Lessons

Lesson Info

About the Solo-Show Format

Now, the show that I do is a solo show. This is just you talking. This is just you either giving a lesson, you taking about your life. Like it could be a vlog style. 'This is what I did today. This is what's going on.' It could be a review show like 'Hey, I just these three new book and this what I think of them.' Or 'I just got this brand new, special tool and this is what I love about it.' There are so many different topics you can cover in a solo show that your audience is going to be interested in. You want to make sure that your always serving them and giving them what they want. So, I like this for a bunch of reasons we'll talk about in a minute. But this is my show, this is my actual podcast image there. You can see it's just really big. Just pro-tip, always make sure your words are spelled correctly. We misspelled enthusiasm the first time we uploaded this. And even though we fixed it, everybody's phone hasn't refreshed, there are hundreds of people out there with enthusiasm mi...

sspelled and they email me to let me know that it's misspelled. Make sure you know how to spell the words and maybe don't pick a word that's so hard to spell. But we'll listen to a sample of my show. I don't know what clip we picked, so hopefully I sound clever. If you don't have sales and you just have marketing, you might have an amazing brand, but if you don't do anything to sell your work, you're not going to have any money and you're not going to have any profit, and you're not going to have a business. Okay. So, I just talk. I do what I do here, in my podcast. And the reason why it's helped me grow my business is because this is what people buy, me talking. When I was doing the blog post, it was hard for people to the sense of what a class with me would be like. Now that they listen to the podcast, they know what it'll be like to take one of my online classes or in-person classes. And because I am talking about things that relate to my products. I very easily and naturally can mention 'Oh I go into this more in my book Map Yourself-- Map Your Business.' That's what's its called. That just let's me very easily lead people to the next step, which we're gonna talk about later today. There's some pro's and con's. The first thing, you don't have to schedule anything with anyone. If you, like me, hate scheduling, you just show up. I can show up anytime time for myself, I don't have to put it on the calender. Your customers really get to you and connect with you, which is awesome. They get a real sense for who you are. This is especially awesome if your gonna do things where you meet a lot of people. If you go to conferences or trade shows or craft shows or you do trunk shows at shops, the people who listen to the podcast will come because they feel like they know you. And also, they will really know you. When they meet-- One of my big things is I don't want you to be like surprised and shocked and horrified by who I really am. You know who I am if you've been lsitening to my podcast and that makes it easy to immediately jump into a friendship. Also, like I said, it's super easy. You can just start recording what I showed your earlier on a phonic, there's no extra technology. With the other kind of shows, there's a little other things you have to work together, right? Like the software to let you interview somebody. Now the con, it's just you and your brain. And if you have a hard time coming up with content ideas or figuring out what to talk about, there's no one to help you do that. It's just gonna be you. Now, I have a solution, but do we have a question? Yeah, I just wanted to ask you. You know for those who are watching perhaps they've never spoken to themselves into a microphone before, you know. It's especially doing a solo show, how would you recommend breaking the ice just with yourself feeling comfortable talking like to either nobody or an audience. You know-- Yeah Because effectively your sat in a room. Perhaps slighter different than doing an interview style, you kind of have somebody else to feel-- Yeah. A bit more at ease with. How would you recommend getting comfortable speaking like solo? (laughing) Just talking to yourself alone in a room, do you guys not do that already? Just talk to yourself? I will tell you actually, my best tip is that I talk to my dog. Your dog is always looking at you just lovingly, everything you say is brilliant. I will sometimes talk out a class or a podcast episode first to him. The other thing you can do, and we talked more about this in the Youtube class. Is really envision your customer right there on the other side of the phone, the recording, the camera. Really picture that person and talk directly to them. So, if Liz has asked me a question last week and I'm gonna cover it this week on the podcast, I would just picture Liz and would just talk to Liz. She's not there, but I'm just acting like I'm talking to her. You can also absolutely get somebody in the room with you like, 'Hey, can I talk this out with you? Can I just start recording and get that feedback?' What I've noticed is that, introverts, people who get energy from being alone, tend to not have a problem doing this. They can sit down and be like these are my thoughts, just of my journaling but out of your mouth. Whereas extroverts, who get energy from being with other people, they need to have that bouncing off. So, if you need that, then do a show like we're going to talk about in a minute, the round table. Where it's actually me and you both recording, talking at the same time, so that we can bounce off each other. If the idea of just talking into your phone, you cannot imagine, then definitely rope in one of your friends. What's cool is if your friend doesn't-- if your doing your handmade business or small business and your friend doesn't, they would actually be a great person to bounce off of. Because they're going to have questions. Your gonna use some terminology and they're gonna be like 'Wait, what does that mean?' 