Meg Casebolt: Digital marketing, SEO & breaking up with social media

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Episode 148 with Meg Casebolt.

“I went into my doctor's office and said, ‘I think I have ADHD. I printed out the checklist. I filled it out. And then I left it on my desk.’”

Meg is the founder of Love At First Search, an agency singularly devoted to helping online businesses get found in search results (like Google, YouTube & iTunes) & turn those new readers into leads, subscribers and sales. Meg loves to help business owners spend less time trying to hack the algorithms and instead creates SEO content that attracts their ideal audience to your website while helping entrepreneurs cut their dependency on social media for their business visibility.

We talk all about running businesses with ADHD, time management, and Meg’s new book. We also talk about SEO practices, digital marketing, and how to cut back or break up entirely from social media.

Also, we talk quite a bit about AI tools, so when I ask Meg what she might call ADHD, she suggested I consult ChatGPT. So, I decided to ask ChatGPT what it would call a condition based on my list of the 60 “not so obvious” traits from my “Hey, it’s ADHD!” online course. Here are the 5 alternate names ChatGPT would give ADHD:

1. Time Perception Deficiency Disorder

2. Chronic Emotional Overwhelm and Impulsivity

3. Executive Dysfunction Hyperactivity Syndrome

4. Impulsive Focus-Attention Impairment

5. Inattentive Emotional Dysregulation

Websites: megcasebolt.com; loveatfirstsearch.com

Links:

Meg’s Social Slowdown podcast

Meg’s book: Social Slowdown: Take a social media break, set better boundaries, and market your business without sacrificing your mental health

Resources mentioned:

Katy’s self-guided course: Hey, it’s ADHD! 

Lauree Ostrovsky, Simply Leap (Katy’s business coach)

Chat GPT

Enjoy!

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Katy Weber 3:16
Welcome, Meg. I'm very excited to meet you. And a little bit about Thanks, Katie. I have to say, I think it was, gosh, it was at your I think it was one of the I think it was when you had reached out and you said, I'd be happy to talk to you and your audience about cutting back and breaking up entirely from social media. And I was like, this is an option. Like, I can't even tell you what my face was like at just that this was because I talked about this on the podcast too, all the time about that. But just this idea of, oh my god, I'm so excited to talk about how this might even be possible for running a business because it's absolutely the albatross around my neck. So. But before we get there and talk about your business, I would love to hear your story about your ADHD diagnosis and kind of how long ago were you diagnosed? And what was happening that kind of led to the diagnosis. What were some of those things? Were those signs that were like I should really look into this?

Meg Casebolt 4:43
I think my story is probably very similar to a lot of 30 Something millennial parents, which is that three it's a we're recording in 2023. So three years ago, the pandemic started I had a five year old at the time who wasn't going indoor garden. And, you know, they sent home the worksheets and he was home with me, I had a five year old and a two year old, right. And the five year old was during kindergarten and I tried to sit down next to him to go through the worksheets to read the books to do the things. And neither of us could sit still long enough to finish half a worksheet, neither of us. And at first, I was like, wow, being a kindergarten teacher is really boring, that must be what it is. And so I started, you know, looking at attention, focusing activities for you know, five year old brains, and taking some of these compensatory coping mechanisms into place and like, oh, let's have some music on in the background. Let's reduce distractions. And then I started doing it with my own work and being like, wow, this, this is this is really helpful Oh, is something I should look into here. And I think a lot of us were kind of at that point of when the pandemic started, and we had a lot of our coping mechanisms forcibly removed from us. The recognition of attention behaviors became more obvious. I couldn't focus on anything, let alone teaching somebody else who also couldn't focus on anything.

Katy Weber 6:25
Oh, my God, well, that's how I was diagnosed as well. I call myself a pandemic diagnosis. Because I, I remember feeling like my kids were a bit older. So I had, my son was in third grade at the time, and my daughter was in seventh grade. And so, but I was helping my third grader a lot. You know, and I remember having those moments where we were asked to like, watch a three minute science video, and then answer the questions about that we have things that we saw in the video, and we would watch the three minute science video. And then we returned to the questions and neither of us knew the answers to any of the questions because we weren't paying attention to the video.

Meg Casebolt 6:58
I can't live video to save my life. I can't learn from video.

Katy Weber 7:01
And so that was in that moment that I had a it was in that moment where I was like, oh, okay, we need to know what the questions are first, before we watch the video, so we know what to listen for. But if it's just listening to like watching a video for three minutes, we're not paying attention. And if we are paying attention, we're not really grabbing, like we're not able to like understand what we're supposed to be listening for, which was really interesting. But yeah, I mean, for me, I was diagnosed because it was like, I was complaining to my therapist about how I couldn't get anything done. Because I was just sitting in waiting mode, right? Like, I just was like, I both of my kids were locked in their rooms. And I didn't know if they were one of them was going to run out and the Wi Fi would be out or zoom, they couldn't get on Zoom and didn't have the link, there was always something that I was going to get interrupted for. And so I couldn't work because I knew that I was going to be interrupted at any moment. And so I was complaining to her about that, right? Like I couldn't focus on work, because I just always knew that somebody was going to pull me away. And that's when she was like, Dude, look into ADHD. So

Meg Casebolt 8:05
how awesome is that, that she recognized that symptom because that's not the most obvious symptom. That's not the like leap out of the pack symptom. That's a really awesome situation for you to have found.

Katy Weber 8:18
Well, I wasn't but like she was diagnosed with ADHD because her middle schooler son was diagnosed with ADHD, right? So it's like the it's like the dominoes start to fall in terms of like, who's getting who's gets diagnosed, and then they look around them and they start to pick out like, okay, here are all the people who need to be dying.

