Your Dream Business

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Starting an online business or creating a course must be done in baby steps. Don’t just take a jump.
• Make short-term goals. In this business, you must be able to pivot and make changes on the fly to keep your business relevant. Start with six-month goals and work up from there as you get more comfortable.
• Creating a course is stressful for a short amount of time, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Find the light and stay motivated. Keep a project plan with a tool like Asana so you can keep track of your tasks and progress.
• When you reach a goal, celebrate! It’s important for you and your team (if you have one) to celebrate those milestones.
• To start, get in the trenches and learn all you can about your target customer. Create surveys to discover what people need.
• Take some time to understand your promise. What is your promise, and can you really deliver it to your customer? If so, this is where your course is born.
• If you’re just getting started, try to create the course first and then market it. Creation and promotion are two separate beasts.
• Keep your course simple at first and get fancy later. Your customer will care more about the content and knowledge than they will about whether you’re using fancy video all the time. You’ll never get to where you want to go if you don’t start.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Don’t compare yourself to the big shots in the industry. Everyone started somewhere; you have to start somewhere, too. Just get started! Remember, however, that while you can use what others are doing as inspiration, that isn’t where you start. Learn from them—take their courses, listen to their podcasts, read their blogs. But then start from scratch on your own. You can do this!HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• How Amy transitioned from being a good employee to being her own boss – 09:03
• Amy’s vision for her business, and how things changed – 12:45
• How to stay motivated when creating a course – 17:33
• The key to completing your course – 19:11
• It’s important to show your team how instrumental they are – 22:39
• Amy’s tips for creating your own online course – 25:23
• The comparison game and how it can affect you – 29:22
• Consistency matters, no matter the size of your audience – 30:20
• What’s next for Amy – 33:16

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Amy’s course on courses: Courses That Convert
• Amy’s website
• Amy’s social mediaFacebook
• Instagram
• Asana

Transcript below

 

Hello and welcome to Episode 29 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast and I'm your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. Welcome back for another amazing week of the podcast. I think I'm still riding high on Pat's interview last week. It really was a bit of a dream come true for me, I have to say.

And this week is exactly the same. You know when you start a new project and you sit down and you think, "Okay, who do we want on the project? What do we want to achieve?" And you dream bigger than you ever think you can dream. You sit there and go, "Oh, imagine if we got that person. Imagine if they would come on the podcast".

Well, that's what my team and I did a few months ago when we were trying to think who would we want to interview. And we had a list of people that were, kind of like, mega stars in my world. And they were, kind of, the people that you would love to get on the podcast, but you knew that they were busy and they have lots of engagements and they, maybe, aren't as easy to get on.

And Pat was one of those people. So, to have him on for week one was, kind of, crazy dream come true. And this week, it is exactly the same. This week I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming Amy Porterfield. You heard right. Amy Porterfield on my podcast. Honestly, this really is like a dream come true. I've been a fan of Amy's for longer than I can tell you. She was, probably, one of the first people that I really started to follow and get into and I feel like I have learned so much from her.

I have her Courses That Convert, which is a online course that she offers, along with another two online courses. One about list-building, so building your email list. And the other one is about Webinars That Convert. So, if you're using webinars to sell to your audience, then she has got a great course to explain every single step on how you do that.

And, like I said, I have just been the biggest fan for as long as I can remember. I've seen Amy speak twice at Social Media Marketing World. And I reached out to Amy, oh, quite some time back now and connected with her over social media. We chatted a bit. Then, when I was in the States back in June, I asked if we could go for a coffee and she really kindly said, "Yes," which was amazing.

We had a lot of things in common and we had a mutual friend, which helped, obviously. And we went for coffee and we talked nonstop for two hours. And she'd said to me, "I've got an hour," which I was like, "Yeah, that's great". And we sat there for two hours and we literally didn't stop talking the entire time.

So, both of us are stepmoms to sons who are very similar ages. So, we had a big chat about that. We both have dogs and, even though I've said before, I'm not a huge fan of my dog, he's more my husband's dog when he needs anything doing, we had a good chat about that. We have really similar husbands. My husband's in the Forces. Amy's husband is a fireman. They're both super-supportive of what we do and it just was the nicest coffee ever.

And Amy really kindly offered to come on the podcast, which, in my head, I'd kind of thought, "Okay, if this goes well and Amy and I get on as well as I think we will, then maybe when I get back to the UK I will email her and say, 'Is there any chance?'"

And I didn't even have to. We were talking about the podcasts ... Obviously, she has one ... and she literally said, "Well, who'd you want to be on there?" And I said, "I've got this list," but I hadn't asked anybody yet, because I was nervous in case they said, "No".

And she was like, "Well, if I'm on your list, I'd love to come on the podcast". And, honestly, inside, I was squealing like a child. I was so excited. So, we got it planned and we did the call and it was awesome. What I love about it is Amy shares, not only how she got to be the success that she is today, and she's a phenomenal success, but she tells you about her baby steps of coming out of a job with Tony Robbins, no less.

So, she originally worked for Harley-Davidson® Motorcycles and then went to work with Peak Performance Coach Tony Robbins, where she oversaw the content development team and collaborated on ground-breaking online marketing campaigns.

So, she talks through how she moved away from a full-time job with someone as awesome as Tony to then starting her own business and also how her business has changed over time. She also tells me how she keeps motivated while putting together her online courses, which, if you haven't ever bought one of Amy's online courses, oh, my word. They are massive. And I just can't even start to think about how you stay motivated to complete all that content.

We also talked about how you can start your own online business and if you're thinking of starting a course, what steps Amy recommends that you take, in order to get started.

So, I am really excited about this one, as you can imagine. And, if you do know me, you know Amy is huge in my world. So, I am over the moon to be able to introduce to you the amazing Amy Porterfield.

Amy, thank you so much for being a guest on my podcast. I am so excited to have you here.

I love that I get to do this. Every time you and I talk it's like girlfriends are just chatting about everything. Work and life and all the good stuff in between-

Love it.

So, I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

Oh, I'm really excited about it. You are only my second interview-

Oh, my goodness.

So, my last one was with Pat. He is just a consummate professional, isn't he?

Right.

He's amazing. So, that was awesome. But, I feel like I'm getting all the best people to start. So, it's just fantastic.

Well, I thank you for having me. I'm honoured to be the second.

Thank you. So, obviously, I have followed you for ages. I've been very lucky to see you talk live. I'm a student in Courses That Convert and I follow your content. I love what you do. And also, your story, I feel like, if I was to think of my future forward, of how I want my story to pan out, is your story. So, I would love it, for my audience that may not have come across you, although I've talked about you a fair bit, I would love it if you could just explain how you, kind of, got to where you are now.

Great. Okay. So, I started my marketing career with Harley-Davidson® Motorcycles, but it was at a local level, so it was in the States and I ... I say, "in the States," because you're not in the States, but it was in California. And I worked for Harley for a few years and that's where I learned marketing.

So, when you work for a company where people tattoo their logo on their body-

Wow.

I mean, that's crazy. It's a tribe. It's nostalgic. It was amazing. And that's where I learned community. But from there, I then went to work with Peak Performance Coach Tony Robbins. And funny enough, I got there because I broke up with a boyfriend. I was up late at night, couldn't sleep for weeks and weeks and that dang Tony Robbins infomercial kept coming up on the television. And I would see it every night and I thought, I need some of that.

So, I went to the library. I got his tapes. I mean, this is how long ago it was. I got his tapes. I listened. I fell in love with his message and then I thought, "I want to work for this guy".

So, I left Harley-Davidson®, got a job with Tony Robbins and I was the Content Director. So, I got to work on the content that Tony would do on stage and in his digital products. And for six and a half years, I got the best education I could possibly get. I-

I can only imagine.

Right? I mean, I got to learn from the master. And I was really in it. I got to pitch and catch with him. I got to be in his proximity. We travelled all over the world. I mean, my travel bug is out of me. I am done. We were on the road all the time.

And so, I finally realised, I want to be my own boss. After listening to Tony over and over again, I wanted to do my own thing. And, quite honestly, I was exhausted. Travelling that much and being on somebody else's time, you could only do that for so long. And so, I thought, "I want to be my own boss. I want to call the shots. I want to create content for my own business, not for somebody else's".

 

How Amy transitioned from being a good employee to being her own boss

 

And I had just gotten married and the travelling all the time just wasn't going to work. And so, I took baby steps. So, this is great for anybody to hear that is wanting to transition out of one thing into another. I didn't just wake up one day and say, "I'm quitting. I'm starting my own business". But instead, I said, "Okay, I want to move on. I want to start my own thing. I'm going to start taking baby steps".

I asked to move from the content department to the marketing department and I had a lot of clout there. I had been there for a while, so they said, "Yes". And then, at one point I said, "Can I start working from home a few days a week?" And then from there, "Can I go part-time?" And then from there I took the leap and went out on my own.

And I think when you're a good employee ... I recently heard Marie Forleo interview somebody about being a good employee and how you want to just shine, no matter what. And I feel like I was a good employee till the very end, so they said, "Yes" to all those things.

Then I finally took the leap and here's where I'll wrap up the story. My goal was to create online training programmes around social media and online marketing and sell those programmes. That's how I had seen it done by the big guns that were making lots of money and a big impact.

I went out on my own. Had no idea how to create an online course. Didn't have an audience. And I was freaked out, because I didn't have a big savings. So, I started to take clients for social media. So, I took about eight clients. I was doing their social media for small businesses and I hated it.

I didn't realise that it wasn't for me. I mean, it's great for other people. They kill it. I didn't enjoy it. And I had no idea how to set boundaries. So, they were calling me at all hours of the day. Their expectations were wild, because I didn't set any and I just was not loving it. But I did it for two years and being in the trenches with small businesses, doing their social media taught me so very much.

So, I needed the education, I just didn't enjoy it. About two years into my online business ... It's almost ten years now. About two years in, I decided, "No more. I do not like this business model I created. I'm starting over". And I started to create courses and let go of my clients.

The day I let go of my final client-

Oh, wow.

I turned up the radio. I danced it out alone in my little condo like, "I finally am doing it". And it was hard for a while. We actually went into debt a little bit when I let go of my clients and started my online courses, because they, kind of, took a while to ramp up.

So, that wasn't ideal, but I'm here now. 90% of my revenue is made from three online courses I sell on Evergreen every single day and then I do some affiliate marketing as well.

Honestly, the story's amazing, because I used to work for Land Rover. I did corporate marketing for Land Rover. So, again, a brand where, in some parts of the world, that's the only vehicle they see.

Oh, yeah.

And people love the vehicles and.

I have a Range Rover. I love the vehicle.

And it is. It's an amazing brand. A great product. And then, obviously, worked in marketing forever. Started on my own, but I did exactly the same and I had clients. And I remember hearing you say once, which is exactly what I thought, was you went from having one boss to suddenly having eight.

Yes.

Like, "No, that's not what I wanted". And people, they think, "Oh, I'm going to have my own business so that I can have free time and I can manage my ... " And it's like, "No, no, no. That didn't work. That isn't how it's working".

Never.

I think with clients, when you have them, you do feel like you are, kind of, tied a bit, or you are responsible, "I've got to be around in business hours". So, if I go off to the States, I feel a bit like, "Oh, how are we going to manage these things?" So, yeah. I feel like I hear your journey and think, "That's where I want to be. That's where I want to be in five years' time, let's say".

 

Amy’s vision for her business, and how things changed

 

I love it.

If I can keep my fingers crossed. Did you ever imagine, in the early days, when you started, did you think, "I'm going to become this successful"?

Oh, heck no. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I'd have the business I have today. And here's something I tell my students, "The business you have today will look dramatically different in just a few years from now". And so, making big decisions, making pivots, all of that is okay, because it's going to look different.

And I wanted to sell online courses, but I didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out and I think that's okay as well. I recently heard a friend of mine say she never sets goals five years out. She does it about 24 months out and that's about it. And that's what I've always done.

At first it was six months out, then 12 months out, then I could look about two years forward, but no more than that. And that's allowed me to not have to make everything such a big deal, because I could pivot as I go.

Yeah. And I think that's so important. Again, when you said you started off on social media, I've thought about social media courses, but the problem with the social media world is, you do something and 10 minutes later, it's out of date.

Yes.

So, I thought I could spend months putting together an amazing Facebook course and Facebook makes one change and that's it. I'm done.

Yes.

That is no longer relevant. What is it that you love and if there's still things that you dislike about what you do now?

Oh, yes. Okay. So, what I love is I love the teaching part. I absolutely love to put together content and teach it in a way that lightbulbs go off and people think, "Oh, I get it. Finally you broke it down".

I'm best known for step-by-step and breaking things down and holding people's hand through the process and that definitely is something that feels good to me. So, I absolutely love it. I mean, I, of course, love the emails that say, "It worked. I did it and look at my results". So, I live for that.

Now, the stuff I don't love. When I first taught Facebook, I had the same problem that you'll likely be up against where it was always changing. I had a Facebook programme, back in the day, and I wanted to pull my hair out the second Facebook would make an announcement. So, I get that part.

I don't love updating my programmes. No matter what you teach, it's a pain in the butt. And I also feel a lot of pressure to support a lot of people, my community. I'm a worrier by nature. I worry about them. I want to make sure they're getting the kind of support they need and that they're getting to the finish line. And so, I hold that a lot on my chest. I can physically feel it sometimes.

And so, I have to be careful about my self-care. I talk to a therapist-type person every single week on a Friday morning at 7 AM. I do meditation. You know I go on walks with my dog.

Yup.

I have to do a few things, because I will take everybody else's struggle and burden of building an online business and just put it all on myself. And you do that when you have courses that teach people how to do stuff and they're going through it and they're struggling. Building an online business is not easy.

No.

And so, that's the part that I have to be very mindful of.

And I think as well, there's a big difference between people who just put courses out to sell and people who want people to succeed.

Yes.

