Rachel Miller / Organic Traffic Strategist

Doable Tactics to Get Engagement And Grow a Brand to reach 1 Million Fans and Beyond

In this thrilling episode, we sit down with Rachel Miller, a renowned business strategist and serial entrepreneur. After building her own audiences to astronomical numbers and generating millions in revenue, Rachel now dedicates her expertise to helping other businesses thrive organically. Discover her unique approach to marketing, why she avoids traditional ads, and how any business owner can implement her strategies for success.

Key Points: 

• Rachel's journey from mom of six to marketing strategist.
• Strategies for organic audience growth without ads.
• The importance of engaging content over paid marketing.
• Tips for sustaining business growth and avoiding common pitfalls.
• Rachel’s insights on the future of organic marketing and AI.

Links: 

• Pagewheel
• 11 Freelancer Services that Take Less than 5 Minutes of Work
• Add 100 Perfect Buyers To Your Audience In Just 10 Days With ZERO Ad Spend

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Welcome to the Headsmack Podcast. This is Paul Povolni. I am excited to have a mom of six kids on the podcast today, but that is not her only superpower. Rachel Miller is also a marketing strategist who supports small businesses in growing their audience and sales organically without ads.

Her marketing courses have had over 27 ,000 students and she regularly keynotes as well. Her most recent project is building PageWheel. Why should we learn how to market our business when AI with automations can market your business for you? That is absolutely amazing. Rachel, welcome.

Rachel Miller (05:34.974)
Thank you so much for having me, Paul. I'm so excited to be here.

Paul Povolni (05:37.518)
Yeah, I'm excited about it as well. So let's talk about your adventure of getting to 27 ,000 students, keynoting, building PageWheel. You know, you're a mom of six So how did that journey for you begin? What were you doing at the time and how did that journey towards what you're doing now happen? How did that happen?

Rachel Miller (05:56.638)
Well, does anybody else like get bored really easily and you have to do something different all the time? So I'm one of those people who I did not realize it, but I thought I was gonna go into like regular career world. But it feels like every time I start like, or whenever I get a job, I'm in it for a season and then either I get bored, they get tired of me, or I keep messing things up because I keep trying to change their system that their system was fine before I got there and it was fine while I learned it. And then I just decided to like,

Paul Povolni (06:17.998)
Hahaha.

Rachel Miller (06:26.43)
mess with it. So I'm basically unemployable. And because I'm unemployable, I'm actually unemployable by myself too. So a lot of times people who are entrepreneurs, they think of themselves an entrepreneur, but what they're really doing is they're making a job for themselves. So like the guy who does construction, he's made a construction job for himself. The person who runs a digital marketing agency, they created a job for themselves to manage people who run like work.

an agency. Well, that's not me. I'm not that kind of entrepreneur. I didn't make a job for myself, although I do make an income. What I do is I build something. I love the act of building a business. And then once my business is alive, I often either kill it or I have to move on to something else. And like somebody else runs it for me, like I sell it or I bring out a business partner to run it or something, because I if I keep that business alive, I'm going to kill it. And so now that I've realized how

Paul Povolni (06:57.966)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (07:21.678)
Yeah. What's interesting about that is I've had, what's interesting about that is I've had several people that have talked about the difference between an entrepreneur and a business owner. Um, and so how would you see that difference? And you've kind of explained, you know, you, you, you kind of fired yourself from your jobs because you were unemployable, because you had this different way of doing things. Talk about that just for a moment.

Rachel Miller (07:30.366)
Yes!

Rachel Miller (07:42.206)
Yeah. Yeah. Entrepreneurs, they can't, they're very difficult to employ for a long time because they want to focus on one project and they get all excited about it. But once that they hate systems and once the system, they don't mind building a system for someone else. But once that system is made, they kind of they're meant to go build the next system. Does that make sense? Like they're not meant to they don't follow rules very well. They buck the system. They're always looking for like the improvement.

And while you can, there's like a spectrum of entrepreneurs. So like while an employee, like it's, you want some, I'm looking for improvement. I'm hustling, right? You want some of that, but you don't want somebody who's always looking to improvement. Cause when it works, if you have the entrepreneur in there, the one who's always trying to go, go, go. Well, they might be considered A players while they're starting. There's this point though, where there's the bell curve, where the company is mature and the company.

has systems that the customers like what works. They've got to, they wash the floors, they deliver the floors clean. Like what else? We don't need to change the wax to a new wax. Like this system works. We don't need a new big machine that's more money. It doesn't deliver better results and takes more time too and more resources. Why would we, why would we want to do that? Whereas the entrepreneur is always looking for that next thing. So there's a point in your business where when you're starting, you need a lot of those people.

Paul Povolni (08:51.534)
Right.

Paul Povolni (09:03.758)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (09:09.63)
But once you're at like a mature spot in your company where the company is stable, if you have an entrepreneur still kind of running the helm, what the entrepreneur tends to do is mess with it because they're bored. And when they get bored, they break it just so they can fix it. And ask me how I know I've done that a lot of times and I've screwed up a lot of companies and now I've made a lot of companies success too. But I've now seen my pattern in myself after doing this running businesses for myself for about 16, 17 years, I've noticed.

Paul Povolni (09:20.078)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:25.006)
Wow.

Rachel Miller (09:39.294)
that about three to four years in, once it's kind of like humming along, if I don't get out, that company's not gonna be humming along for very much longer. I'm gonna quit. Yeah, exactly. And I have actually like, we did this once with shop, I had a Shopify store, drop shipping was a thing. It was beautiful. I was like, awesome. This is a machine. So I got the ads working. I got the social media posts to promote my products. I picked the viral products that were yada, yada, yada. Okay, so now the company's running.

