm excited today to talk to you about long-term strategy in this age of increasing noise. Think of this. What if, fill in the blank, your chosen social media marketing platform went dark tomorrow? Would your business survive it? Would your audience know where to find you? Equally, if not more importantly, would you know where to find you? This is what we get to really lovingly, discerningly look at when we are exploring and implementing long-term strategy. Long-term strategy that's actually freaking sustainable for you, your nervous system in this day and age. I have long said I have zero desire to attempt to quote unquote retire from Instagram. Some minute percentage might. Specifically, the first pillar, which is long-term sustainable strategy. So let's start here. Why social media isn't strategy and certainly is decreasingly so to begin with. You already know your socials are owned by someone else. They are increasingly just, I'm finding them incessantly noisy, unstable. And some also perhaps increasingly near antiquated in terms of the ways that we are still trying to make them work because things are now so ad heavy. Gone are the Tumblr era-esque days of early Instagram where you could get hundreds of likes from a picture of your feet in the grass or your lunch, right? We're beyond that. And for better or for worse, yes, it's epic theoretical reach when it comes to marketing. However, it is increasingly a pay-to-play platform. And that's just one example of many across the just near-endless options when it comes to social channels. So not only are they noisy, unstable, owned by someone else. Here's a great example of that last point. You may have seen this if you are or are not on TikTok. It was recently acquired by an extremely conservative Trump-allied company. This is just the latest reminder that not only do we not own these platforms, but there's a degree of risk now increasingly in having your presence somewhere. We all saw some of the news last week with people being doxxed, fired, et cetera, from opinionated social media posts. Mix that with your marketing strategy, make it your primary marketing strategy, and we've got a real risky potential problem waiting to happen. That's if your nervous system is great with all of this to begin with, right? Which mine isn't. I have done two things as of late to navigate this. One is delete some of my social apps off of my phone. Threads, for example, I will absolutely access on my desktop, but no longer is it right here in my pocket within reach for endless refreshing at all time. The second thing that I have done is download a different app called Screen Zen that I highly recommend. This is not a paid advertisement. I'm not an affiliate, but it basically allows you to set times, durations that you're able to access various apps at X number of frequency throughout your day. Otherwise, you are locked out. It's brilliant and it gives you the opportunity to have a somewhat thoughtful prompt as to why you're checking before you just grab your phone when you're at, say, I don't know, a red light or waiting in a line, that kind of compulsion. So deleting the apps from your phone, that's a power move. Another power move in terms of self-preservation is screens in or an equivalent that lets you time block your use on socials. So that was a little sidebar of how I'm navigating social media myself over here these days, as things just seem to get louder and louder and more um extreme in the range of content that you just passively come across and are having thrown in your face just by opening your phone. So that said, back to why social isn't an entire marketing strategy. Visibility that depends entirely on social isn't a long-term viable strategy, certainly not one anchored in self-preservation, because it is completely hooked in and subject to algorithm unless you are paying to play. And there's something great to be said about purchasing ads. And I've absolutely worked with clients and myself have run ads so that you are still visible without having yourself to be on. And we've talked at length in previous audio drops about yes, the benefit of theoretic global marketing that's free via social. However, those days are wrapping up pretty quickly in favor of algorithm forward, pay-to-play, purchased ad buys. That alone creates a very different environment as well from say how you may have been using social media even a year ago, certainly a few years ago, and absolutely prior to say 2020. All of this and more is why this diversifying marketing beyond social is a priority of mine on your behalf inside the first pillar long-term strategy of my fire of transformation mastermind. Because without it, you're at best chasing yes, validation on someone else's own stage or platform, but it is all quite fickle and subject to go dark at a moment's notice. And I do not speak to this to scare you, but rather to bring forth that there are some pretty fantastic and robust alternatives when you are willing to do business differently. And if you're here listening to this, chances are you deeply desire to not only do business differently, but to do it increasingly so that it is in deep honoring of your work and you as the channel of your work. Like you completely nervous system fried because you are just in the vortex of social media all the time because your revenue and your income depend on that is not a