Meg Casebolt 8:36
I got diagnosed first because I had the first doctor appointment, but I had already been setting up the breadcrumbs for my older child with the pediatrician to be like, I think there's some inattention happening. I think that, you know, like I had seen the signs in him. I got the first diagnosis because I went into my doctor's office. And I said, I think I have ADHD, I printed out the checklist, I filled it out, I left it on my desk. And then by the time we got to my younger son, he's also on the autism spectrum. He has that comorbidity. And so I was able with both of my kids to by this point, I was able to advocate for them and say, Listen, I know that this is hereditary. I have been diagnosed, this is the medication that's working for me. So by the time I got to their pediatrician, they were able to say, Okay, well, let's try, you know, the same medication for you that we tried for them and it sort of ease the process for them because we already had that medical piece in place.

Katy Weber 9:34
Yeah, that's really cool. Okay, so now how old are your kids now? So three, so they're eight and five? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Five, it's actually a really that's super young because it's I feel like when they're still five, a lot of that you don't know what is developmentally appropriate versus what is you know, what are what are your expectations of a five year old when it comes to especially when it came to sitting at a computer during that time, right, like,

Meg Casebolt 9:57
you didn't start any medication for them until they were Back in the classroom, and they were so young, I'm so grateful that they were so young, I can't imagine third grade seventh grade like you had.

Katy Weber 10:07
It is funny as parents, because, you know, I was just talking to my brother about this because his kids are much. They're much younger than mine. So his daughter was five. She was in kindergarten and at the beginning of the pandemic, and I remember being really grateful that my kids weren't that young, right? Like, I was like, I was really glad that I could leave you know that my kids were self sufficient enough that I could do something right that they weren't that like toddler stage, where they're always you know, where you just have to be on them all day long. And there's no, like possibility of even also working. But like, I was talking to him about how like my daughter who was in seventh grade, who is now going into 11th grade, like she was really, really deeply affected by the lockdown. She has had some really lasting effects in terms of her social anxiety. And like, I feel like teenagers now who went through middle school, like those were some really, really formative years. And he had so he having really young kids was sort of like, oh, we came out of that unscathed. Like, I'm kind of glad I didn't have older kids. Who are we really felt the effects. I think it

Meg Casebolt 11:12
was harder to live through with younger kids, but now the ramifications don't feel as intense. Yeah, yeah. Good point. Oh, my curious though. I don't know. My kids are pretty cool.

Katy Weber 11:22
A Parenting is hard at every age. are we kidding? Right? Yeah. There's always gonna be something. Cool. Okay. So then, so you were so you were diagnosed with ADHD? And then you are already running this business? You're already this entrepreneur? What were some of those things where you started looking over the over the course of your whole life through this new lens being like, Oh, my God, the the signs were there all along?

Meg Casebolt 11:47
Well, I mean, I think the fact that I was running a business that, you know, in the first, in the first five years that I was dating my now husband, I had four different jobs. And he was like, Why do you keep changing jobs? And I was like, I'm bored. I can't just keep doing the same thing over and over and over. And my performance evaluations at work would be like, Wow, Meg is such a pleasure to have on the team. But wouldn't it be great if she did some work? You know, and like, not, I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit here. But there certainly was a level of, you know, the administrative work was really hard for me to continue the repetition was really hard for me. I, I was always seeking stimulation in classrooms always wanting some sort of that, you know, that novelty, but only in the topics that I was interested in. So like, I, in college, I didn't want to, I didn't want to take a science class. So I found a way to get an American Studies credit to count for my science elective that was all about the, the history of the atomic bomb in literature. I love it. Like, okay, let me look at all like, let me go rewatch Dr. Strangelove and write about that, for my science credit, because that there's that innovation of like, these are the things that I'm excited about. These are the things that I'm curious about. And I will go self advocate to make that make sense to me because I don't want to go do the periodic table again. I've already done it three times. I can't do it again. So yeah, just finding finding workarounds, I think is a very scrappy ADHD approach to things. I'm interested in this. I'm not interested in that. How do I get to do more of the thing that I want to do? And not bother with a thing? That isn't exciting?

Katy Weber 13:36
Yeah, yeah. So were you in a very, like high intensity work place before you went into work for yourself? Or did you find that entrepreneurship was one of those because I find for me, like, I could work seven days a week, like I have a really, really hard time with those boundaries. And so even though I used to be in journalism, where there was like a lot, it was very high intensity. I don't feel like I've ever worked as much as I do as an entrepreneur. Yeah, I

Meg Casebolt 14:04
think for me, I worked in nonprofits, I was very idealistic about what I studied, and how I wanted to see an impact change in the world. And so I worked for nonprofits, but I my and my first boss sat me down when she caught me working on a Friday night after I went home. And I was like doing data entry or something, right. And she caught me because she was working that same time. She was like, she said, We got off on Monday morning and said, Meg, we don't pay you enough to work that many hours. He taught me how to set my boundaries around that. And she was very clear that like, you need to turn it off at 430 on Friday afternoon, because you will burn out and she was very protective of me and taught me to be that way. And so that actually got me in trouble later on when I was working in more more intense fields like doing marketing for an architecture firm where there is the expectation of 5060 hour weeks, and I'd been trained in the nonprofit space of like, oh, no, no, no, we don't save as 530. So I think then when I started my business, I started it part time. Because I, you know, I did the math and figured out that half of my take home pay would have gone to child care. And instead, I decided to freelance and work during naptime and bedtime, and when, when my, you know, like, kind of just shuffling it around. And that was when it started to feel a little bit more addictive, like I had to always be on, I had to always be working, because I wasn't working that traditional nine to five hours, it was any pockets of time, it was like time confetti, you know, like, if I could throw it in the air and grab it, then I would use that time to work. And if he was, you know, playing independently, I would pick up my phone and post on social media or I would reply to a client email, it was like I had to always be on and that dopamine hit from, especially, you know, in that point, it was new motherhood, it was so isolating, that the community that I was creating online was the input that I was getting it was this the interaction, the intellectual stimulation that I needed. I couldn't talk to a newborn, I couldn't talk to a toddler. So I went online into these business communities and kind of threw myself in there.