'What are you saying there?' Or 'what's going on there?' Or 'I don't understand that.' Or they'll just be able to point out 'What you do is really interesting this way and this way', and you might not see it because you do it. We'll talk more about the round table, but that's a solution. Or just get a dog and talk to your dog. A few people in the chat room, saying brilliant, this is the excuse I needed to get a puppy. This is more than one person saying that for sure. I like just told Liz to get a puppy. And I got one. Yeah. My advice to everybody is get a puppy. If you have a hard time coming up with content, the easiest way to make a solo show is to make it a Q&A show. Which means, people ask their questions and you answer them. If your an expert or a pro, like your a fitness professional or you are a workshop leader or you help small business' with their marketing, then, a Q&A show can help you show that expertise and build your authority. It's also super easy because you never have to pre-think it. Now you do need to be the kind of person who can think on your feet and come up with answers. But if you're a pro and an expert and you do live workshops, then you already do this. You know in the beginning I was saying sometimes we don't come across like we want to in written things online even though we're great on-person or in-person. Because we can really talk with passion and expertise in-person. Doing a Q&A show lets you create that in the online world. There's a couple ways you can do it. The first one is to make a phone number on Google to take questions. Google voice let's you create phone numbers for free. I think up to two per account and then you can set this to go directly to a voicemail box in Google. So your phone never rings. If you want people to call you, that's fine. But I don't have it forward to my phone, I have it forward to a recording and it's all free, I have a number you can call and leave your question. I say in the recording and I also say in my podcast, if you call in and leave a message, your giving us permission to use it on the show. If you do this, you're getting an audio clip which is awesome for an audio show. You actually have an audio clip of their question you can play. And then you can use this in two ways. You can come to it totally fresh, like you can insert the-- In your editing software, so you will have to edit it in, this clip in your editing software. You can play it and you can just answer live. Or if you're a little worried about that, you can listen to it ahead of time, write out your answer, think through your answer, and then answer after you've thought it through. The more live you make it, the more excited people get. That's why people asking a question in the chat room because they like the live, oh, the answer just came out of her. You can make a phone number and get their audio. You can also create a form and have your audience fill it out. Google sheets lets you do this totally for free. You can create a form and when people fill it out, the answers will show up in a spread sheet. Now this isn't, your going to get their question and your going to read it outloud. Where I have this, is if you sign up for my email list on the big pink box on the top of my website, you get an email that asks you what is biggest struggle? What are you dealing with in your business? There's a form, people fill it out with what their dealing with and then I have an endless stream of questions to answer on the podcast. Because people are telling me what their dealing with and I have that sent out automatically so I'm always getting new answers to that question. So, I'm always coming up with new content. When I run out of ideas, I go back through there. I look for somebody's question of what the biggest struggle they have. So, for you and your health and wellness business, it might be like what is your biggest health priority right now? Or what is your biggest health concern? Or why haven't you gone with no toxin products before? Like what's held you back? And you've done this in a Google form? Yeah, you can do this in a Google form. You can also do Survey Monkey. Okay. They'll give you a page with essay results. But on a Google form, it's gonna fill out a spread sheet. If you can read that spread sheet. Actually Google forms have changed it now, like there's a button for you to get a report, and they'll give you an essay form that's a little easier to read. Yeah. And there are tutorials for how to create that online. It's really simple. And then you can also make a post calling for questions on social media. Now , if you watch the Youtube show, then you've heard me explain this but this is one of the things that works best for me. I'll tell you why. It's actually gaming the social media platform and moving those people, from whoever's following you on social media to your podcast. Itunes and-- Not Itunes, Instagram and Facebook show your posts to more people once people have commented and liked it. The more interaction one post gets the more they show it to everybody else in your audience. When you do a post asking for questions and you get comments of people's questions that post is gonna be shown to more and more people. My audience always grows on Instragram when I do one of these posts and then it alerts all those people who are following me on Instagram she does a podcast where she answers people's questions, I should listen to that. What I do exactly, is I will post a photo of whatever, most of the times it's like my feet, because it doesn't matter what the photo is. In the caption, I will write, 'Hey, it's time for a Q&A episode. Post your question below and I'll answer you question on my upcoming episode of hashtag explore your enthusiasm. Because that's my podcast hashtag. To listen to the most recent episode, click the link in my profile.' What I've done with that one post, I've told people I have a podcast, you can listen to that here, leave a comment and I'll answer live on air. You do have to have some people following on that platform in order to get any responses. But it really helps move people. If you already have a small Instagram audience, but you obviously don't have any podcast listeners yet, it helps notify them and then, from their comments, you have two options. You can do a show where you answer it all in one episode right, that's going to be a little longer of a show. Or you can answer their questions one by one, and that'll give you continuous content for a while. And then what I do, I make a post when that episode goes live. It's a Q&A episode where I answered four peoples' questions and I tag them. 