For a long time, no one was engaging with my content. I had a core group of followers and some friends and family, but I wasn’t getting the kind of engagement I used to get. And honestly? It was really disheartening.

I went from blowing up and gaining 200k followers on TikTok to getting less than 100 likes on each post. On top of it all, I was losing followers in droves. None of my old strategies was working. Until I found the problem.

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about the reason nobody is engaging with your content. And it’s not what you think! It’s not that you’re irrelevant or that no one likes you anymore. It’s just that over time, you started to make content for yourself, rather than other people. So, it’s valuable content to you, but not for the audience you’ve created.

If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, I’m going to break it down in this week’s episode of the Chingona Revolution podcast!

How to work with Erika:

Join the waitlist for the Magnetic Mastermind program here!

Join the waitlist for the Courage Driven Latina program here!

Resources Mentioned:
Click here to watch the free training 3 Mistakes Keeping Your Content Invisible (and How to Fix Them) here! 

Click here to claim your Manifest Your Marca bot! https://theerikacruz.com/manifest-your-marca 

Follow Erika on:
Instagram @‌theerikacruz
TikTok @‌theerikacruz
LinkedIn

Website:
http://www.theerikacruz.com

Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST, an Afro-Latina-owned boutique podcast production and copywriting studio. 

Episode Transcript:

Erika: What if the real reason your content is not working has nothing to do with how often you are posting? What if it has nothing to do with your aesthetics, not your editing, not your captions? What if the real problem is that your content is just, and I say this with a lot of love, is kind of selfish? Today, I’m gonna break down the difference between selfish content [00:01:00] and selfless content, and I promise you that by the end of this episode, you are not going to look at content the same ever again.
You will be able to go back and look at some of the pieces of content that you have posted, and you’re like, “Oof, now I know where I dropped the ball on that.” I am your host. My name is Erika Cruz, and last year I was losing hundreds of followers. This year, within five months, I grew 15,000 followers, and I’ve supported my clients in growing their followers, their views, and landing clients, all because of this one thing I’m gonna be talking about in today’s episode So here’s something that took me way too long to figure out.
For a long time, I was really good at building an audience. I was consistent, I was showing up, I was growing. I mean, my whole business started because I blew up on TikTok and ended up with 200,000 followers. And then I was like, “I should probably do something with these people. I should probably create an offer.
I should probably do something like that.” And that is when I started selling. I actually created my program. At the time, it was [00:02:00] called Purpose Driven Latina, and then something shifted. The more that I posted about my offers, the more I was selling. And the truth is that nobody wants to be sold to. And people wanna be sold to, but they wanna be sold to in a way that feels good to them.
And I’ll give you an example. Whenever you see a commercial and you’re watching your favorite show, and you immediately know it’s a commercial, you’re going to zoom through that, right? But now, think about the Super Bowl commercials, or earlier today I was watching the Mexico World Cup game. And I was watching the commercials because they get really creative with them, and they’re funny.
Sometimes they’re not super salesy, and we actually enjoy watching those commercials. So I want you to think about how when you are marketing your offer and creating content, it’s not that you should never sell, but how you sell really matters. So I had done a really good job of building all this demand.
I had all these followers, and then I [00:03:00] had an offer to sell. So then I started selling my offer, and I had a lot of people interested in the offer. But what happened was all I was then doing was selling. And now that I look back, I know where I messed up. And I can’t believe I didn’t realize this until literally this year, which is why I created my training, which you can access down below.
It’s a completely free training. It’s all about the three mistakes you’re making that are keeping your content invisible. AndThis is the mistake that I was making. What was happening is my sales content was very selfish content.
I wasn’t thinking about what my audience actually cared about and what they wanted to hear.I wasn’t creating something that felt insightful or valuable to them. I was creating content for me to fill my program, to make my numbers look good, to hit my goals, and there’s nothing wrong with hitting your goals, right?
There’s nothing wrong with selling. But the way in which you do it, again, really does matter. And maybe you’re not selling something right now, but eventually you might want to. But either way, [00:04:00] this mistake of creating selfish content is the biggest thing that is keeping your content invisible. So the truth is that I was transitioning from creating really relevant content for people that people really cared about.
It was so selfless, and then it became selfish, and honestly, my audience felt it. Even if they couldn’t name it, they just kind of stopped engaging because how much can you engage with a little graphic from Canva that’s saying, “Now opening for enrollment,” or, “Come join us here.” Like that doesn’t actually give them any value.
And again, I didn’t fully understand this at the time, but now I do. And what I understand and what I want you to also understand is that we are no longer creating content for our friends and family. The algorithm has shifted from a social-based algorithm to now an interest-based algorithm. Every time you create a piece of content, you are creating a piece of content for strangers.
Think about that. [00:05:00] When you open Instagram right now, what is the first thing that you see? It’s not your friends list, it’s the explore page. So it’s content from people all over the world who you’ve never probably met before, you probably never will meet. You’ve never heard of them, you’ve never interacted with them, but they are creating content about something that feels relevant to you That is a reality of how content works today. Their algorithm is not showing your content to the people who already know you. It’s showing it to people who have no idea who you are. And if your content only makes sense to people who already know and love you, then your content’s invisible to anybody else There’s nothing wrong with not being known yet, right?
Every single person that you admire online at some point was also unknown. You- they were also a stranger for you. But you have to create content that works for somebody who’s never seen your face before, meaning it has to invoke curiosity, it has to be entertaining, and [00:06:00] really what summarizes all of this is it needs to be selfless.
Even if you are talking about yourself, it still needs to be valuable for somebody else So instead of creating content for you, you need to create content for the stranger who’s about to discover you. So what in the world is selfish content? Let me break it down. Selfish content is content that is about you without a bridge to your audience. So it’s the content that assumes people already care and know who you are.
Let me give you some real-life examples because I think it’s going to make it really clear for you. ” Here’s a day in my life.” Okay, but whose life, and why should I care? That is an example of selfish content. If I was to post a piece of content, “Here’s a day in my life,” if you already know me, and you know that I’m running a business, and you know that I have a podcast, and I do all these different things, you might be interested.
But imagine a stranger coming across that post. They’re not gonna care. Let’s imagine that you see, I [00:07:00] don’t know, some girl or guy says, “Here’s a day in my life.” Are you going to watch that? And you have no idea who they are. No, ’cause they haven’t given you a reason to want to watch that. But now, let’s compare this to, “Here’s a day in my life as a work from home entrepreneur with ADHD trying to hit this crazy deadline by Friday.”
Now, somebody’s interested, right? Now, that becomes… Even if the day in the life is still about the same person, it became selfless because it’s valuable. It adds context. We’re talking about being a work from home entrepreneur. We’re talking about having ADHD. We’re ha- we’re talking about having a deadline I personally resonate with that way more than the other example because I’m also an entrepreneur, I also have ADHD, I also am constantly running against deadlines. Or another example, “Here’s everything I ate today.” That would be an example of selfish versus, “Everything I ate today as a vegetarian trying to hit 90 grams of [00:08:00] protein.”
I’m not even vegetarian, and I would probably watch that because I’d wanna know, how is a vegetarian hitting that many grams of protein? So do you see the difference? The second version, the one that’s selfless, is very specific, it’s relevant, and it makes a stranger think, “Wait, that’s me,” or, “Wait, I need to see this.”
That is what creates selfless content. It’s not about removing yourself from the picture, but it’s about making sure that what you share creates a bridge between your experience and your audience’s reality. It’s almost this bridge between, “Oh look, here’s the thing I can offer,” and they’re also interested in this thing.