Katy Weber 16:25
Yeah, yeah, you know, that's it. It's one of the things I really struggle with, especially with Facebook, because like I, if Facebook came around when my daughter who's now 16 was a baby, and it saved me like that community, those communities really, really saved me, you know, all of those questions. Is this normal? What color? Is this a normal color of poop? Right? Like all those things that you immediately go? And there's, you know, 1000s?

Right, but all those questions add like community is so important. And we talked about that a lot too, with ADHD and neuro divergence, and like how community and the validation of like, am I normal is something that a lot of us really, really crave. And so social media really does provide so much of that community element, but at the same time, like it for me, I had to leave it was so mentally destructive for me for in Facebook, especially Facebook, like around like crazy, you know, around the pandemic, and elections and just all of the vitriol like, I was, like, I need to, I was an on off switch, like, I couldn't have a balance with social media. So I decided to leave. But when I left social media, I feel like 99% of my friendships dried up as well, like how because we everybody relies so much on that. It's like, it's like passive friendships are so this passive socialization, right? Where we don't really have to, like, rightly letters or call each other anymore. We just like their posts. And so, anyway, it's long on this, right? But it was, so it's interesting to me, like I always grapple with that community element versus like, saving my mental health.

Meg Casebolt 18:04
Yeah, and I think especially for those of us who are neurodivergent, especially ADHD, you know, when we log on, it can be so hard to log off when you go on, like I hundreds of times in my life, I've logged on and be like, I'm just gonna go look up this one thing. And then an hour passes. When I've got complete time blindness, I have no idea what I just read. I, I, you know, I just go into this vortex of information overload and stimulation and, like, it's so hard to pull ourselves back out of it. And I think it's harder for us than it is for neurotypical folks. You know,

Katy Weber 18:43
Oh, I feel like we are bossed to a flame for all of those dopamine hits are, it's it becomes so it's I don't even think about it. So unconscious, right? It's muscle memory to just like lift like you just shirt like I go. I pick up my phone to look at what the weather is. And I forget in that split second opinion on my phone, I will forget I'm even there for the weather and I hit Instagram. So okay, so wait. So when you were launching your business, you did have a real like, need for social media. How did it kind of click in your brain that you were like, I could actually do this without without this constant promotion? Or was it like it was an aha moment? Or was it sort of a slow drag?

Meg Casebolt 19:29
Both sort of both. So I in 2017, I started a Facebook group where I was teaching people search engine optimization, I recognized the irony of teaching people in Facebook group how to not be on Facebook, but that's okay. But it was the place where people were congregating and they could learn it and it wasn't really, you know, 2017 It wasn't really as much of a conversation to get off social. It was just here's an alternative right? And I was running free challenges and I was growing my email list and the Facebook group was working really well and people were Growing up for Facebook Lives, and then it you know, we just saw a decrease in reach, and then people engaging and in conversions into paid programs. And over time, we started to see that sort of slip. And I'm, I'm a data person, like I can geek out on any spreadsheet. So we were always tracking, you know, how many sales did we make from the Facebook group, how many clicks. And then in, I ran quarterly live challenges. And then at the end of a weekly free challenge, I would open the doors to a paid program. And that was sort of our launch structure. And then in true 2021, in spring of 2021, I ran a live challenge, and nobody showed up for the lives and very few people bought the new program. And I looked at the person who was running my Facebook group, and we went, this just isn't working anymore. It was. And it's not, it's not that she wasn't doing her job. It's not that it was just the algorithm change, emphasis society changed, you know, like, we all flocked online in 2020. By 2021, we were like, Oh, I just, I can't be in this space anymore. And so after I closed that launch, I, we looked at the numbers, we looked at how many of the people in our group or bots, how many we thought would never give us $1 and decided to shut down the Facebook group. And I talked to the social media person, Sarah, and I said, I'm sorry, I just I can't afford to keep you on for a Facebook group that isn't converting, I let her go. And then I just forgot to post for three months. Okay, maybe that's a little graduated. But it wasn't like, you know, I made a big announcement, I shut down the Facebook group, I talked about that intentional decision and why we're doing it and how to get on the email list, if you want to hear from us. And we did the whole announcement thing. And then I was just like, you know, that like, exhausted, it's over feeling. And without having a team member to prompt me to be like, hey, we need to post on the Facebook group on Tuesdays and Thursdays about this and dismiss. I just didn't. And, you know, two weeks, four weeks, or whatever it went by. And suddenly two months went by, and I was like, Oh, well, this hasn't. I've still been putting out my YouTube videos, I've still been sending emails to my list. And I do not see a difference in the amount of leads that I got in summer 2020 versus summer 2021. The Facebook group, the Facebook post, the Instagram post, the LinkedIn connecting was really good at nurturing the people who already knew me. But nobody knew was finding that group and buying from me very quickly. And what people who were finding me were going to my YouTube channel, or they were joining my email list, or they were being referred to me for my relationships and the collaborative partners, the you know, the referrals that I was getting, those did not stop when I left social media. So I just kind of took a break, it ended up being once I realized that it had been two months, I was like, I wonder if I can go 100 days. That's just how our brains work. It's like, let me give myself a challenge, right? What happens? I want to make a nice round number three months would work 100 day, you know, like, let me see what happens. And on the 100th day I posted I was like, Guess what, I've been gone for 100 days, and people were like, Oh, we didn't even notice. Right? Because the algorithm doesn't show you anything. If you they just expected that they weren't seeing it. They didn't realize they even made the shift. But nothing else in my business changed. And I started to have more and more conversations on this topic. And then, you know, that was September I came back into social media. And in December, I started a podcast to talk about what is actually working. And where does social media fit into that whether you you know, you choose to leave you choose to diversify or you go all in, but you're more careful with how you spend your time so it doesn't have that same impact on your mental health. Yeah, it's