And you can't just ... Well, you can, but it's not ... I don't think this would be my [inaudible 00:16:05] and it definitely isn't yours. You can just put together a course and sell it and who cares if they do it? That's up to them.

But of course, you don't want that. You want people to buy your course, go through it ... In fact, I have a friend who has her own business who spoke to me just the other day where, "Oh, my God. Amy's done it again". And I was like, "What do you mean?" She went, "I've bought courses ... " She'd already got...

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Practice a “serve first” mentality. Serve first and you will be rewarded. Aim to help people. This should be first and foremost in your mind always.
• Pick the platform you’re most comfortable with FIRST. Work your way up and don’t start with everything all at once.
• If you’re going to post videos on YouTube, start by answering your audience’s questions. They are looking for answers!
• To make video and YouTube work for you, you must be consistent.
• YouTube’s algorithm makes consistency critical to your success. Over time, the platform will tell you what works and what doesn’t. Follow their lead.
• Create themes in your videos and give viewers the option to subscribe or watch another video. Only publish one video a month that involves a lead magnet or upsell for growing your email list instead of trying to do this with every video. This balance will ensure you’ll succeed and gain new leads.
• Plan ahead and batch process your videos. This is the key to staying on top of things on YouTube.
• You don’t want to be just like everyone else. Add your own style and stay true to yourself. Your vibe attracts your tribe. You can use influencers as inspiration, but don’t copy.
• Check and watch your analytics. Don’t compare yourself to others. Instead, compare yourself to your earlier self. Are you improving and growing?
• Don’t focus on being an overnight success. Social media and YouTube take time and hard work. Focus and keep going! It will pay off.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Hit “record” and go. Forget all of the excuses you use to keep yourself from publishing. You must go through the bad to get to the good. Even if your first videos are terrible, they will still resonate with someone. Don’t focus on the failure; instead, focus on making it fun. Everything else will follow.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Pat Flynn’s jumpstart into entrepreneurship – 07:00
• A game-changing platform – 17:54
• Does Pat have a miracle morning? – 22:57
• All about YouTube success – 28:54
• Don’t worry about the numbers – 47:42
• One tip to rule them all – 49:00

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income website
• Smart Passive Income Podcast
• Ask Pat Podcast
• Pat’s YouTube Channel
• Answer the Public Website
• Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
• Facebook
• Instagram

Transcript below

 

Hello, and a really warm welcome to episode 28 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I am your host Teresa Heath-Wareing. I am so excited for today I can't tell you. I've been waiting some quite time to finally get around to interviewing people, which was intentional, because I wanted to work on the podcast on my own and know that I knew what I was doing, and that I got all the systems in place, and everything was working well before I went out to the world to ask people to come onto the podcast.

And today is my first interview and it's so good, I mean, so good. I'm not saying that I'm a really good interviewer, by the way, this isn't some uber confidence thing, but the person who I've interviewed is such a good guest on the podcast that I am over the moon. The guy that I have interviewed for today's first ever interview podcast is normally at the top of people's interview lists, so this guy, you don't normally start with him, he's normally what you work up to.

So today's episode I am interviewing the amazing Pat Flynn, I feel like there should be some kind of like, woo, applause, clap, clap, clap. I should get some sound effects in for future ones. I first met Pat back in Converted 16, which is a conference in Minneapolis, and I have to say at that point I didn't know a lot about Pat. I vaguely knew that he was this guy that helped people with online businesses, but I haven't seen him talk before, and I went a long to this conference in Minneapolis, and Pat was a keynote speaker, and he is so good at speaking, he makes you an instant fan, and immediately fall in love with his style and how he does things, and makes you want to follow him and consume as much of his content as you possibly can.

Pat is a father, husband, and entrepreneur, who lives and works in very beautiful San Diego, for some reason lots of people in my industry all live in San Diego, which is crazy but that's just the way it is, so let me share a little bit about Pat with you, he is a keynote speaker and speaks all over the world, including during the closing keynote of Social Media Marketing World 2018, which I can only imagine that for people in my industry that has gotta be top of the bucket list type thing.

He is the owner of two podcasts, in fact, he's had more than two, but two main podcasts, Smart Passive Income, and Ask Pat. I'm gonna link up to all these things in the show notes, which now have over 50 million downloads. As a fledgling podcaster I can only imagine the day when I can say I've had a million downloads, let alone 50 million downloads.

He is a Wall Street Journal best selling author and has two books, Will It Fly?, and Let It Go. Will It Fly is a book I've read, it's really good if you have an idea and you want to see if it's going to succeed when you put it out into the marketplace, and his current focus is not on YouTube although he still does the other podcast as well, where he currently has over a 130,000 subscribers, and to top it off he is one of the nicest men you will ever met. In our industry he really is probably the nicest person of social media. He is a devoted husband and father, and often shares personal posts on his social media with him and his two delightful children.

This year, at Podcast Movement Conference he even invited his son to come onstage with him and speak, that's right, I mean I couldn't imagine bringing my daughter onstage with me and hoping she says the right things, but his son came onstage and spoke with him, because they now have a podcast together. Now, all these things could be the reason why Pat has one of the loyalist followings ever. He has notes all the time from people who say thank you to him for sharing some of his knowledge, and for helping them with their business. People love Pat Flynn, and in this podcast he shares with us how he got to be the successful entrepreneur that he is, and what has made the biggest difference to him and his business.

And then, on top of all that he gives his top tips on how you can kill it on YouTube, which I have to say I sat there with complete fascination, because YouTube is something that I am thinking about working on, so I was kinda taking in every single word he said, anyway, I feel like I have wound you up enough, so without further ado I would love to welcome you to the amazing Pat Flynn.

Hey Pat.

Hi, how are you?

I am really good, thank you, and you?

Great. Congratulations on your new show and you know I'm happy, and honoured, to be episode number one, and fun fact, I don't know if you know this, but for another very famous podcast called Entrepreneurs On Fire, I was also John Lee Dumas' first episode.

That's amazing.

So you know, this is the start of a good thing.

Yeah, well if I can follow in his footsteps, then absolutely, so as I've said before I've never interviewed anybody before, you're my first, and I said in the intro that we sat down in San Diego a few months back, back in June, and I talked to you about how I wanted to get people on the podcast, and that I wanted to interview, and you very kindly said that you would be happy to be a guest, and how fitting it was that you would be my first guest.

I'm happy to be here.

I am so over the moon and for my listeners out there that are listening, if you don't know Pat, I am about introduce you into someone who is phenomenal, and I'm telling you now, you need to follow him. I know I've mentioned you so many times before, and I've talked about you all the time, so I know that they would've perhaps heard a bit about you, but they probably don't know your story, and your story's fascinating because you have this great saying that getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to you, and really, that was kinda the start of your journey, so I would love it if you could just spend a minute or two kinda taking us through how you kinda got from there to here? That would be awesome.

 

Pat Flynn’s jumpstart into entrepreneurship

 

Yeah, I mean, getting laid off was great but I didn't know it at the time, at the time it felt like the worst thing to ever happen, this was back in June of 2008 I was told I was gonna be let go from my dream job, and I had my dream job for a number of years as an architect, or aspiring architect, I was quickly climbing the corporate ladder only to be thrown out with a lot of other people who were losing their job too around the same time. 2008 was a tough year for a lot of people, and to make this even worse I had just recently proposed to my girlfriend. We were planning a wedding and she's Filipino, I'm half Filipino, and so if you know any Filipinos you know that you need to invited the entire Filipino nation to your wedding.

And so, we're like, what are we gonna do? So my fiance moved back with her parents to save money. I moved back with my parents to save money and I was just trying to figure out, okay, what am I gonna do next? And luckily, I discovered this thing called podcast, because I had some extra time and I listened to a podcast called Internet Business Mastery, and there was one particular episode, and I don't know, divine intervention, right? Like things just kinda happen for a reason sometimes.

I had randomly stumbled upon this podcast, and within this podcast archive, I randomly stumbled upon ... it wasn't even their latest episode it was from a while back, but it was an interview with a guy named Cornelius who was making six figures a year by helping people pass the Project Management Exam, or the PM exam, and that's my first big light bulb moment in my online business career, because I had taken a number of exams to lead up to where I was, and where I was going, as an architect, and I was like, maybe there's someway that I can take this information that I know about one of these exams I took, and I choose one in particular that was extremely difficult that I had recently passed, it was called The LEED Exam, L-E-E-D, which is a worldwide sorta standardisation of green buildings, and environmentally friendly architecture, and that sort of thing.

Very niched exam but it was on my mind so I was like, okay, how can I take this information I know? So I had created a website and I actually had some information already up that was mainly created just to help my co-workers, and me pass this exam, so to kind of rewind a little bit, in 2007 I had studied for this exam which is very difficult, and to help me and a couple co-workers study I created a blog to essentially just keep track of our notes so we could always go back to it, it was always like a good repository for that information, and then after we passed the exam, we literally just let it sit there, because there was no more reason to go back to it.

So when I went back to it several months later and I put a tool on the website to check the traffic, which was like I had no idea what I was doing I signed on the next day and I noticed that thousands of people were already visiting this website from like 30 different countries around the world, and it kinda scared me, I was like, I have no idea how this is happening, where these people are coming from, but I basically found out that they were coming from two places, number one, Google, Google loved what I was posting, or what we had posted on that website, and so they started to rank me really high for a lot of those keywords, but I was also being found in a lot of forums, because people who found me through Google were like, oh my gosh, this resource is exactly what I needed, you guys have to check this out.

I was getting kinda ... people didn't even know who was behind the website but I was famous in this little niche of this exam, and so when I discovered that I was like okay, I gotta show that I'm a real person on the other end, so I opened up the comments, I put my face on the blog, I started saying, hey, my name is Pat, I took this exam too, I'm here to help you, and that's when I started to become seen as like an expert in this space, and people started to call me ... oh, go to Pat's website, because he's an expert on this exam.

It kinda made me laugh at first, because I was like I'm not an expert, I mean, I've taken this exam and I barely passed it, but I started to becoming known as one, because I was the one who was posting information and really just helping people for free, until October when I published a study guide. I'm taking a lot of the same information that I had published for free, and packaging it into a $19.95 eBook, and in that month when I launched that eBook I had made $7,908 dollars and 55 cents.

Oh my God.

From launching that, and it kinda just, I mean, my first reaction was, what is happening? This is crazy, this can't be true, I must be doing something illegal, like, this can't work, I don't even know if this is right, like, I thought that at any moment like the FBI was gonna come and knock on my door, because obviously it just was so new to me, but the coolest part about this was not the money that was coming, the fact that I was able to kinda save myself from this layoff, but the fact that I was also getting these amazing thank you letters, both emails and hand-written letters from people who had passed the exam that I was helping them study for, and a few of those people were like, Pat, I'm a huge fan now. I'm a fan of what you do. I'm gonna share you with the world.

Like, I told my entire office about you and we all bought your programme and I was like this is amazing, and that's when I started smartpassiveincome.com, which is where most people know me from now, where I just decided to share every little bit of this story and everything that I had done, and things that I am doing, things that I'm doing right, things that I'm doing wrong, how much money I was making, where it was all coming from, different strategies I was using, because when I was trying to learn all this stuff nobody was sharing anything, everybody was like okay I would love to teach you internet business stuff but you have to pay thousands of dollars to get access to it, and I was like, that's not right, like, I'm just gonna share everything and see what happens, because that's what I did in the first go around, and now, I'm known as a top leader in the space, and an amazing podcast, with ... we just past 55 million downloads which is kinda insane, and speaking around the world, Wall Street Journal best selling book.

The beauty of this is not just the fact that there's this incredible support that I have from an amazing fan base, and audience, but the fact that I can also structure my time and my life in a way that allows me to spend more time with my kids, my wife and I, we walk to school with our kids every day, we bring them back from school together every day, and we're like the only set of parents who do that. We can go to Target which is a place here in the US that you can buy things at, like, at two in the afternoon when nobody else is there, so little things like that mean so much because now it's like I'm in control as opposed to when I was working in architecture, it's like I was always under somebody else's direction, I was always under ... you know, even the layoff, like that was out of control, now my business is fully under my control and I can decide when I want to do things, how I want to do things, and even decide like how big I want to go, and how much more money I want to make.

It's just so incredible I'm just so thankful and blessed, and this is why I love coming on shows like that and even being episode number one, and just wanting to help as many people as I can.

And the thing, A, that shows in everything I've ever seen you ... it comes from a deep desire of wanting to help people which is such a great lovely way of doing business because it's not like you said, hey, I'll tell you all my secrets, but you've gotta pay all this money, and sometimes that can feel a bit of a con, you know, the reason they made money is because they're selling this to so many people, whereas your isn't like that at all, you're very much this is what I've done.

There's a couple of things that I want to just pick up on, one, I love the fact of your work life ethic, because I think so many people come into their own businesses, especially if they've been in the corporate world, I was from a corporate world myself, and you come into this business thinking great, now I get to control my time, and I think very few people do, I think you'll find yourself working harder and longer, and thinking oh my gosh, I'm working all these hours for what? Probably less than I was earning in corporate world, so the fact that you kinda went, no, I'm not gonna do that, you know, I'm gonna run my business but make suer I have that time for my children and my wife, and I'm present for them.

And then, the other thing that I love, and I was looking at again today, is the fact that you publish your income records, which one, I think is such a brave move because that is the most transparent thing I've ever seen, but the other thing I loved about it was I could look at your income records starting from as way back as you started to post them, and you can start to see your journey, and for someone like me where I feel I'm at sorta the tip of my journey where I'm really gonna start, it's so good to see how your income increased month, from month, from month, and I was wondering as I was looking through what must it felt like, that first month you did a 100 [inaudible 00:15:42] in the door.

Oh, gosh.

I bet it was so exciting.

