Create Consistent Content for Your Small Business

[00:00:00] Jen McFarland: Educational, how to women in business podcast that features stories, marketing news and real life experiences from fun and friendly hosts. Jen McFarland and Shelley Carney. Join us as we dive into the details. So you can slay marketing, overwhelmed, streamlined processes and amplify your impact. You'll learn strategies and tactics, leadership skills, and practical advice from successful women entrepreneurs to help you grow, nurture and sustain your business.

[00:00:34] Shelley Carney: Hello. Hi Jen.

[00:00:38] Jen McFarland: Hey Shelley. So hello and welcome to Women Conquer Business. I am Jen McFarland, and this is Shelley Carney. So if you have been a listener or a viewer of the show for a long time, you know that usually I'm in here by myself, but that's not the case anymore.

What I want to convey to you is how important it is to get help. So I realized that I couldn't do this by myself. It just wasn't going to happen. As my business got busier with the pandemic with just life. Women conquer business kind of faded out. I met Shelley Carney at the She Podcasts Live event and we really hit it off.

And so she said, Hey, would you, what do you want to do? Do you wanna do this? Do you want to do this together? And I said, sure, why not? Let's give this a try. Shelly, do you want to tell everyone a little bit about. Oh, you bet.

[00:01:32] Shelley Carney: Like Jen said, we met at the women conquer business. I'm sorry, at the she podcasts live conference.

And I got to listen to her talk about her podcast and how much she loved it, but how little time she had for it. I am a livestream coach and consultant, and I help Encore entrepreneurs to master the technology, to live stream video blog and podcast at the same time every week. So with my strategy, we go live.

We don't do any editing. We make it happen. And that's how we stay consistent. And I have been live streaming for years. Toby and I, my business partner, Toby started a business called streaming New Mexico back in 2014. And we offered live streaming services to organizations especially in New Mexico where we did a lot of our live streaming for different Different things like we, at one point we helped the local, they were a semi-professional soccer team and we live stream their games to YouTube for them.

And we've done B2B expo and we've, a lot of different things and I've done a lot of live interviews. Through that. And we have transitioned over to YouTube, has a live streaming process. And we just love it. And w that is my forte. I love YouTube and I love live streaming and that's how we podcast.

And so I talked Jim into doing that as well as what if we took out the editing. Then could you do a podcast? Oh yeah. It's easy.

[00:03:07] Jen McFarland: So I have to admit that my inner perfectionist kind of went, I don't know that we can do this without editing. This is so scary. And I think that it's really important to admit that like on the one hand I'm like, wow, you could live stream back in 2014.

That's because live streaming is becoming. It's like such a game changer right now for many people, especially with the pandemic, I think. But it's also the fact that many people don't get started with making content consistently because of that like inner critic, that person that says I have to work on it and work on it and work on it.

To make it perfect. And I will admit that is part of why women conquer business started to fade out a little bit because I was like, I don't have time to worry about it. So even though something I loved, it was really hard to keep up with it because I was such a perfectionist about it.

So on the one hand, this is very appealing because Hey, it gets out there on the other hand, it's oh no editing.

[00:04:13] Shelley Carney: Cause you know what, it's never going to be absolutely perfect. No matter how much you work on something, because you don't have time for that. You have to move on. You've got to put out another week's content and another is content and you got to move on with your life and you have other things going on.

And that's why everybody pod fades. A lot of people pod fade because there's just too much going on and they can't take care of everything. So we got to let go of something and won't let go of is perfectionism. We and what happens when you let go of perfectionism is you become more human.

You become more relatable when you make mistakes and people hear those mistakes. And they're like, oh they're like me. They're not perfect either.

[00:04:50] Jen McFarland: Exactly. I'm certainly not perfect. And it's just funny because. It you're right. I don't have, I have, I got too much to do and that's part of why.

Thanks Toby. That's part of, that's part of why it fell off and not only did it pod fade, so most pod fading. So pod fading in the podcast world means you do it for a while and then it just kinda goes away. But I, and usually, so most people will know this, the average podcast only lasts about seven episodes and that's about the time when people say, oh, wow, this is harder than I thought.

And then it just. Peter's out. I did it like spectacularly because my last episode was the hundredth episode. Like I had been doing it consistently for two years and then number 100. And I think I just went. And like it, like nothing happened. I didn't even celebrate that. It was a hundred episodes and it just happened.

[00:05:43] Shelley Carney: By yourself.

[00:05:46] Jen McFarland: So it's really ironic that what we're going to talk about today is about creating consistent content. When you know, here I am, I haven't been in your ears or your eyes for a long time. Exactly. But it's also to say, that it's okay to stop as long as you get back on that horse again. And for me, I started a new business.