Paul Povolni (09:47.726)
You're going to be fired or you're going to quit. Yeah. I think that alone right there.

Rachel Miller (10:09.726)
and I forget about it. I completely forget that I had a Shopify store. Completely forgot. And so like, I don't know, four weeks later, not four weeks later, like, like, okay, six months later, I'd forgotten about it, right? And then something breaks in the system. The system worked for six months, great. But remember, I'm no longer, I just checked out, like that business was running and I had it all automated. I had the email set up to file, la, la, la. Okay, well, you needed some adult in the room to check.

Paul Povolni (10:11.982)
Oh my.

Paul Povolni (10:15.918)
Oh my goodness.

Rachel Miller (10:39.134)
that the system was still running because you know what? Sometimes zaps get disconnected or sometimes maybe your supplier ran out of the product and they don't sell it anymore and you're still selling it and you're saying that they're shipping it. So anyways, the supplier was really mad at me. They're like, can you please stop selling this? You keep sending us orders. We told you three weeks ago, we're not selling this anymore. We are no longer going to be your supplier because you keep doing this. And so now I have no supplier. I have 200 and something orders.

Paul Povolni (10:40.014)
Yeah.

Right.

Rachel Miller (11:08.414)
for a product that three weeks ago I told them shipped. And yeah, so anyways, my point is if you're an entrepreneur, you're gonna have that because you set the system up and you're like, this is amazing. And then you completely forgot that you made that system and you've pieced out and you started working on other things. Meanwhile, something breaks because you have to have a manager, you have to have that person. Now, let's say you're like, oh great, well then no worries, Rachel, I'll just hire the manager. I thought that too.

And then I have to actually have somebody that hires the manager now because what if the manager leaves and I don't know the passwords to get into anything. So it's like, yeah.

Paul Povolni (11:39.278)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And you might hire another entrepreneur because you relate to them too. Because you're like, oh, this is a person.

Rachel Miller (11:47.774)
You can hire an entrepreneur, but they can't be like, there's like a spectrum, like I said. Okay. So I'm like that spectrum way out here that's building, building, building. And there's a spectrum of, of, um, people that keep things alive and keep things running. And I think of those people as the business owner. The business owner has the mindset of, I'm going to keep this alive as a business. I'm going to grow the business. I'm going to, uh,

Paul Povolni (11:51.534)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:01.326)
Right. Right.

Rachel Miller (12:13.022)
follow up with profit and loss statements consistently, whereas an entrepreneur might think, well, that's going down because I'm investing it in something. So you're going to need a business owner of that business eventually, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the entrepreneur. I still own like six businesses, okay? Technically it's three different EINs and then each EIN, some has like different companies inside them. Okay, so I'll go with my legal definition of three. So I own three different businesses.

Paul Povolni (12:18.286)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:27.182)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (12:41.535)
But I'm not running those businesses. Like somebody else now is the business owner of those, even if they're like the stakeholder, they're the ones keeping the business alive while I'm focusing on my pet project.

Paul Povolni (12:44.59)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:53.006)
Yeah, that's so awesome. I think that alone is a headsmack for somebody. I think there's somebody that, you know, thought they wanted to be an entrepreneur, but they actually wanted to be a business owner. And there's somebody that thought they wanted to be a business owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But understanding that difference, I think is a big headsmack moment for folks to get that clarity around what that means. And so, you know, we,

Rachel Miller (13:02.334)
Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with being a business owner. We need you.

Rachel Miller (13:14.206)
just celebrate if you're not that. If you want to create a stable business, by golly, that's beautiful. And I am jealous of you because there's so many times I look at the mess I make in my businesses, because I build these things. And I think, wouldn't it be nice if I just had something stable and beautiful and peaceful? And so I'm jealous of you because you can keep it alive and peaceful. Whereas once it's peaceful, I start messing with it, trying to make it better. And that's not useful anymore. It's broken.

Paul Povolni (13:20.558)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (13:39.534)
So that's your wiring. So how did that journey look like for you to get to where you're at? Because you didn't start off in entrepreneurship, business ownership. You started off somewhere very, very, very different.

Rachel Miller (13:51.358)
Yeah, I was a high school teacher. I taught economics for a couple of years. Then I had babies and had a lot of babies. Then I started online business and I started by collecting my people first. And that's something that I've realized that a lot of entrepreneurs or business owners get wrong. They think about their product before they think about their people. And so if you think about your product first, well, you're going to make an amazing product, but there's no one there to buy it. Whereas for me, I always thought, who is my perfect person?

Paul Povolni (13:53.486)
Heheheheh

Paul Povolni (14:12.654)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (14:17.806)
Ryan.

Rachel Miller (14:21.022)
I want to collect more of those perfect people. And once I have those people, then I will sell products to them. And it doesn't even have to be my product. It can be anybody's product. And I'll create, I'll find out what they're buying, and then I'll make it better. And then again, that whole make it better bit, and then sell that to them and then make that process. And then once that kind of is humming along, then I usually pass that audience onto a different team that then is the business owners and they keep it.

Paul Povolni (14:35.214)
Yeah, right.

Paul Povolni (14:47.182)
So what was the first business you jumped into as a high school teacher that was kind of your first step away from high school?

Rachel Miller (14:53.598)
My first job ever online was writing manuals. It was actually like they're the paper manuals, but I got the job online and a Japanese company hired me because they were making like like small appliances and they were writing the appliance manuals in their version of English, but it wasn't like English that was readable to average Americans. And so they had me rewrite their manuals. So, you know, ages like.

Paul Povolni (15:15.918)
You

Rachel Miller (15:21.278)
I don't know, 15 years ago, there was a remote blinds. I wrote a manual for remote blinds. I wrote a manual for like, I don't know, TV remote or something else. I don't remember. There were like, I don't know, dozens of these that I wrote. I just remember the remote blind one. I didn't keep any of these manuals by the way. So I have no proof that I did that. And I don't remember the name of the company because like it didn't make any sense to name it. I couldn't have said it like anyways, it's what it is.