It was mind blowing and kind of unreal it seems, because you hear about these people who do these big launches or make that much money, and it's just like, that can't be me, and to actually work hard and put in the effort to get to that point, which didn't happen right away, and I tell this story about even how I earned my first 8,000 dollars in that month of October of 2008, I mean, there was so much work that went into that, I mean, I don't want to lie and say that, yeah, this is easy, I'm on a laptop on a beach sipping pina coladas, it's nothing like that, like, I work my butt off, and I still continue to do it, but I am now in control of when I want to work my butt off, and when I want to relax, you know, work hard, play hard, on my own time, not somebody else's time.

And now, I think the best part about this is I'm building my own dream and I'm building my own legacy versus working hard and waking up everyday to build somebody else's dream, right? Like,...

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Make sure you think about how your advertisement works with the landing page. You’ll want to keep them consistent with one another.
• Only use one CTA or call to action on your landing page. Make sure it’s clear and tells your audience what to do. Place it high on your page, in case they want to make a move straight away. Make the CTA button standout!
• Try your best to include an image of your offering. This will help your audience visualize what they will receive. Also, include an image of yourself to help your audience get to know you and your brand!
• If your landing page is connected to Facebook ads, the way your page looks on mobile is extremely important. Make sure your landing page looks great and is easy to read on mobile and desktop.
• Be creative with your page elements! Videos add personality and countdown timers are unique and create urgency.
• Don’t ask for loads of information from your audience. Instead, keep it simple and ask for name and email address.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Content is crucial! The amount of content on your landing page will differ depending on your audience and your goal. If it’s a cold audience, you’ll want more information. If it’s a warm audience, a smaller amount of information is okay. Use your best judgment and make sure the CTA is clear and straightforward. Keep your text broken up with short paragraphs and bullet points, making it easy to read and straight to the point.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• What is a landing page? – 05:37
• Secret #1: Create a page that is clean and direct – 10:06
• Secret #2: Use one call to action – 11:59
• Secret #3: Include an image of what they will get and a photo of you – 14:25
• Secret #4: Think about mobile – 16:19
• Secret #5: Be creative in your page elements – 17:06
• Secret #6: Keep your audience’s effort minimal – 17:43

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Episode #2: How Lead Magnets Help You Build Your List & Stay Connected With Your Followers

Transcript below

 

Hello, and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of The Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I'm your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you've had a great week. I feel like we're like friends now, so I feel like I can come on and be super honest with you, because this week, I don't know about anybody else, but boy, have I struggled with motivation.

I don't know whether it's still because we're in summer holidays here in the UK and obviously things are a bit up in the air with children off school and that sort of thing, but I have just not wanted to do anything this week, and I hate it when I'm like that. I get so frustrated and so cross with myself.

I was listening to James Wedmore's podcast, which I've talked about before and I listen to regularly, and really strangely, but wonderfully, he talked this week about being in a funk, basically where you don't want to do anything. No matter how hard you try, you don't get seem to get anything done. Work isn't coming easily. You're not very motivated.

I know that sometimes in the world of a personal brand or someone who speaks to people like I do, that you feel that you should always be on your game and you feel like you should always be showing other people that you don't struggle with this sort of thing or that you find it really easily to get on with stuff, but I really don't.

Sometimes I find it so difficult to motivate myself, and that's one of the downsides I would say of working from home. Even though I have this great team that work with me, we're all virtual. Three of them are in the States, so obviously we're virtual.

Sometimes it just is really difficult to get yourself motivated in the morning and I have to say, I have really struggled this week. I'm hoping that it's just a bit of a blip and a little bit of time that maybe my mind and body is saying to myself, "Do you know what? Take a bit of a rest. You don't need to be working this hard at the moment. Take it easy a little bit and then we'll get back to it," and I am confident we'll get back to it very quickly, but sometimes like I said, you just don't feel motivated to do anything.

So, I managed to make myself record the podcast, which is really bad because I love recording the podcast, but I'm making myself do it early so that I don't leave until the last minute like I did last week, and the poor team had to run around and get it all sorted for me in time.

As always, I apologised to them and I'll apologise again. However, much to their delight, we've started recording interviews, as I mentioned last week, and therefore, it's forcing my hand to be organised, so they are going to have a much easier run at it this time, which I'm sure they'll be most grateful of.

Anyway, onto today's podcast episode. Anyway, onto today's podcast episode. I think I might have mentioned this, I can't remember, but recently, I have been running an exercise to build my email list and I could not be happier how that exercise has gone. I've been giving away a lead magnet. Talked about that before.

In fact, I did a whole episode about what a lead magnet is back in episode number two, all that time ago, and I gave away a really good lead magnet in order to get people to give me their email address and hopefully start to see who I am, start to see what I can offer them, and see if I can get them to follow me and become part of my tribe.

The whole idea the lead magnet is that I get them to do this, and I was thinking about doing a podcast episode on the whole process of that, start to finish, everything I had to do, and I realised that is a big, big episode, so I might not do that just yet.

I'll have a think about how I can do that and make it concise for you and useful, but what I wanted to talk about today was how important my landing page was, and the key steps to think about or consider when building a landing page for yourself.

Now, my landing page received a 68% conversion rate. I have to tell you, I couldn't have been more over the moon with this. This is a really good conversion rate, and I'm going to give you some of those winning secrets and formulas as to why that page converted so much.

I'm also going to link to that page in the show notes so you can go and have a look at my landing page. Great if you want to sign up and get the free checklist that I was giving away, but really I'm doing it as an exercise so you can have a look at the page and see how I put that page together.

 

What is a landing page?

 

Now, before I talk about the key things that you should do on a landing page, let's just talk briefly about what is a landing page. A landing page is a page that is not normally on your website. That page has one very specific goal, and that normally is to get someone either signed up to a free lead magnet or someone to purchase something. It also tends to only have one call to action. Like I said, it's very direct, very succinct, and it's there for one purpose only.

When I create a landing page, I use the system Lead Pages. Now, there are other systems you can use out there, and if you wanted to and you have a web developer, you could essentially just build a landing page from scratch. However, I am a huge fan of Lead Pages.

I'm going to put a link to it in the show note and it is an affiliate link, and I have to tell you that A, I don't do lots of affiliate links, but B, when I do have an affiliate link, it's because not only do I use that system but I love it. I have to say, Lead Pages for me is a great tool. It does what it does really, really well.

Even though I've actually just started with Infusionsoft and I know that they have a landing page section of Infusionsoft, I'm actually still sticking with Lead Pages, and I'm going to continue to use it because it's worked so well for me in the past. Like I said, I'm going to link up Lead Pages. It is an affiliate link, so don't feel like you have to click on it or use that link. You could literally just search Lead Pages and find them.

The other great thing about Lead Pages is they have lots of tried and tested landing page templates that you can use for lots of different reasons, so whether it be for a webinar or a download or an eBook, they have lots of different examples, so you can go and check them out, as well.

But what I really want to get on with today is telling you the key things that I do or look out for or how I put together my landing page so that it converts as much as possible, because obviously when you're putting together a funnel, you're going to start off with, let's say you're advertising on Facebook, so you're going to start off with your reach on Facebook. That's the number of people that see your advert, and that will then come down based on the number of people who actually then clicked on your advert to go through to your landing page.

That then comes down again when people actually input the details into the landing page that you've created, so at each point, people can drop out of that funnel. The key thing here is in every single step is to maximise that bit so that as many people stay in the funnel as possible, so the bit that I'm talking about with you today is specifically the landing page.

Now, one thing I should say before I talk about building the landing page. When I say building, I don't mean physically building. I mean the things that you should think about when putting the landing page together. Before I start talking about that, one thing that you need to bear in mind is the advert that you're going to use, and it doesn't have to be a Facebook ad. It can be just a post on social media.

It might be coming from somewhere else, whether you do a talk or whether it's a blog or whatever, but wherever you're going to send them from, I.E. where they're going to click to get through to the landing page, the very first thing you need to think about when you're putting this process together is, are they consistent, because that's going to have a bit effect on how many people then convert when they've hit the landing page.

So, let's say I have the best landing page in the world, but the advert that drove them to that landing page looked nothing like the landing page. It talked about a different product. It had a different tone of voice. It was aimed at a different audience. Then, no matter how good my landing page is, they're not going to convert because the thing that they're expecting to see when they got to it was not what they saw, so make sure you think about the advert that you're putting out there and how well does that match with the landing page that they're going to.

Okay, so when they then reach the landing page from wherever they've come from, they're going to see a consistent colour, tone, voice, images all on that page, so they're going to match up what they saw on the advert. One of the first things I do when putting together a landing page is I want a page that is really clean and direct.

 

Secret #1: Create a page that is clean and direct

 

Now, the amount of content you have on the page can completely differ. Unfortunately, there's no hard and fast rule to help you with this, but to give you an idea, if I'm talking to a completely cold audience, I might give them a bit more information on the landing page than I would if I was talking to a warmer audience.

If I was trying to sell something, then I would definitely put more information on that landing page. If the thing that I was trying to give away for free required some effort, I.E. if it was a video series, if it was something that someone needed to spend time and energy doing, then again, I probably would put more information.

If it's a simple download or a simple access to something, then I might not put so much information, but what you've got to do is when you get to that page, is it clear and obvious what you're asking me to do or what you're giving me?

In lots of cases, less is more because if I go to a landing page and there are reams and reams of writing or there is loads of content on there, then the chances are I might get a bit distracted or bored before I do the thing that you're asking me to do.

Another really good tip is if you are going to put text on that page, which obviously you need to put some text on there, if you are going to put text on a page, then obviously bullets always help to keep the text broken up. I tend to keep the length of the text boxes fairly short, so I won't use massive long paragraphs. I tend to keep it quite short and succinct.

 

Secret #2: Use one call to action

 

Obviously, one of the most important things you need to have on a landing page is a call to action. Only have one call to action on the page. Again, you don't want to confuse people by giving them more than one thing to do and run the risk of them doing the thing that you don't want them to do or the thing you want them to do least, so one call to action on the page.

It's also a really good idea to have that call to action high up on the page in case they just want to go ahead and do is straight away. Sometimes people put the call to action right at the bottom of the page. Well, actually, if I've read your ad and I definitely want the thing that you're giving away, give me the opportunity to do it the minute I get to the page.

Try and give that call to action, that first one above the fold. Imagine the kind of standard size of a website page, and then try and imagine the thing that would fall into the bit you see first. I hope that makes sense.

Also, with your call to action button, the colour of your call to action button should stand out massively on that page. It should almost jar with the rest of the page and be really garish in terms of how it stands out on the page.

Now, I have to say, the inner creative person inside me that likes everything beautiful really struggles with this part. I was looking at the landing page I've just talked about earlier, and actually, the colour I picked for my call to action button, even though it really stands out, it does appear somewhere else on the page. I've not listened to my own advice there, but because I wanted it to be consistent, that's why I chose to use that colour. It still does stand out and it still is a strong colour on the page overall.

However, if you really want to maximise that call to action button, you should use a differing colour that doesn't appear anywhere else on the page and like I said, is almost jarring in terms of all the other colours on the page, but it doesn't mean that overall, your page can't be consistent with your brand.

Again, if people do know you or have come from a website, a blog, a Facebook page, then you're going to want to make sure there is some consistency in your branding, your text, and your fonts and your colours and your photos.

 

Secret #3: Include an image of what they will get and a photo of you

 

Now, really quickly on photos and images, it's always a really good idea to actually include an image of the thing they're going to get. Now, I know that this can be tricky, especially if it's going to be a download or something like that. However, do try super hard to include some kind of image.

Now, for me, because it was checklists and there was three checklists they got in the one download, I actually had my designer not only design the checklist once I had given him what I needed on there, but also, then I got him to superimpose them onto clipboards because I really liked the idea of them being on there and it gave you something to physically look at, so you can see and get a feel for the thing that you're going to download.

I know sometimes if you've got an eBook or something like that, then you can run these programmes on something like Photoshop where it superimposes it onto a book, and I know there's websites as well that do that sort of thing. Again, like I said, a visual cue or something that shows them the thing they're going to get can help.

The other thing that can help, especially if like me, you're basing your download on the fact that I want people to get to know me, I've got a picture of me on there. It's advisable if you have a photo of yourself or someone, the picture is either looking at the person who's getting to that page or they are looking towards the button where you actually want them to click the call to action button.

I initially set up a page a while back where my photo was actually looking away from the page and out of the page, as it were, and that wouldn't convert very well because I wasn't connected, or my photo wasn't connecting with people coming to my page, so now my photo on there is looking you right in the eye and hopefully drawing you into that page.

 

Secret #4: Think about mobile

 

The other things that I want you to make sure that you're doing is think about how this is going to look on a mobile device. Really important, especially if it's coming from Facebook ads. I know a lot of my people who convert on my ad are on a mobile, so again, if my landing page didn't look good on a mobile, the chances would be that they wouldn't convert.

One of the great things about Lead Pages is the fact that they give you a view and a preview of how your page can look on a desktop and a mobile device, which is great, because actually, when you're building on the desktop, and I know I did it with this particular page, I looked at it on the desktop and thought, "That looks brilliant," and then I put it on the mobile device and thought, "Not so much." I needed to edit some things because it didn't quite look the right way.

 

Secret #5: Be creative in your page elements

 

Some other things that actually work quite well, as well, are things like videos. If you've got a short video explaining the thing you're giving away, then that can work really well. Also, things like countdown timers, if you're trying to create some urgency, if there's a webinar coming or something that's going to run out, a particular deal or offer, then having a countdown timer on there can be a really good tool.

Again, Lead Pages have all this built into their system. I swear this sounds like an advert for Lead Pages. It really isn't, I promise. It's just a really good tool that I use and some of these things are really helpful to have on your page.

 

Secret #6: Keep your audience’s effort minimal

 

Now, the final thing that I want you to think about when it comes to a landing page is what are you asking them to give you? What effort does it require in order to get the thing that you're giving away? The actual box where they put in their details should be as minimal as possible, so you shouldn't be asking them for loads of different information, because the chances are, if you're trying to get them to fill in a big long form with everything including their inside leg measurement, they're not going to do it.