Katy Weber 24:10
funny, because I have two Instagram accounts, I have the podcast Instagram account, which is if you've ever seen it, it's very you know, it's just three posts every every week, there. It's just the same feed. It's very lovely. I don't ever want to mess it up. And the whole reason I started had this other account was because if I was like if I ever had anything that deviated from these three posts, I wouldn't want to put it on the My lovely symmetrical feet. So I have this other account and I had this other account where I was posting feverishly and I had this whole schedule and I was doing all these reels and and my my podcast account has significantly more followers than my other one that I was putting all this effort into and totally burnt out on and then just was like I can't keep this up. I can't do it anymore. And I just kind of laugh because this other one that just sits here you know has to mass and so the idea of followers has become sort of irrelevant to me now, because yeah, it was what there was this thing like you said I was working towards, which is like, I gotta get to this number. And then, and I had this moment where I was like, what's the final number that will make me happy, right? When I kept trying to increase my followers? And I was like, where? where's this going? Like, if I get it, I was like, oh my god, I'm at 45,000 followers. Now what I was like, what was the number? Where's the cap? Where I'm gonna be finally, you know, feel like I can get off this hamster wheel. And once I realized that number didn't exist. I was like, This has to stop.

Meg Casebolt 25:35
Right? What's the definition of success? And if I hit some sort of threshold, what doors does that open that aren't currently open to me? You know, if you hit 50,000 followers, because could you then say, I'm gonna go pitch myself to conference to speak at it? Because I can say I have 50,000 followers? Like, how does that change? Your public perception? And how does that change your internal validation and your your ego, because a lot of this is our ego. A lot of this is us wanting to be seen in like a what has become a digital standard for our society, to say, Look at me, I provide value look at me and see that I'm still here. And I need to be recognized. Yeah, I

Katy Weber 26:23
feel like I heard you talk about this, maybe if this was on your podcast, or in another interview, where you were talking about that idea of like, the more we rely on that kind of the hits and the likes and the comments and the validation, it's like, it becomes more, it becomes so much more meaningful, right? So then we start going after the validation, right, as opposed to what we actually came here to do, which was to sell a business or a product or

Meg Casebolt 26:46
to make money. It's money does not there is not a direct correlation between your follower count or your likes or your reach, and the amount in your bank account. Unless you're selling sponsorships or something along those lines, where you can say, Here's my reach. Here's my best, you know, if you're selling to brands, it's a little bit different. But for most of us who are straight b2b or b2c businesses, like I have clients who have, literally, I have a client who has a million Instagram followers and has never made a sale from Instagram. But then they work with us on SEO, they get people into their email funnel, they start to sell through that. So it's still good that they're there. It helps with their brand recognition, it helps with their nurturing, but they cannot attribute a single sale to their million Instagram followers.

Katy Weber 27:40
Yeah, no, it's true. I had a similar reaction to that. And that's and that's what I ended up stopping posting on Instagram, because I was like, No, it's great. I love being sort of Top of Mind and feeling very much like I'm helping people. But at the same time, it really wasn't doing anywhere near the amount of conversions that my podcast was doing what it right, which I loved and never burnt out on. It was great. You know, like, I was like, this is where I fed in, people get to know you, right? So it's like the people who want to work with you are getting to know you on a much more authentic

Meg Casebolt 28:13
and eye level. That's something that a lot of people aren't talking about, too, which is what where's the satisfaction in your marketing? What is it that you are enjoying doing? What is the thing that lights you up? I like prop Well, you have specific offerings for women with ADHD. So you have these conversations that can then lead into, here's how you can join our community, here's how we can work together, right? Like you have a pretty clear call to action here. My call to action for my podcast is not that clear. It's not get off social media and come to SEO because that's not always the best solution for everyone. My my podcast, I think of as, let's talk about what's happening in our industry, and hey, if you want to do this thing, sure, I'm over here if you want to find me, right, but so there's not a direct correlation. There's not conversion metrics on all these things that I teach people how to do, I don't do for myself, but I love the conversations. I love having these, you know, deep dive dialogues with other humans who are exploring these same things. And sometimes that marketing and I feel like that, I'm gonna get a little blue here, the energy that you bring into your marketing is so clear to the people who are engaging with it. So when I was doing YouTube videos about how to how to do SEO, I had to really like force my gut to be like, I know this is converting, but like, it's a little boring to talk about this stuff. Same with like taking the YouTube videos and splitting them up into this was like IG TV days, you know, like, how do we how do we repurpose that across all these platforms? I didn't feel excited and tic tac came along and I was like, I cannot make myself get excited about tic tac, so I'm not going to do it. But the podcast, you can tell from my tone of voice right? Now, this is something that I love. This is something that excites me this is, you know, and I think that especially for those of us with conditions where focus is a problem, we have to chase, what excites us novelty is really important to us. So, you know, not just going, where can I get the followers? Where's my audience hanging out? You know, how can I get in front of them, because if they're all hanging out in a place that you hate, you're gonna resent it, you're not going to want to do it, it's going to fall to the bottom of your to do list, you're just going to feel like eating the frog every term time you log into that platform. Whereas if you can find even a smaller group of people who love to consume content in the way that you'd like to create it, and who are engaging with you, and you can be in dialogue with them, then it's worth it to track the thing that you love, even if it has a smaller volume of, you know, audience.

Katy Weber 30:54
Oh, my God. Yeah. Right. And that's one thing I really credit my business coach years ago, Laurie Ostrowski who had said, you know, her whole, her whole mantra when I was working with her was like, what's the one thing that lights you up and do that one thing and don't feel like you also have to be everywhere, so she was always sort of, you know, because I'm like, I'm easily distracted. So I'm like, I might be doing a podcast, and then just suddenly be like, Oh, I gotta write a book. And I would drop the podcast and go write a book. And she was like, pick the one thing that's really going to be the thing you do. And then everything else is sort of ancillary. And it can you know, it can roads can lead back to it. But for the most part, it's like, yeah, don't abandon ship. Because you think something out that, because you feel like you need to be in all places at all times.