Paul Povolni (15:24.846)
Mm -hmm.

Paul Povolni (15:32.526)
Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure if you go to a Home Depot or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (15:46.782)
So yeah, you'll just have to take my word for that one. But I wish I'd kept it, because wouldn't that be cool? I could be like, dude, my first thing I wrote was this remote blinds manual. No one reads that. But somebody writes it and that somebody was me. Okay, so I did that first and it was not, I was not making minimum wage, but I was able to do it with my children. And I learned how to write really quickly and I learned how to write like concise and in steps. So like, it was good training.

Paul Povolni (15:51.182)
Yeah. In the beginning. Right.

Paul Povolni (16:08.398)
Mm -hmm.

Paul Povolni (16:16.686)
Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Miller (16:16.734)
but it wasn't like a good job.

Paul Povolni (16:19.662)
Right, right, right, right. Yeah, it was a good, at least a look away from what you were doing and seeing that there's other things out there. So what did that lead to? How did that lead to entrepreneur, Rachel?

Rachel Miller (16:29.758)
I don't know how it led to writing online. Somewhere in there, I started a blog and after starting the blog, then I went on to grow that blog to getting 10 million pages a month. And we grew our audience to 1 million fans in a year. So that was really fun. Yeah, it was really fun. We had so much fun with that. That's preschool, preschool parenting. At the time, I had six, I have six kids and at the time they were preschoolers.

Paul Povolni (16:47.246)
Wow. And what was it about?

Okay, wow.

Rachel Miller (16:59.262)
Looking back, I'm like, did we really make Play -Doh that often? Oh my word, we did anyway. I barely remember those years without like pictures, which is kind of sad. But yeah, I loved working from home because I was able to control my business. I could scale a business. I knew what I needed to do to make more eyeballs. I knew what I needed to do to make more sales. I knew what I needed to do to get more ad revenue coming in.

Paul Povolni (17:03.086)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (17:08.686)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:13.838)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (17:22.942)
Whereas with kids, I don't know if you have kids, they kind of have minds of their own and they do what they want. So it was for me, it was like a great outlet. And so I was so grateful that I got to build my first business, which was a website. And then I went on to sell that one and then build three more. And eventually somewhere in there, people started saying, hey, wait, what are you doing? You're building all these websites. And I was like, oh, yeah, I am. And they started asking me how I'm doing that. And I thought they wanted to know how I was making money from my.

Paul Povolni (17:28.27)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:35.342)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:43.566)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (17:51.614)
websites and no they didn't. They didn't care how I was making money. They wanted to know how I got all that traffic and so that's how I became known as the traffic girl. The first class I brought it. It was hilarious. It was like on Halloween night and so like definitely when you're selling to moms in the United States, you should definitely sell to them on Halloween night when everyone's trying to get their kids dressed up and trying to make sure their kids don't eat the entire bag of bag of candy or take their neighbors entire bag of candy.

Paul Povolni (17:52.654)
Mm -hmm.

Paul Povolni (17:58.03)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:20.942)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (18:21.086)
and go door to door. Like that's definitely the time you should say, bring out your credit card and buy something from me. And so I had a tiny little group of like 200 people. And I think, yeah, I think it was exactly 200 people actually. And they, 40 something, 45 of them pulled out their credit card and purchased my product on Halloween night. And so I turned off my sales card and I was like, don't buy, I don't have this made yet. I don't think you'd actually say yes. What am I gonna do? I freaked out.

Paul Povolni (18:23.918)
You

Paul Povolni (18:39.15)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:45.55)
hahahaha

Oh, that's incredible. That's incredible.

Rachel Miller (18:52.094)
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I still didn't think I'd gotten it though until my official open cart like was like six weeks later after they helped me build the course. And that one we did a $96 ,000 in my first sale. And I remember like crying buckets because I had been a teacher and like and at the time like we had a broken car. Like I didn't. I didn't I didn't understand the gift that was possible with making courses.

Paul Povolni (19:07.022)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (19:10.734)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (19:20.382)
with my websites, I was making like a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there. And I mean, I think I was making consistently equal to or more than my hubby, but it wasn't like big money. Does that make sense? It wasn't big money and it wasn't big impact. Because when you read a blog post on how to make sourdough bread, do you really think, oh, this just changed my life? Not really, right? So the course is...

Paul Povolni (19:30.318)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:38.158)
Yeah. Yeah. It did change my life though, because my wife started making sourdough and I started looking like sourdough because it did change my life. So, but anyway, go ahead.

Rachel Miller (19:44.414)
oooo

Rachel Miller (19:52.19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, I think you can make more of an impact with someone when you ask them to invest more time and more money, because then they invest more time and more of their resources, so they have a bigger transformation in their lives. And for me, that meant that that course was what transformed my life, but also transformed my students as they were able to like build their audiences. So it was really fun.

Paul Povolni (20:13.966)
Right. And so the course was on organic traffic. And so what did that, did you learn that from experimentation, from something from a teacher, a mentor, like how did you get to that point of understanding that, or were you just naturally gifted at it?

Rachel Miller (20:29.79)
I think I was naturally gifted at it, but I think that natural, or that gifting kind of was kind of cultivated over years, kind of like for your childhood. So like I grew up a little bit with not as many friends because I was a homeschooler in the United States when homeschooling had just been legalized. Like the year I started homeschooling was the year it was legalized. So like there weren't very few of us in the area. There were very few homeschoolers. So I'm homeschooling and I didn't have a whole lot of like social interaction.

