How to Become a Content Creator on TikTok with Racheal Cook
February 21, 2023
As an older millennial, I’m both curious and anxious about TikTok. I can recognize the value of joining TikTok and using it for my business. But at the same time, I have no clue how to become a content creator on TikTok in a way that helps me grow my audience, but doesn’t feel like another marketing “chore” I’m doing because I have to.
Which is exactly what I hear so many clients and colleagues express, too.
This is why I’m so excited to have Racheal Cook, business growth strategist and founder of the CEO Collective, as a guest expert to talk all things TikTok. Why? Well, she isn’t a TikTok strategist. She doesn’t offer any social media services in her business, and even better—she hasn’t even been using it for a full year in her business.
Her value in this series is that she is a small business owner—just like you and me—who decided to experiment with TikTok in her marketing. And the results were incredible.
Racheal has used all the social media platforms for her business. She utilized Facebook Live videos for her marketing when they were all the rage and saw significant traction from jumping in early on that trend, among many other platform wins she’s experienced on Instagram and LinkedIn.
And what she’s also understands is a slow down of those tactics, in which the over-saturation of people doing the same things over and over again translates into feeling like you’re screaming into a void as you were a business owner. However, Racheal paid close enough attention and recognized when those marketing efforts weren’t performing in the same ways as they did before.
So when Racheal noticed that TikTok was beginning to gain more popular attention and other demographics besides young GenZers were using it, she knew she needed to ride the wave and utilize TikTok as part of her marketing efforts.
But part of Racheal’s experiment was learning how to become a content creator on TikTok in a way that aligned with her values, goals, and felt good for her business. Just as you’ll need to figure out what works best for you.
I won’t give away all her secrets in this introduction, but let’s just say that Rachel approaches TikTok differently than many people. She doesn’t perform. In fact, her current approach to creating content on TikTok revolves around batched and prerecorded videos.
So, if you’re curious about how to become a content creator on TikTok, her approach is one option that may work for you, too.
In this episode of Talk Copy to Me, Racheal Cook and I are going to talk all things content creation. You’ll learn about how she watches for historical social media trends and patterns to determine where and how she’ll spend her energy online. Then, she’ll walk you through exactly how she approaches content creation in her own business and what wins she’s witnessed (immediately and in the short term!) from her initial six-month TikTok content creation.
Curious about how to become a content creator on TikTok? Here’s what Racheal and Erin discuss in this episode of Talk Copy to Me
The importance of not being attached to a specific platform, but instead the outcomes you hope for
How all social platforms were created for young adults, but then eventually shift into being useful for business owners
How the U.S. elections of 2016 and 2020 and the major events throughout the world in 2020 shifted how creators shared content and educated on all platforms, but especially TikTok
Why you don’t have to put in a performative effort to grow on TikTok
Why Rachael hired a video company to help her create high-quality videos and audio for her TikTok content
Erin and Racheal’s best suggestions around creating TikTok content with the help of content pillars
The mistakes content creators make when they create content for social media (or their websites!)
Why it’s important to keep in mind the different groups of people you’re speaking to, and to remember that you need to talk to people who don’t know you yet
The massive (and obvious) increase in various KPIs that Racheal noticed through her TikTok content experience
The changes (if any) Racheal would make to her batch TikTok content creation process
Other podcast episodes and resources mentioned in this episodes:
Racheal’s client Megan Ford from Be Kind Coaching, and how before Racheal joined TikTok she was so intrigued by how Megan approached TikTok content and how it great Megan’s audience
How Racheal was inspired by Glenda Baker, an Atlanta Georgia real estate professional created professional quality content for her business on TikTok.
If you’re really struggling with coming up with content ideas, Racheal suggests using Answer the Public to help you ideate.
Rachealpredictions for TikTok in 2023 (and Erin’s thoughts, too!):
Rachel starts her prediction by saying. “Right now, what’s really interesting is I am seeing a huge shift in TikTok optimizing for search.” So if you’re using TikTok as a marketing tool in your business, you’re going to want to make sure you optimize the content you’re creating.
Now, of course you should optimize things like your name, your handle, your profile description, the title of your video and each video’s description, but don’t forget the potential for audio search either.
Racheal says, “I do believe they have an audio search happening in the background. We might not realize it but they are searching through content for keywords.”
Not quite sure what that is? Audio search is where the words you speak within the video are “scraped” for SEO search. Think of it like this: You know how you can get automatic captions created for you in some videos? That tech is able to “hear” the words you use and translate them into words on the screen. Is it possible that TikTok (and other platforms) are “listening” and using what they hear from us in our videos to inform search intent and search results?