It's called a the Strategic Marketing Membership. And what I found is as a marketing consultant, that's a totally different cap than when I put on my Strategic Marketing Membership cap, and I'm creating courses and content and being creative. I need an outlet like this, so that I'm a better. Educator. So I'm more prepared to just get into that creative head space.

So I want to thank you for bringing this opportunity to me so that we can talk to each other and share this journey and make sure that everything is okay. Continuing and that we help share all of our ideas because you have a much, you have a unique way of getting people in the saddle and going, we talked about this two days ago and then you're like you want to do it Thursday and was like okay, let's do it

[00:06:57] Shelley Carney: I livestream every day. So it's not a big deal to me.

[00:07:00] Jen McFarland: So thank you so much for being here. And is there anything else you want to share before we get,

[00:07:07] Shelley Carney: I'll just give you a quick rundown. I am in my late fifties, so I'm considered an Encore entrepreneur, and that's why I work with other fellow Encore, entrepreneurs, people who have had a career, they have some knowledge in their life that they built up a bunch of skills, and now they want to create their own at-home business.

Combining all of those skills along with their passion, something that they love to do. And for me, I love to live stream. I love to reach out to people. I love to have that conversation going online with our chat room and that's my passion. And then offering, I build up a platform and then I offer it to other people.

So when we have guests on our show we offer that platform to people who want to share their voice and their message. And that's something that I'm passionate about as well. I'm a mom of two grown children and my daughter's married. She. Currently in Texas, they're on their way to moving to New Hampshire in March.

And my son lives at home with his girlfriend and they're helping out with things around the house. My husband just came home from the hospital yesterday. Whew. He had major surgery on January 4th and he is recovering from cancer. So we'll be going through some chemotherapy. Chemotherapy and radiation appointment.

So if for any reason I'm unable to be here, that is why. I do have a lot of support though. I should be able to be here for these shows and I hope to be because there, there are a lot of fun. Other than that, I just moving and grooving and having a good time.

[00:08:42] Jen McFarland: Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. And again, it's just been so lovely to get to know you more and more.

As we go through this process, I was a guest on your show and then you're having a summit or a panel discussion later in the month.

[00:08:56] Shelley Carney: Next week, on Wednesday.

[00:08:58] Jen McFarland: And and I'll be a part of that. So I'm very excited about that. And that'll be that.

[00:09:04] Shelley Carney: It’s on Messages and Methods YouTube channel. If you want to tune in for that, we're going to have six experts on the panel talking about different aspects of online marketing. It's going to be really informative.

[00:09:14] Jen McFarland: Yeah. And I'll be talking about my favorite thing. I have so many favorite things, but I'll be talking about marketing automation and that's one of the things that I love. And so let's get into that. Like I, let's start going through our.

So this is so fancy. Shelley does fancy things like a show flow. This is not something that I've ever done. If you've listened to the show before, it's usually just a riff it's, whatever I'm thinking of.

[00:09:41] Shelley Carney: When you have a team, you have to have some kind of a plan.

[00:09:44] Jen McFarland: That's true. It's so funny. Oh, Hey, Heather. Thank you so much for figuring out how to find this.

[00:09:55] Shelley Carney: We both have control.

[00:10:00] Jen McFarland: Heather's sights Wolf. She has a podcast called get the balance, and she is really amazing. I knew her before she podcasts and then we got to hang out there as well.

Please be sure and listen to her show and she's watching right now on YouTube, which is really exciting. So thank you so much for watching Heather and yeah. So we're going to talk a little bit. We have this. This first section that we call a breaking news. And so one of the things that I wanted to talk about this time, that's really going on a lot.

And in fact, Shelly and her business partner, Toby are engaging in this, which is the idea of shoppable posts. So they have a channel that they're working on and they're going to go live on Amazon, which is helping people shop and buy things through Amazon. I was fascinated with things like Pinterest TV, which when I first I have this in my head, I haven't shared it with anyone.

I just I'm like, oh, it's so it's like QVC for creators, and it's true, you can so say you have a cooking show or something like that. You can now do that on. But what's really important about this. The shoppable posts is that it includes links. So you can like click on something.

So imagine if you could click on this link that says, Amazon live channel and it would like actually take you there. And right now, YouTube doesn't do that. But there are posts that do that. So the way that I'm really fascinated with this, the way that I really want to share about this is there's multiple ways of doing that.

So they're doing shoppable posts. I think they're exploring it on Instagram. You've been able to click in real sometimes, and it will take you to a link somewhere else. But now what I'm really exploring, what I'm really interested in is an app called firework and what I cause I'm all about automation.