Even if your story is very personal, it can still be selfless if you tell it in a way that makes somebody feel seen. We all saw Jessie Jiang completely blow up as she talked about her millennial career crisis. How many of us, especially women of color, especially Latinas, that were taught towork hard, go to school, get a job, and then we’re going to be happy, and yet all of us are here [00:09:00] like, “Mm, not fulfilled in this job.”
And not just Latinas, right? So many women, so many millennials, so many people nowadays. So even if your story is personal, you can still connect with other people, and we saw that in real time So this matters more than ever because we are living in the era of AI, and AI can produce information faster than any of us ever could. So if your content is just information like tips, facts, advice, you’re competing with tools that never sleep, have access to the entire internet, never get tired, and never run out of ideas.
You cannot win that game. That is not the game you want to play. But the thing that AI cannot do is it cannot be you. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t have emotions. It doesn’t have personal stories. You can share your story AI can’t speak from your lived experience as a first-generation woman to work in corporate or as a first-gen Latina to [00:10:00] go to college and had to figure something out the hard way or to be the person that was paving the path. It cannot create the feeling of, “Oh my gosh, she gets me.” That is your superpower, but only if you use it, and this means going beyond information.
It means being relevant, and it means creating content that makes a stranger stop as they’re scrolling, right? Think about how people are consuming content. It’s very passive. They’re just scrolling. So you have to make people stop the scroll and think, “Wait, is she talking about me?” Or, “Wait, I see myself in this.”
And that is selfless content And that is what builds an audience today
When I learned what I was totally messing up on social media,Which again, if you want the complete behind-the-scenes of all the mistakes I was making so that you don’t make them, go to the link down below for the free training. But when I realized what I was doing wrong, I updated my programs to reflect this. the curriculum is now supportive in [00:11:00] helping my clients go from creating selfish content to selfless content, and I wanna tell you about two examples, two clients who did this.
So one of ’em came to me because she was posting content that really wasn’t doing much for her. She was posting consistently, but what was happening is she was posting content that felt good to her. So things she was maybe proud of, just kind of a few updates here. But nobody outside of her circle was actually engaging.
And once she learned the difference between selfish and selfless content, she started creating content with her audience in mind. She started telling her story in a way that felt relevant to other people. It was valuable to them as well. And she had never made an offer before. She ended up having… She was working in tech, she ended up getting laid off, and I was like, “Hey, why don’t we give this a shot?
Like, why don’t we actually give content a shot? And why don’t we see if you can land a client because you’ve helped yourself navigate corporate America as the first in your [00:12:00] family to ever do this.” And within a week She landed her first paid client without thousands of followers, without a ton of time, literally just the right shift.
And then there’s Evelyn, who’s another client of mine. She started creating content that was truly about her audience. I mean, oh my gosh, I’ll never forget some of the first posts. Like, it was just usually a post of nature, which there’s nothing wrong with that, and then a little caption at the bottom. But people scroll right past that.
It was what she needed at that time to get comfortable posting, but I think she was on average getting, like, maybe two hundred views on posts. This girl has gone viral so many times over the last three months, it’s insane. And w- she started then creating content around what her audience was struggling with, sharing h- why she was moving out of her parents’ house, and it was so real and raw that it was so relevant to so many [00:13:00] people, and they felt so seen.
That video totally blew up. And she really started talking about what they needed to hear and sharing her story in a way where it felt so relevant. Her follower count grew, her views grew, and this girl is just getting started. She’s absolutely crushing it because once you stop creating content for yourself and you start creating content for the person that you are trying to reach, literally everything changes, friends.
So here’s what I want you to do after this episode. I want you to go look at your latest five posts, and I want you to ask yourself honestly, “Is this content actually about you, or is this content for your audience? Is there actually a bridge between your experience and what your ideal follower might be going through?
Are you making it relevant to them,” again, even if you’re talking about yourself. Try to look at your piece of content with fresh eyes. Ask yourself, “If somebody else posted this, would I stop to watch it? Would a stranger, somebody you’ve never met before, [00:14:00] find this relevant?” And if the answer is no, that is okay.
That’s the purpose of this podcast episode. Now you know, and knowing is the first step to making change. So start with one post this week,One piece of content where you can take something from your own life and then make it undeniably relevant to the person that you are trying to reach. And maybe it was your younger self, right? Maybe it’s you five years ago, maybe it’s you three years ago. But get super specific, give content, give context, build the bridge, and that is how…
And that is how you go from invisible to visible I know I’ve mentioned my training a few times. If you want to go check that out, check that out. But if you’ve already seen the training and you’re like, “You know what, Erika? Everything you shared in this podcast episode is super relevant. I actually think I really wanna do this, and I would love your support,” then I invite you to join me inside of Courage Driven Latina, because everything that I just talked about in this episode is exactly the kind of work that we do inside of CDL.[00:15:00]
It is my 12-month signature program for ambitious women who are really ready to stop being invisible online, and they’re ready to build a personal brand that creates real income, real impact, and real opportunities. And the doors are currently open, but they will not be open for long. So if you’ve been listening to this podcast episode and thinking, “Okay, this is really relevant. I think I need more than a, than a podcast. I want somebody in my corner helping me do this,” then this is your moment. This is not just a course. I actually meet with you every single week, Tuesday evenings, and I will give you reviews on your content. You can submit your content for review. You get, immediate access to all of my trainings that go through how to create self-list content.
I have a hooks training. I have a finding your niche training. I have templates to support you with creating content. I have tutorials. You get so much in this program, and you’ll be surrounded by other women who also have goals that are bigger than themselves and also want to create content so that they can have time freedom and money [00:16:00] freedom. You can go to couragedrivenlatina.com or I’ll link it down below.
Okay, so here’s what I want you to walk away with. Your content literally has the power to change somebody’s life. And you know this because you also consume content, but only if it reaches them first, and the only way it’s going to reach them is if it’s relevant to them. So stop creating for the people you already know and start creating for the stranger who’s about to discover you.
Because guess what? Whenever you’re creating for the stranger who’s about to discover you, the people you already know are gonna love that piece of content so much more than if you just created a super general piece of content. Make your story their mirror. Make your expertise their permission slip. Make your content so relevant that when they see it, they think, “Where has she been all my life?” That is the key to selfless content Happy creating, and I will see you in the next episode [00:17:00]