This is exactly why Racheal uses TikTok’s native captions instead of captioning the videos pre-publication. (Oh, and aside from Erin: Use captions whenever possible to make your content accessible!)
Quotes about how to become a content creator on TikTok from Racheal and Erin
“I’m not attached to the platform. I’m focused on…How am I going to get attention? How am I going to get in front of the right people?” – Racheal Cook
“And then we ran into another challenge when the 2016 election and then the 2020 election happened. It really disrupted ads for a lot of small business owners, including myself, I can’t outspend a Super PAC.” – Racheal Cook
“I have always been the person who wanted to embrace aging. But as I am aging, and seeing like these things come up with technology… I’m like, ‘No! I was the child who helped my grandparents, my parents, my siblings with technology.’ This means I’m officially an old lady now!” – Erin Ollila
“Pay attention to the people who pay you not just the people who want to pick your brain.” – Racheal Cook
“We need to train the algorithm to have our potential people focus on us as the TikTok creators. Pillar content and similar-themed videos are doing that for you.” – Erin Ollila
“TikTok is a discovery engine…If you go into your Instagram analytics, or your Facebook analytics, most of the people seeing that content are actively already following you. So trying to get more followers is really challenging…But on TikTok 95% of the people watching my videos are finding me for the very first time. They have not followed me yet.” – Racheal Cook
“That’s where I really try to reposition people and how they think about creating content—whether it is website copy, blog content, or social…because we don’t need to talk to our clients about every thing we could potentially talk to them about.” – Erin Ollila
“Being niched down is an asset. So if you have a specific topic, you want to go really strong.” – Racheal Cook
Rachel wants you to experiment with creating content on TikTok, just like she did.
She says, “Keep in mind, TikTok is a discovery engine, and also, being niched down is actually an asset. So if you have a specific topic, you want to go really strong.”
Now, as for the actual homework, she wants you to give yourself 30 days to see if you can grow on the platform. And you can do this by batch creating content and then scheduling out one a day for 30 days.
If the idea of creating TikTok content in one batch stresses you out, don’t do it! Take one week to research, plan and film your content. The first day could be all research and content ideation. Day two could be making outlines for your TikTok videos. And you could approach days three through five by filming ten videos each day. Once that work week is over, you’ll have enough content to post once a day for an entire month on TikTok.
One more quick note here: Don’t be a perfectionist. I can’t tell you how long I avoided creating content for my own business just because of really high standards that I have for myself and a mix of anxiety about what people would think of the end results. None of that matters. What matters is that it’s out there and not living in your head where no one else can experience it.
But back to the point. Racheal says, “Make it a goal that you’re going to post a video a day for 30 days, if you can do that, you will probably see pretty quickly whether or not you’re going to tap in to the audience that you want to get in front of.”
I’ll be honest, friend. This feels super do-able to me. I’m so motivated to experiment with Racheal’s homework assignment that I’m currently in the process of ideating my topics. So if you like to consume TikTok content, keep an eye out for me.
Learn about our guest expert, Racheal Cook
As an award-winning business strategist, host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast, and founder of The CEO Collective, Racheal Cook is on a mission to end entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money for women business owners.
Leveraging her 90 Day CEO Operating System, Racheal helps women entrepreneurs design rinse and repeat systems, develop business assets, and level up their leadership to sustainable scale their businesses without burnout. Racheal is a sought after speaker on entrepreneurship, marketing, and productivity featured by the US Chamber of Commerce, Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, Business Insider, Female Entrepreneur Association, and Business Insider.
Racheal lives in Richmond, VA with her husband Jameson, three pre-teens, and 3 furbabies – so you’ll often find her with a fantasy fiction in one hand and a glass of prosecco in another relaxing on her favorite spot the back porch.
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.
When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, The Driven Woman Entrepreneur, Go Pitch Yourself, and Counsel Cast.
Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
Learn more about Erin’s VIP Day options if you’d like to learn more about how you can hire her to help you with your content strategy
Here’s the transcript for episode 055 on how to become a content creator on TikTok with guest expert Racheal Cook
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. SPEAKERS
Racheal Cook, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila 00:00
hello friends today I am here with Rachel cook a business growth strategist and founder of the CEO collective. What you may not know about Rachel, though is that she actually has a degree in French horn performance alongside two business degrees. So tell me, have you always been a high achiever? Or is this just something that was a temporary college thing for you?