'Hey Liz and Sarah and Laura, I've answered your question.' So they get notified their question has been answered. I've had people ask me questions, who didn't actually listen to the podcast, and then I told them basically, go listen to the podcast. In my business, those Q&A episodes are my most popular. When you look at my stats, which I did last night just to be sure, the Q&A episodes always go way up because people are, I think, is that I'm answering specific questions and their sharing it with their friends. 'This is my question, I got it answered, Oh my gosh.' That's what I think is happening. Also what it does, it gives me really content what people really want to listen to because a real person has asked the question it's not out of the top of my head, but I want to talk about. It builds a much stronger relationship because it's exactly what people want to hear. Another way to do a Q&A show, is to do a live Q&A. So you can go live in a million ways. You can go live on Youtube, on Facebook, on Instagram and what you gotta do then is record it. All of those options, Youtube it will go live on your Youtube channel and you can take that audio and split it out for your audio podcast. On Facebook, you have to do this from the actual browser, you can download a Facebook live video to your computer, split out the audio and on Instagram live, there's an option to download it when you finish it. It'll say save, so you save that to your phone and you can upload that audio into your podcast. You both have questions. We have a question. Could you not just hit record on the app? A phonic-- Before you start-- As the same time as your doing it on Youtube or on-- If your recording live on something at the same time and just hit record. Honestly, that's what I did. I got on my computer and I just put up photobooth app, recorded myself while I was recording myself on a phonic the same time because I didn't know what I was doing. (laughing) I like that. On your computer, you can use the quicktime. If you've got a macbook. Yeah. Use quicktime to record the audio. Instead of photobooth? Yeah, it actually shows it to you there. So to go to your question, can you have a phonic and Instagram live open on your phone at the same time? If you click away from Instagram live, it pauses your Instagram live. But if you set a phonic up and then you click on Instagram live. That's what we'll test. The other think you can do is record on your computer and go live on your phone or vice versa. Go live on your computer. The thing to keep in mind, is people are gonna be sending you questions you have to read out those questions because otherwise, the person listening won't have any idea. So if I'm on Facebook live and Liz asks, 'Hey, can I record two things at once?' If I just say, 'Yeah, you can Liz.' The audio listening has no idea. So I have to say, 'Liz just asked blah, blah, blah.' And once you get in the habit of doing that, it's not that hard. You have a question. It seems to be one of the comments, some of the comments from watching online, season for example said, 'I'm a lifecoach and a massage therapist So I've been thinking about doing Facebook live to talk about mind, body and soul. Would recording my audio with Facebook live and turning it entirely into a podcast make sense? Or do I have to do them separately? Yeah, you can totally do them at the same time. On your computer, its gonna be much easier. Because you can open, it's quicktime in Macbook, I'm not sure what it is on a PC, and you can open it and do new audio recording and then start up Facebook live. You want to make sure all of the notifications are turned off. Like you don't have to computer dinging away at you. But you can also just read their questions out loud. You definitely need to do that. But yeah, it's a great way. If you've been doing Facebook lives or Youtube lives turn that audio into a podcast. You can use anything you've been doing regularly. Instagram live isn't going to transfer well to Youtube because it's going to be vertical. But a Facebook live, absolutely. We talked about that a little bit in the Youtube class. Anymore questions about this? Because this makes for such an easy show. Okay, I wanted to say, if your struggling with what to talk about and you have an audience anywhere. If your business isn't brand new and you've made any sales, do a Q&A show to get started. It will make sure that your content is really serving the best people because your going to get the questions directly from them. You do not have to make it hard, you do not have to do what I did which is write a brand new episode every week from scratch or come up with something new. Get the questions from the audience. If you teach live, which I know you do live workshops, write down people's questions when they ask them. A lot of times when I'm doing a in-person workshop like at a conference, I ask them for their questions and I will write down everything they asked. And then I'll go home and add it to my content calendar. I had a great answer in the moment, I should share that with my podcast audience. So then you are always having a new stream and you also don't have to rethink your answers, you can just go with what you already know to do.