In most cases, I literally have first name, email address, and now for GDPR, I have a tick box where they can opt into my email list. Obviously, that is super important because this whole exercise of trying to get people to...

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• People invest in people. You need to be your absolute, true and authentic self. People want to see you, not a carbon copy of someone else. You are the thing that sets you apart from everyone else. Be you!
• It’s important that your audience can see your face. This is how someone will connect with you on a different level.
• When you’re growing a personal brand, you need to show an element of your life. What you share will depend on how comfortable you feel. How can you help others understand who you are? People will remember the details such as how you enjoy cooking, rather than your years of experience.
• Consistency is key. People need to know that you’re going to keep showing up day in and day out before they connect.
• It is best to choose one or two social media platforms and kill it! Don’t try and take on too much. Work incredibly hard on the platform you choose. You want to be able to focus on your platform, adding content that is valuable and worth reading. You can’t do this if you’re strapped with too many other platforms.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Building a personal brand means putting yourself out there. Share your knowledge with others and your audience. The more you get out there, the easier it is for people to get to know you!HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Be you, not someone else – 06:40
• Tip #1: Show your face – 09:47
• Tip #2: Think about how to show your authenticity to others – 13:37
• Tip #3: Create consistent content – 16:24
• Tip #4: Find your social platform and work hard – 18:20
• Tip #5: Get in front of other people’s audiences – 19:49

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Ep. 22: The Importance of Creating Consistent Content

Transcript below

 

Hello, and welcome to Episode 26 of the podcast. So good to have you back with me again. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you are having a great day, and continue to have a brilliant and successful week.

This week I have recorded the first of my podcast interviews, because up until now, as I've talked about before, I have done all of them on my own, and that was purposeful. I went to an event, Traffic & Conversion in San Diego back in February, and I met John Lee Dumas, who is a podcasting king, and he suggested that before I interview anybody, I get really good at doing podcasts on my own, and I have lots of practise of doing the podcast on my own, so that's exactly what I've done.

Then it's given me the time and I guess position, in order to go and get some really good guests, so I've recorded my first one this week, and I loved it. I found the experience completely different, obviously, to how I record it on my own, because normally like now, I'm sat in my office, it's quite early in the morning again. As I always say, I do these in the morning, because then the house is quiet, and obviously I talk to myself for about 45 minutes, then I edit it down, and then there's the podcast.

Whereas actually, it was so lovely to have someone to bounce off, someone to talk to, and also someone who is phenomenal at what they do, and they can give you their advice and their suggestions on how to do it really well. So I am super excited to share with you who I've got coming up.

In the next couple of weeks, I've got another two interviews coming up, and I'm actually going to start these interviews with four or maybe five back to back, so week on week, there will be interviews for at least four or five weeks, and you are going to love them, and not want to miss them.

I think they're going to start at the beginning of September. I say all these, "I think, I'm not sure," just because I want to make sure they're all in the bag, I've got them all recorded, and I'm confident they're all ready to go before we hit the button, because I really want this to be an amazing launch into this interview side. Then going forward, it's going to be a mix of interview and then sessions like this where I'm on my own, and I just talk tools, and tips, and tactics.

So yeah, I'm super excited. I can't wait for you to hear, I can't wait for you to see who I've got, which is going to be amazing. I'm ... yeah, really excited about it. Anyway, onto today's podcast episode.

Now, I was out networking yesterday, which I haven't done in a really long time. When I first started the business, I used to network all the time, and if you are just starting out, I would suggest networking is a great way to meet other people, to meet ... I've met loads of friends from networking, but also to get your name out there and get some customers. I have had customers from networking, although on first look, you might think, "No one here is going to buy my product or use my service." Networking can be really, really useful.

It made me think about building a personal brand, and how often people think of building personal brands is only really applicable if you're a consultant, or a trainer, or you are your product. Actually, I was thinking about this, and I don't think that's the case at all. I think if you are the face behind a business, if you are selling something, whether it be a product or a service, people like to buy from people. People invest in people.

In fact, I can't think of any product or service that I don't use because I don't like either the person that I deal with or the people behind it. In fact, I know that there are products and services out there, this is me and my stubbornness, I can be quite stubborn, and unfortunately, I carry it over from my mom, but I know that there are businesses out there that I won't use, because I don't like the people behind it, or I don't think they're of similar character, or we gel, or whatever.

For me, it's all about the people. Often when people think about digital marketing and they think about the digital world we're in now, they feel like it's made us further away from human beings, and I get it. When I sit down every evening, and if the stepchildren and my daughter are ever in the same room as me, which is rare, because they go to their bedrooms, but they're all on their phone.

They don't have friends around like we used to. When I was younger, summer holidays meant we were out with our friends all the time, and that just doesn't seem to happen. They're on FaceTime to them all the time, but they don't appear to be spending that one-to-one time with them.

I get why people think that technology has made us further apart, but from a business point of view, I actually think it's even more important that we show that personal side, that people crave to see that personal side of business. Today I'm going to talk about personal brand, and like I said, you might be sat there thinking, "Well, I'm not a consultant, I'm not a trainer, I'm not selling a membership or a course. I don't need to build my personal brand."

But I would urge you to listen to this, and just think about actually, if a few more people knew you, knew what your thoughts were behind the business, knew what motivated you or drove you to do that business, how many of those people might then come and buy from you or use your service?

What I'm kind of saying is, I don't think this would hurt. Some of these tools and tactics I'm going to give you, I don't think it will hurt for you to take on board some of these. Give it a listen, and see what you think.

Be you, not someone else

 

Before we get started on the actual steps behind how you start to build a personal brand, and some key things that I would suggest, I want to make it really clear that you need to be your absolute true authentic self. That is step number zero. This is the first thing you need to make sure you're doing before you do anything else.

What people want to see is you. They don't want to see a carbon copy of someone else who's really good. They don't want to see two Gary Vees or two Pat Flynns. They want to see you and who you are. In my industry, there are a million social media people, millions of us, but the only thing that sets me and them apart is me; is my history, my experience, my character, my personality, how I like to do things. It would be a complete disservice to myself if I tried to be someone else, if I didn't come out and be the authentic me as I am.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are parts of me that I choose not to share on a business front, so I can be really silly, and I like to laugh a lot and do stupid things, and I know that when it comes to social media, I'm a little bit more careful about how much of that stupid side I show. Also, I want to look good when I'm on social media, so again, I'm not as authentic as say someone like Jenna Kutcher, if you've ever seen her Instagram. I love it. She cracks me up. She will come onto Instagram and do an Insta Story, and will say, "I've just woken up."

Now normally, what this means on Instagram, is when someone does an Insta Story and says, "I've just woken up," it means they got up about two hours earlier, had a full hair and makeup done, and now they're putting themselves on Instagram. Not Jenna. Jenna looks like she has just woken up. She looks like a hot mess, it's hilarious.

Now, I would love to be that authentic, and that honest, and vulnerable, but you know what? I am not comfortable with showing you the mess I look when I wake up, because you would be shocked, I am telling you now for nothing. However, I feel like I show a very honest version of myself, and in doing things like the podcast, and videos, and talks, it's very hard to not show the honest self.

Just have a look at how you're coming across. Is that really you? Is that your true self that you're showing? Is there a passion in your life that you could show more of, or something that really gives people an idea of who you are and what you like? Okay.

I've put together five tips on things that I think you need to do, or concentrate on, or think about if you're going to start to try and build this personal brand. I'm not sat here saying, "Do this tomorrow, and wow, you're now Gary Vee." I'm saying that these are really nice steps in order to take you to that personal brand to get you to show a little bit more of your authentic side.

 

Tip #1: Show your face

 

Tip one, okay, you might not like this, I know lots of people don't. I don't mind, and people think I'm a little bit crazy, but you're going to have to show your face. Now, I am very careful how my face looks when it's on social media, or when I come across on camera, or if I was to do a live, however, you really do have to show you, because people connect with people. If I can't see a face, I can't connect with anything, I can't find a way in which to link or identify someone.

Funnily enough, I was talking to my assistant yesterday, and she said to me, "There's a new group or a new event going on in the town where we live." I know lots of people in this town, which is great. And she said, "Do you know who's behind it?" And I was like, "No."

So we went onto the website and had a look, and it was so faceless. There was no name, no photos, no nothing, and immediately I felt uneasy. Immediately I thought, "I don't know who these people are, and therefore, I don't feel confidence to get my ticket for the event or feel the need to come along to the event." I wanted to see some realness behind it.

I look at all these About Us sections on websites, and actually, funnily enough, that is normally one of the most viewed sections on your website, the About Us, because people want to know who they're talking to. Again, I looked at one the other day, and it just said, "We are this, and we are that." No face, no name, no nothing.

I think ... well funnily enough, at this networking group yesterday when there was a talk, it was a photographer, and she said that when you put your face on your website, you're showing people the, "I believe in what I do. I am passionate about what I do because of the fact that I am willing to put my own face on my website to say, 'This is me, and this is my business, and I am proud.'"

So make sure you've got your face on your site, on your social media, that people can start to identify who you are, what you look like. Now, as I've said, I am very careful about what goes up of me. I really don't like the candid, pulling your stupid face shots, I have to say, although there are a few out there that I couldn't control, but I don't like them.

I actually have photo shoots done. I think I might have talked about this before. One, I have an amazing photographer over in San Diego who whenever I go to California, whether I'm in San Diego, or the last one was in Laguna Beach, he will come and visit me and take photos of me. Now, this seems like such an egotistical thing to happen, and it is a little bit, and I do feel a bit like that, I hear you. However, I don't want to look stupid.

I want those photos to look good when people see me and my face. Also, I want them to look real, and I know Tim over in the States, when I have those done, he can make me look real, because he makes me laugh, and he makes me do silly things that I wouldn't do, and the photos come out great, and I'm super happy with them. So I have photos done.

I also have photographers that I use over here, obviously, but I would suggest that if you aren't keen on having your face on your website or your social media that you go and get someone professionally to take some photos. I promise you the investment will be worth it.

 

Tip #2: Think about how to show your authenticity to others

 

Onto tip number two. Now, I kind of mentioned it in the intro about showing your real self. Once you've decided that you are showing the authentic you, or you are being honest to who you are, think about how you're going to show other people that, because you know when people meet me, they talk about stuff that actually either I've done personally, or somewhere I've been, and it tends to be the stuff that they've seen on Insta Stories.

If you don't follow me on Instagram, please come and follow me, because that's where I am most active. Every day, I probably do an Insta Story, or two, or three, depending on what I'm doing that day. That's when you'll get me talking to camera, that's when you'll get me showing you what I'm doing at the weekend with my daughter. I am more than happy to show you that side of my life, and I think when you're growing a personal brand, or you're trying to get your name out there a bit more, then you need to show an element of that.

Now, it's entirely up to you how much you show. That is purely your decision. I am happy to show a bit of my home life, I'm happy to show my dog, or my husband, or my daughter, my stepchildren are teenagers, I don't think they want to be on my Insta Story, but I'm more than happy to show those parts of my life.

Now, you might not be comfortable putting your children or your home life on social media, and I get it. No problem. But you've got to think how can you bring people into who you are? How can you show some of the more real side of you? If you think about some of the stories you've remembered recently, I bet they are personal details. I bet how long someone has worked at somewhere, or how many years experience, or what degree they have, that's not the stuff that sticks in your head. The stuff that sticks in your head is the personal details. It's do they have a dog?

As you know, I'm a huge fan of Amy Porterfield. I follow her, I watch her stuff, I consume her content, and I know her husband's called Hobie. She has a dog called Scout, and she has a stepson called Cade, and you know what? That enables me to relate to Amy. When I met her again for the third time, I think it was, we went and had coffee in San Diego in June, and one of the things that we talked about for quite a long time was the fact that we both have stepsons at similar ages, and what it's like to be a stepmom. It's tough, by the way, in case you were wondering. Really tough at times, but there we go. That was the thing that we talked about, and that was how we built our connection.

If you can show a bit of your personal life or feel comfortable to show a little bit of that, then great. It might be you have a hobby and you want to show a bit of that. It might be that you like cooking and you want to show what you're having for dinner. It might seem inane, it might seem a bit stupid, but I promise you, that's the stuff that people are going to remember.

 

Tip #3: Create consistent content

 

Onto tip number three, and you're going to get sick of me saying this, because I say it all the time. In fact, I did an entire podcast to it a couple of weeks ago. You need to create consistent content. How am I going to know that you are someone I need to follow or engage with about a certain subject if you never tell me you know about it?

I know it's irritating, I know it's hard work, believe me, it is Friday on the week before the podcast comes out, so my podcast comes out on Monday, and I am recording it at 10 to 9:00 now on a Friday morning. That is not ideal, I'm telling you, because this week it's been a super busy week, and I'm up against it, but I've committed to doing is every week, and therefore, I've got to get on and do it.

I know it's tough, I know it's hard to create consistent content, I know it takes work, and in the early days, no one is going to pay attention, and you are going to think, "Why am I doing this? I am sending it out to the world and getting tumbleweed back." But those people need to understand that you are going to show up week on, week off, and they want to see that that's going to happen before they commit to loving what you're doing, consuming what you do. Decide what your content is going to be, and make sure that you are creating that consistent content.

As I mentioned in Episode 22, I did a whole podcast about the importance of creating consistent content, and in that podcast, I talk you through a bit of pros and cons to each of the different types of content you can put out, whether it's video, YouTube, podcast, blog, so go and have a listen to that one if you haven't already. That might give you some ideas of the types of content you might want to put out.

 

Tip #4: Find your social platform and work hard

 

Okay, so you're putting out that consistent content. The next thing you're going to do, tip number four, is find your platform and work hard at it. When I talk about platform, I mean social media. Now, you don't have to be on every single social media, it's a myth. I would much rather you be on one or two platforms and kill it. Do amazingly well on that platform.