Paul Povolni (20:49.422)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (20:59.038)
And then I went to college and like, I didn't know who Michael Jackson was or the Insync Boys. And I wore all the wrong clothes, dating myself. Like I didn't look like you were supposed to look at college, right? Like I just was weird. And I was like, dude, I'm not gonna be weird anymore. So I like looked at what people were doing and what makes popularity. And then I was like, well, I can hack that. So I started hacking user engagement.

Paul Povolni (21:03.086)
Oh wow.

Paul Povolni (21:12.302)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (21:26.206)
because what kind of behaviors did they do to excite? I'm gonna do those things. So I think anybody could do that. I don't think it's like a natural skill necessarily, but my background made it where I kind of felt like I had to step up and figure it out.

Paul Povolni (21:40.59)
Yeah. Yeah. You could spot, you could spot those things and, and, and that's an awesome thing. So that led you of course, to, to doing organic traffic, leading others into learning more about organic traffic. So let's talk about that for a little bit. What is the key difference between paid and organic traffic?

Rachel Miller (21:56.766)
Paid traffic is when you run an ad to get someone to click on a piece of content with the intention of them converting. So converting to giving you a lead magnet and growing your list or converting to a buyer of a product, converting to getting on a phone call with you so you can go over your insurance plans that you're gonna sell to them. Whatever that is, you wanna have a conversion and a conversion is an action that the customer completes. And...

A click means that they clicked on the ad in order to click on the website, to click onto the action. So each one, we have like click -through rates, CTRs that we like measure at each stage of that journey, and that's paid traffic. So if you are starting from scratch and you're running ads, well, it's really, really difficult and you're gonna have a hard time getting sales and even knowing why the ad worked because you have to get like 50 conversions for an ad.

platform to realize this is the right person because I have to have enough people coming in that they can see like this. You're looking for moms. You're not looking for 20 year old boys. I remember the one time I ran an ad and we had so many clicks and it was because I didn't know this, but there's this Facebook group in England and they're the couch surfers and it's not actually couch surfers. It's like 18 year olds who don't have a whole lot to do in their time.

Paul Povolni (22:58.958)
Right. Right.

Rachel Miller (23:19.966)
And so what they were doing is they would go on to usually a woman who was older, they'd go onto her Facebook live while she's talking about whatever she's talking about on Facebook live and say, I'll come sit on your couch. Oh, my mama's on your couch. Who's gonna buy her couch? I'm gonna buy her couch. Oh, her couch is too ugly for me. Basically they were talking about sex, but instead of the word sex, they were using the word couch.

Paul Povolni (23:34.414)
Oh my god. Oh my god.

Paul Povolni (23:41.614)
Wow.

Yeah.

Rachel Miller (23:46.334)
and we were talking about it on my profile. And now all of a sudden I'm getting all this traffic to my website and I look through the traffic. I'm like, it's all coming from these three towns in England. What is going on? And I look at the people and they're all 18 year old boys. I'm like, oh no, no, no, no. So this is a high school or a college class that just got really bored during seminar, like their teacher and decided we're gonna gang up on this poor woman. And I...

Paul Povolni (24:07.534)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (24:10.878)
telling you they had the time of their lives and I'm glad they had fun. But, but the point is, I know because they're totally leaving these paragraph responses and they're going back and forth. But I'm like, no, this is not what I'm like pages. I'm like, no guys, we're talking about like, you like, so my point is like those kinds of things that happens when you're just using paid. Now, if I was just using paid at that time and I didn't know what I knew now about the algorithm.

Paul Povolni (24:14.766)
Yeah. Well, and then so Facebook saw that as your audience, right? And so Facebook's like,

Paul Povolni (24:25.614)
Right, right, right. You guys have messed up the algorithm.

Rachel Miller (24:39.934)
I would have been in a world of hurt because now the algorithms like awesome. Rachel wants 18 year old boys. And no guys, it's not that I don't like 18 year old 20 year old boys. It's just they're not my perfect avatar. My perfect avatar is a female trying to grow a business with that business. So anyways, my point is paid you pay for engagements and then organic is like what those boys did. They saw the post, they took action on the post. I wasn't paying for that traffic.

Paul Povolni (24:47.085)
from England who like furniture.

Paul Povolni (24:53.262)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (25:09.79)
But what Facebook does is looks at who's coming and then gives you more of that. Now with organic, you can clean, there's little tricks you can do. Like you can, I call it engagement stacking to get a post to rank and get more people to see it. There's also things you can do to de -rank. Like, so when I had the couch surfers, that's why I call them. I don't know what they call themselves. I could not find the Facebook group where they came from, but obviously they came as a group, okay? They knew each other when they arrived.

Paul Povolni (25:28.526)
Heheheheh

They existed. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (25:34.494)
If I, the couch is all like there's a things I can do like delete them, like block their comments, hide. There's things you can do to depress it in the feed. And then that tells Facebook or if it was on Reddit or LinkedIn or wherever it was that that was posted, it tells those platforms, this is more valuable content. This is a more valuable user. This is a more valuable action. We're going to deliver this to more people just like that person that's engaging.

Paul Povolni (25:44.814)
Right.

Rachel Miller (26:02.398)
So both paid and organic, they work together. One, you have to pay for the views and you're not, you don't get as much control. And then organic for me, I can control organic more because I can like tweak it and make it sing for me.

Paul Povolni (26:16.302)
So when should you use one above the other and who is it perfect for? Who is paid perfect for and who is organic perfect for?

Rachel Miller (26:22.974)
Organic is perfect to attract who your perfect person is. And then once you have your perfect person, I love to use ads as conversion traffic. So ad says, hey, you're here, come on back. You've engaged on this content. You've consumed this. You're talking to Rachel about XYZ. Come on back now and purchase this product that she has.