Meg Casebolt 31:39
I call that I always have a team member that I give the role of naysayer to. They I'm like, right now her name is Megan, before this was Teresa before it, it was Britney, right? Like people just shift around in my team. But we had a hashtag that was Britney says no, because it's like no, your bag, you're not allowed to do it. Teresa called herself my parking lot attendant. Because it was like, great idea, Meg, let's put it in the parking lot. Let's bring it to the quarterly meeting. And if you still want to do it, in three months, we can figure out a project plan for it like, we are such it eaters, we are innovators, we love to chase new things. And I always have a dedicated team member who's like, great idea. When how and what are you giving up?

Katy Weber 32:24
Oh, what are you giving up? That's a big one. Yes.

Meg Casebolt 32:28
It just I've spent the last six months writing this book. And it's like, okay, what are you giving up to make that happen? Right, what are the things that have to give in order to create the both the time and the mental energy for you to dedicate to this new project? Yeah, that's

Katy Weber 32:44
something I feel like I've worked with a lot of clients who have that workaholic. You know, it's like this, I feel like we are very excitable, right? We always, you know, we have a lot of ideas, we generate a lot. We want to do all the things we see ourselves doing all the things. So we end up in a lot of those situations where it's like, Sure, I can take that on. Sure, I can take that on. Sure, I can take that on. Oops, I'm burnt out, right. And so like I work with clients that kind of figure that out where it's like you are you have to think about yourself as a limited resource. So every time you bring something new in, you have to make room for it. It's like a bookshelf with 20 books. Every time you want to put a new book on the shelf, you have to figure out which one's going to leave in order to make a bigger bookshelf, bigger books. Don't listener? But but you know, because I think we have to do would have a tendency to do that. Right? Which is like, Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure. So So that's amazing that you've actually appointed these people on your team, how did you amass this team, because I feel like that's another thing that, you know, for so many of us as entrepreneurs can be really, really difficult, which is to delegate and to create, trust, you know, a trustworthy team where we, where we feel like we can adequately communicate, but also be able to delegate in a way that we are making more work for ourselves. Sometimes I find that when I work with people, I end up doing more work for myself, because I'm like, they didn't do it properly. And I don't want to tell them that improperly because I don't want to hurt their feelings. So I'm just gonna secretly do it myself instead as well. And then we you know, like, I feel like I have a really hard time working.

Meg Casebolt 34:15
Welcome. realized as a woman anti capitalist.

Katy Weber 34:22
So I'm What do you talk about your team? I'm like, how did you build? How did you build a team? Because I cannot be the only person out there who is really, really struggles with that. Just what is it? It's, I guess, it's just it's delegation. But I think it's like delegation mixed with communication, right, where it's sort of like, I don't even know how to tell you what I want to have done. So I'm just going to do it myself because it's easier, right? And we get into that, that loophole of like, I'll just do it myself. I'll just do it myself.

Meg Casebolt 34:51
I think the secret that I learned several years ago accidentally, was to always have somebody who is maybe not my polar opposite But who is an operations minded process driven person as my right hand person, you know, in like the rocket fuel terminology would be I'm the visionary, and they're the integrator. I don't love everything about that dichotomy of those two roles. But you know, I have somebody on my team who works less than five hours a week. And this is what she does is she makes sure that things are running smoothly, she and she lives a town away from me, she's the only person on my team who's local. And she and I sit down and come up with our strategic plans for the quarters. And then when people have questions about like, what are my priorities supposed to be? They go to her. And, you know, I don't know how the system works, they go to her. So having somebody who's very operations driven, and she's the one who tells me her name is Megan. So it's a little confusing, because we're both Meg and Megan. So that's what I'm just using she as a pronoun. But, you know, we sit down, we come up with the plan, and then having people go to her and be like, I don't know how this works. It's sort of taking me out of the loop, because I have trained her so well, because, you know, there have been times where we sit down at the table together, and we get out, you know, a visual whiteboard, we use mural for this. And we're like, okay, what is the process that we want our clients to go through, when somebody comes in through the contact form, what's the automation that happens, and then she'll build out the automation and Active Campaign and when something's broken with it, the team knows to go to her to fix it. So I probably could hop in there and fix it. But I am no longer the owner of that tool. And of that automation. And I know the tool I could, I could pull it together. But now I'm the one going, Hey, this broke for me too. And having team members who own different things, and and recommend, I think a big part of that, for me is not just having the processes, although that's huge. And we can come back to that. But having the knowledge, the self knowledge that the things that need to be done on my team, I am not always my brain is not always the best person to build those systems. So we brought on about nine months ago, we brought on somebody to do specifically to do inbox, inbox management, customer satisfaction, community management, like to just keep everyone in the loop to keep them happy. And when when she would say like, what was the last thing that happened with this client? I'd be like, Oh, I don't remember, I didn't write it down. Right. So now she built a system for me, we're after I have a call in, you know, in my calendar, she'll ping me and click, it'll already be a project in clickup, where I then have a task assigned to me that's like, write down your notes from this call. And she has built an entire CRM system for me, that pings me when it's my turn to be part of it. So I'm no longer creator. I'm not even doing the follow up. I'm just downloading the information from my brain in a comment. And sometimes it doesn't even make it in click up. Sometimes it's in Slack. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I had that conversation with that person. Right. But no, she knows. My I don't want to use the term blind spots. She knows my limitations. She knows the places where I falter, because she looks at my calendar. And she's like, Oh, Mike has a really busy day. She's gonna forget to check in with me. I'm gonna ping her. And I have given her the, the right. And responsibility to do that, because otherwise it won't happen. Hmm, that's my executive, but I'm outsourcing my executive functioning is what I'm doing.