Sometimes, and I am at the risk of this, because obviously doing what I do, I have to be on all the platforms. However, I run the risk of diluting myself because I'm trying to do so much. Funnily enough, I was just having this conversation yesterday when I was talking to my assistant, as I said earlier. We were talking about me starting a YouTube channel, which I really want to do, because I feel ... well, I'm having serious FOMO, fear of missing out.

I'm watching these other people to YouTube and do an amazing job of it, and I'm sat there thinking, "I need to be doing that." But the problem is, if I do that, am I...

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Repurposing content is taking a piece of content you already have written or recorded and reinvigorating it. It means packing it up in a different way to remind your audience that it’s there.
• Finding content ideas is hard! Your audience probably hasn’t made the most of the content you already have. There is still opportunity for your content and more room for others to take advantage of it.
• Evergreen content can be repurposed. This type of content is content that is relevant now and in the future. Blog posts, videos, webinars and even your interviews can be repurposed into something new as long as it’s evergreen.
• What content has done well previously for you? Which blog post is the most read post? Which video received the most views? These are the ones you want to repurpose first!
• For blog posts, you can create multiple social media posts, a live video to link back to your blog, and create a checklist or workbook for people to download. The opportunities are endless!
• Round-ups are also an option. What are your top five blogs? Share those through an email and on your social media.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Create less, promote more! Your content has much more life in it than you think. Look at your content as a whole and brainstorm ways in which you can repurpose it. Do you have a series of videos? Turn it into a course. Do you have a blog you can turn into an infographic for social media? Share it on Pinterest. Get creative!HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• What is repurposing content? – 03:59
• Why would we want to repurpose content? – 04:46
• What kind of content can you repurpose? – 05:57
• How do you repurpose your content? – 07:31

Transcript below

 

Hello, and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. I am your host Teresa Heath-Wareing, and I am super pleased to have you here with me this week. So every time I start my podcast, I always really struggle with knowing how to start it. I'll say good morning, good afternoon, have you had a great week, and then I think to myself, "Well, I don't know when someone's listening to it," so I don't know whether it's morning, afternoon, whether it's a Monday, a Friday. So I always struggle beginning my podcast because I don't actually know what to say, which sounds like a really stupid thing, but I end up saying the same thing every time. I've tried to do a bit of research and go back and listen to the podcasts that I listen to, to see what kind of things they say, but again, I think they have the same problem that I do and they end up saying the same things as well.

But anyway, if you've got any bright ideas, then please feel free to let me know because I would love to hear them because I'm struggling with the beginning a bit. I really do appreciate you listening to me, although I apologise for rambling on. Today's podcast is going to be a really good one because one of the things that I get asked all the time is about content and creating content, and there's a really big thing about you've got to be good at content, you've got to be imaginative and engaging, you've got to put lots out there, and it's really hard to keep coming up with stuff.

I know I'm really bad for this because what I should be doing with the podcast ... And I've tried a bit ... is I should be planning out, okay, for the next six weeks this is what I'm talking about, but I don't. I do tend to get to a podcast and think, "What should I talk about today?" And today I was struggling, which is ridiculous because I'm talking about social media, which is such a huge subject. However, sometimes your mind just goes blank and you think, "I don't know what to post, what to write about, what to record on a podcast."

Also, I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like there is just so much content. I was looking at a course the other week that was available to purchase, and it was huge, and they had all these upgrades that if you paid more, you would get this bit and that bit and this cheat sheet and this checklist and this email thing, and all I could think about was that's just so much stuff, and actually, am I going to get to read it all? Am I going to get to go through it? Because I have to say, in the past I have purchased courses and I've not completed them. Big massive courses that cost me thousands, and I've not finished them because there was just so much content.

So sometimes I feel like we are overwhelmed with how much stuff there is out there and how much stuff we've already put out there, which got me thinking about today's subject. So today I'm going to be talking about repurposing content for social media, and I think this is a really good subject, and one that actually everyone can probably take some benefit from because if you're having to produce any content of any kind, finding a way in which you can put more content out without actually having to think of a million new ideas has got to be a good thing, and I'm hoping you agree, which I'm sure you do.

So today I am going to talk you through what is content repurposing, first and foremost. Then, why should you think about doing it? Then we're going to look at what is really good to repurpose, what kind of content is good to repurpose, and then I'm going to give you some ideas on how to take a piece of content and ways in which you can repurpose it. So today should be a really good podcast episode. I'm so glad I've got you here along with me. Let's get started.

 

What is repurposing content?

 

Okay. What is repurposing content? So basically it's taking a piece of content that you've already written or recorded or have somewhere in some format, and it's basically reinvigorating it. It's giving it a new lease of life. Doesn't necessarily mean you have to change anything on that content. It just means packaging it up in a different way and putting it back out there so that people can see it again or they're reminded that it's there again. So for instance, if you've got a core bit of content such as a video or a webinar, a blog post, whatever it might be, it's about using that content that you've already put out once and you've already shared once, but putting a new spin on it, putting a new lease of life, and sharing it again.

 

Why would we want to repurpose content?

 

Why would you want to repurpose content? Well, as we've talked about before, finding content ideas is hard, and actually, you've probably produced so much content already and people have not made the most of that content. When you go and look at, say, your Google Analytics and look at how many people are landing on your blogs, on your website, it doesn't matter whether 500, five thousand, or fifty thousand people have read that blog post. There's still opportunity for other people to read it that maybe haven't read it already. Also, have look at your video views on Facebook or YouTube. Again, there's always room for more people to see that content.

Also, as I said, there is so much content out there already, and I am sure that people have not made the most of the content that you've already put out. So therefore, looking at how you can re-put it out there, put a fresh spin or a new light on it, is a great way to make sure that people are really making the most of that content. Basically this is the ethos of create less, promote more, which for me, someone that has to produce a lot of content, sounds like a brilliant idea.

 

What kind of content can you repurpose?

 

Okay, so we're convinced that we know what it is and we want to do it because we know why we should do it, so what kind of stuff can you repurpose? Well, one of the first things you need to think about is, is it evergreen? And by evergreen, I mean does it matter whether it comes out today or in 4 months, 6 months, 10 months time? Because actually, there's no point in me trying to repurpose a bit of content that talks about Instagram's latest updates because after a month it's not going to be the latest updates. However, when we're talking about how to build an audience profile, then that's evergreen. That doesn't matter whether I do it today or in six months time, the principles are still the same.

So then the next thing we're going to think about is what type of content can you repurpose? Well, it's anything that's been produced already such as a blog post, a video, a webinar, an interview, anything that you've got a really good strong piece of core content that provides a really good value to your audience. That's the sort of thing you're going to look at repurposing.

A great tip you can use when trying to decide what to repurpose is look at what has gone down really well previously. So for instance, if you look at your Google Analytics again and you go and see all your blog posts, which is the most read blog post? Which are the videos that got the most views? Then obviously that's really good content because people were interested in it, so those would be the ones that I start with first.

 

How do you repurpose your content?

 

Okay, so you've identified some key pieces of content that you think were really well-received the first time round. Maybe it's a blog post that was written 12 months ago, a video that you did six months ago, and you're now looking at how you can repurpose that content. Also, I should mention that it doesn't have to be old content you repurpose. It could be something that you produce tomorrow and then just find multiple ways in which you can put it out and to promote that bit of content, or use that key core of content to produce more content. I'm saying content like a million types in this podcast, but I do feel like it's necessary so I apologise.

Okay. So now we've looked at why we want to do it, how you get started in terms of finding the content to repurpose. Let's think about now actually how we repurpose things. So I'm going to give you some ideas on what sort of stuff you can turn into other things, and because I know I'm going to be firing lots of ideas at you, and if you're like me, you're listening to this while driving the car or getting ready in the morning, I've put together a handy guide with all my ideas for repurposing on it. So if you head over to the show notes or go to teresaheathwareing.com/25, then you'll be able to download it from there.

Now we've got that sorted, let's get on with the ideas. Let's start with a blog post. If you've got a blog post, the very first time you put it out, the very first thing I do is I create at least three social media posts about that blog post, and I will make them all different. So the first one, for instance, might be the title of the blog post. The second post might be something like a key fact, or something like that, that's in the blog post. Then the third post might be a surprising fact or a surprise question or an answer to something that people might want, and I would create memes or some kind of graphic out of all of these as well. So that's on a very basic level. So when you've written a blog post, you put those out, and you share it on social media a number of times.

You could then take that blog post and do a live video about it or do a video full stop. Now, you don't have to do a video that's the entire of the blog post. You could just do ... Let's say if you were doing five ways to do something, you could just give away tip number one and two, then direct them to the blog post to read the rest. If the blog post talks about tips and tricks, you could then turn that into a checklist or a workbook and provide that for people to download. And of course, if you have someone super creative on your team, then why not turn that blog post into something like an infographic and post it on Pinterest? And of course, it goes without saying, if you have a podcast, then use one of those old blog posts like I did last week to then talk through it on your podcast.

Okay, so let's say that your core piece of content is a video. This is a really good one to repurpose. One of the first things you can do is have an audio version of the video, so you can actually just pull out the audio depending on how you recorded the video and you can have that put up as a podcast or as an audio download, something like that.

The next thing you could do is to have that video transcribed. So I've talked before about rev.com that I use. So every time I do a video or a podcast, I send them the file or a link to it and then they transcribe it for me. And with my podcast, I literally just have this transcription put on the page, but if I wanted, I could then take that transcription and tweak the content, because obviously someone talking to how someone would read that is quite different so you would need to tweak it, and then you could turn it into a blog post and put that on your website. And of course, as I've talked about, you would then market that blog post out by promoting it through posts social media.

With the actual video itself, you can either chop this up into chunks and do a video series with it, maybe through email, something like that, or you could take a small section of the video and put it up on Insta Stories or Facebook Stories. So you literally get a clip, 15 seconds long, maybe get three of them that show the kind of highlights or the really good bit of the video, and put them out on your Insta Story so that you direct people back to the full video, whether that be on YouTube or Facebook. Of course, you can also record a small trailer for the video and put that on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else that you can think of in order to, again, direct people back to where that video is to watch the full version.

If in the video you mention stats or facts, then you can turn each one of them into its own meme that you can put on social media that, again, you would add a link back to that video. Another really good idea to think about when recording the video itself is all those bloopers and outtakes. Oh, man. If you could hear how many mistakes I make on this podcast, I swear to God, it's probably twice as long by the time I finish recording and then we have to remove all my errors, all my sos and ums and getting things wrong. Anyway, on a video, some of these can be quite funny and quite human to watch, so again, think about keeping those and maybe putting together a small blooper reel of funny things that you did while recording it.

Also, if the video that you did was a live video, then after you've actually done the live and it's up on Facebook, then don't forget to download it and you can then use that video in other places. So either you can upload it to YouTube if you have a YouTube account, or you can put it on your website and then send people to that.

Also, don't forget to think of your content as a whole, as in don't just think of one blog post. Is there a series of blog posts that you could turn into an ebook, or maybe a series of videos that you could turn into a mini course? So try and think of overall what you have from a content point of view and how you might be able to repurpose that to give you something new or fresh or a new way in which to promote it out to your audience. And if you're looking for something just a bit quicker and simpler, then why not do a roundup email or some roundup posts of your top five blogs, or your top favourite episodes on your podcast, or your top five most watched videos, and then send out an email to your list letting them know about these, or make up some posts to go on social media where you draw people's attention to your favourite blogs or podcasts?

I really hope this has been a helpful podcast and that you've got lots from it and lots of ideas in which you can use to use some of that already really valuable content that you've come up with. Also, don't forget to go to teresaheathwareing.com/25 to download that list of ideas that I've put for you there as well. So I really hope you've enjoyed today's podcast, and if I could ask a favour, I would love it that if you enjoy this podcast and you know other people that might enjoy it too, or other businesses that it might help, or other social media people that might find it useful, then I would love it if you could share it. You can just put a link to it on social media anywhere that you like, tag me in so I know you've done it, and I would really, really appreciate it.

And also, while I'm asking for favours ... I know, I'm being really cheeky today. If you're listening on iTunes or you have iTunes, I would love it if you could go and give me a review. One of the ways in which you increase your visibility on iTunes is by getting lots of reviews, and therefore, if you would be happy enough to go and give me a positive review, I would be so very grateful. So like I said, thank you so much for listening and I can't wait to see you again next week.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Check to make sure the consultant that you hire is active on their own social media. Huge amounts of followers don’t always mean success. Focus on how engaging they are with their own audience.
• Social media is a fast-moving industry. Ask your potential consultant how many conferences they have attended or what they read for updates. You will want someone who remains up to date on all industry news!
• Although there isn’t a qualification for just social media, you will want someone knowledgeable. Ask what qualifications they have that are suited for the industry. Do they have a marketing degree? Or, have they taken any courses from influencers in the industry?
• You will want to see examples of past work your consultant has completed for other clients. You will want to see what specific campaigns they have done and what the result was. Don’t be afraid to ask for ROIs and results!
• Look at the consultant’s testimonials. Better yet, ask to speak with some of their existing clients. You will want to know what the relationship is like and how they feel the project has gone.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Hiring a social media consultant is extremely important for your business. You must choose wisely! Make sure that above all else they are able to interact and keep up with your followers, always engaging them. This is the most important part of social media marketing.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Question 1: Do they practice what they preach? – 04:11
• Question 2: How do they keep up to date with industry changes? – 06:39
• Question 3: What qualifications do they have? – 08:19
• Question 4: Can they show examples of their best work? – 10:04
• Question 5: Are there any testimonials or can they provide contact information for prior clients? – 11:59

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Teresa’s blog post about questions to ask when hiring a consultant

Transcript below

 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I'm your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you've had a really good week, and I am really excited to talk about this week's podcast episode, because it's something that I am super passionate about.