strong, steady, clear, grounded, embodied, balanced channel through which your magic and intuition can flow. So I mentioned that I deleted several of my own social media apps. I added the Screen Zen app. And again, there's that, and there's numerous equivalents that you can find for yourself. But I did all of this to create a reconnection entry point for myself that was not happening when I was constantly churning out content, constantly engaging, constantly refreshing, and not surprising to me or to you as a mystic listening to this, right on cue in making some of these decisions for myself. A press feature drop to a platform of over, this is wild to me, a platform of over 60 million readership, not social media adjacent. With a single pitch, I was able to reach that sized audience. No Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, Blue Sky, what else have I not said? TikTok, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. None of that required. And a press pitch absolutely grew legs as far as my reach. I call that confirmation. I also want to be clear here that long-term marketing or long-term strategy, including diversifying marketing beyond social, includes and expands beyond media and press coverage. I love media and press coverage because of exactly what I just articulated to you. The reach that you stand to make is phenomenal. And I think it's a lot of fun to be the solution, the source to a journalist uh query, to a journalist consideration. Now, in addition to press, media coverage, certainly PR, certainly email, we're going to get into that here in a moment, certainly podcast in real life, organic collaboration, and so on and so forth. You can hear there are near limitless alternatives to just depending exclusively in large part on social media. So let's speak specifically to email as part of your long-term infrastructure. This need not be the whole weight of it, but part of. So I have used Flowdesk for many years and Flowdesk F L O D E S K, I am a partner with, and it is beautiful, first of all, if you get my emails, I hope you will agree. Their platform, their designs are extremely well done. It is highly intuitive. You do not need to have any degree of tech savvy to navigate it, and it really presents and honors your brand in visual and in voice. So this is free from algorithm. This is woman-owned, by the way, which we also love. It absolutely lets me market to various segments to my list on my terms. So I truly have been paying Flowdesk$19 a month, which is absolutely absolutely insane for years now. And I am here to tell you this is one means of marketing that is a high touch point and feels very personal. There are individuals who I am sure I follow on social media, rarely, if ever, see their post. However, absolutely flag and star their emails in my inbox so that I can devour them in my time at length on my schedule. All of this is part of the power of email. Asterisk to note when it comes to Flowdesk, they are shortly eliminating their unlimited plan. And I will drop in the show notes here my affiliate link that lets you book in the unlimited before it ends, I think sometime in November, for 50% off your entire year. If you do not yet have an email service provider, I recommend Flowdesk wholeheartedly. And if you do already have an email service provider that is not Flowdesk, and perhaps it's one that was in a recent uh less than ideal PR moment around dramatically raising their rates, this is Convert Kit. Your alternative may well be Flowdesk. So I will leave it at that and I will drop my affiliate link in the show notes as mentioned. Back to long-term strategy. Long-term strategy, including diversifying your marketing beyond social, gets to be, as I alluded to, highly personalized to you so that you can actually sustain it. So that it's a joy to create, not like that meme that at least my clients and I pass back and forth incessantly of this girl sitting in a table covered with like wine and liquor bottles with a half-smoked cigarette hanging out of her hand, her head in her hands, and all it says is time to post again. If that's you, let me tell you, there's another way. You don't have to live like this. I don't know about you, but I'm in my mid-40s and I'm like, I legitimately feel too old to be messing around in Instagram and TikTok for my livelihood. There was a time and place for that, amazing, and times have changed. So if you're still listening, I trust that you are with me in that thought. So when we're talking about long-term strategy and diversified marketing, all of this is like everything in your business. Yes, ritual and yes, very much a sacred act of energetic self-preservation. And energetic self-preservation is critical when you yourself are the talent. You're the talent. And I would imagine you're also your own booking agent. You're the talent, the booking agent. And what else might you be? In part your own messaging strategist, your own copywriter, perhaps. Some of you may be your own, I don't know, accountant, online business manager, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There is no room for energetic bleed out when you're all of those things, and the talent, and not just any talent, but an actual living channel that energetically is absolutely either this like raw, wide, open, vulnerable state, or embodied, composed, and hollow bone able to channel for yourself and your clients. So this is