Why I Regret Building My Business on Social Media (And What I Do Instead)

"Do you regret building your business on social media?"

It's a question I get asked a lot by my peers in the Google Ads industry. Because my network knows how I built my consultancy, on LinkedIn (if you're reading this, come join me over there), they often come to me for advice on how to scale their own.

My answer to them is always complex.

On one hand, I don't regret the relationships.

My agency contacts and industry friends were the first to give me business when I went out on my own. LinkedIn was the catalyst that helped me land writing positions at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. It's the space that allowed me to speak at major conferences like SMX and HeroConf, and to get on the Most Influential PPCer list, and even become President of the Paid Search Association, our professional trade association.

In short, LinkedIn helped me build a reputation as the person who trains the agency world, and it connected me with my closest industry friends. If you want to know how the Google Ads sausage gets made, you come to me.

But if you ask me whether I regret relying on social media to attract actual consulting clients, the answer is a resounding yes. Here's why I changed my entire strategy, and why I'd never advise my own clients to do what I did.

The "Plumber" Problem: Speaking the Wrong Language

For years, my LinkedIn algorithm was perfectly tuned to the search marketing industry. I spoke my natural language: high-level strategy, technical Google Ads updates, algorithm shifts, agency growth metrics. And it worked, but only for the industry. I got jobs easily and never had to turn in a resume.

It's what I call the Plumber Problem. Imagine a master plumber who knows every other plumber in the country. They go to the conventions, they talk shop, they debate the finer points of pipe schematics. It's a great community. But a local homeowner with a flooded basement doesn't care about pipe schematics. They just want their problem fixed.

I was speaking "agency geek," but my ideal consulting clients didn't care about industry inside baseball. They cared about revenue, business growth, and marketing ROI. By feeding the social algorithm what it wanted, I was building clout with my peers, but I wasn't connecting with the business owners who actually needed to hire a Google Ads consultant, save for the agencies who love industry clout for its own sake.

Why I Stopped Giving Social Media My Best Advice

Beyond the language barrier, I realized I was letting social platforms capitalize on my intellectual property.

When you post your best, most valuable insight directly onto a social platform, two things happen.

Your highest-value thought leadership disappears into the algorithm's ether within about a year, never to be found again.

And it becomes incredibly easy for someone to scrape, duplicate, or mimic your framework right there on the platform without ever visiting your website or understanding the actual depth behind it.

As a marketer, I looked in the mirror and realized I was breaking the golden rule of business growth: never build your house on rented land.

I would never, in my wildest dreams, tell a client to rely solely on a third-party platform as their primary lead source. Yet, like a lot of business owners, I was guilty of serving my clients' strategy better than my own.

The Pivot: Building an Organic Traffic Asset

Today my relationship with social media is entirely different. I no longer give third-party networks the best parts of me. When I have a deep tactical breakthrough, a strong case study about Google Ads, or a proven lead-generation strategy, it doesn't go into a LinkedIn post. It goes onto my blog.

By shifting my best content to my own website, I'm finally getting what actually compounds for a growing business.

Every substantial piece I write drives site traffic, lifts my entire domain, and trains Google to treat my own site as the authority, sometimes without me sharing it on social at all, which I still find funny.

Someone scrolling social media is looking for distraction. Someone searching Google is looking for a solution, and when a business owner searches for a Google Ads consultant to fix an underperforming account, I want them landing on my website, not my social profile. A blog post written today can capture leads for the next five years. A social post written today is dead by Wednesday.

The Same Mistake Shows Up Inside Your Ad Account

Here's the part that took me longer to see, even though I tell clients a version of it constantly: rented land isn't just a content problem. It's the exact same structural mistake I see inside Google Ads accounts that have handed everything over to automation without keeping anything for themselves.

An account running entirely on broad automation, no first-party data banked, no clean conversion tracking, no structure anyone on the team actually understands, is built on the same rented land I was building my content on.

You're fully dependent on a platform's black box and misinterpretation of your signals to keep performing in your favor, with no owned asset underneath it if the algorithm shifts, the policy changes and your ads are flagged, or the agency managing it walks away. That's the same vulnerability as deleting your best LinkedIn post the day the algorithm stops showing it to anyone.

The fix is the same instinct in both places. Stop handing your best material to the platform and trust it to compound on your behalf. Bank the data, build the structure, and own the asset, whether that asset is your content or your Google Ad account, so the platform is a distribution channel for you, not a landlord you're renting your entire business from.

Treat Your Business Like Your Best Client

If you've been relying on social media to find clients and feeling frustrated by the lack of high-quality leads, ask yourself: am I speaking to my peers, or am I speaking to my prospects?

I still love my industry network, and I'm proud to train the next generation of agency professionals. But if you want to attract real, high-paying clients who respect your expertise, you have to stop giving your best ideas away to an algorithm. Put them on your own site, build your own asset, and let the clients come to you.

If you were so won over by this post that you want to talk to me, I offer Google Ads coaching and training, but I'll also coach on any topic you've read here. Book a coaching call.

Feel free to reach out, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't want to trash the place that served me, but I do want to call it what it is: social. Sometimes you just aren't ready, and you want to lurk first. I get it. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Feel free to reach out or connect with me on LinkedIn. I don’t want to trash the place that served me but I do want to call it as it is - social. But sometimes you just aren’t ready and want to lurk. I get it.