Authentic Selling

I learned something the hard way that I want to share with you: trying to sell everything all the time, trying to force other people to perceive something about you, to make them think good or even like to make them think something, to make them associate specific words with you - all of this is something to avoid.

When I started talking on social media about my journey, it was just part of me vlogging, part of me showing my road trip to Milwaukee. That was my channel when I started. And that stopped very shortly after that when I opened a community and 50 people joined the community on the first week. After a few months, we had like 250 people in the community. After a year, 450. So I gained a lot of attention right from the get-go.

And then my brain immediately thought: how to monetize it, how to make profit out of it. I started to create products that I thought I might be able to sell easily. And then to realize like nobody wants them. To realize that all the people just unsubscribe, just unfollow. And trying to push people into clicking my links or joining my events or whatever.

I stopped being honest. I stopped being me. I started to be someone else.

That first of all hurt my soul, second of all hurt my business, and third of all hurt my community. People stopped talking in the community, stopped answering questions, people put the community on archive even though it never was on archive for them. Ultimately it led me to stop all of my doing and stop the whole community and pretty much delete it just because I felt like it's not mine anymore.

I felt like I'm in a box - the name of the community was Young People Doing Real Estate. I felt like I'm in that box. I felt like I don't want to be there anymore.

When I call it selling, it's already not there. When I call it selling, it's already forcing or trying to force. Selling is all about - like true selling, like the good type of selling - is all about offering, just offering. That's it, just offer. Just showing, just to show how to do what they want to do.

And don't get me wrong, I made a lot of money. But not from my selling, right? My forcing. I made a lot of money from my genuine offers. So immediately, as soon as I started to sell, I stopped. I blocked that traffic. Like trying to force people to buy something. Instead, it always worked for me just speaking from my heart.

I felt like I don't want to be anymore like "young people doing real estate." I just want to be Dan. Me. Dan. That's it. That's all I want to be. Also here on social media. Also in my blog. I don't want to talk just about real estate because I care about all bunch of stuff. I want to talk about everything. I want to be me in front of you, in front of everyone. Always. Genuinely me. Bring my honesty. Bring my thoughts. Bring my ideas.

I don't want to force you to buy anything. I do offer. I do have things that might help you. But I'm not here to think about what you can associate with me. You can associate whatever you want with me because I have no control about this. And I will never have. And the fact that you can associate whatever you want about me is not my permission. It's just a fact. Just reality. That's just the way it happens naturally. It's like saying that, I don't know, sun is rising every day. It's the same, you know?

Being honest worked for me tremendously better than being persuasive. Think about that.