If you've listened to some of the others where I've got a bit of passion out, I tend to talk quite fast, and I tend to record the podcast really quickly, so I'm kind of hoping that I'm going to do that this week, because I am actually away with my family on holiday. We have brought the children just to Wales.

I say just to Wales, that's really bad, isn't it? It's not just to Wales, Wales is lovely, and the children are having a great time. We're spending time at the beach, we're going swimming, and we're just hanging out as a family, which we don't do very often, if I'm honest. We all tend to have our own lives.

I know that sounds weird, but when I think about my step-son who's 15, he spends a huge amount of his time up in his room, or playing on his games, or on his phone. My eight year old, who is eight going on 18, she has got her iPad, and they tend to get so wrapped up in their lives, as do we as adults, so whether it's doing work, or normal adult stuff, we don't often spend a huge amount of time just all sitting in the same room and talking.

This is what we've been doing this week and it's lovely, so we're having a really fabulous time, but I've kicked them out this morning, because obviously one thing I can't do with them around is record a podcast. They've gone off to the park, and I'm here recording. So like I said, I'm hoping it's going to be a easy one to record, because I'm super passionate about it, and therefore it won't take all day. Let's see.

Okay, so today what we're going to be talking about is something really close to my heart. When I first started my business, one of the things that I was really struggling with, and I think I've talked about this before, is that there were social media people who were charging good money to businesses to do their social media, and they weren't very good. I was really concerned that when I started telling the world that I was going to offer social media consultancy, or training, or my agency were going to do the social media for people, I was super concerned that I didn't want people to think that I was a fraud, or I wasn't very good, or I didn't know what I was talking about.

When I first set up, I worked really hard to get really good at this, and I went and found all the world's experts, I did loads of training, I went back to my initial marketing degree to see how obviously that would help with doing social media and profiling customers, and that sort of thing. Like I said, I worked super hard to ensure that I was offering a good quality service.

But there was still lots of people out there offering social media that possibly weren't at the standard they should have been, or that their clients thought they were. Some time ago, I wrote a blog post, which I am now going to talk through as the podcast, about the questions you should ask when taking on a trainer or a consultant for social media.

If you are working in social media and you are a consultant, then this might be a great podcast for you to listen to in terms of the types of things that you might want to make sure that you tick these boxes. If you're not a social media person and you're a business, if you ever do think about taking on a social media person, then again, this is hopefully going to be really helpful for you.

I went through these five questions that you must ask. I'm going to talk you through these today, and hopefully by the end of this, you're going to have a really fair idea of if and when you take someone on, or if you are a social media person, that whether you or they tick these five boxes. Let's get started.

 

Question 1: Do they practice what they preach?

 

Question number one, do they practise what they preach? What I mean by this, is have you been and had a look at their social media? Have you checked out their follower numbers? Have you seen how quick they are to respond, to read posts, or to read tweet content? Do they get back to people? Are they active on it? Are their followers interacting with them?

Let me break this down a little bit. The first thing that most people will look at is follower numbers. Depending on the platform, these can be either easy or harder to get. If you were not so moral about this, then you could even go and buy followers.

I've seen some accounts with huge followers, that I've thought to myself, "Oh my gosh, how on earth have they got those followers, they've done three posts?" In fact, I had a great example of this. There was a guy who contacted me for training on social media, and he wanted me to train him so that he could go and do social media for a living. "Absolutely fine, not a problem with that," I thought. I went to check out his social media just to have a look at him before I responded, and his Facebook page had something like 5,000 followers.

Now, a Facebook page is actually quite difficult. Unless you're paying in terms of to do like adverts, but even still, it would take a bit of an effort to get that many followers on Facebook. His Facebook page had 5,000 followers, and he had done two posts. Literally, two posts, and one of those was updating his cover photo, or something like that.

So there was no way on earth that these were genuine, real followers. And also, those two posts had no interaction on them at all, and he hadn't posted for what looked like weeks. I just think it's not just about the follower numbers, it's not just about how many people follow their different social accounts, it's also about how they're interacting, whether they're real, alive, what their posts look like, what they say about them. Are they real? Are they human behind their posts? Do they practise what they preach? Are they doing their own social media? Are they doing their own social media as well as their promising to do yours?

Now, I get it. Lots of people will say, "Well, I don't have time to do my own, because I'm doing everybody else's," and I'm in exactly the same position, but actually for me, that's where my business changed. When I started to prove that I could maintain my own, then suddenly, that seemed to make quite a big difference.

 

Question 2: How do they keep up to date with industry changes?

 

Question number two to ask them, how do they keep up to date with industry changes? Now again, I've said before, we are in one of the fastest moving industries in the world. Social media moves at the speed of light, things change all the time, platforms evolve, they remove things, they bring in things, trends change, so how are they keeping up to date with things like that? That's a question I would ask them.

There were a few different ways in which they could be doing this. Are they doing courses or training? Are they attending events? Now, events are a really good one. I think by asking them what was the last conference they attended, I really think that is a worthwhile type of question.

In the UK, there aren't masses of social media conferences. There is Social Day, which happens in London. There's also MarketEd.Live, which is a general more marketing conference, but certainly has lots of social media aspects about it, and there's a new conference that's literally just been announced, which I'm so excited about, because I've been asked to speak at it. It's called Atomicon, and it's by Andrew and Pete, who I think I've mentioned before, but that's going to be a brilliant event, and that's happening next March.

So again, ask them what events they've been to. Also, I spent a lot of time and money going out to events in the States. I go to Social Media Marketing World, which is in San Diego every March. I also have attended Traffic & Conversion, I've attended Converted. I spoke at Converted last year, so I make the time and effort to go to these bigger conferences where I'm getting the information first, to make sure that I'm up to date.

 

Question 3: What qualifications do they have?

 

Onto question number three. Now, this is a tricky one, actually. What qualifications do they have? I'm not sat here saying they have to have a qualification, and there isn't really a qualification as such, that someone who manages social media could have. Now, there are lots that go around, you know, digital marketing, and I know a lot of the degrees include social media now, but in terms of tools and tactics, as I've just said, it moves so fast, that actually, if you got a degree in social media, by the time you've got your first job, probably most things have changed.

So this question's a bit tricky in terms of qualifications. Now, me, I have a marketing degree, and I'm a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketers. I feel like this is important, because actually, social media is another marketing tool. I'm quite happy of the fact that I come from marketing, and I have that degree. It's just interesting to ask the person what qualifications they might have, and is there anything that seems suited to this role.

I guess if they don't have a formal qualification of some sort, then going back to last question about sort of how are they keeping up to date, what courses have they done, who have they worked with, and go and Google those names. I know when I first started, [Maurice Smith 00:09:34] was really big on the social media scene, and I did some courses with Maurice Smith, because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about.

It's something I continue to do to this day. I've done courses with Amy Porterfield, with Jasmine Star, with Maurice, I've said. I've done stuff with Kim [Gast 00:09:50]. Again, if you Googled any one of those names, you would see that they are experts in their field. That could be another way to look at if they don't have a qualification, as such.

 

Question 4: Can they show examples of their best work?

 

Okay, onto question number four. So the next thing I would be asking from your social media person is can they show me some examples of their best work? They might sort of say on question one, "The reason I haven't done my own things is because I'm busy doing someone else's." If you're okay with that, then that's fine, but at the very least, you want to be saying to them, "Can you show me some examples of what you have then done for clients?"

You want them to point you in the direction of clients that they're currently working with, so you can watch them over time to make sure that posts are going out regularly, that they're interacting with people, but also you want to be asking them about campaigns, so have they done any specifics campaigns, and if so, what have they got from those campaigns?

I know one thing that we do quite a lot of is competitions on social media. I would be able to pull out one of the last competitions we did for a client and say, "This is what we did. This is the artwork we created. This is who we targeted. This is how we ran the campaign. This is the results they got." Are they able to give you some of those more ROI type KPI figures? Are they able to actually say, "This is what we got from this campaign?"

Now, it's understandable that everyday social media doesn't always give you that return on investment, and not all accounts will be doing social media for that reason. We had a client where they literally just wanted a presence, and that was it. They weren't concerned about converting, or trying to develop an audience as such. They literally wanted an active page that when people did their research on them, they found them.

That wouldn't perhaps be the one that I would pull out to show, I would pull out the ones that worked really hard in terms of they're trying to build a following, or they're trying to drive traffic to their website, or something like that. But again, ask them for examples of that best work that they've done on social media, and what kind of results they got from it.

 

Question 5: Are there any testimonials or can they provide contact information for prior clients?

 

Last but not least, this follows on nicely from number four to number five, are there any testimonials we can see? Even better, ask if they can speak to the clients of the people that you've just seen the work for, because that would be the best way. If you've put forward a campaign or they've put forward a campaign to show you, then I think it'd be great for you to say, "That's a great campaign. Can I talk to that client to ask them how they felt that campaign went, and did that meet their objectives?"

At the very least, you want to see some testimonials. Ideally, you want to speak to clients. I know when I took on a VA initially, that's what I did. I asked if I could speak to some of their existing clients, and at least email them to say, "Can I just ask how things are? How'd you get on? What's it like?" And they email back glowing reviews, obviously, hence where I went with that.

For me, they are the best people to speak to, because if you're already doing business for someone, then they're going to have a really honest and true response in terms of how you work with them and what they provide for you. So like I said, number five, ask for those testimonials.

Let me run through those five questions again really quickly. One, do they practise what they preach? I.e., are they on social media, do they have follower, and are they interacting with people, and keeping things up to date? Question two, how do they keep up to date with industry updates? What courses are they doing, conferences are they going on?

Question three, do they have qualifications? If so, what are they? Question four, can they show you an example of their best work? And question five, are there any testimonials that they can give you, or even better, can you speak to one of their clients direct?

I really hope that this has covered off if you are going to take on a social media person, the kind of questions and things you want to be looking out for. Like I said, if you are a social media person, then do you tick those boxes? If you looked at yourself from the outside looking in, would you see those things? Would they see that you're keeping up to date with different things?

Again, one of the things as a social media person that I like to do is if I'm going anywhere, any conferences, or doing any training, I like to put that on social media too, so not only am I keeping active on social media, but I'm proving to people, "Look, I am learning all the time, and I am trying to do things to ensure that I keep up to date."

So yeah, I really hope that this has been helpful, like I said, from both sides of the fence, really, whether you are a social media person or not, and if you want to take one on, then those five questions are great ones to start with. Anyway, this is a super quick one, which is really useful for me this week, because the fact that I'm away. I really hope you enjoyed it, and I will be back next week for the next episode. Have a great week until then.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• A lead magnet allows you to put out valuable content in exchange for your audience’s email addresses.
• Detailed targeting on Facebook offers so many options for you, including demographics, interests and behaviors.
• Common interests to pursue include which publications they might read, who they might follow and websites they might be interested in.
• Install your Facebook pixel to be able to target people who visit your website, sales page or landing page.
• Using a pixel on a landing page can get real granular. You can identify the people who landed on your landing page BUT NOT on the following thank you page. This allows you to target anyone who visited your landing page while excluding those who visited the thank you page.
• You can create a custom engagement audience, which allows you to target individuals on Facebook who have viewed a video on your Facebook page.
• Facebook will match your own audience database to who they have on the platform. This is helpful for you to reach your list in a couple of ways and market to additional audiences who look like those on your existing list.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…There are so many variables that can impact the effectiveness of your ad spend. This is where using targeted audiences on your ads can truly help; the narrower your audience gets, the higher your conversion rates will be. The opportunity that Facebook is affording you here is phenomenal! Spend time looking into creating audiences in Facebook and seeing how they can work for you. All these things are trial and error. If they aren’t working, stop, rework and try again.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• How Teresa’s ads are working right now – 02:08
• #1: Picking your audience using Facebook’s options – 04:38
• A deep-dive into detailed targeting options on Facebook – 05:56
• #2: Remarketing to known website visitors using Facebook’s pixel –08:43
• #3: Remarketing to video views using custom audiences – 14:37
• #4: Uploading your own audience database to Facebook – 17:20
• How to use look-alike audiences based on existing data – 18:38

Transcript below

 

Hello and a super warm welcome to this week's podcast episode. I hope you've had a fabulous week and you're still enjoying this lovely sunshine if you're in the UK. I know it's causing havoc in other places, but I have to say I do enjoy the sun. So I quite like this warm weather.

Anyway, I have had a really good week. I have been super busy actually doing some work for me, which kind of sounds strange, but when you have an agency like I do, and you have a team and you work with clients, you often find that your time is taken up doing work for them. And rightly so, they're paying the bills, they're obviously giving everybody a job. And therefore, when I have a list of things to do, theirs always tends to come first. Although I am also a big believer of, you need to work on your business, not in your business, and I don't probably spend enough time doing that.

However this week and the end of last week, I've managed to do it. So that's really cool. And one of the things I've done this week is I have advertised a lead magnet. Now obviously I've talked about lead magnets before in the podcast, and it's basically when you're putting out some content, some really good, valuable content that my audience are gonna want to have, and in exchange for that content, they give me their email address. And this week, I have been advertising that via social media, both on Facebook and Instagram. And it's reminded me again about how wonderful the advertising tool is that Facebook have.

 

How Teresa’s ads are working right now

 

And I obviously do ads all the time for clients, but I think when it's your own, you pay more particular interest to it and I've been desperately watching the leads come in and I've had a really good result. My average lead is costing me about 70 P at the moment, which for me and my business, this is really, really good. And actually, just while I'm on this subject, one thing that is really interesting is that I often get asked, "What should it be? What amount should it be? How many leads should I get?" And you know what, there's no hard and fast rule. It really does depend. The interesting thing about doing any type of advertising is that there are so many variables that take place that could affect the advert one way or the other.