Racheal Cook 00:26
Oh my god. It’s called gifted kid burnout. It’s real. It is so real. I’m just wired this way. That said, my instrument is currently sitting in a closet. And my husband’s also a musician and winter, went to school and decided to sign up for music. We thought Great. We’ve got two trombones, a French horn, a piano, Piccolo clarinet, like, we’ve got all this stuff for a band and, and they’re like, No, we’re gonna take violin.
Erin Ollila 00:54
Yeah, it’s so funny to be a parent and see how in some ways your kids are so similar to you. And in other ways, they are just not what you expected. Because I think you had like preconceived notions of what it would be and then they like, they completely blow your mind with the different ways that they are their own human. I love watching how that plays out. Absolutely, absolutely. Part of the reason I am so excited to talk to you today about tick tock is because you are not a tick tock strategist, right? Like you are a business strategist who use tick tock as a tool. And I as a SEO website, copywriter, I have a lot of social media conversations with my clients, because they’re either so burnt out from what efforts they’re doing, they’re showing up on platforms that they don’t want to be on, or they don’t know how to show up on the platforms that they really want to test out. So I love that our conversation today is starting with the story of why you would join tick tock like, so can you kind of I actually I want to point out one more thing, by the time this goes live, you won’t have even been on tick tock for a whole year at that point. So tell me, why join tick tock for you. What were you hoping to get out of it? And how did you grow from the start to where you are now, I know that’s a lot. So basically take as many paragraphs as you need to talk about.
Racheal Cook 02:19
It’s a long and winding road friends strap in. Because I have been in business for 15 years. So I have seen the rise and fall of many social media platform, like basically all of them. And, you know, it’s so interesting, I remember when I first started my business in 2008, Facebook didn’t even have business pages, but people were starting to use Facebook or business like we’d go on there and talk about our business. And it was great because no one else was doing that. So you were timing wise, in a perfect position to ride the wave of Facebook growing. And same with Instagram, Instagram rolled out, you could ride the wave, like if you happen to get on platforms at the right, right time, you could ride the wave of those platforms having the situation where there was an inverse relationship between the number of people on the platform consuming content, versus the people who were creating content. Right. So keep that in mind, this is very important. This is something that I think a lot of people forget about when they’re starting marketing now is a lot of those platforms are now not prioritizing organic content, you can’t get people to see it, it just starts to feel like you’re shouting into the void, especially when you’re first getting started. And you don’t even know what you’re talking about yet, right? Like you’re not even sure what your contents gonna look like. You’re not really sure what your message is, it’s really hard to come out into a very crowded area, and cut through that noise when it’s already reached a saturation point. So I’ve been through the rise and fall of many of those things. And I have been lucky and that I knew about that relationship early on. So I have done the rise on Facebook, the rise on Instagram. When Facebook ads launched, I wrote that too. When Facebook Live launched, I did a full year of Facebook Lives, and did a full year of doing a live every single week. And the minute I see something not working anymore again, because now there’s more people on there and people’s attention is shifting. I’m not attached to the platform. I’m focused on how am I going to get attention? How am I going to get in front of the right people? So I think this is one area where social media annoys and even upsets a lot of entrepreneurs because they’re like, I’m trying all these things and nothing’s working. It’s like, well,
Racheal Cook 04:46
there is a lifespan of some of these tools and things and if if you can understand that you’ll have a better experience. So what happened for me is I’ve had a podcast for about 10 years and for me Everything comes back to my podcasts like my podcast is my core content, and everything else. Content marketing wise, is spin offs of my podcast, right? Like when I did a Facebook Live show, it was related to that week’s podcast episode. My newsletter is related to this week’s podcast episode. The blogs we create are from the podcast episode like everything. The podcast is the hub, everything else spins out of that. So I could see. I mean, at the beginning of 2019 2020, we could see the reach organic reach on everything was dropping a ton. And then we ran into another challenge when the 2016 election and then the 2020 election happened. It really disrupted ads for a lot of small business owners, including myself, I can’t outspend a Super PAC. And I’m trying to get in front of women ages 30 to 50, who are entrepreneurs, like, I am in front of the same audience that super PAC wants to spend money on. So I was like, Okay, how else am I going to get attention. And I was paying attention to tic tock kind of out of the corner of my eye. At first, I did not take it seriously, like most people, because just like we talked about with Instagram. And just like we talked about with Facebook, it was for kids, right? Remember, Facebook started on college campuses. I was in grad school, when Facebook rolled out. And you had to be at a university in order to get access to Facebook. That’s for kids. There’s nothing you can do with business. Same thing with Instagram. This is just kids, they’re just taking