So what I like to do, I'm blowing your mind. Thank you, Heather. So what I'm all about is if I create content in one place, I want to be able to have it in multiple places. So say I created an Instagram real that's the short form video content. What I could do is also upload that into firework, add links to the content or the thing that I wanted to do, and it creates it for my website and those are called web stories.

So what I can do now is you can create videos that are like shoppable. Posts that are inside on your website called web stories. Now the power of web stories is they can get picked up by Google and show up in search. So if you've ever seen, videos that kind of go through the process, some of the great ones are like journalists, news channels that kind of go through a story and it almost looks like.

A slideshow that's on Instagram. Those are called web stories. And no, I did not get firework on AppSumo. It's just doing some research and finding it. And I think it's called firework.tv is where that's located. So web stories are what's hot right now. In Google land, because it's a way to get your videos or get your content.

They don't have to be videos and get your content on your website so that you are really creating things that are showing up in Google and then are drawing people into your website. So the advantage. Doing something like firework and having shoppable posts and then making them web stories on your website is that you're not just sending things out to social media, which you don't own.

You're trying to like also draw people in that are like cold traffic, from search Some of these things take a lot of time and I've been trying to figure out how to do this in a way that is easy for the small business owner to integrate this into their workflow. And I haven't quite figured it out yet, but it's really exciting to me that so much of this is going on.

Kind of all around us that we have ways to really draw people in, to repurpose our content in ways that maybe we hadn't really thought of before, like Heather, who's watching this and saying blowing her mind and she's picking her brain up off the floor. If that's what's happening for you then.

Thank you. No. That whatever it is that you want to do is available and it's out there. And that's one of the big things that I'm looking at that I'm really thinking about a lot because I don't know that a lot of people know about it yet. I think it's been emerging, but it hasn't really hit the mainstream yet.

[00:14:27] Shelley Carney: So is this something that you want to include on your website?

[00:14:31] Jen McFarland: Yeah. So I've been working on it with apifany courses and that's the new business that I have formed with my colleague. Gail bender, Gail is a fractional CFO. And like I said, the marketing consultant and I have all of these ideas about how to.

Get this new business and the content we're putting up on that website, getting that into the hands of not only people that we know, but also the people that we don't know. So one of the ways that we've done that, and I started doing web stories, there's like a plugin from Google that you can add to your WordPress website.

And it was just too hard for me to use. I'm like, I'm not going to keep making these, so I'm looking for easier ways of doing it. And I really think that video is the way to go. To integrate these things into your website. If you're interested in that, I haven't done it for women conquer business.

Most of my focus right now is actually on a Tiffany courses. My marketing consultancy, which is women conquer business is just chugging along, and it is continuing the Strategic Marketing Membership is brand new and I'm actively making content. So what a lot of people don't know is I've been.

Teaching for years, I was I, one of my roles before was to really, teach, do a lot of teaching in, on marketing. Before that it was all different kinds of things. I did a lot of training with people, so I've been going all around town in Portland, Oregon, and throughout the state of Oregon, teaching people about marketing.

And then also this wisdom that I shared on the women conquer business podcast. Before Shelley joined. There's a lot of things in there that can all be courses that I can really walk people through and really teach them how to make some things happen in their own business. Like this, shoppable posts thing, but other things.

So I'm really focused on that. I'm creating a lot of content there and that's really what I'm looking at the shoppable posts for, because I think for course, creators content creators, I think this could be a really big thing.

[00:16:31] Shelley Carney: That's awesome. And I think that it would be great if in the future, sometime we talk about creating courses and the software that you would use, or we would recommend to somebody who's just starting out with creating their own courses and then marketing those courses because I want to do that.

Of course, I imagine everybody wants to do that if I want to do it.

[00:16:53] Jen McFarland: Sure. We can talk about that. Oh, we do have a question from Heather Zeitzwolf. Do you know if you can embed the video from firework into an email like loom. What I would suggest in this case is when you create a video for a a web story, something like that, what you do is you create a poster.

So it's like your, I don't know, like your video card or your thumbnail, if you do things on YouTube. You use that, and then you would hyperlink it to your website where you've embedded it. And then the video would play. And part of that is because you're driving people back to your website.

You always want to go back to that place where the content that you own the information that you own. So I think that. That's how I would suggest doing it. I don't know if you can embed it like in MailChimp so that the video can play, which I think is what the question was. Heather you can let me know if that was the question.

And I'm just learning firework now. But it won't take me long. I love software, so I'm always learning.

[00:17:56] Shelley Carney: And while we're talking about learning stuff, that is the huge, big, giant reason that I decided, you know what? I need to be on this podcast with Jen, because if nothing else, I'm going to learn a ton of stuff.