Paul Povolni (26:46.798)
And for -

Rachel Miller (26:46.942)
So I use ads for conversion instead of attraction content.

Paul Povolni (26:50.478)
And who would that be perfect for? Who would you say, Hey, if you're looking at which one, you know, what to do, do you spend time in pay? Do you spend, um, you know, effort in organic? Cause one requires more effort, right? Um, with organic, there's probably a lot more that needs to be done. Or am I getting that wrong?

Rachel Miller (27:06.75)
Well, both of them you have to set stuff up. So like with an ad, if you don't, you have to set up the ad and then you have to like create the creative. So you're creating the post already. So I don't know if they're too much, there's a little less work with ads, but then you have to pay for it. And if you have zero engagement, you have to pay potentially a lot. Like we're talking like five grand in your first month to really be able to seed the engine enough so that it can see what results you're gonna get.

Paul Povolni (27:29.646)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (27:36.254)
So knowing that, I think most people probably need to start with organic if they're a small business owner, unless they have 5 ,000 to burn, because what if you give it the wrong information and you have to do it again? So I would suggest that most people start with organic, but everyone needs organic and paid in their business. Every single small business out there, if you are marketing right now, you need both. Start with organic.

Paul Povolni (27:47.63)
Right, right, right.

Paul Povolni (27:59.758)
And so if somebody, so somebody came to you and said, you know, I I'm ready to, to do paid stuff. What are some things that they need to consider or having place or make sure that are aligned and right, um, before they, they invest in paid ads.

Rachel Miller (28:18.078)
What I like to make sure is that I have a converting offer before I run paid traffic to it. That I have a converting offer, that the offer has all of its tracking set up and all of its like pixels that I know when someone purchases. So I have a converting offer. I know when the pixels are set up. I have a fulfillment and an upsell sequence because the issue with ads is often you have to spend every penny that you make in your initial sale on the ad.

So you need to make sure there's a follow -up sequence to sell to them because potentially you're gonna lose, they may not be as profitable as you think. So I need to have a converting offer. And I usually test that with organic traffic first, because if organic doesn't buy it, selling it with ads is not gonna cause, you're just gonna put more money in what's not happening. So like ads just amplify what you have. So if you have zero sales, well now you just have more zero sales. If you have...

Paul Povolni (29:12.238)
Hahaha.

Rachel Miller (29:13.406)
Leads that are there, well now you have more leads. So like as you ads add gasoline, but if you're starting with nothing, then it's not gonna work. So you need to have a converting offer on organic. You need to have pixels and tracking set up so you know if a sale comes in that it's attributed accurately. You need to have creative and content that you know converts. Again, organic, I usually have it tested in organic first. And then.

Once you do that, you just need to have it set up in your ads manager. And something that I'm really, really bad at, which is why I don't really run even my own ads. I mean, I do start them, but my team helps me a lot with ads is because you have to follow up with your ads. And if you don't follow up with your ads, when it stops working, when it needs a content refresh, when your ad budget gets kind of screwy and next thing you know, the guys from England are coming in and no guys.

Paul Povolni (30:00.846)
Hahaha.

Rachel Miller (30:03.326)
They're just teenagers. Does that make sense? So the teenagers came in, they could have come from any country. The teenagers came in and started, well, now I could say, okay, turn off that ad because obviously the audience on that ad is corrupted. So we need to clean out that audience and get a new fresh audience. So you have to kind of manage it. And as the entrepreneur, guess what I'm really bad at is remembering to check that ad. So.

Paul Povolni (30:05.358)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:23.278)
That's why you have a team.

Rachel Miller (30:26.014)
I'm so somebody else has to help me with that one. But yes, so you're going to want to those those five different things. Once you have those things, you're ready to run ads. But I always start with organic first, because organic, you can test your offers. I don't know how many businesses out there. I guess this is like a business owner thing. We see the we put the rosy glasses on and we see the world as awesome and amazing. And this is going to be the best. And we create this product. And I hate to break it to you, but like.

of all the products that I make, like when I make a product, like, I don't know, four out of 10 are complete bombs, guaranteed. Even now. And like the next four are so, so bombs. Like we got a couple sales, but we didn't knock it out of the park at all. And no one would call them successful. And then two of them are not, are good. And that one is a knock it out of the park. And that's the one that like, you can pour all your ad money on.

Paul Povolni (31:03.214)
Wow. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:13.358)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (31:20.798)
Well, the problem is you have to test so many times in order to find that one that's knocking out of the park. And I'm saying that because I've done this for 16 years and I still have one out of 10 knocks it out of the park and eight are bombs and one is like a good one, but not that great. So like knowing that you have to do a lot of different tests. And that's why one, you should test with organic first and two, you should make a ton of different offers before you turn on that.

Paul Povolni (31:35.406)
Yeah, that is so good.

Paul Povolni (31:44.622)
Yeah, that is so good. Cause I think some people think that every, every, every hit is a, you know, home run every, every shot is going to be fantastic. And to hear that, you know, that sometimes it takes some testing, it takes some trying, it takes some putting it out there and seeing, and it's, you're not going to, you're not, you don't have to stop and think you're a failure and think that you've missed it and think that nobody wants what I have. Nobody, you know, I'm, I'm a failure. Why am I doing, you know, that sometimes you just got to stick with it and try more things.

And so I'm glad you've shared that. Now, when it comes to organic marketing tactics on social, what are some common mistakes that people make when it comes to that?

Rachel Miller (32:21.15)
Oh my word, there's so many. Sometimes they'll post just one type of content. So like, I only post photos or I only post videos. So posting one type of content is one mistake. Another mistake is that they like use an auto feed or an auto responder. So like they just set up their like account to just publish and they never engage on it afterwards. And it's kind of like, it's like a loud speaker. Another thing is they don't feed the platform. Like I had one perfect account.