pictures of their food and taking pictures of like, where they’re at and their clothes or whatever. But over time, things change right over time, the conversation shifts and what started to happen as I was paying attention to tic tock. One is I was getting increasingly worn out from Facebook and Instagram. Like I didn’t even want to show up on Facebook. I barely scroll Facebook or looking at Facebook. I feel like the conversations just got so negative and so exhausting. There was just a lot going on there that was really frustrating to participate in. Same thing happened with Instagram, right? Like suddenly it just felt like you’re hearing from the same people. The conversations are just, you’re done. But what was happening on tick tock that really piqued my interest was about mid 2020. We were already in the pandemic. So yes, there were a bunch of people who are getting on and starting to learn tic tock dances and stuff like that. But there was also a surge of creators getting on Tik Tok, that were sharing very important information about racial justice around social justice around diversity, equity and inclusion, they were providing a lot of informative educational content. And I was like, Oh, the way they’re doing this is really fascinating to me. And I was finding all these creators I’ve never heard of before. And I started paying more attention. To me, that’s the tipping point when a platform goes from just being like kids having fun to now creators are stepping in and using it as a way to educate using it as a way to share content. It’s really valuable. I started to lean in. And then I talked to one of my clients. Her name is Megan Ford, and she owns B kind coaching which is a parenting coaching company. And she’s also kind of always ahead of the curve on social media. She’s always looking at like, what’s the latest thing they’re rolling out? And how can I be an early adopter knowing that the algorithms of these platforms are going to prioritize her content? Well, she started getting on Tik Tok, and sharing her parenting content. And of course, it took off because everybody’s at home with their kids during the pandemic. And they want to know, how do I stop yelling at my kids? Like, how do I get my kids to clean up? How do I you know, so her content started taking off. And then she came to me and she’s like, I cannot believe the growth I’m seeing you need to get on here. So I’m, I usually kind of sit and watch and I want to see who is doing what I think is interesting. I had some very clear ideas of what I did and didn’t want to do. One, I’m not going to dance. I’m not going to point at words on my screen. I didn’t want to have to chase trends. I didn’t want to have to lip sync. I didn’t want to do any of those fancy transitions. Like let’s be honest. I’m I’m officially like old now. I don’t know how to use most of the things on my phone. So I
Erin Ollila 09:39
say the same thing. I’m like, you know one, I have always been the person who wanted to embrace aging. 100% But as I am aging, and seeing like these things come up that like I’m struggling with like technology. I’m like, No, I was the child who helped my grandparents, my parents, my siblings. Technology. This means I’m officially an old lady now, but sorry to interrupt your train of thought, I just want to commiserate with you and also celebrate the aging as well.
Racheal Cook 10:09
It’s like we used to program the VCRs for everybody. I still get calls from my mom, like, I can’t get into my email. And I’m like, Okay, I can’t help you from here. Yeah. But there are certain things where you just realize like, this is not really worth my time to figure out all these little tiny things. And just, it’s not aligned with my brand. Right. And for me, that’s, that’s a big thing. So my brand is CEO Collective, we work with women entrepreneurs, who are already at or approaching six figures in horror, ready to scale. I don’t talk to business beginners, I’m not focused on getting your first clients. I’m not interested in hobby businesses, like all of those are great. But there’s a gazillion other people out there talking to the people who just want to make an extra 500 bucks a month. That’s not who I’m talking to. I’m talking to much larger businesses, women who are really in more of a leadership role and how they’re running their business, and who are now not just driven by, you know how this business can pay them. But how this business can truly create jobs and be impactful. So I knew that that was important. And I needed to make sure if I was going to explore this platform, that it had to be aligned with my brand. So I started thinking through that, and then I found a real estate agent who I became obsessed with. Her name is Glenda Baker. She’s from Atlanta, Georgia. She runs a multimillion dollar real estate company. And what I loved about her content is it felt to me, just like now, like it felt like she was getting interviewed by somebody, and there just happened to be a camera recording it. So instead of being a podcast interview, it was short form video interviews, and I thought you know what I’ve been doing podcast interviews. For years, they’ve been one of the primary ways I’ve grown my own podcast, and one of my favorite ways to just continue to get in front of new audiences. So once I saw how she was doing it, I was like, I love this. She had a video team. She hired a camera person collaborated with them. And she was able to create very high quality video, high quality audio, and deliver great content. It was not fluffy, there were no trending sounds. And she was just herself, like just absolutely herself. And so that’s what made me think, okay, I can do this. And I decided earlier this year, I was like, I’m going to do a six month experiment. To see what I think about tick tock does it work for my for my business. So what I did was one, I mean, aside from stalking a couple people who I just