And I am, I'm learning all kinds of stuff. From the get go, every time I talk with Jen doesn't matter if it's on the phone or if it's during a show, I learned something that I can use. So that was your breaking news,

[00:18:28] Jen McFarland: breaking news. Do you have any breaking news? That's pretty breaking.

[00:18:32] Shelley Carney: My only breaking news is we started doing the Amazon live this week and it's been a lot of fun. We have had a store on Amazon first. You have to be an influencer then. Storefront and you put things in your store and you'd recommend them to people. And then you can also then apply on your phone to be a live streamer and to have your own live stream as an influence.

And then you do your live streams. And there's a few tricks because we like using stream yard for our live streams so that we can multistream. We want to go to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. We want to go everywhere at the same time to save us time from spreading things around. So we multistream.

Because we were using stream here, there was a few extra clicks that we didn't know about that we had to really research deeply into some YouTube videos to figure out. So we had tried starting going at one o'clock on Monday and that didn't quite work. So we kept that and kept at it and kept at it.

And then we finally did our show at five o'clock. But we got it done. We don't give up. And that's what I can say to everybody. Don't give up. You keep at it'll happen and it doesn't have to be perfect.

[00:19:50] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. And, I think I've joked about this before that I've recorded entire podcasts, not knowing the microphone wasn't on.

I think, I think we've all been there and we've all done that. And I think that it's just important to keep going. Now. I will say don't. Don't do what I did. I remember the first time. Oh yeah. I'm pleased, follow the Amazon live channel. It's a great thing. And you can see how it's done today.

[00:20:12] Shelley Carney: What we talk about is photography right now because Toby is a professional photographer, beauty, videographer, and all of that. So we're focusing on small set photography and today we're going to talk about the splash shot, where you drop an ice cube and you catch the splash when you're taking the photo.

Yeah, it's so it's fun and that's what we'll be talking about today on our show. So follow us there and check it out. And even if you don't buy anything, you'll learn stuff about photography and lighting and cleaning the floor because we made a mess.

[00:20:47] Jen McFarland: Yeah. I've never. Yeah. I've never figured out how people do that. So I may have to check that out. Yeah. If I'm around later on today today's a pretty full day. It looks like we have a question from Heather about how big of a following do you need to be an influencer to access this? And I think she's talking about accessing Amazon in this way.

[00:21:11] Shelley Carney: So if you go to just Google, Amazon influencer, they have a page set up that tells you everything you need to know. We've seen people on there who live stream, who only have about a hundred people following them on YouTube, but we don't know how big their Facebook is.

Our YouTube is about 6,000. And we have a lot on Facebook, but we've had our store for a couple of years and this live stream thing is pretty new. Just try it. Go to Amazon influencer and try it. Try signing up and see if they accept you.

[00:21:47] Jen McFarland: I think that's the big thing. If you see the sign I have behind me, and for those of you listening, it says make content habits. And I think that one of the biggest things, especially now that I'm emerging from this pod fade and all of the things it's, what we're really trying to say is just try it, get out there, come up with the thing that you want to talk about.

And then. Just keep doing it over and over again.

[00:22:13] Shelley Carney: That's right. It's the little things get in your way and give you excuses to not do it.

[00:22:19] Jen McFarland: That's right. Not do it. There's so many reasons to not do it, but you need to do it. Like I was saying, I've recorded an entire podcast with the microphone off.

The one thing I did that I wouldn't recommend is when I rerecorded it, I could tell that I was agitated. You can hear it in my voice. Stay positive

[00:22:39] Shelley Carney: We do that all the time. We've done this for years and something happens a lot. Call it a rehearsal. Say, that was a rehearsal. Got all my mistakes out of the way. Now I'm ready for the real thing.

[00:22:52] Jen McFarland: Yeah. And part of it, it's so funny because people, he's not really my cup of tea, but a lot of people like Gary Vaynerchuk and they forget that yeah, he had this wine business, but he like, the Gary Vaynerchuk you've seen now is because he started just making YouTube videos.

And if I bet, if you went back to whenever he did his first. Videos. They weren't very good.

[00:23:16] Shelley Carney: And that's for everybody. You can look at anybody national. Now you go back to their day one. You'll see a big change.

[00:23:23] Jen McFarland: Yeah. Like this little background I have like my desk, the way it's set up, I just started noticing that people have.

Fun backgrounds. And I was like, oh I can do that. That's challenging sometimes because I don't always keep my desk that clean. That's a real desk back there. It doesn't, it does I walked in last night and my husband had settled this stuff out here and you could just put it away after I didn't say that Dean, but I thought it because I was like, this is always clean in here now, but it's. You pay attention to what's going on, you do what you can and you start just knocking it out. There are all these videos out there about, setting up content schedules and all kinds of stuff, but, it's really important to you. Get started and then you can worry about all of that stuff later.