The messaging was great. The branding was beautiful and clear and clear and everything. They had even the right people they attracted. And they're like, why? We have a hundred thousand followers and nobody says anything. We have 17 million on, not 17 million, I think it was like seven million on YouTube. And they were really confused why their Facebook account only had a hundred thousand followers and they were all dead. They're like, Facebook doesn't work. I'm like, no, Facebook works great. It's a beautiful that of the seven million you have on YouTube, there's a hundred thousand of them clicked over and followed you.

Paul Povolni (33:10.478)
Hmm.

Rachel Miller (33:19.87)
But look at what you're posting on YouTube, on Facebook. Every single post on Facebook is a YouTube link. Well, guess what? Facebook doesn't really like it when you post their competitor. And that's the only content that you're putting on Facebook is their YouTube link. Well, yes, of course, Facebook's not going to work because you're only posting the competitor. So like, you're on the exact...

Paul Povolni (33:25.998)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (33:36.014)
They want to keep you on their platform. Yeah, they want to keep you on their platform.

Rachel Miller (33:42.046)
Like, I mean, come on, dude. It's like you're going to, yeah, it was like, you're going to the girlfriend's house and basically saying, my ex -girlfriend did this, my ex -girlfriend does that. It's like, it's just, no, stop it. Facebook is a jealous boyfriend. Do not do that. It just doesn't work. And so, so anyways, so that's another one. So, okay, we have, the first one is they post only one type of content. Next one is they post automated, so like an automated loud speaker.

Paul Povolni (33:50.542)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (33:54.51)
Yeah, that's perfect.

Rachel Miller (34:10.878)
The next one, third one was that they post like the competitor platform. So they're not posting links for Facebook. And the last one is they're posting the right, like they're posting regularly, but they're talking down to their audience. So I don't know if any of you guys have noticed this, where you guys go onto a Facebook page and like they're posting variety and it looks great, but it's like, they're kind of bossy and they're constantly telling you there's something wrong with you and that they have the solution because they're the expert. And you're like,

Paul Povolni (34:38.766)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (34:39.39)
I just met you like yesterday in my feed. So you're totally not an expert to me because I don't know you from Adam. And why are we like, oh, this guy's really full of himself. You guys have all seen those feeds and you've all thought that, right? I'm not the only one who's been on Facebook. I was like, whoa, this guy just wrote a four page para..., like, and there's no engagement and there's nobody engaged. So my issue with those is that they seem to expert positioning.

Paul Povolni (34:46.286)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (34:51.342)
Right.

Paul Povolni (34:58.35)
rent yeah.

Rachel Miller (35:05.726)
and they didn't build the relationship first in order to have the right to app to be an expert. And so that they just need to change their messaging up. So, and then the last one is we've all gone to Facebook pages where it's just ugly. And what I mean by that is when you come to it, it just, you feel like it might be like a scammer. Like you feel like it's fake. You feel like you're not in the right place. And that's usually like,

Paul Povolni (35:10.318)
That's so good. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (35:35.966)
Yesterday, somebody gave me a button that was green button with red text on it, or it just was poorly written and they thought it was a somebody said, is this a scam? I'm like, no, oh, GVC wrote this. Like it just feels off, right? And so that's that last one. And I think this is a bigger one that's starting to be an issue more now. Five years ago, ugly sales pages could convert and ugly stuff, ugly content could convert.

Paul Povolni (35:41.006)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (35:48.206)
Yeah, that's 1995 design right there. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (36:04.35)
Now people are getting a little bit more savvy and they're saying, I think that's a scammer, even if it's not, but because it just doesn't feel right anymore.

Paul Povolni (36:12.814)
Right. That's interesting because yeah, you're right. You know, several years ago, you know, the, the funnel community and design went through that era of ugly things converting and making people a lot of money. But I think so many people got into that, that you're right. People are now looking at that and it's like, that's so easy to, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They haven't really invested a lot of time and thought into the look and feel of this. And it's something that could be generated very easily. So.

Rachel Miller (36:31.582)
I think that's a scammer! They just feel off!

Paul Povolni (36:42.798)
Can I trust them? And I think that's a big part of it.

Rachel Miller (36:44.126)
Exactly. They lose that trust factor just because it kind of has some style issues. Now I have noticed the difference though, the older populations, so if they're over 50, you can still have some style issues. But if you're under 30, style is not going to cut it anymore. You have to have that style.

Paul Povolni (36:59.438)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (37:04.174)
Yeah. So what are some emerging trends when it comes to organic marketing? What are some, some strategies that would help businesses, you know, that they should be aware of? What are they?

Rachel Miller (37:15.806)
I'm seeing a lot of businesses right now using AI, which is great. I use AI all the time. Like literally there's not a thing I do in my business every single day that AI doesn't touch. But a lot of them are using AI just straight from ChatGPT. And I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, but there's a lot of posts that are looking a whole lot alike. And there's not a whole lot of, they're feeling like you're starting to be able to be like, why is this feeling like I just read this? It feels, and that's because,

Paul Povolni (37:26.542)
Mm -hmm.

Paul Povolni (37:36.558)
Hmm, yeah.

Rachel Miller (37:44.542)
What ChatGPT does is it looks at the world and you ask for Facebook posts. Well, it looks at the world and it creates a Facebook post for you. Well, if it's a Facebook post like everybody's posts out there, well, does everybody's post convert or do they kind of flop? Well, it's just getting a Facebook post based on the average. Well, you don't want to be average. You want to be better than average. The one thing I've noticed is that everyone's kind of becoming similar. There's kind of like a little bit of an echo chamber, which means that the businesses that

Paul Povolni (37:58.638)
Mmm, yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:04.014)
Right. Right, right.

