BS'ing With Brandi

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about selling what you know online.

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Some of you have always had dreams to sell online courses or group coaching programs - especially if you’ve maxed out your 1:1 client capacity but need to generate more sales and revenue without working 27 hours a day.

Some of you have in-person services that you need or want to quickly switch to being offered online.

Some of you have in-person services that just can’t be done without physical contact, and so you want to turn to teach others instead as a source of income.

I have a pretty intense blog post that breaks all of this down in a ton of detail, so I’ll link to that in the show notes. That blog post is kind of specific to online courses, where some of you are doing something more like live online classes, or group coaching, or digital products -  this podcast is going to be more applicable to all types of online services.

As well, I just want to focus on the basics today - the minimum things that you need to get going. Those things are:

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about what I use to create these podcast episodes, aka my podcasting tool stack. This is going to cover everything from the podcast planning and management, to the actual recording, so the promotion.

Podcasting is more popular than ever, and the tools out there make it more accessible than ever for anyone to start a podcast from home. Podcasting seems really straight forward, but like all content creation, it's about more than just sitting down and making the thing. Maybe you want to have some kind of strategy or plan for your topics. Maybe you want your episodes to be syndicated to get the biggest possible reach. Maybe you actually want people to find and subscribe to your podcasts after you put them out there. Maybe you want to monetize your podcast with sponsors.

There’s a lot to think about, but to help reduce the overwhelm today I’m going to walk you through everything I currently use to create these podcast episodes from start to finish. We’ll cover the tools for:

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to all of the resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best-getting shit done this week!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about the lonely life of the entrepreneur - or maybe I should say the myth of the lonely entrepreneur.

So ever since I became an entrepreneur, and in fact even before that when I worked a 9 to 5 and remote working was becoming more and more commonplace for businesses I would always see articles about how people working from home would go to coffee shops or libraries to work, just to have other human interaction. Or there would be tongue-in-cheek comics about entrepreneurs in sweatpants and messy buns who flinch at sunlight because they haven’t been outside in so long.

I hear a lot of my peers bemoaning this very same thing, saying they need to get out, or cringing if someone else hadn’t been out. It’s led to the growth of coworking spaces, and in fact, in my city, there are a couple of really amazing coworking spaces that are beautiful and filled with awesome people. I think coworking is great. But . . .

I will never be their ideal client.

Why?

Because working in my own comfortable space has been my dream for as long as I’ve been in the workforce. And being constantly told by people that I need to work or get out of the house was starting to grate on my nerves. I’ve tried it. I’ve done coffee shops. I’ve done coworking spaces and shared offices. And you know what happened?

I was sooooo unproductive almost every time. It wasn't my space. It didn’t have my things. The temperature was too cold. The temperature was too warm. People were having loud conversations and distracting me. If I needed a break I couldn’t just lay on the couch for 15 minutes and listen to music. I couldn’t just wander around and visit with my husband for 5 minutes. I couldn’t play with the dog. I couldn’t change into looser pants if I ate too much for lunch.

But here is the thing that really drove me to today’s rant: just yesterday I read a lengthy post from someone who was reading all of the same articles as me and seeing all of the same jokes and comics as me and they were wondering if there was something wrong with them for actually not minding “being lonely”. They liked the comfort of being at home, which other people are referring to as isolation. They liked that they didn’t have to conform to a dress code and could wear whatever was comfortable, which other people are referring to as lazy. They liked that people couldn’t just barge into their office or interrupt them at any time, which other people are referring to as bad customer service.

I call all of these things boundaries, and self-care, and knowing what makes you most productive. If you are forcing yourself into an environment where you feel uncomfortable just because society tells you that’s what you should do, how can you give your clients your best work? How can you show up as your best self?

So for any of you out there who are busting your ass from your couch in your yoga pants and telling yourself, you are lazy - cut. it. out.

If putting on business casual and doing your hair and makeup make you feel better and make you more productive - then go for it. If those things don’t concern you, then as long as you are clean and you don’t smell who the hell cares what you’re wearing?

If interacting in person with other human beings makes you feel like a better human being that’s great. If people are distracting and they suck your energy then sit down in your comfy home office and work away...

Read the rest here

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about webinar software. I’m not necessarily going to tell you what tools to use, because there are a lot out there and I haven’t tried all of them. What I'm going to walk you through are the steps for evaluating which platform is going to work best for you based on what you need it to do.

At the time of recording, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people doing videos, live streams, and webinars due to the global pandemic which shall not be named because on one hand I’m sick of it, but on the other, I do realize that we need to acknowledge what is happening in the world.

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this episode:

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best-getting shit done this week!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about one of the biggest reasons you’re not doing the video for your business. One of the big reasons is tech confusion and frustration, but I talk and write about that all of the time. Today’s episode is tackling something a bit more personal, a bit more uncomfortable: fear. Specifically fear of criticism.

Our topic today is coming from my personal experience with doing the video for my business, but also discussions with members of School for Heartful Entrepreneurs.