was absolutely loving the way they were delivering what they were delivering. Um, I found a local video team here to me in Richmond, Virginia. And I reached out to them, they had worked with a friend of mine. And I said, I have this idea, what do you think, and they were a little nervous, because they have done a ton of video for small business. But in their experience, doing video for small business is usually doing like a promo video, that’s like three minutes long that sitting on like some financial advisors, website, or something. And for them, it’s probably really hard to get that person who’s not a podcast or not a speaker, not, you know, creating tons of content to actually come up with like a two or three minute video. So when I told them, I want to deal with you, we’re going to record all these small videos, I think it’ll go really well. And I think they were kind of like, well, we’ll see. I really didn’t know what to do with me because I worked with a content creator before. But we blocked off a full day in March. And I went ahead and I treated it like, Okay, we’re gonna sit down and record as many videos as we can. I’m going to come prepared with a list of questions that are kind of like the top things that I talked about on my podcast, the top things that I knew my my best content on my podcast is about. And also the top things that I knew clients always ask me, paying attention to the people who pay you not just the people who want to pick your brain. I think that’s a really big tip. If you’re trying to make money off of your content, don’t just answer questions for people who are never going to pay you answer the questions that come from actual paying clients. And I ended up with a list of about I don’t know 6070 questions not that hard to come up with by the way. It really isn’t when you’ve been doing this forever. I was like I started narrowing down by okay, I talk about productivity a lot. Well, here’s my five things on credit. I’m gonna talk about how I structure my calendar I’m going to talk about how I have no call days I’m going to talk about this I’m so I just kind No kept adding to this list until the day of. I had a list of like 6070 questions, we set it up so that that day I had hair and makeup calm. I had, of course my rack of different shirts and earrings and things. They set up their whole, you know, camera setup. And Sue read a question to me just like she was interviewing you. She’s literally sitting in a chair by the camera. Her husband Meredith is right next to her, you know, doing all the techie setup stuff. And Sue’s like asking me questions, and I’m just responding. It is literally an interview. And we batched 58 videos,
Erin Ollila 15:36
and how many hours or while that’s very impressive. I was so when I was trying to very hard not to let my ADD overpower me and interrupt you as you were saying that because once you started talking about coming up with a questions, the content creator in me is like, Okay, did you prepare the answers? Did you like obviously there’s the strategy slash on strategy to coming prepared with the questions. But I was very curious on because I’ve seen obviously some of your videos, they are excellent. I found it interesting now to know that someone asked you a question. And then you just responded to that question as part of how the content was created. So did you make yourself any, like bullet points or anything? Or was just off the cuff?
Racheal Cook 16:21
So here’s, here’s the secret. I’ve been practicing my message for 15 years? Yes, yeah. I’ve been talking about the same things for 15 years. Like there’s very little and all these videos that I created that I haven’t already talked about a million times before. So it was very easy for me. And they again, video team very nervous. They were like, do we need to script these out? Like they wanted to have a whole planning pre production session? And they were like, do we need to have all these scripted? Like, how many do you think you’ll get through and I was like, I don’t know how many I’ll get through. But I’m telling you, all you need to do is ask me a question. And I can fire it off. And for anyone who is not there yet, I just want to let you know that if me from like, 2012 2013, when I had first started my podcast, I probably was not doing it that way, I probably would have needed, like some bullet points and more to feel comfortable speaking. But when you’ve done so much speaking, and you have the podcast and all of that it comes really easily.
Erin Ollila 17:26
Yeah. And I think it’s also really important to stay here for just a second, because a lot of what I’m hearing from my clients is like, overwhelmed, because there’s just not a strategy there. But lack of wanting to create a strategy because it feels overwhelming. And that’s where I really try to reposition people and how they think about creating content, whether it is website, copy, blog content, or social because we don’t need to talk to our clients about every thing we could potentially talk to them about. We need to talk to them about like, like you said, One what you are paying clients need and what are they talking to us about? But how are we drawing people to our business in a very specific manner. And if you continue to talk about those things, it is going to become very natural. You know, obviously, just the practice of the many years you’ve been in business is definitely what’s helping you. But if someone has only been in business, let’s say three years or so, they could be just as successful, so long as they’re not spreading themselves thin and talking about everything to everyone. And if you are in business a year, 10 years, and you find yourself in that boat just recognize its call in like, in a sense, it’s niching down on where you already are within your business. So you start to develop the message that feels so natural for you that you can just talk about it easily.