Rachel Miller (38:14.046)
make human additions to AI are the ones that stand out and are gonna see more growth.

Paul Povolni (38:19.822)
Do you think that's always going to be true? Do you think there's a point where AI is going to be, that won't care anymore? Or do you think that, that human element is always going to be critical and it's always going to be noticeable and people are just going to get a sense for it.

Rachel Miller (38:34.174)
I think AI is always going to be, from here on out, AI is going to be a game changer. And the businesses who use AI well will stand out and the ones who don't won't. I believe that businesses who add human element will always win. So I don't think I believe those are mutually exclusive. What I think is going to happen is that the lazy businesses who are just using straight chat GPT based on the world, that's going to get muddier and muddier.

Paul Povolni (38:51.086)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (39:02.334)
because as chat GPT grows and as more people are using it, well guess what? More people are making crap content. Now if your content is not based on what the world of chat GPT says, but instead is based off of your own data of what winning content is, or based on another set of data of what a winning post looks like, and it's not based off the world, well now you are able to create human.

Paul Povolni (39:08.27)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (39:29.566)
Like it's like a human wrote it content that looks like a human is based off of your content and now is able to be successful. So one of the benefits for me, I thankfully I was able to run like I told you, I have multiple audiences. We have over 4 million followers across social media platforms. So I know posts that have done well. I already have lists gobs and gobs. I think I have like 1200 ones that have done over a million in reach. So I've got this huge base of content that has done well.

Paul Povolni (39:31.662)
Right.

Rachel Miller (39:58.046)
Which remember when you have 4 million fans getting to a million of them with a single post is actually not that difficult. So it's not don't it's it's not as hard as it is when you're starting out. OK, so know that I have these posts that are reaching. So I collected our top posts and then I have had 27 ,000 students in Facebook of the 27 ,000. Believe it or not, only about 1200 or so gave me access, maybe 800 gave me access to their actual data, their full data. So like.

Paul Povolni (40:03.406)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (40:27.646)
I know what post did well for all of those businesses. So knowing that I have that data, now we've anonymized it, anonymized it, that's how you pronounce the word, yeah. Okay, we've anonymized it where you can't copy my post exactly, you can't copy their post exactly, but what I did is I took just post that I knew converted and then fed that to ChatGPT or not actually to ChatGPT, because you can't do it like that. What I did is I built a base that ChatGPT,

I use open AI off of my content. So it's not the world's content, it's just my content. And then said, make posts based off of this, because I know these work. And now I open it up and I'm like, oh my word, I post maybe not all of it because sometimes it still gets a little funky and weird, but I can post 60 % of it just like this. I can post 70 % of it. And so now I'm able to work much quicker and it's AI created, but it's also not.

Paul Povolni (41:05.454)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (41:17.678)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (41:25.246)
AI like the world is using because if you do that, you're going to get this watered down stuff.

Paul Povolni (41:30.766)
So, you know, with the people using AI to just generate content quickly, do you think it's laziness? Do you think it's the frequency of posting? Like, let's talk about the importance of frequency of posting and, you know, that evil algorithm that everybody talks about.

Rachel Miller (41:47.71)
Well, each page has a different frequency. So your frequency depends on how many people are active on your page or your profile or wherever you're posting. If you have a few people active, well, you're gonna need to post a few times. If you have a lot of people active, you gotta have to post a lot of times. So like, it doesn't matter how much time you post, it matters how many times can people see this in their feed and not be like, I've had too much content of this in my feed. So if you have,

Let's say 100 ,000 people. Facebook is probably gonna show your initial post to about 1 ,500 people. If those 1 ,500 people all take action and they're all hyper -engage and they see that post, well now, Facebook's gonna amplify it to 5 ,000 people. If it's amplified to 5 ,000 people that are all your followers and those 5 ,000 people take action on it, well now, you're gonna be reaching 25 to 35 ,000 because those...

That grows. Does that make sense? Like, but now once you're reaching 35 ,000, you can post another post because those engaged 35 ,000 people are waiting for the next piece of content. But if you're still, when you post that first one and you've got a hundred thousand people and you posted crap, posted to YouTube link and Facebook doesn't want that. So they only showed a 1500 and they don't take action because they don't want to click on a YouTube link or on Facebook. And so then the next time you post, you're not going to reach but those 15, another 1500, because you're only going to reach 1 .5%.

Paul Povolni (42:47.342)
Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Miller (43:13.694)
with your initial posting typically.

Paul Povolni (43:17.134)
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And so with the frequency of posting, with the difference between organic and everything, tell me a little bit about what you've done with Pagewheel.

Rachel Miller (43:29.278)
Okay, so what we did, we looked, my business partner and I, we had a problem, which I bet a lot of people have, they have to make offers. And we also had the problem where I don't actually like running a team, I don't know if you picked up on that, managing a team and following up that they did their job is something I forget to do. I follow up with it and say, how are you today? Did you have a great day? But I forget about like, did you do your job this week? So that's not my, like, not my gifting. So knowing that, that I'm not a very good manager or that,

management is not my best use of time. Knowing that I needed to have a way that I could build products for my business without a team and without a ton of revenue because remember I have to build like at the time as we actually did the math we had to build 47 products because we our business had gone through some changes. We were losing affiliate revenue. I don't know how many of you guys have seen the third party cookie and all that other stuff. We had two businesses that were running primarily affiliate and ad revenue.

Well, ad revenue was going down, especially with all the Google changes and the ad network changes. So we were seeing ad revenue go down and we were seeing affiliate revenue go down. And I'm like, oh, no more. So I'm having to write like we looked at the stats. We're going to have to create 47 products to replace this loss of income that we're seeing. And I don't think that loss of income is going to come back. So knowing that we had to make 47 when we're making products, it takes me how long does it take you to build a funnel from start to finish ball?

