Attention may be the currency of social media, but it doesn’t always equal dollars.
If anything, it’s often the opposite.
We’re trained to chase the algorithm online, believing that the more views and engagement we earn, the more money we’ll make.
And while this can be true, if you don’t have a plan to monetize your work, you can end up on the proverbial hamster wheel, endlessly churning out content that doesn’t actually move the needle.
So while trends and retention editing may keep them watching, there’s something else entirely that turns them into customers.
The challenge
Every social media channel is designed to keep you on the platform as long as possible.
They do this so they can serve you ads and maximize revenue.
That’s the whole business model.
I’m not knocking it—it’s a powerful model—but it’s important to know that’s what it is.
So if you’re trying to build a business, the arbitrage isn’t to earn more attention than everyone else—it’s to pull people off the platform entirely and into your own ecosystem.
Yes, earning attention is a requirement and creating content that gets more engagement certainly casts the net wider, but if it doesn’t ultimately convert to leads or sales it’s not doing its job.
This means directing people to anything that either A) pulls them into a smaller pool that gives you more direct access and the ability to nurture the relationship (i.e. email), or B) puts at least a modicum of money back into your pocket for the effort (e.g. digital products, communities, SaaS subscriptions, tickets sales, or even streams).
Remember, you’re not competing with everyone else online—you’re competing with the platforms themselves.
The mission
Getting someone to click through from Instagram to your landing page isn’t just about crafting an engaging message that touches their emotions.
You also have to have something they want.
This can be art, music, merch, or a live event, but in my experience, nothing moves the needle more than solving a problem.
Just one problem. That’s all you need.
If you can solve one meaningful problem for a small subset of the population, you can build a business, then you can take that problem (and that solution) and help people in a variety of ways.
You can sell your time through coaching, sell a productized service, sell a digital product, a physical product, or even build software that solves the problem while you sleep.
But it all starts with solving that one problem.
Putting it all together
Big numbers are attractive.
A million followers, ten thousand likes, a hundred thousand streams.
These all look good on the surface, but there’s really no way to know how these convert into revenue that supports your family until you give it a go on your own.
Just because someone has a million followers on Instagram doesn’t mean they’re not broke.
And even if they’re not, they might be stuck on the content treadmill, chasing brand deals and hoping for meager creator payouts.
But the ones who are truly winning the game are those building businesses behind all that.
Selling products.
Selling services.
Helping people.
Attention is a means to an end, but it’s not the whole game.