My Jerry Maguire, Come-to-Jesus Moment KDS: 118

It seems I’ve been having a lot of these moments lately.If you haven’t seen Jerry Maguire, it came out in 1996. Long story short, Jerry Maguire is a successful sports agent who has his own “Come-to-Jesus” moment, writes a manifesto, distributes it to the agency he works for, and all hell breaks loose in his life.Ideally, these moments don’t cause everything in our lives to unfold.But they’re pivotal moments.Turning points, if you will.The first moment I had that was really more of a “Come-to-Jesus” moment was when I decided to focus my business on serving women.I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but haven’t really had the courage.Until now.Before I get into this recent epiphany (that’s a hell of a lot shorter than writing out “My Jerry Maguire, Come-to-Jesus Moment”), I know exactly what has contributed to arriving here.Focus.Without a doubt, the focus I’ve applied over the last four months has created space for me to get clearer on what I truly want.What I want my life to look like, the work I want to do, and who I want to do it with.Choosing to focus on serving women felt like a huge fork in the road for me. I have a lot of men on my list and in my audience, and I was incredibly nervous that I would be cutting my audience in half.Here’s the kicker, though… even though men have purchased my products, most of my customers are women.This is also why I’m investing in paid traffic.I’ll always do organic content (which is where my Jerry Maguire moment came from), but being able to target exactly who I want to target?That’s gold.OK, let’s get into my “Jerry Maguire, Come-to-Jesus Moment.”I love the phrase, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”The beauty of this is that the teacher doesn’t necessarily have to appear as a person. It can be an article, a video, or a specific message you start to see repeatedly.I subscribe to a lot of email lists, and YouTube channels and read a lot of articles in the digital marketing space, and it’s easy to pick up on trends.Sometimes, I get an inkling of a shift happening, and other times, it takes a little longer.The first inkling I had of a shift happening was from the YouTuber creator Jessica Stansberry. She has a YouTube channel called “Hey Jessica!” and decided to launch a second channel just under her name.She’s been online for about 12 years (I think) and started out doing a ton of “how-to” videos. Months before she decided to launch her second channel, she did a video where she was telling viewers to STOP doing so much how-to or creating content based on keywords.(This is where she hooked me; I hate creating content based on keywords or doing anything based on keyword research).Then, she launched her new channel because she wanted a place to do different content. Lifestyle, vlogging, and sharing her journey. That channel has almost 2k subscribers in less than a few months (and yes, she has her previous channel and existing audience where she can promote the new channel, but it wouldn’t be growing if there wasn’t valuable content).Then I saw this FB post from Adam Linkenauger.It’s a long post, so I’ve copied and pasted it here, along with the image he included showing he knows a thing or two about YouTube:Post:“YouTube isn’t about keywords or SEO.Forget that crap.I could care less about the “search engine”, as ranking for keywords is small potatoes on the platform today.The first step is JOINTLY pleasing your subscriber base AND the algorithm.Understanding the traffic sources and the depth of strategy that comes with increasing clicks and keeping viewers watching longer.Where viewers come from drastically can change your thumbnail strategy, your headline strategy, and the content strategy depending on whether search, brow