Paul Povolni (45:00.206)
Probably a week or two.

Rachel Miller (45:02.462)
A week or two. OK, well, I was like super proud of myself. I got it down to like six to eight hours because I'd use all these templates and all these things. So I brought like he said, maybe two weeks to like six hours. Now remember, I'm a mom of six kids. I only have six hours in my day to work like to be. I mean, I love that people can work for 10 hour days, but that is not me. And like that's just not real. I could not even if I wanted to OK, and I do want to for the record. So I'm looking at this going I.

Paul Povolni (45:03.662)
Yeah, depends on the complexity, of course.

Rachel Miller (45:32.414)
This I have 47 of these and if I have 47 and six hours to make each, that's like six weeks of work because I got to take off for Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. That's six weeks. I don't want to spend the next six weeks building products and funnels like that's like a hot fiery place for me. That's not a place I want to hang out. And so I'm and then I was trying to hire people and they were going. It was like $1500 per funnel. It's like no way. And that was.

Paul Povolni (45:50.51)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (46:02.238)
cheap person. I had people quote me like $15 ,000 to make a funnel. I was like, you're crazy. Okay. So knowing that I didn't want to pay for it and I didn't want to spend six hours building that my business partner, Holly and I were like, there's got to be an easier way. So we built it with AI. So what I did is I looked at my previous funnels. Hey, AI make funnels just like this for all of these products. Okay. I looked at my previous social media posts that were successful.

Paul Povolni (46:03.822)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (46:31.614)
Okay, AI use this bank of 1200 Facebook posts. Make me more pay Facebook posts just like this for this other brand, this other business. And when we did that, now we can build a funnel from start to finish in as fast as four minutes. But our average user now just so you know, the FTC requires that you talk about like what the average user gets whenever you're telling like a testimony or case study. Our average user takes about 34 minutes.

to build a website from start to finish with AI, not including their first two, because their first two, they always take a little bit longer. But if you take the first two outliers off and their third, fourth funnel, they can make it in under about 34 minutes. So you could make a funnel what was taking you two weeks to now taking 30 minutes, or if you make zero edits, which that's what we were doing, because we're thinking 80 -20 this, like we have something up and it's better than failing. And then if we have...

Paul Povolni (47:05.486)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (47:26.846)
47 funnels up by, you know, Sunday. Now we can see, well, which ones get better traffic, which ones, then we can make that one better. But until then, let's just get them up. And so we built 47 of them much more quickly using AI. And that's what Pagewheel is.

Paul Povolni (47:35.246)
Right. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:42.638)
That's amazing. And this is, yeah, that's, that's Pagewheel. And so not only creating the websites, creating the social content, and this is stuff that people can actually sign up for. This is something that could be a part of and get all your algorithm, your AI knowledge of stuff that's worked to create their own content, uh, to put out there as well as creating their own websites.

Rachel Miller (47:52.19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Miller (48:03.806)
It makes their lead magnet. So like if you need a checklist like we made, I made one for a vet this morning. They signed up this morning and I was like, awesome. They're like, do you have anything for vets? I was like, let's hop on. I'll show you. And we made a longevity foods for dogs. So what should you add to their foods to help them have like a better gut and to live longer? So they made this longevity foods guide in like.

three or four minutes, it was like a check three page checklist of different types of foods and different ways you can increase the longevity of your pet. And they made that guide in like three or four minutes, but they made the checklist, they put it on a cover, they designed it, they put it into an offer page, they made the mockups, the creative images, they have the sales page written, the offer page written, the delivery page written, the emails written, and all of it was done in, I think together we worked on it 18 minutes. So,

It's something that's really, really fast because it also makes the product. Now this person's a doctor and they want people to eventually like come to the office, right? So now they can say a sign up page that says, hey, I'm the thank you page. Would you like to sign up for a wellness check for your dog to make sure they're reaching their longevity goals? I'm like, I didn't even know there was like a pet thing for longevity pet doctors. Like that's pretty cool. But like, that's weird, but cool. Also, how old is my dog? I don't know.

Paul Povolni (49:07.054)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (49:19.086)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:27.118)
Yeah.

Rachel Miller (49:28.35)
Yeah, it was it was fascinating. But anyways, this is that they were able to create that lead magnet with me just last this morning because we walk through the sequence and it actually made the list builder. So we think often that we have to make the list builder, but AI now can build that too.

Paul Povolni (49:47.118)
That's amazing. So how do this has been fantastic. This has really been so much fun and so many, I think, moments of headsmacks that people can just take and run with or change their thinking about running ads and paid ads, organic ads, what they're doing in the algorithm, so much value. And thank you so much, Rachel, for that. So if people want to be a part of your world, what's the best way to get a hold of you or to connect to what you're doing?

Rachel Miller (50:11.774)
I'm Rachel Miller on Facebook. Come find me. I'm the girl, the Rachel Miller with big hair. Hopefully you'll be able to find me. And I'm on Pagewheel .com. So that's my business. People know me for growing Facebook audiences. And we did create a bonus for everyone who's listening. You're part of Paul's audience. He has a link for you so you can grow your first 100 people. But Pagewheel is my main focus right now. And we're helping people grow their audiences so they can sell more products so they can make an impact in the world.

Paul Povolni (50:16.526)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (50:40.622)
That's awesome. And those links will be in the show notes as well for Pagewheel as well as some other things. And be sure to follow Rachel, follow her adventure. Great value in these short few minutes that we've had together and appreciate you coming on. And I would love to have you on again at some point.

Rachel Miller (50:56.67)
Paul, thank you so much, I truly appreciate it. You too.

Paul Povolni (50:59.022)
Thank you, have a great day.