the necessity of building out in your business an entire ecosystem. Yes, in your business and yes in your marketing. And this is much bigger bird's eye view than just curating a cute feed with brand colors that you like and graphics that you love. Someone who did my branding said this to me years ago. She had zero interest in if I liked it. It has nothing to do with if I like my brand colors and my visuals. What we are trying to do is evoke something from the unconscious. So that you can feel is a very different level of branding than just, oh, my favorite colors and Canva, right? So this is where you come back to the remembrance and reverence of your business as a living altar, not a content mill. If you want to work with me and it's just for social media content, I will happily refer you to someone else. If you want to work with me and it is to cultivate an actual thriving ecosystem of a business that has the heft to stand the test of time and infuse, not deplete you in its long-term strategy, including marketing. Let us absolutely have that discussion. This is the first pillar inside Fire of Transformation Mastermind for a reason. My interest on your behalf is ensuring that your work lives well beyond the endless, mindless flash in the pan scroll. When we zoom out on this even further, what's also actually happening here is a call to leadership. This is a call to leadership of yourself and of how you are doing your business. I love too that I'm recording this here just days before a big astrological weekend with equinox right on the flip as well. We've got new moon, I believe it's a solar eclipse, fall equinox, and so on. All of this prime time for you to lovingly, critically, lovingly look at where you are perpetuating things in your business that you actually don't want any part of. Where are you doing old ways because that they used to work? Things used to work back in, say, 2021 when coaching, healing, yoga, energetic work was a different industry. You're doing things because they used to work, or because someone told you to. My energy from this in a way that you can't in something I've created in Canva, right? So what we're talking about here is yes, leadership, you to you. How do you in now almost the fourth quarter of 2025 want to actually lead yourself in your business? What isn't working anymore? Can you this weekend with all this astro opening get really discerning there in? What for real are you over in your business? And can that be okay? And then can you get yourself inside a circle, whether it's my mastermind or someone else's, to start to give yourself permission to do it differently, to be bolder, to be pitching media, for example, that hits a platform of 60 million readers rather than resign yourself like the girl in that meme crumpled over a table, that it's time to post again. So I'm calling you toward even greater leadership than you already hold around pivoting in your business. If you're curious about how I have done that this year alone, there are a couple drops in the last two months, I believe, around big moves that I made in my business and the equally big windfalls energetically that followed. So absolutely go look those up if you are moved in this way. You get to build what outlasts any mood. You get to build a business that infuses you when you are offline. This is also how you lead when no one's watching, right? It's also how you get to stay visible without being addicted to being on the apps. What a messed up thing to be, just because of how we are culturally in this day and age, addicted to scrolling all this stuff and also hating to post. That's no way to live. That's no way to live. My most recent audio drop was regarding business maturity. Go listen to that as well because all of this is a call yes to leadership and really evolving your business into a deeper maturity such that you can embody her even further. You become a believable leader in and for your business when it's actually a hundred percent resonant with you, right? Because people can feel when something's off, we can feel when there's a disconnect, we can feel when there's reluctance, hesitance, you're not really buying what you're putting out there, right? When embody deep leadership and self-trust and a sustainable long-term strategy is within reach for you. And let me tell you how your life, your nervous system, your energy, your work will grow and glow from that. So to tie all of this together and wrap us up nicely today, before I go teach this evening, I invite you to stop negotiating with instability, frankly, through your apps, through very short-term marketing. I also invite you to stop pretending that these short-term tactics and short-term strategy is enough when you know you desire to steward a business for years, if not decades, to come. Inside Fire of Transformation, we co-create together businesses that are sovereign and spacious and structured to hold you for the long game and energetically self-sustaining, if not outright infusing. If you are a big yes to this, a big yes to give get me off my phone, a big yes to deepen and broaden my marketing reach beyond freaking social media for the rest of my life, absolutely DM me on Instagram to book a month long intensive, or apply to join us inside a fire of transformation mastermind, where we do this all the time. Because your favorite self and your future business are already inside.