That's what I think, it is getting it out there. The, oh, so this is another, we have another question about Amazon live and what you could actually sell on there.

[00:24:18] Shelley Carney: Anything on Amazon, there are books and the author, or even if you're selling your own books, interview the author, or talk about yourself, writing the book and show the book off.

Absolutely. You can sell books. You can sell anything that's on Amazon through that marketplace.

[00:24:37] Jen McFarland: That's pretty neat. Yeah, I'm an avid reader. I'm reading a really good book right now called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. It's by the founder of Gumroad, which is like a content creator’s PayPal. So it really works with helping, if you have like PDFs for downloading or different types of things that you're selling, it makes that process much easier.

See, I don't think you even need to have a website with a storefront for e-commerce to use Gumroad handles a lot of that and he talks a lot about the process. Starting a business. Some of the things that you have to do, and what I love about it is it's none of the flash in the pan kind of things that you see everywhere.

It's like what you actually have to do to start a business. And he talks really honestly, about some of the mistakes that he made and a lot of the different things that are just going on in the world and people that he knows and the mistakes that they've made. So if you're looking for a good book, Right now, I would say the minimalist.

Entrepreneur's a really good one. If you're really diving into the details or you're not getting traction in the different places that you're working.

[00:25:50] Shelley Carney: Let's see another question and they take the same cut as if you were to sell their stuff for your own website? What happens is people who purchase items off of Amazon pay Amazon, whatever Amazon's price is, they don't pay extra.

And if Amazon is running a coupon, they get the use of that coupon. And sometimes Amazon offers the live streamers special deals that you can offer during your live stream, so people will purchase. And then Amazon gives you a commission as if you were a salesperson. So if you were to shop at Best Buy and buy a product from a salesperson there, maybe you buy a computer at Best Buy.

You don't have to then pay anybody else. You've paid. Best Buy takes care of their own employees. Amazon takes care of their salespeople by giving them a commission, which would be worked into the markup of that product price.

Did you want to get into, let's see, what was it? Three things?

[00:26:55] Jen McFarland: The training and advice. I don't know. I feel like we've been playing around with that.

[00:27:01] Shelley Carney: I’d like to know more about what that is. More about what is what's what kind of a thing? Three, three things?

[00:27:10] Jen McFarland: Oh, the training and advice. Oh, I thought that was the the tweak of the week, but yeah.

[00:27:23] Shelley Carney: Yeah, so it's a new show flow. The new show flow. We're trying to figure this out. So our call to action is subscribe people. The call to action is to subscribe.

[00:27:24] Jen McFarland: We don't have anything fancy cause this is all new.

Yeah, we just have all of this new newness. We're trying to figure this out. So what we really wanted to talk about today is around creating, curating, consistent content what you need to do in order to create consistent content. So right now we've been talking about just getting out there and doing it.

But for some people, I think that. It really doesn't work that way. And for some people, and I want to really honor that and talk about that for some people, it's, there's a lot of analysis paralysis, or maybe you really want to do that thing and you don't know how to get started. And. And so it's easy for us who are sitting here to say, Hey, just get started, just do the thing, and at the same time, I want to honor that part of me that was like, yeah, but you haven't been doing this for a year or maybe longer. I don't know. I don't know. And it COVID time, everything changes, but yeah. There is an easy way to get started and it is about finding that.

And it's one of the things that I've talked to clients and other people about a lot is around readiness, and it's about what is it that you're willing to do? So everybody says you have to do video everybody's, and it's like when I talk to people, what I really want to convey is get everybody does this or that.

But what is it that you want to. What is it that you feel most comfortable doing? And usually that is where I start with people is, if you really don't want to be on video, you don't have to be on video. And maybe Shelley disagrees with that, because she's really, but I just, I think that the most important thing is to really do a little bit of a soul searching and.

Figure out what you, what it is that you want to talk about. And believe me, don't worry about the fact that somebody else is talking about what you want to talk about. How many people talk about marketing? My gosh, it's like everywhere, right? So everybody's talking about marketing and here I am.

Let's talk about marketing. And. So don't worry about what other people are doing. Don't worry about how other people are doing it. Think about what it is, what it is that you want to do, what you want to talk about, and then just come up with something. But then you have to have that accountability with either another person or something that will get you going.

And a lot of times, it's interesting. One of the conversations I had at she podcast that was pretty fascinating is around somebody who's but why do you do. Why do you like having a podcast? Why do you do it? And I kept saying I like it. And he's and this person, and he was like, no, why you?