Katy Weber 38:26
Right. Yeah. And then that's where I think we, you know, I talk a lot about the difference in socialization, which is, I think that as women, we are especially socialized to believe that if we want something done, we have to figure out, we have to do it ourselves, right? And we can, we can only ask somebody else to do it if we have already tried and exhausted all options, and have somehow have to admit failure. And then we have to ask somebody for help, right? Whereas I think men are socialized to have support system. So they're sort of like, well, okay, if something wants to get done, I have to figure out who's going to do it for me. And if nobody else will do it for me, I'll do it for myself. And so it kind of works the opposite way. And so I feel like you know, that it's like a muscle to build, which is like, if there's any part of me that is not excited about this, I have to immediately figure out who else can do it for me. And that's really hard. Like, I feel like it's not innately part of my wiring.

Meg Casebolt 39:22
And that's why I think sometimes it does make sense to build out these systems where like, for our SEO projects, I have specific responsibilities for them. I'm the one on the client calls, I'm coming up with the initial strategy, but I don't necessarily have to be the one to do all the research, all the content, all the you know, building everything in a Google Doc, so I can, I could do all of that. But I know that in our workflow. I do steps 123 And then I hand it off to this team member and then they hand it off to this team member and then it goes out the door. Right? So having those specifically delineated roles, having cross training, we have three people Do research and any given project I'm like, Oh, should this one go to Shannon or le Omoni? You know, and based on because they're all part time contractors, they're all moms, you know. So sometimes things come up and they're like, oh, but it's, you know, my sister in law's in town from Denmark, and I won't be able to work this week. Great. Someone else will pick up the slack. Or we'll talk to the client about an extension versus me going well, I have time. Yeah. Because I want to pay them. I've priced myself so I can pay them so that I absolutely could still go to all that keyword research, I still have that skill set. I taught them how to do it, I create, I should say, I created the trainings that they watched to know how to do it. But that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily the best person to

Katy Weber 40:40
do it anymore. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I did it, I

Meg Casebolt 40:44
might break the system of the next person in line. I, they, the three of them have collaborated to be like, Okay, here's how we do this now to make sure that there's quality control. So yeah, that's about the family recipe.

Katy Weber 40:57
Okay, so I want to backtrack a little bit about just talk a little bit about SEO, because I feel like we didn't, we kind of jumped right in there. And I if there are paid listeners who really don't know what the hell we're talking about, I just want to backtrack. So my understanding of SEO, which is search, search engine optimization, my understanding of SEO has always come from the journalism side, right, which was like you want your articles to be found. So you got to use keywords that will, you know, to anticipate what people are going to search for. I've said this about the podcast, when I was diagnosed, one of the first things I did was type women, ADHD into the podcast, into my podcast player. And so I knew what I wanted my podcast, but I didn't want it to become some I didn't want to name it some kind of weird hybrid name, like squirrel printers or something that nobody would ever search for a spell like I wanted it to be super, super findable or findable. Is that a word? And so but that's right. So that's my understanding of SEO, is there something more to it? When you're talking about it in terms of businesses,

Meg Casebolt 41:59
I think you really hit the nail on the head in terms of what are the benefits of it? And how do we need to think about it in terms of user experience, which is, I want to create something that people can find in the moment that they need it. And I need to anticipate what the things are the what are their problems? What are the solutions that I can provide for them? What are the things that they already know versus what they need to know in order to make an informed decision to be able to buy something? All of that is part of our content strategy, based on what are the things that they think they need? Now, to expand a little bit, you made a really good point, Katie, that, like you went into your podcast player and looked for it. A lot of people think of SEO as being Google only. But you can go into Spotify or Stitcher and use that as a search engine. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the planet. Amazon's a search engine, you know, like there are so many different search engines that people use for different reasons. Pinterest is a search engine, he Bay's a search engine, right? Like

Katy Weber 42:56
he like chat. GPT is becoming one of my most used search engines. Now to find an interesting

Meg Casebolt 43:01
search engine. I would call that an information aggregator, but okay, my idea would be anyway, where I'm like, have a question.

Katy Weber 43:07
And like, who's going to answer it as fast as possible, right? Yeah,

Meg Casebolt 43:11
I like random chat, GBT. I was like, so give me like, tell me who Ariana Grande is in 200 words or less. And it gave me like, because I knew I'd heard her music. And I was like, but it's a show like, just give me the blurb. And that way, I don't have to read the entire Wikipedia. So yeah. Huge fan of chat TPT. It has its limitations. We can talk about that too, if you want. But, you know, any, I wouldn't also chat GPT doesn't provide citations. It doesn't guide people to the original source content, it isn't quite as clear about where it's getting that information. So it's harder to fact check. So what we'll

Katy Weber 43:53
use it for your reports gets, oh.

Meg Casebolt 43:56
While I was writing the book, I was like, hey, chat, JpT. Tell me Give me some resources to check out on it just made up resources from made up organizations and then gave me made up links. And I was like, not research.

Katy Weber 44:13
Did you use it though, for your book? Congratulations on your book. It's coming out like next week, right, isn't it?

Meg Casebolt 44:19
Yeah. 23rd be out by the time you send us. But by the

Katy Weber 44:23
time by the time this episode airs, it will have just come out. So congratulations. I'll make sure to put a link to that for sure. Thanks. Did you use did you use

Meg Casebolt 44:34
AI for your birthday? Yeah. So the actual like book blurb I used GPT. Because my book is basically a distillation of podcast interviews. I pulled a lot of excerpts from the interviews, but sometimes I would put the interview in and be like, what's the most salient point if I want to talk about this or like, make this I didn't want to pull it and be like rewrite this quote. Because I did want it to feel like an excerpt of the podcast interview, and not just what's the paraphrase of it, but what's the actual quote of the conversation that I had? But yeah, I certainly used it for. I like to think of it as like a co brainstorming tool. And a way to consolidate information, not necessarily to aggregate or synthesize information, but to help me get over bumps in the road, right? Yeah,

Katy Weber 45:28
I use it all the time when it's like that. That feeling of staring at a blank page, just to get past that paralysis.