I have a great example of this. So we were doing the adverts, we were running them across Facebook and Instagram, and I always thought that Instagram ads weren't ever as good as, say, the Facebook ads in terms of engagement, because of the fact that on Instagram, it's much more about liking pictures than going to visit a website, which is what my advert is doing. I'm trying to get people to leave the platform they're in and go to a landing page where they give me their details.

So anyway, I put this advert on Instagram, and I just used the same image as I used for Facebook and it was a landscape image, really nice image of the checklist that I was giving away. And anyway, Steve, who works with me, he does the tech side and helps me with advertising, he said to me, "Could we recreate the image so it's square for Instagram?" And I was like, "Yeah, great idea," obviously with all the other things we were doing, I just hadn't thought about it.

And we saw our advert conversion cost go from one pound 50 per conversion, IE, each person that gave me their email address cost me one pound 50, once I changed the image to a square image, it went right down to 58 P. And it blew my mind. I couldn't actually believe that having the square image would make such a difference. But anyway, it did and it was fabulous.

So, doing this advertising spurred me on to talk about Facebook ads in this week's podcast. So today, I am going to talk you through why Facebook audiences are amazing and some of the different things that you can do with them. So I am gonna go through four different types of audience that you can do and how you can use them to better target and to really maximise your spend on Facebook.

 

#1: Picking your audience using Facebook’s options

 

Okay, let's get started. So, I'm going to start with the one that probably most people use when they're setting up an advert. And this is through picking your target audience by creating an audience using Facebook options. So, when you're going through the advertising tool, the second screen you get to which is the advert set is where you pick your audience. And in here, you're going to be able to pick the types of audience you want to go for. So the most basic form is that you're going to be able to go for where are they in the world. You can choose by post code, you can choose by type of place, you can literally put a pin drop on a map and decide how far out you want that pin drop to cover.

Obviously you pick location, then you can pick your age of your audience. Obviously it goes from anything 13 right the way up to 65. Then you can pick your gender. Is it men or is it women or is it both? There is an option to enter a language in there, and you only really need to do that if you are advertising in a certain language that is not the normal spoken language in that area. So obviously, if you were advertising in the UK, you don't need to put English in there because that's the language that the majority of the people in that area speak.

 

A deep-dive into detailed targeting options on Facebook

 

Okay, and then we get down to the good bit, we get down to the detailed targeting. And I'm actually having to bring this up on my screen as I talk you through it because there are so many options that I'm never gonna be able to remember. So I'm just gonna click through a few just to give you an idea. The main kind of targeting areas you have are demographics, interests and behaviours. Under demographics, you've got things like education, life events, parenting, politics, US only, relationships, and work.

So let's just dive into education. And you can look at the level of education someone went to, the field of study, what universities or schools they went to, or what undergraduate years they're in. If I go to parents, for instance, I can pick the age of the children that these parents are. So, let me explain that because that doesn't make much sense. But basically, you can pick parents with preschool children, parents with adult children, parents with preteens and so on and so forth. Relationships, obviously you can look at relationship status, so things like, are they divorced, are they engaged, are they single? The work section is another great one because you can look at things like, are they employees, what industry are they in, who employs them and job title. So if you're going after a particular type of person in a particular job role, then this can be really useful.

And then, under the next section, interests, you've basically got a huge section. And it's every possible interest that you could imagine. So I would suggest to you that if you're gonna use interest, you literally just type in the thing that you're thinking about. So normally, when i look at this, I think about what publications might they actually purchase or read, who would they follow, and what websites might they visit? So for instance, if I was searching social media people, I might pick things like social media examiner, Amy Porterfield, Kim Garst, all those types of people. What I'm trying to do when I pick an audience is think about who my potential customers might follow or be interested in. So like I said, that interest section is huge. They literally sort of put everything down there.

And then you've got the behaviours section which can be quite useful if you're looking at things like financial stuff, if you're looking at mobile data and those sort of things. But like I said, it tends to be those first two, demographics and interests are amazing.

And that's how you would create your target audience. If you're coming new to this and you're deciding to do some advertising, then that's probably the place you're going to start. You're going to try and find your audience by picking out some of the key characteristics that you can think of.

 

#2: Remarketing to known website visitors using Facebook’s pixel

 

Okay. Onto number two. One of the other really smart things that Facebook can do is they can give you something called a pixel. Now all a pixel is is a snippet of code. You might want to speak to the person who built your site or someone who's a bit more tech savvy if you're not, and personally, I have, I mentioned Steve earlier and I have Steve who would do this for me. So, he would put the pixel on a website or a landing page. And landing pages can be really useful to have that pixel on. And what that bit of code is doing is it's reporting back to Facebook every time it recognises someone.

So what happens is, let's say for instance I go onto a shop and look at some shoes. You know when you leave that shop, or leave the web shop, not the physical shop, when you leave that and you go and visit something else on the internet and those shoes keep reappearing around the internet? Well that's called, "Remarketing," and the pixel is how Facebook enables you to re market to people. And why this is so powerful is, when people come to your website, great if you've got a lead magnet on there trying to get their details, but if they don't leave their details, you don't know who those people are. Now if you have a pixel on your website, okay, granted you're still not going to know the exact people, however, you're gonna be able to target to people who've visited your website.

So although you might not know names and people and be able to contact them directly, what Facebook is able to do is store those people in a custom audience. So to find your custom audiences or to look at how you set one up, you go into your ads manager and you click top left, "Audience," and then you come to the audience pages and top left again is, "Create custom audience." And this is where you're gonna find all the audiences that I'm now going to be talking about.

Okay, so let's get back to that pixel. So it's basically tracking who has visited your site or your landing page, and it's putting them in a pot in custom audiences. And what you're able to do is you are then able to send an advert directly to those people. You can even do things like check out certain pages on your website. So if they visited a particular page that is focusing on a particular product or service, then you can re market back to them, you can send them an advert in Facebook that basically says, "Did you wanna look at this thing? Were you still interested?" Or whatever it might be.

And like I said, these are brilliant. And I have seen some great examples of this where I have visited a website, within 10, 15 minutes, I've gone into Instagram and suddenly, that website is advertising to me. And it's great because I know some people get a little bit freaked out about them being stalked around the internet, but for me, I don't see it like that. I see it as a opportunity to recapture that lead, to remind those people that you're still around, you still exist, and also, people could end up coming off your website for loads of reasons, that they got caught up in something, that the internet went down, that they got called into a meeting or whatever it might be. So don't presume that just because someone's gone to your site and left again that they're not gonna want to hear from you again.

And then the other really good example is where I've seen it on landing pages. So, this is where it can, again, get super clever. Let's say you have a pixel on your landing page which is selling something or promoting a lead magnet. And then you also have a pixel on your thank you page. What you're going to be able to do is identify the people that landed on that page but didn't then complete. So, they never reached the thank you page. Because obviously, you only reach the thank you page if you've bought the product. So basically, what you can do is you can set an audience that says, "Target everybody that hit that landing page but exclude the people who hit the thank you page." And therefore, you can give those people another opportunity to come back to that landing page and actually then complete the purchase or fill in the details for the lead magnet.

Again, not all of them are gonna want to do it, but you're potentially gonna capture some people who didn't get a chance to do it for whatever reason previously. And again, I saw a brilliant example of this.

Marie Forleo, she sells a programme called B School. And Amy Porterfield, who you know that I follow and think is wonderful, she promotes that really heavily. So, when I was watching Amy's stuff, she was talking about B School and I was thinking, "Do I need B School?" So anyway, as I do, I go along to the sales page and I have a look at what B School is and is it right for me? And then, within a day or two, I then get an advert served to be on Facebook and it's Marie Forleo. And she's done a live or she's definitely done a piece to camera video, and in that video, she says, "I saw you looking, I know you visited the sales page, what stopped you? Why didn't you sign up? Do you know that," and then she obviously went into more of a sales patter in terms of why I should be a B School member.

But how powerful is that, actually being able to identify what pages people went to and then be able to market back to them to try and then re convince them that it was the right thing to do or that they should've bought the product or whatever? But also, to capture the kind of people that were maybe a bit on the fence. And actually, if I was on the fence, which I wasn't, I didn't get B School in the end, but if I was on the fence and I was thinking about, "Should I have it or not?" Then maybe that advert might have swayed me. So, that is another great one.

 

#3: Remarketing to video views using custom audiences

 

Okay, onto number three, re marketing to video views. This one is a brilliant one too. So, within that audience that I talked about on Facebook advertising, there is custom audiences. That's what these audiences are called. That's just the group name for them. And one of the custom audiences that you can create is an engagement audience. And when you click on, "Engagement," you're going to be able to target people who have watched videos, who have done a full screen experience, who have visited your Facebook page, looked at your Instagram business profile. So this is a really, really good one.

And the way I use this is ... Now, if you've put a video on Facebook and someone sits and watches your video for, let's say, 30 seconds if it's a minute, and they've watched it for 30 seconds, 30 seconds on Facebook watching one video is actually quite a long time. I know it doesn't feel like it in the scheme of things, but actually, for a video on social media, for someone to engage for 30 seconds, it's quite a long time. And therefore, I would presume that because they sat and watched my video for a fair bit of time, that they're interested in what it is I'm talking about. Or otherwise, they would've gone straight on and ignored the video or they would've caught the first few seconds and thought, "This isn't for me."

They have sat and watched this video for any length of time and this can obviously depend on the length of the video, what points at which they might drop out. But basically, if you said 50 percent of the video, then you're thinking they're fairly interested. Which means, I can then target back to those people knowing that they are probably more interested than the original target audience that I was advertising to.

So let's say the first audience I talked about where you pick your target audience and you try and pick the people you think will be interested, if you then sent them a video ad, you could then only target the people who got halfway through your video in order to then send your lead magnet ad, for instance, and hopefully what you'll find is because you're narrowing down the people that you're targeting, that actually, your conversion is a much better price than if you'd just sent that to the whole audience initially.

I hope you're keeping up. I do get that this is a little bit confusing, not only for me to say, but maybe also for you to listen. So I really hope you understand. But basically, like I said, what I do is I advertise a video, I might choose a target audience to advertise that video to, and then I choose the people that have watched at least half of the video, depending on the length of time, and then I re advertise back to those people as well.

 

#4: Uploading your own audience database to Facebook

 

Okay, onto the final one. The last one is custom audiences that you can upload your data into Facebook. Now with recent GDPR changes, obviously everyone's data is looking a little bit thinner than it was. However, if you still have a sizeable database, that's really difficult, because saying it's sizeable means one thing to one person and one thing to another, I get it, I'm sorry, but all I can suggest is that you upload it and see. But if you have a database where you have your customers and prospects on there, this is obviously the best data that you

Key Takeaways Covered In The Podcast

If you want to be seen as an expert in your industry and want people to come to you for knowledge,

producing consistent content is the best way to prove it to them.

Think about how your content will add value or provide your audience with a solution. When you add value without them paying first, they see you in a brighter light! If your audience doesn’t see you providing

consistent content, they won’t stick around and wait to see it.

When starting a blog, it is best to use longtail keywords instead of one-word keywords. This helps to narrow down your niche and improve your SEO.

If you are more inclined to speak, a podcast might be best for you. Think about what style of podcast you want to create, how often you want to create them and of course, the initial set-up cost.

Video is another great way to create content for your business. But, you must make sure you are comfortable on camera and are able to speak well.

Live video, although a bit scary, is one of the quickest and easiest ways to create engaging content. There isn’t a set-up cost or much preparation required. Plus, it is a great way to engage your audience.

The one thing you need to remember above all else…

It doesn’t really matter which platform you choose for your content. What is important is that you get content out there consistently and find ways to constantly deliver value to your audience. Share your message and do it often!

Highlights You Simply Can’t Miss

Consistent content adds value – 3:09

Consistent content makes you an expert – 5:00

Consistent content attracts your audience – 7:01

Ways to create consistent content – 9:13

Start a blog – 9:29

Start a podcast – 12:27

Try using video – 14:36

Consider live video – 20:22

Links to Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode 19: How to Create Your Own Podcast From Start to Finish

Episode 1: How to Use and Leverage Live Video for Your Business

Want the full transcript?

Click to Download!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• If you want to be seen as an expert in your industry and want people to come to you for knowledge, producing consistent content is the best way to prove it to them.
• Think about how your content will add value or provide your audience with a solution. When you add value without them paying first, they see you in a brighter light! If your audience doesn’t see you providing
• consistent content, they won’t stick around and wait to see it.
• When starting a blog, it is best to use longtail keywords instead of one-word keywords. This helps to narrow down your niche and improve your SEO.
• If you are more inclined to speak, a podcast might be best for you. Think about what style of podcast you want to create, how often you want to create them and of course, the initial set-up cost.
• Video is another great way to create content for your business. But, you must make sure you are comfortable on camera and are able to speak well.
• Live video, although a bit scary, is one of the quickest and easiest ways to create engaging content. There isn’t a set-up cost or much preparation required. Plus, it is a great way to engage your audience.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…It doesn’t really matter which platform you choose for your content. What is important is that you get content out there consistently and find ways to constantly deliver value to your audience. Share your message and do it often!HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Consistent content adds value – 03:09
• Consistent content makes you an expert – 05:00
• Consistent content attracts your audience – 07:01
• Ways to create consistent content – 09:13
• Start a blog – 09:29
• Start a podcast – 12:27
• Try using video – 14:36
• Consider live video – 20:22

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Episode 19: How to Create Your Own Podcast From Start to Finish
• Episode 1: How to Use and Leverage Live Video for Your Business

Transcript below

 

Hello and welcome to Episode 22 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. Wow, that is always such a mouthful. And I feel like I say it all the time at the beginning. So I apologise. And wherever you are in the world, I hope you are having a wonderful day. So here in the UK we are coming into a holiday time for the children, which means that we've got eight weeks of now trying to juggle being a mum and also being a business owner, which for parents out there, you'll know that this is pretty difficult. Obviously I am lucky that I chose to work from home. I used to have an office and I didn't use it. So, I decided I didn't need an office anymore. So I am able to work from home, which means that I am able to have my daughter here with me and kind of look after her while I'm kind of working. But the holidays are always challenging, which is like I said, if you're a parent, I'm sure you can appreciate.