What I’m going to do is break down this fear into 3 specific subtopics, which are:

I’m pretty firm on what you can do to address the first two, the last one is still something I’m struggling with and haven’t yet come up with an answer I’m happy with.

I suck at speaking: let’s talk about the words “like” and “so” and those wonderful “umms” and “uhs”. Whether you sign up for Toastmasters or get a speaking coach or just start practicing speaking on video in your car the key is to speak with confidence - if you’re hesitant or unsure, all of those vocal habits and tics will stand out.

I hate my _______: for me, it was my voice. That is a very common one. For many other people, it has to do with weight - even crazy successful people like Amy Porterfield avoided putting her face on camera for a long time because she wasn’t comfortable with her weight. If you are doing things to try to hide or cover-up, chances are you are creating more of a distraction.

To get dolled up or not: I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. As a work-from-home online entrepreneur, when I go live in sweats and a messy bun am I being my authentic self? Or am I just being lazy? Am I giving a bad impression or am I being relatable?

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best-getting shit done this week!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about when you shouldn't automate in your business. I'm often talking about automation and how you should do it as much as possible but there are definitely times when automation is going to do your business a disservice.

I wanted to talk about those times specifically so that people can kind of understand I'm not saying that you should have bots and Zapier and everything running your business 100% of the time. There are times when it is not appropriate to automate but that differs from business to business and situation to situation. What I want to do is give a few general guidelines for when you shouldn’t automate if you're in a position where you're trying to figure out what you should do, and then I want to dive into some really specific examples of when you should never automate or maybe an example of where an automation went wrong.

I also want to clarify what I mean when I'm talking about automation. A lot of people hear the word “automation” and get scared because they are thinking about really complex things happening with supercomputers but when I'm talking about automation in terms of business automation it’s anything that you can set up that runs without the intervention of another human i.e. you.

Let's start with some more general situations where you probably don't want to automate.

1. When you don't know what you're doing.

If you have some sort of business process and you don't actually understand it or know how to complete it or have a clear idea of what you want to happen at the end of that process then you shouldn't be automating it. The best advice I always give people when they're trying to decide should I automate this or not is “Do you have all the steps worked out manually? Because if you don't then how are you supposed to tell the computer what to do?”

2. When it's something that isn't a repeatable process.

Automation is good for straightforward repetitive tasks, but if you have something that you do every month but depending on what's going on in your business the process changes every single time you do those are the kinds of things that are not a good candidate for automation.

3. It happens infrequently or the set up is more work than what you’d save.

Something that you just do quarterly or annually can sometimes be more trouble than they're worth to set up an automation for. To be fair you could hire someone to figure out how to automate tasks if you think eventually it is going to save you time and sometimes it's about frustration as well so even if there is something that only takes you half hour but you just absolutely hate doing it then having someone you hired to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to automate that task is probably going to be worth it to you

What about some specific examples of when you shouldn't be automated in your business or examples of when automation went wrong?  These are typically the things that I see the most and a lot of the time I think I think people do them because they're so focussed on saving time that they don't realize the impact that they're having on the people interacting with their business or it's just they haven't properly worked through the steps of what needed to happen and then the automation has kind of gone awry.

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In today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi I’m going to walk you through my decision to stop recording my podcasts as on-camera videos. Lots of podcasters out there are doing their podcasts as videos and uploading to places like YouTube or Facebook in addition to extracting the audio for their podcast channel. The idea behind this is that it makes it easy to distribute to more channels, and it’s a lot easier to turn a video into an audio file than vice versa.

Here’s what I discussed:

If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best-getting shit done this week!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today I’m going to share some quotes with you that have been particularly helpful throughout my entrepreneurial journey.

I thought this topic would be nice to dive into close to Valentine’s Day, which is when this episode will be coming out. It’s also National Heart Month and February 14th is also National Organ Donor day, so anyone who has been following me for awhile will know that these topics are highly personal to me and play a significant role is how my business was formed and has been shaped over the last eight years.

I want to encourage you to share your own meaningful quotes with me, so please comment or send me a message or an email - I’d love to hear from you!

I have six quotes that I’m going to share with you. Most of them are by women. I don’t know if that’s meaningful but I thought it was interesting.

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!

Today we’re going to talk about outsourcing - specifically, the things that you, as the business owner, need to keep in mind when you are outsourcing your tech work in order to keep your service provider from being confused and frustrated. In the end, that will make you happier because you’re likely to be getting their best work!

This came from a LOT of personal experience, both as the service provider and as the person who needs to hire some outsourcers. So when I get into the details I’m going to be giving a lot of personal examples from working with past clients and past contractors.

What I’m going to cover is:

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best-getting shit done this week!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about Facebook Groups and what steps, processes, and considerations you need to think about before you start one.

This is something I’ve talked about before on the blog, but it has been coming up a lot lately since so many people are creating memberships and online courses. You could use other forum software or find a course or membership platform that has some sort of discussion feature built in, but what my clients have found is that people don’t engage in those very much, but they engage a lot more inside a Facebook Group.

I’m going to go through nine things you need to think about:

If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!