And I'm like money, like at the end of the day was like money. And he was like, that's what I'm talking about, and. That's really, what's going to get you going, is figuring out how to either monetize it. Or maybe you're really passionate about reaching as many people as you can, whatever it is that you, that is really going to get you out of bed in the morning and get you creating that's the thing that you have to keep coming back to now money that may not come right away.

But it's still the more that you're talking about, who you are, what you do, how you help people. It helps people understand. And I think that when we talk about money, we have to understand how many touch points it takes before somebody is willing to. Engaged with you as a customer or buy your product.

A lot of people don't know you. So think of it as a way, if this is for your business to really get to know people and. Then perhaps they will go down that further path with you of sales. One of the things about women conquer business was it was never super focused on what I do. It was more about having fun and meeting cool people and giving back.

And this time we are going to talk more about marketing because. It's what I do. I don't think a lot of people knew what it is that I do. So in terms of training and advice, I think for me, that's, if you're fearful about talking about what you do or fearful about content creation, maybe that just sounds like really big.

That's how I would suggest getting started. What do you think Shelly, is that similar or different to what your thoughts are?

[00:32:07] Shelley Carney: Yeah. I think you need to speak things aloud in order to make them happen. When you and I started talking about this, I brought it up. I said, let's do this and let's talk about it and let's get together.

And how about this? How about that? And then you bring in ideas, but we speak them aloud. And then when we do that, not only do I hear it, and you hear it, but the universe hears it. And when we speak it into a podcast, it has the opportunity to spread out across the world. When we speak it out to all the channels that we're broadcasting to.

Right now, we are on three Facebook pages. We're on LinkedIn and we're on two YouTube channels. And anybody out there in the universe could find us and hear us and start following us and connect with us and collaborate with us. But none of that happens until we go live and start talking. It can all be in our heads and we can think about how wonderful it might be if we were to do it, or we can just do it and perfect it as we go. It's a practice and practice makes perfect. But if you don't start the practice, you can never get to perfect.

[00:33:18] Jen McFarland: So there's this thing, like if you build it, they will come, it's from one of my favorite movies of all time. And truly guests, we are broadcasting to like a jillion places and it's a podcast and it's going to live in infamy forever and ever, because when you put something on the internet, it stays there.

And in the beginning, not a lot of people are going to be listening or seeing it. So if it's the idea that of putting it out there is what the scary part is. The truth is. People are just going to think. It's really cool. And they're not going to criticize it anywhere near as much as you criticize it yourself.

Most it's like going to the gym and you're like, oh God, I'm going to look like an idiot. That's nobody's looking at you, everybody's in their own head thinking about their own exercises. And it's the same thing. When you do some sort of creative.

[00:34:13] Shelley Carney: It's your perspective. I could focus completely on, how we totally messed up the first live Amazon thing.

Oh my gosh. It was such a disaster, but I don't care. You know what? We tried, we kept working at it and then we had success. That's what I want to focus on is the success part and that we were determined to make it work and we did. That's right.

[00:34:36] Jen McFarland: Yeah. And here we are, we're doing this. I didn't even know you could go live on Amazon, but Hey, maybe, and like Heather says, I can live out my QVC fantasy.

Maybe that's what, maybe that's what gets you up in the morning and gets you going. It's just the idea of sharing the stuff that you like, the things that you see you're living out this fantasy of. Of living, QVC or whatever it is, but the only way that it happens, you're absolutely right.

As you start saying this stuff out loud and you start like sharing it, you have to share it with the world.

[00:35:09] Shelley Carney: Rejection never killed anyone. If somebody says no to you, you're not going to die. If nobody listens to your live stream, you're not going to die.

[00:35:20] Jen McFarland: Yeah. And they talk, he talks about that a lot in the minimalist entrepreneur, how you know, and his thing is you shouldn't even start marketing until you have a hundred customers.

And I was like, oh, what? It's like that marketer in me was like, oh my gosh. But then it made a lot of sense, like when he explained the whole thing But like the true thing is you have to be able to sell, you have to be able to talk to people about what you do and you have to be willing to accept.

No, even if you're starting your business and your first few people are your friends and family, some people are gonna be like, yeah, that's nice. I'm not interested. And that's the same thing when you're creating content. If you're talking about that thing that you like at first, people will be like, ah, I'm not that interested, but then in time, people do become.

You have to give things time. So this is also, you can't do a one and done and say that didn't work out only two people watched it.

[00:36:08] Shelley Carney: But what if one of those two people told 10 people, you know what I, you could go to a meeting right after you saw the video and you go, you, my best friend was on the live stream and she talked about Amazon live and I'm going to do that now.

And all my friends, you don't know, it could be. Ripple effect.