Meg Casebolt 45:35
I also write a question. And I use it for like, I have a character named this, and I want this vibe for her sisters. So if she's named Victoria, and she comes from Connecticut, What would her sisters be named? And they're like, Well, how about Elizabeth and Charlotte? And I'm like, Oh, right. You know, like,

Unknown Speaker 45:53
Oh, I love that,

Meg Casebolt 45:54
you know, or like, she's going to work at this type of business. And it has this history, it was created, you know, like, the backstory comes really easily to me in there. Sometimes that's all you need is like you get stuck on little things when you're writing and it can help you get over those speed bumps.

Katy Weber 46:12
Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. I use that all the time. And then, one of the things I started using it for is I will put the transcript of the podcast in it just to say like, what are five things we even talked about? Because these conversations go all over the place and are never on topic. And so people with ADHD? There

Meg Casebolt 46:34
wouldn't be one where Yeah, Pinball pinball machine.

Katy Weber 46:37
I know exactly. Right. So there's times where I'm like, What do I even call this episode? I don't even know what this episode is about. What isn't it about like I you know, and so I've started just putting it in putting the full transcript into chat GPT, it'd be like, what are five things we talked about? And then GPT? Like, it's like, you broke me. Now, it can be really helpful for that. Yeah. So okay, we're totally off topic. Again. We're talking

Meg Casebolt 47:02
about search engine optimization. You asked me, let me see if I can remember.

Is there anything else beyond sort of that keyword research component and creating content that's based on what we're anticipating people need from us. I think there's also a lot in SEO around making sure that your content is formatted in a way that makes it easy for people to read, you know, with your shownotes, you could very easily take the transcript and just have it be one big block of text. But both for Google being able to understand what the most important pieces are. And for your readers to be able to skim easily you do want to pull out here are the top five things that we talked about in this and be able to say, here's a podcast, show notes, or podcast episode title, that gives people an idea of what they're going to get, but also can show up in those search results for you know, not just women in ADHD, but also every single episode can show up for something and people will actually want to click on it and listen to it and get to know you better that way. So I think a lot of it is not just what are those keywords? But then how do we use them in a structured way so that way people can can find it and actually want to click on it?

Katy Weber 48:17
Yeah, yeah, I've had that complaint where I've said, like, we talked about anxiety, and then people will complain, like, you talked about anxiety for five minutes half way through the episode. And I was like, I know, sorry. We didn't talk about that it was an important part of the bots. Okay, so for somebody who's still not convinced that they can, or I guess is somebody who really relies so heavily on something like say Instagram and Instagram rails, you had mentioned newsletter, i Your my email newsletter is I think the number one converter for me in terms of I could probably count on one hand, the number of people who sign up for my group coaching or, or other offerings who haven't already been on my newsletter list. And so what are some ways that you feel like people can reliably fall back on other less irritating ways of communicating with their potential audience that aren't social media?

Meg Casebolt 49:21
In the book, I list out 17 different options, which I'm not going to list for you now, especially since I actually did close my browser window that had the book opening.

Katy Weber 49:32
Well, go, go, go.

Meg Casebolt 49:34
Yeah, no, it's cool. I break it into two kinds of categories. When we think about this. The first is content marketing, which is how can you create something that people can consume when it's convenient for them that is evergreen in nature, so people can find it in a year, five years, 10 years from now, and still have it be relevant. This podcast some people might listen to it in July 2023, and some people might listen to it in July 2028. And the contents still relevant, and it'll still show up in that search results. So that would be, you know, and when I say find it, I'm saying probably through search, but maybe they also find it through, you know, a referral source or previous guests or something like that, right. So your podcasts, your blogs, your YouTube, any of those ways that you are exhibiting your expertise in a way that other people can find to consume. And then so I would say that's sort of like top of funnel content marketing, how people can find you. And then I would say, you know, email marketing is so great for nurturing and converting, it's still the way that is the most valuable cost per dollar that you're spending on it is email marketing. And then the other side of what I teach and practice is relationship building. So in addition to creating this piece of content together, Katie, now you're going hey, I'm sort of endorsing mag by having her on this podcast, she's the person that I would go to, for this topic of SEO, go check out her stuff, right. So there's a relationship being built in this piece of content as well, you know, you and I could collaborate on future projects, we could send each other referrals back and forth, we could join a mastermind together, we, you know, like, there are a lot of ways that you can develop these online relationships and networks that are mutually beneficial to everyone who's included, but you don't have to do it in a DM, you don't have to log onto a platform that is built to be addictive and will drag you out into the rabbit hole. You can, you know, reach out to previous colleagues and be like, Hey, do you know anybody who needs this right now? It doesn't always have to be this like hyper automated solution with multiple segmentations. Maybe you just reach out to someone and say, Do you know anyone?

Katy Weber 51:42
Right, yeah,

Meg Casebolt 51:43
it's just as good for most relationship based businesses traffic based, you have to go automated, you have to scale. But if you're in a relationship based business where you're high touch, high leverage or not high leverage low, if you're high touch. If you don't need a huge volume of new people coming into you. You could just say to a friend, hey, can we do an email swap? Could we find a way to do a webinar together to talk about our services? Right? Could we maybe you join an online Summit? So you get in front of new people? Right? It doesn't always have to be social media.

Katy Weber 52:18
Ah, oh my god. I can't wait to read your book. I'm so excited. Seriously, I You are changing lives bag. Well, no. And I think about my therapist, because I'm actually going in, I'm about to start school, I'm going back to get my mental health counseling certification to become so nervous. And I'm so excited. But one of the things I often daydream about is my own therapist who has never once like, she doesn't have a website, she's never once marketed herself ever. It's all just word of mouth. And she's had a very, you know, vibrant business for many, many years. And I'm just like, You are my dream. That is my dream.