Racheal Cook 18:49
Absolutely. And I think of all of my content, one, I think of everything as an asset, right? If I talked about it 10 years ago, I’m still talking about it today. It is an asset, I am going to rinse and repeat as much as I possibly can. And I also have some very clear, like pillars of content that you’ll see throughout my work. I talk a lot about productivity. Because I also talk about how I only work 25 hours a week well, if you’re only work 25 hours a week, people want to know how are you getting done and growing at the rate you’re growing if you only have that time. So I talk about productivity. I talk a lot about marketing. I talk a lot about sales, like I have these content pillars. And within each content pillar, I’m always thinking to myself, Okay, what is the big idea here that I’m trying to get across? What are the common myths in this topic area that people need to understand are actually taking them in the wrong direction? What are the common mistakes that they’re going to run into? Right? What are the road bumps along the way? What are the case studies I have? Rarely do I really get into a ton of tips and tricks. because I feel like how to content doesn’t actually lead to sales.
Erin Ollila 20:04
Yeah. Or it could if you have a DIY type of audience, but if you’re in like the situation where most service providers are, you’re you, you want to avoid the how to. And that’s what people think is so natural, it comes natural to want to educate in the way of teaching people how to do something. But most consumers want to be taught about something so that they can make better decisions from buying.
Racheal Cook 20:29
Absolutely. And like, if you are a graphic designer, and you’re showing me stuff in Photoshop, not exciting for me as someone who’s trying to hire that out, really exciting for another graphic designer, but not exciting for your potential clients. So I think the tips and things you have to kind of be careful with because I know that’s usually the go to is the how to content, the tips and tricks. I tend to if I’m going to focus on that it’s in a very, very clear, specific way. But it always leads into the next thing. So for me, when I’m talking productivity, I literally pulled up one of my brainstorms here. And I have a whole bunch of tips, you know, master your calendar, buffer days, catch up days, CEO dates, client only days, flex, Friday, no call days, how to work ahead. I mean, these are all very tip and trick. But anybody who watches all this together, realizes, okay, this is a strategist who has such a handle on how she shows up and where she’s putting her time and attention, I need to understand more about how she’s operating in that business, or how people how to operate in that business. So it’s very selective.
Erin Ollila 21:45
I think the idea of categorizing it by pillars to if we’re looking at Platform Specific with tic tac here is we want to also make sure that we’re giving people multiple touchpoints on similar things, so they can binge the content a little bit better. You know, we need to also train the algorithm to have our, like, potential right people to focus on us as the tip top creators and pillar content and similar themed videos are doing that for you.
Racheal Cook 22:13
Absolutely. So that’s kind of how I went about it. We had one day and March, where we record again, recorded 58 videos, took them a few weeks to get them back to me, I started posting them. And very quickly started seeing traction. Literally, I by the I’m trying to think of when my first post was it was either end of March or beginning of April, within like the first two weeks, I had a post, hit something like 50,000 views. And the opening. By the way, if you don’t know how to write a great hook, please go Google hooks like how to write a hook. This is the most important thing for anybody who’s a content creator, that first line out of your mouth determines whether or not they’re going to stop and watch or listen on a podcast. And I knew this from podcasting, because statistically, you only have 10 seconds to keep someone on a podcast. But if you can get them through the first 10 or 15 seconds, then listen to a full hour long episode. You know, by then they put their phone in their pocket, and they’re going on their way. So I had this hook that opened one of the videos that said if you were getting paid $1,000 an hour, what would you do differently? And then I went into you know, Hey, are you truly showing up and acting like a CEO? Or are you still doing $10 An hour administrative work? Well, this is why your business isn’t growing, you’re not going to grow up multiple six or seven figure business doing $10 An hour work. And what was interesting is that one took off. There’s a lot of people who are like, Oh, my God, this is so insightful, and helpful. A lot of people who weren’t my audience who got frustrated, and we’re like, you’re talking bad about the administrative, you can’t get people for $10 that like, they didn’t get the point. But it’s okay. Because at that point, there was activity happening and tick tock was just pushing this video out and pushing this video out. And it just took off, which was mind blowing to me, because I had never seen that happen on any other platform. I’ve never had that experience on on Facebook. I’ve never had that experience on Instagram. I’ve never seen anything take off within 48 hours and suddenly have 50,000 views.