I don't know about you, but I'm always constantly reviewing in my business, what I'm doing, whether I'm doing the right thing. As in not having my own business, as in the right content, am I putting out the right lead magnets? Am I giving people what they want? And I'm always reviewing the content that I'm putting out there, and always thinking, should I change it up, do something different? I love doing the podcast and I'm so happy to do this. But I've been debating whether I should start a YouTube channel or do more purposeful video. And it's really tricky because I think especially in social media, or the kind of world where you're having to produce content, there are always people doing things that you're not doing.

So, I look at colleagues and friends and competitors and see what they're doing and think, "Oh, should I be doing that too? Maybe I should have a YouTube channel. I'm not working hard enough on Insta stories. I'm not working hard enough on Facebook Lives." But at the end of the day, there are so many things in which you could do. Sometimes I have to say, "Teresa, you can't do everything." And I could literally spend my entire time working on content and giving away free content, which I would find most enjoyable. However, I would never get any work done and earn no money. So not ideal.

But that's what's inspired me for today's podcast episode. I want to talk about the importance of creating consistent content. And then I'm going to take you through why it's important, what the benefits of it are. And then we're going to look at some actual ideas of what types of content you could do. So whether it be a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, whatever.

Let's kick off by looking at why we want to be creating consistent content. Well, I guess the first thing I should say is it differs. Depends what industry you're in. It depends what type of business you are.

 

Consistent content adds value

 

But if you want to be seen as an expert in your industry, if you want people to come to you because you know what you're talking about, then producing consistent content is a great way to prove that to them.

The first thing it does is it adds value. And this is a big buzz word. Always has been To be fair, but I seem to be saying a lot or thinking about it a lot. How can you add value? How can you move away from trying to sell and pitch to people and give them content and value and give them a service or provide them with a service that is helping me? And ultimately at some point during that exchange, there will be an exchange of money for service. But basically, your clients have a problem and your job is to solve that problem. And clients are always going to have problems, and they'll always be willing to pay someone who knows what they're talking about in order to get this problems solved.

If you can add value to them without them even buying anything, then they're going to have you in a much better light. And when they do look for someone to come to, they're going to think of you and you're going spring to mind. It also gives you a reason to communicate to your list, to your audience. Whether this be on your email list, or whether it be on social media, it gives you something to say. Again, that added value thing to say, you're sending an email out as I do to my list. If you're not on it, head over to teresaheathwareing.com and make sure you get signed up. But I will email when there's a podcast. If I've done a blog. If I've seen a good article that I think is useful, and I rarely actually email saying please buy my services. I tend to just go on the let me add value, let me show you that I know what I'm talking about.

 

Consistent content makes you an expert

 

Obviously the other thing it's going to do, is it's going to make you an expert. Now, a little while back they used to be a kind of belief that if you told people all your stuff, if you basically gave away your tips and tricks and tools and strategies around what makes you brilliant at what you do, that your competitors will come along and steal it all, or your customers will just take all that information and go, "Thanks very much." And do it themselves. Well I have to say, my attitude when it comes to this is okay. No problem. Because the opposite, if I don't tell anybody anything, then how do my potential customers and clients know that I'm any good? And if someone wants to troll through every single podcast I've done, if they want to troll through every single blog I've ever written both on the THW site, which is the agency side and the Teresa site, then good luck to them.

And absolutely fine. Not a problem whatsoever. You carry on. And if you want to do that, and you want to learn what I know and you can get it from those posts, then, great. Please go ahead. I don't mind in the slightest, because I know that there are lots of people out there that either A, won't have the time to do that and therefore they will want to come to someone who can do it for them. Or they might have the time to do it, but actually their expertise and he takes them so far and again, they need to come and find someone. And if they do, do it themselves, then fair play. Brilliant. That's absolutely great. That is not what I mind in the slightest.

And in terms of competitors, I'm not too concerned about them either to be honest. If they want to take my stuff, then at least I was first. At least they're copying me and I'm not copying them. So again, I'm not bothered. I would much rather put content out there then run the risk of not putting anything out there and not communicating at all.

 

Consistent content attracts your audience

 

And of course, putting out consistent content means that you can start to build your email list as well. You can attract your audience, especially if you are doing something like using Facebook ads in order to promote a blog or a podcast or whatever content you're putting out there. So, you can really help attract your audience to you when you're putting out consistent content.

Also, you'll notice the word I keep using here is consistent, and it's so important that it is consistent. I was watching a talk from Pat Flynn recently and he has a podcast called the Smart Passive Income podcast. And he is on episode 320 something. So, it's huge. He's been going for ages. And he has a very loyal and dedicated following. And one day out of every single week that he put the podcast out, he was late. He was late by a day I think. He literally had people emailing him saying, it's Wednesday and there's no podcasts. And that's where I want to get to.

But what I'm trying to prove here, not only would I love people to say, "Hey, where's your podcast?" If I happen to miss a week, which I'm not going to. I'm close to the wire sometimes. But I haven't missed one yet [inaudible 00:08:13]. Anyway, the consistency elements is so important. Imagine if you find a nice coffee shop, and you turned up to this coffee shop, and you thought, "Oh, this is lovely. I'm going to come here again." And then you went there again the following week at the same time, and it was shut. And then you went there again the following week, and it was open. And then you went again the following week and it was shut. You would be so confused as to whether that coffee shop was going to be open or not. That you would think to yourself, "I'm not going to bother."

And it's the same with the content. If people don't realise you're turning up every day or turning up every week or every month and providing them with this consistent content, then they're not going to look for it. They're not going to stick around and wait to see it.

Okay. Hopefully I've convinced to you that consistent content is really important for your business. And especially if you're trying to build yourself as an expert or your business as the go to place.

 

Ways to create consistent content

 

So in this next part of the podcast, I just want to talk you through a few of the ways in which you can put consistent content out there and give you a couple of ideas of what you might need to think about if you're going to use that particular route in order to get your message out there.

 

Start a blog

 

One of the first ways in which you can start to put content out there and it's probably one of the most popular and easier, I'm not sure I'd agree with that because I don't like writing, but is to start a blog. Now the one thing you need to know about blogs is that you need to be good at writing. You also need to consider that there are 414,000,000 yeah, million blogs out there. You are in a fairly noisy environment. But the more that you can be specific, the more that you can find your niche, then obviously that can help you stand out on your blog. And if you are trying to serve your immediate audience and reach a slightly bigger audience, then blogs are a great way to do that. And I wouldn't worry about there being loads of them.

So like I said, obviously, if you're going to write a blog, the first thing you need to know is that you're good at writing. Or you can bring someone in who can write the blog for you. You brief them. You give them all the details. You give them the facts your tone of voice. What sort of things you would say, and then you get them to write it. Obviously, the one thing that blogs are awesome for is keywords and your SEO on your website. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which basically means when Google ranks websites, if it's really good on your site, you will be ranked higher. And one of the things that are particularly helpful in getting ranked is keywords and content. So if you're putting a regular blog guy with good keywords in i.e., the words that people would search for you or look for you on, then you might help your actual website rank better.

Now, a couple of tips with the keywords. Obviously, they need to be words that people are going to search for. And when you choose those keywords for the particular blog, try and choose more long tail keywords. So, two or three words together, and therefore it will be more likely that you might come up. For instance, if I put the keywords social media in my blogs, I wouldn't rank anywhere, because it's so competitive. So, if I was to look at something like social media management or Facebook analytics or Twitter insights or whatever it might be, by adding that other word, I help narrow it down just a little bit more. Make sure that keyword is in the title of your blog and make sure your first paragraph has that keyword in again.

What you can also do which will help out, is you can link to other blogs. You can link to other parts on your site and that will also help your SEO. Likes that blogs are great. If you're happy to write or if you've got somebody who can write them for you. They're fairly low cost. Fairly easy into the market. There's not a lot of setup that you have to do other than have somewhere on your site to put them or you could even use like a blogging site like Tumblr or something like that.

 

Start a podcast

 

The next method of putting content out there, I would obviously be very remiss not to mention a podcast. Now, as I just mentioned, blogs there are 440,000,000 roughly. I'm sure they're starting new ones every single day. However, the last reported amount of podcasts was 550,000. So, obviously there is a considerably less amount of people producing podcasts than there are blogs. If you really want to stand out, then maybe a podcast is for you. Now obviously the setup costs in setting up the podcast can be a little bit more and it takes a little bit more effort and a bit more money. If you go back to Episode 19, I'll put a link in the show notes, then you will find out how I set up my podcast and what I do every week to produce it. So it does take a bit of work. But for me, I would much rather speak than right. I am much happier talking into a microphone than I am sitting looking at a blank piece of paper thinking, "What am I going to write about?"

Also, if you're going to do a podcast, you can have a think about what type of podcast or style are you going to do. So for instance, all my podcasts at the moment of just me talking. They are me giving you the tools and tips and tricks, really practical stuff about how to use social media and marketing for your business. However, you might want to do an interview style and as I've alluded to you already, I have some amazing interviews coming up. I'm so excited and I am going to move to mixing up the interviews with podcasts on my own. The main reason I haven't done an interview to date, is because I wanted to get better. I wanted to make sure that I was comfortable with what I was doing before I brought someone good onto the podcast, and I'd run the risk of messing up, is the truth.

But like I said, so you can either do a podcast that is a kind of tips and tricks thing, you can do a lifestyle thing, you can do an interview. I know that John Lee Dumas did a podcast every single day, which must be exhausting. I don't know how he managed it. But obviously, have a look into the different types of ways to podcast as well.

 

Try using video

 

The next way you could look at putting content out there is through video. So I've split this up into kind of standard pre-recorded video and then the next one I'll talk about is live video. If you're going to consider doing a video, then the first thing I'm going to say is that you really need to be okay on camera. Not only are you okay to do video. Do you like being on camera? But do you come across well? And I know this might sound a bit mean or harsh and I really don't mean to. But if you don't come across well on camera, then you're not going to be very nice to watch. It's not going to be very easy to watch and therefore you're not going to get the engagement you want.

Again, just popping back to Pat Flynn. As I was talking about him earlier. He started working on his YouTube channel really hard over the last sort of six, 12 months. But Pat is really natural on camera. He comes across really well. He's obviously done a lot of work at training himself and making himself come across well. And he does a brilliant job with it. So like I said, one of my first considerations is even if you think I want to do video, record some video and ask your most honest friends and critics, "Am I okay? Do I come across all right? Would you engage with me? Would you stop and watch?" Because like I said, I've seen some videos out there where, yeah, the idea of having the video was a great idea, but boy, the person in front of the camera was not great. So obviously, like I said, you've got to be confident to be able to do that.

The other thing you need to do if you're going to start doing videos is you do need to have some equipment. Don't get me wrong, you could happily pick up your iPhone or Android or whatever you've got, the cameras on the phones are amazing. And you could just start recording on your phone and upload them to YouTube or Facebook or wherever it might be. However, if you want to take this seriously, then I'm not saying go out and buy a 5,000 pound camera tomorrow. I'm just saying, you might want to invest in some equipment. Myself, I do record some short videos. They tend to be for adverts that go on Facebook. I would like to think about doing some more video for me, but I don't have the equipment right now. I do have a fairly good camera that was sort of 500 pounds that apparently, so my stepchildren tell me, all the YouTubers use. I wouldn't know these things, obviously, not being a teenager. But you do need a camera. I've got some lights. I've got microphones. So I have got various different things that will help me produce a better quality video.

But like I said, it's not that I'm saying you've got to get all the care. Bring in a big video production company, but you might want to think about the quality that you're putting out there, if that's what you're going to focus on.

The other thing you're going to have to think about, is the time it takes to produce the video and then the post production. Again, this could be kind of as long or as short as you want. Are you literally just going to put a...

Key Takeaways Covered In The Podcast

Your organic reach on Facebook is decreasing rapidly. If you post regularly, your audience won’t see your posts. Facebook prioritizes content from friends and family over pages. You should be using Facebook Ads

to combat this new algorithm.

Instagram is the second largest platform behind Facebook with 1 billion monthly active users. You can create content for Instagram daily without having something that photographs well each time.

Twitter is the best platform available for communicating and engaging with your audience. It is great for building community, but it does take a lot of work due to the new algorithm change.

LinkedIn isn’t as noisy and fast moving as the other platforms. Posts and content hang around a lot longer there than on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, making it great for engaging with B2B companies.

Pinterest isn’t only for pinning home décor and recipes. Instead, it is a great tool for business use by driving traffic. The whole point of Pinterest is finding content outside of the platform. Use it for things like blog posts, checklists and tools for your audience.

The one thing you need to remember above all else…

When you are marketing on social media, you are on borrowed ground. If the platform makes a change and you have pinned your marketing on one platform, it will negatively impact your success. Think about how to move your social media followers to your own email list.

Highlights You Simply Can’t Miss

Platform #1. Facebook – 2:58

Reap the benefits of using Facebook groups – 5:41

Platform #2. Instagram – 7:26

You may be surprised to know who uses Instagram – 12:02

Platform #3. Twitter – 13:04

Don’t repeat your content on Twitter – 15:10

Platform #4. LinkedIn – 18:16

Platform #5. Pinterest – 22:10

Links to Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode 2: How Lead Magnets Help You Build Your List and Stay Connected With Your Followers

Episode 6: 5 Tried and Tested Strategies to Build Your Email List

Episode 8: InstaStories: How to Use Instagram Stories to Elevate Your Business

Episode 14: Facebook Algorithms Explained: How to Post Better, Get More Engagement and Improve Your Reach

Episode 15: 5 Reasons to Use Twitter to Market Your Business

Episode 20: 4 Social Media Mistakes That Businesses Should Stop Making NOW

Want the full transcript?

Click to Download!