[00:36:27] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. And doing it more often and you're sharing more tips and tricks and all kinds of stuff that's how these things grow and blossom. So I guess that if we were to, wrap up this. Training and advice, which I feel like we've, it's been the thread throughout it's really, it really does come down to jumping in there.

And sometimes you have to fool yourself into doing it. You have to trick yourself, you have to say, oh nobody's going to see it anyway. And there's like some freedom in that. Nobody's going to see it anyway. So we're like, what? What's the harm? And then, like Shelley said, it's not.

[00:37:03] Shelley Carney: You know what? You might actually reach somebody who really needed to hear what you had to say.

[00:37:09] Jen McFarland: That's right. So if you like to write, start writing that blog that you always thought about, if you like to make video, make those videos, if you like, whatever it is, share a bit of yourself and you never know where that's going to lead.

[00:37:24] Shelley Carney: I like it.

[00:37:26] Jen McFarland: Yeah. Yeah. And if you like this, be sure to subscribe,

[00:37:34] Shelley Carney: wait, here we go.

[00:37:36] Jen McFarland: We're gonna keep, we're gonna keep doing this week after week. And because we've made a commitment to do that. And our commitment is my commitment is to bring back women conquer business as a weekly. Livestream and podcast for people because I really enjoy it.

And so please and share tell your friends about it. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. I have started updating the website. So you'll find not just my picture, but also Shelley's picture on there. And we'll be posting the new shows as soon as the episodes are ready.

So there you go. So go to women conquer biz.com/podcast, and you'll be able to find all of the information about the new show, the new episodes, everything like that.

[00:38:24] Shelley Carney: This is in the crawl and we'll also put it in the show notes.

[00:38:26] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. And do you want to talk about the tweak of the week?

Did you have a tweak of the week?

[00:38:31] Shelley Carney: No. I want you to talk about yours and I'll think about it while you're doing that.

[00:38:38] Jen McFarland: And fast. So what I found in my own life, and I think that it might be true for others as well is I do better if I am grounded and if I know what it is that I'm supposed to do, not only for the week or the day, but like setting quarterly goals and things like that.

One of the problems that I had, I used to use this program called monday.com for like project management. I think it's pretty popular and well known. But it became a little bit expensive and it was really for I think it's really for larger teams, but. Project management software. You have to build out what you want to make it happen.

I think other people use things like click up and things like that. I'm trying to simplify everything that I'm doing. So I use a Mac and I was I've joined a community called fizzle fizzle.co, and they had somebody on there talking about ways that you can develop some productivity habits as a content.

And the, I can't remember his name. I wish I could, he was talking about things or OmniFocus all of these different task management programs that you can use and it is, it's really cool. So thing things, three is Mac only and you can get it at the app store, but what I like about it is you can put in tasks and say, these are my weekly tasks, and then it will continue to.

Re restart and show you the next tasks that you have to do for the next week. So it is really good at helping you build in like weekly habits around the things that you need to do every week, but that you may find that you are forgetting. So one of the tweaks of the week is, and it automates, it goes into your calendar.

It helps, what's coming up. It really helps you. All of these types of things. So you can install it on your iPad, your Mac, your phone. And it is not a monthly charge, which I really like subscribe. And it's like a one-time one-time charge, I think on your Mac, it's like $50. And I like it.

It's not really for teams. It's really built for one one person. But I really like it because it's helping me keep kinda my personal tasks in line. It's helping me keep keep me on track with some things I have in front of me, a board. I keep, I have a huge whiteboard in my office.

And I have all of my Q1 goals up here. And then in things for each goal, it's a project. And then I have the tasks underneath. And so if that kind of thing is interesting to you, or if you need a way to really keep on task with some things that's really what I recommend.

We're talking about habits, we're talking about creating content consistently. One of the ways that you do that is you systematize it, you automate it, you make it part of your workflow. And having a task management. Half that you use that is low cost and really easy to use. That's what's really appealing to me about things is I don't have to build anything with, to think about it too much.

I can just add things and say, it's probably why it's called things. I can just add things. I could just add things and. And it will remind me and it will tell me what I have on my calendar and what it is that I need to do. And I think that for many people, especially the longer COVID goes on and we're in this kind of alternative universe, the longer it goes on, the better it is for us to really build in some consistent habits and some scheduling.

So that's my tweak of the week.

[00:42:23] Shelley Carney: I've found when I’m at Toby's house where I am for work. He has the Alexa. I shouldn't say it very loud because she listens in and I was going to say, but she is connected to both of our calendars. So if I have something on my Google calendar, she will announce, Hey, this is coming up to do and send you a notice. So all I have to do is make sure everything important is on my Google calendar or his Google calendar. And she'll tell us about it. And then of course she'll do reminders. He takes medication twice a day and another medication once a week.