Erin Ollila 24:24
Yeah. And I think the key here is like I always, you know, harp on why it’s important to both attract and repel people with our copy and all of these things in the same goes on social like you mentioned, you know, the people who just didn’t get it well, they’re not the right clients for you. But there’s like a secondary level that’s not really like out outright open there. It’s that you also have to take yourself out of the content. We have to like mindset wise recognize, I mean, you might get, especially if like virality you might get a lot of people disagreeing with you and you have to recognize that it’s not about you, and that takes a lot For a content creator to move forward, I think that is something that is a constant address that you have to do. You don’t perfect this at any point and all of a sudden become you know, oblivious to people saying rude things to you or about you. But I think that if you want to focus on short content, especially anything in the Tick Tock world, you need to recognize you’re going to repel. That’s great. And you also need to be hearty enough to handle how people communicate with you on the platforms.
Racheal Cook 25:27
Well, what got really interesting to me is when you start digging into analytics, and I’m a total like, I’m a nerd, I want to know the numbers, I want to know what’s going on. Um, tick tock is a discovery engine. It is not like other platforms. It’s not social media in that the people who are finding your content or watching your content are the ones who are already following you know, if you go into your Instagram analytics, or your Facebook analytics, most of the people seeing that content are actively already following you. So trying to get more followers is actually really challenging than it has been for a long time. But on Tick Tock 95% of the people watching my videos are finding me for the very first time they have not followed me yet. And this has been pretty consistent. About 90 to 95% of the views on all of my tic toc content is brand new to me people. So that tells me one when it comes to like the buyer readiness journey, the customer awareness journey. They don’t know who I am, what I’m talking about the my overall like thesis on business. This is their first taste of what I’m talking about. So you have to keep that into account too. If you’re coming onto a platform like, like tick tock is that this is all about that first, taste that first bit of awareness. So you absolutely want to attract or repel. One because it’s gonna get in front of more people. But the people who are attracted to it, it opens is curiosity about you. And then they go down the rabbit hole. So what happened in the first few months of me posting on Tik Tok, and I kept it simple. Like, I know, there’s some people who are like, You need to post three or four times a day and you need to bottle I was like, I just put it out once a day, five days a week. I’ve already batched it. Let’s keep this simple, insane. And I started already getting pretty pretty quickly. I started seeing an increase on my podcast. And I started seeing people reaching out about do I do coaching? Do I do one on one coaching? How can I work with you. And that was really exciting to see that happen. In fact, in May, we opened the doors for the CEO collective and we had somebody who had found me 10 days before she joined and paid in full for our annual program on Tik Tok. She was like I saw your talk. And I was just like, Who is this person, I’m obsessed wash, everything I had put out, I had only been on Tik Tok for like a month and a half at that point. And already I was getting five figure clients coming in the door. For me that that was the confirmation I needed. It wasn’t just the reach, because the reach is great. But it’s still kind of a vanity metric, right, you can get a ton of reach, and not have any clients from it. But I pretty instantly started getting clients from it. And I realized I had invested in one day of recording content, you know, cost me a few $1,000 to hire a video editing team and to get my hair blown out and all that kind of stuff, maybe $2,500 $3,000 For that one day. But I made that back 15 times over within six to eight weeks. Where else are you gonna make that happen?
Erin Ollila 28:44
Nowhere is the answer.
Racheal Cook 28:47
And so I realized, okay, it was like I’ve tapped into this, this is what I need to do. And so we did again, like we’ve had a had a nother video day, I want to say in May I did it. Two days in August. I’ll do another a couple days coming up soon. But basically, I’m on track for like once a quarter, I sit down and I will record as many videos as we can pull out. And then now my team just takes it and post it for me. I’m not manually doing that. But every day I get in there and like if people are leaving comments or whatever, I’m definitely going and engaging with them. But it’s been it’s just been kind of mind blowing that in six months, I saw such a huge lift. In a lot of numbers. I saw a lift. I mean we could see clients coming in because they were telling us they were straight up saying I found you here and then we started seeing our podcast numbers continue to climb. We started seeing more orders of our we have a planner that we sell. We started seeing more of those gets sold. And I don’t even I don’t even Pitch Anything on Tik Tok. I’m just giving great content. And then they go to my link. I have a little page where they can find some of my free resources. And then once they’re in to my email list, where they get onto my podcast, they just continue down, you know, the rabbit hole of all the content I have.