Meg Casebolt 52:58
And that's the way but all businesses used to be right is, your sure you could put up a billboard, you could buy a TV show ad like there are a lot of ways that you could mass market. But the traditional way of running, especially a local business is like who do you know, that you can introduce me to and that I think that almost like referrals have become a swear word in our culture of needing everything to be automated to the hilt. And I'm stranger, that is for me to say that as the SEO person who's like, get more cold traffic. Probably 60% of my business comes from referrals comes from relationships comes from collaboration comes from probably another 20% is just connecting with people like you and having honest conversations. Yeah, right. Yeah. And I track that stuff because I'm a nerd.

Katy Weber 53:52
Awesome. Okay. So I do love to ask, I don't know if you if you thought about this at all, but I do love to ask my guests. If they could rename ADHD to something a little less confusing or confounding? Would you call it something else? Or do you like, do you like the name?

Meg Casebolt 54:07
I don't like the name, but I don't have a better alternative. Meaning perhaps we should go back to chat TPT and be like, if you had these give me a list of 30 different names that you would give in this condition.

Katy Weber 54:20
You know what I'm gonna actually put that in the show notes are gonna go after this episode, I'm going to ask cheaper charging PT What are five alternative names for ADHD and see what it comes up with? Don't

Meg Casebolt 54:29
even say alternative names for ADHD, say, if there were a condition where you would experience executive functioning disorder. I mean, maybe that's what it is. I think maybe it would be executive functioning disorder or something along those lines for me, because that, to me is the biggest part of it. It's not necessarily focus. It's about decision making and prioritization. But, you know, don't even say what's an alternative for ADHD because then it's gonna throw in those same terms. But if you say here are here are the things that people experience. If they have this, then it might spit out something that you really Don't expect

Katy Weber 55:00
Oh, you know a part of my part of my hates ADHD course one of my favorite things about the course that I built was I have this sort of checklist quiz with 60, you know, random things that I discovered after I was diagnosed that also had to do with ADHD that I couldn't find anywhere that I was like, Are you kidding? You know, weird things like, I hate traffic, right? Or, you know, I hate standing in lines or things you don't necessarily associate with ADHD immediately. And I put together this whole list. And so I'm just maybe I'll just plug in that whole list and see what

Meg Casebolt 55:31
the results are that I need to know. That little pig in the back of my head like, Katie did, I wonder,

Katy Weber 55:40
I know, well, I'm gonna put a list. I'm just typing this out to myself, or else as soon as I get off this call, I will forget about it forever. There's

Meg Casebolt 55:47
the executive functioning.

Katy Weber 55:52
Well, this has been delightful. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your story. And also your fascinating business, which is called Love at first sight, which I will have hopefully, look at cheese. I will have said this in I will have actually introduced you in the introduction. So but yes, love it. First Search. And how long have you been doing this business? Like, how long have you been? I've been in business since

Meg Casebolt 56:12
2013. Doing exclusively search engine optimization for five or six years of that.

Katy Weber 56:18
Wow. Okay, that's amazing. And so now in addition to the book, which just came out? A Do I know you have some wonderful downloads on kind of the your SEO starter kit? But do you work with customers? Or do you have workshops? Or how to how do people find you and work with you?

Meg Casebolt 56:33
Yeah, we have three ways that you can work with us. The first is if you're like, oh, this sounds confusing, and I don't want to have to figure out keyword research and can't you just tell me what to do, you can hire our team to do one of our SEO roadmaps, where we can either give you an itemized list of here are the changes to make based on our research. Or we can go in and make those changes on any wordpress Squarespace or Shopify site for you. Or if you want to learn how to do this, but you want to have somebody hold your hand through the process and have a group cohort to work through it with. So you can learn from other people. We have a group training program called attract and activate, we run twice a year, where we teach not just how to attract people, but also how to activate them to take action on your website. That's a four month group program. So that way, you're getting me every week to help you work through that process. And if you're like, I just want to talk to Meg and I don't want to have to figure out which program and let's just get on a call. You can go to love it first.com/consulting You can book just a one hour 30 minute call with me pick my brain session. And then if you decide that you want to move into one of those other options, we can take some of that and apply it to the programs. But sometimes that's a good way to be like I don't know what I need. Just hop on a call.

Katy Weber 57:45
Yeah. Awesome. And of course, I definitely want to plug the social slowdown podcast because I feel like that is a fantastic resource. And you're just lovely to listen to, you're just to feel like we're you know, very, very instantly feel like I'm your best friend. So

Meg Casebolt 58:01
I feel like that's the thing about people with ADHD and you even put this in like your pre show notes where you're like, we're just gonna leap right in. We just feel like our brains don't work on small talk. It's like, people have told me I feel like you you are having a conversation with somebody, you just hit the record right in the middle of it. Like that's how it feels to talk to us.

Katy Weber 58:20
I know. And it kind of amazes me because I love having that conversation. But it amazes me that we can also follow along and listen to other people have this conversation like that anyone listens to this podcast. It amazes me, because I feel like I'm like, I'm a rambley I don't know what I'm talking about. I've just feel like a lot. Like we're just going off into on all these tirades. But like I also love listening to that too. And those are my favorite podcasts is the ones that are like, I'm going to tell you 10 ways to do this. Those are the podcasts where I'm like, No, thank you enough. I really liked the ones where it's like let's pontificate about, you know, the the meaning of life. And yeah.

Meg Casebolt 58:57
Let's see where this conversation goes. Instead of following the script is much more interesting to me.

Katy Weber 59:03
Yeah, right. Say. Okay, well, wonderful. Thank you so much for reaching out. Meg, it's been great to meet you and yeah, all the best and congratulations on your book. So the book is also called love it for search, or is it called Social slowdown, social selling? Okay, awesome. Okay, well, there'll be links to all of that in the show notes. So check it out and let me know what I should put in the the SEO for this episode. Thanks, Rick.