So he has Alexa remind him to do that so that he doesn't forget to do that. So that I don't have to keep reminding him. Did you take your meds? Because, I forget too. So that's another way that if you have one of those, a L E X, a things in your home connect it to what you're already using. If you're a Google calendar user, then that's a great way to do it.

[00:43:24] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. Unless you're like me, I. I don't have one of those. And I also turned off Siri. I live in a Mac house and I turned Siri off. I feel like I don't need Amazon or Apple to know any more about me then.

[00:43:45] Shelley Carney: Yes.

[00:43:46] Jen McFarland: And I also found out I was talking to Alexa too much. I was just trying to see what I could get Alexa to say back. And I was like, this is also a huge time waster. It's true. I'm asking you to tell me jokes all the time.

[00:43:58] Shelley Carney: Toby lives alone, so sometimes Alexa is the only one he has to talk to.

[00:44:00] Jen McFarland: So I know you can totally integrate all of that in, and I am like this strange. I already know I'm like a weirdo in a lot of ways, but I am this strange like balance of like digital minimalism and being everywhere. So I believe in privacy. That's why I have a lot of problems with TikTok.

Toby and I were talking about TikTok right before we went live. Because TikTok, and they have in their privacy or in their terms of service policy, they say that they can take all of your biometrics and nobody knows exactly what that means. But it's concerning to me. And and then a lot of privacy people say it's the same as any other.

Social media account. But I at least for right now, I think I'm opting out of making videos on TikTok.

[00:44:52] Shelley Carney: I don't get into TikTok. It doesn't work for me, but what came to my mind was the Incredibles where Syndrome says, when everybody's special then nobody is, right?

So I'm feeling like nobody's private anymore. Everybody's on every kind of thing. That's true. Everybody's private anymore because you can't see it all. You can't look for everybody and you don't have any interest anymore. You're like, there's nothing private anymore. There's no secrets, there's no excitement.

[00:45:23] Jen McFarland: And I think that's true. And one of the things that is getting me more interested in doing, TikTok and Instagram in particular, Pinterest has always been searchable. Like one of the big advantages of Pinterest is that it's searchable and Google recently announced that they're indexing all.

Your Instagram videos and TikTok videos, which means there'll be searchable online. So now TikTok is becoming good for SEO and I'm like, how does that let me think about that. So it is a balancing act, like of privacy, but every everything's public now. I don't have all the answers.

I'm navigating it. Just like everybody else.

[00:46:03] Shelley Carney: Yeah. I think you need to really focus on, okay. Who is it that I'm speaking to? Who is my target audience? And do they hang out there? And we don't know Encore entrepreneurs hang out very much on tech talk as to YouTube. So we focus on that.

[00:46:17] Jen McFarland: It trends very young. It's they're really targeting like like 13 to 18 year olds, anybody under 24. That's really the target market. You're right. There's not a lot. There's not a lot of Encore entrepreneurs there. Yeah. And we only have so much time ourselves to be in places, you can't be everywhere. So yeah.

That's the other reason why my content, I have a slightly different audience. I don't know how many business owners are just hanging out on Tik TOK. I, I spend most of my time focusing on LinkedIn. I do have a Pinterest following and then I'm focusing more on YouTube just because.

It's such a great search engine. That's right. I'm super nerdy. Like I'm like, let's do things for search.

[00:47:00] Shelley Carney: Again, Google is a search engine. YouTube is owned by Google and it also qualifies as a search engine and Pinterest is a search engine. So those are really good places to be to double the bang on your buck.

[00:47:16] Jen McFarland: Yeah. That's right. I think it's probably about time to close out. I did not prepare an inspirational quote or anything like that.

[00:47:32] Shelley Carney: We are an inspiration. We are the inspirational nugget. That's how we are closing. We'll use the inspirational nugget that Jen had experienced podfade and she made a new friend, made a friend and brought it back. We brought it back to life. You can do that too.

[00:47:45] Jen McFarland: A hundred percent. Thank you so much, Shelley. Thank you, everyone, for being here, and thank you Shelley for bringing this back and we'll see you next week.

[00:47:54] Shelley Carney: That's right. We'll be back next week. So please subscribe, tune in. And we would love to have any questions or feedback from you so that we can address any questions or concerns in the next show. So please do that.

[00:48:10] Jen McFarland: Thank you. And thank you Rosa Linda. She's been commenting throughout and thank you so much for being here too.

[00:48:18] Shelley Carney: Thank you for joining the women conquer business podcast, posted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland, please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem. Then share this podcast with family and friends so they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the world. Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.