Erin Ollila 30:11
Yeah, you pretty much answered my next like three questions and what you just said, my first question was going to be like, you know, because you’ve seen success with this. Are you planning on continuously doing it? It sounds like it. I’ll jump back there. Because I do have one follow up question to that second question was going to be like, what kind of calls to action are you actually putting, but it sounds like really, for the most part, you’re giving people the opportunity to stay in your network, and they’re choosing how they want to stay in your network. After that,
Racheal Cook 30:37
I think, in the world of marketing, and has changed a lot. I think 10 years ago, everything was very, and we still hear all the funnel talk as if people only do one thing at a time. Well, I know because I’m watching what’s happening. Most of the people who find me they don’t just find one thing and sign up for one thing to learn from me. They find me they go to my resources page, and they opt in for everything. And I realized that because we had all these funnel setup, and they were like, I’m getting so many messages. And I was like, Oh, crap, they’re not doing this linearly. There’s no linear anything. It’s an ecosystem. It’s a web. They’re all in it. So I realized once I realized that, I was like, I just need to make sure that I can get them into the email list, get them into the podcast, because that’s where the actual nurturing and conversion will
Erin Ollila 31:32
happen. To jump back to my first question is probably my last question that I have for you. But did you approach filming differently in your follow up days? And would you approach it differently in the future, in the sense of what you had mentioned before as your first round, it was kind of like talk to the camera, provide content? Have you changed that? Do you have any interest in changing that
Racheal Cook 31:52
we’re playing around with a couple of things like, I’m pretty much like, if it works, don’t break it. My goal is to continue just doing more direct to camera stuff, we did film a couple just kind of B roll type of video so that I could do like a voiceover or something on it. And the other thing I’m playing with now is, you know, I record my podcast while I’m sitting here batch recording a podcast and I’m like, You know what, I should be recording myself as I’m recording the audio, because then we could just clip out pieces of that. And that’s something I hadn’t really hit. Because you know, if you’re, if you’re a podcaster, like me, like really, you want to sit here in your sweatpants and not have to do your hair, to be honest. But now that I see that like, okay, if I’m already creating the content, I might as well take the extra hour to do my hair, so that I can get this much more out of it. And then I can put it in that many more places. That’s probably the only real big shift that I’m looking at for next year is just continuing to just feel more what I’m already doing.
Erin Ollila 32:53
Awesome. So I like to end these specific episodes with two questions. The first is if people are listening, and they’re like, oh my gosh, I love everything you said I love the results you got and how you approach this, because that feels like a natural way for me to show up on Tik Tok, where I’m not like pointing and dancing and lip syncing, what would be a small and quick and dirty homework assignment that you would give them to kind of get their feet wet or to just show up on tick tock?
Racheal Cook 33:22
Oh, I love this because I’ve actually handed this to a couple of my clients. One keep in mind tick tock is a discovery engine, and also being niched down is actually an asset. So if you have a specific topic, you want to go really strong. And just to start building that momentum, just start with giving yourself like 30 days, this is what I’ve told some of my clients, if you want to just start in, some of them didn’t want to go hire a whole team or anything they didn’t. For whatever reason, I was like, just sit down and make it a goal that you’re going to post a video a day for 30 days, if you can do that, you will probably see pretty quickly whether or not you’re going to tap in to the audience that you want to get in front of if you can come up with 30 questions that your audience is asking themselves and give a quick answer to that you will probably plug into that little niche very, very quickly. If you don’t know where to go to figure out what questions are asking go to answer the public.com and type in your topics. And you will literally see questions populated that people are literally typing into search engines all the time.
Erin Ollila 34:32
Now we are recording this at the end of 2022. So this question can obviously change drastically at any point but what do you think 2023 has in store for Tiktok.
Racheal Cook 34:47
Right Now what’s really interesting as I am seeing a huge shift in TikTok optimizing for search. So there has been a lot of results coming out. TikTok is now more popular Then Google YouTube, it’s the number one downloaded, gone to website. And what’s interesting is people are actively using it for search. So there is an opportunity to get SEO optimized in there. And it’s not just about what’s hashtag hashtags you’re using, like that’s one component of it. But it’s even down to like the handle. You choose your username, your description, your descriptions on all of your videos. It’s also about audios audio search. I do believe they have an audio search happening in the background. We might not realize it but they are searching through content for keywords. So I always use the captions that are native to Tik Tok because I’m like, if they’re actively filtering through, and using the captions as part of their search, I want to use their native caption option so that I can optimize on that.
Erin Ollila 36:03
Super helpful. And obviously, you know, if you are on Tik ok, or you’re just starting definitely do captions no matter what to make it as accessible as possible for the people who can watch you. That is great. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I love this specific lens that you’re bringing to showing up on Tiktok. So excellent. I love that ending right there. Thank you so much, Rachel. I will put all of the ways that people can get in touch with you in the show notes. Good luck for the rest of your tech talk. Everyone go follow her right now to see what it is she’s talking about.
Racheal Cook 36:36
Thank you so much. It’s been so much fun to talk about this with you.
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