Inclusion Inspires: Brand Building Challenge (Day 2)

Go to chat. All right, we're back on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn. See if it is any better. So let me know if you can hear me. You know, platforms are funny that way sometimes, so let me know. All right, Instagram, you guys are great. Thank you for joining me. I will be kicking into this momentarily. I know we're like 20 minutes in already, um, so let me know if you can hear me on any other platform than Instagram, because you guys can hear me on Instagram. All right, I'm gonna keep it going. Um, the stream has started, and hopefully— oftentimes what happens when I like have 50 people on and I shut down and come back, like, people are like, pshh, I got stuff to do, and they don't come back. So, um, that's okay, you'll catch it on the replay if that is the case, but it would be good to get some confirmation that you can hear me. Instagram is still good. Yes, I know. But I'm wondering if the other one is not as good. Okay, well, if you are watching this on LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube, you can head on over to my Instagram, Noelle Russell, and I'm going to very quickly be— not very quickly, but in the next half an hour or so— going to be going through the vehicle that you can use to get your message into the world. And there's a lot of them. And then I'm going to give you some tools to make it a little bit more accessible. So as I was saying earlier, welcome to day 2. So excited that you all are here. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks so much for those of you who decided to join me on the live session. Thank you also to those of you who decided to join me on the replay. Feel free to hashtag live or replay depending on where you are so I know you are here. Um, and comment away. I'm always reading your comments and always super grateful to hear from you. Um, so awesome, great to hear you. Okay, let's do this. So today what we are going to cover in day 2 is all about the vehicle that we're going to use to get our message into the world. So yesterday we focused on, well, what is our message, right? So hopefully you did the 5 whys, because the 5 whys figure out what it is you want to give to the world. What do you You'll notice for those of you who got the workbook, in the workbook, I asked you some additional questions around the Who Are You section, right? So I asked— maybe I put it in the email as well. But the Who Are You section says, you know, like, what role do you have? What accomplishments have you done? What successes have you had? What losses have you had? Like, it's all part of your story. But the most important question was after all of that, you ask, what value does all this stuff allow you to bring into the world, right? What value does it give you? Hi, let me know if you can hear me. I don't know what platform you're on. But I have a few people. Oh, and if you're on Facebook, let me know if you can hear me. If not, I'm on Instagram. They'd have to read my lips. Anyway. So it does provide us the ability to, you know, figure out and align our life experience with the value we bring to the world. Oh, yay! Thank you so much. All right, so we are live on, on Facebook, so thank goodness. Um, so, and this is the critical part. So a lot of people, they— thank you so much, uh, for my Facebook peeps, you guys are awesome. And thanks on LinkedIn. All right, awesome. So it must have been just a platform glitch, how unfortunate. But we're live now, so that's great. So one of the things I've noticed when people come to me and they ask me for help to try and build their business, one of the things I've noticed is that they, they A, don't have a clear identification of who they're trying to help. And trust me when I say you can't help everybody, right? You can't say I'm here for all the people. I'm here, my, my audience is everyone in the world. And some of you here know that that's the truth from just doing the work that you've done. But you can't help everyone. And maybe you can, right? But not all at the same time. And here's why. Today in the world of social, I, Noelle, very personally, in all of my things that I hold dear and think about and care about, I'm looking at a feed. And I am actually training an algorithm to find things that I, Noelle, like.. And if you as a product owner or a startup want to get in front of me and sell things to me, guess what you need to do? You need to be saying things that are in alignment with the message I'm asking Instagram to tell me, right? With what I've asked Instagram to promote to my feed. Things that are in alignment with how I think and what I care about. And that's not going to be true for everyone, right? So when you say certain things, if you do it in a way that tries to capture everyone, No one will engage. So yesterday's activities are incredibly, incredibly important. It's not too late to do your homework. You can go in there and write your sentence. If you do your homework, I wonder if I have it handy. I'm giving away this really cool gadget. Yes, I do. This really cool gadget called a pod. It is amazing. Thank you, Warren. It is amazing. It is— let me just read it to you. Like a cameraman, just way better. So, so cool for some of us who do a lot of this video stuff. It's awesome. So I'm going to be giving one away, but you have to do the homework in the Lovefluencer Assemble group. So please go over there and do that. And it's pretty easy, right? It was just introduce yourself to the group in 30 seconds and use the simple story structure that we talked about yesterday. Today, though, we're going to focus on the vehicle. The vehicle is going to be how you choose to get your message into the world. My suggestion is that you listen to all of the ones that I am talking about, and you pick one. And I'm gonna actually give you some tips as to how to do that. So first, you want to pick the best vehicle. So let me tell you a story about— and it's not a story, it's like, you know, this just happened to me with LinkedIn Learning. I was on LinkedIn Learning. And I was going through this process of trying to figure out the best way to create content for LinkedIn Learning. And what my content producer asked me to do was sit down and take a topic, any topic you can talk about. In your case, I'm going to call it the backstory. We just defined it. Take your backstory and do 3 things with it. One, write it out like a blog post. Two, record it like a podcast, like audio only. And then three, record it like a YouTube video, on video, on camera, just like this. And then exam— like, do all three as if they were all three gonna go get published. Take the time to do that because you won't do this for everything. And what you want to do is examine that for friction. Which path—writing, audio, video—which one produced the least amount of friction for you to build, the least amount of friction for you to go and get started? That's the one you want to choose, right? So I'm going to give you tips and tricks on how to land after doing tonight's homework. But tonight's homework is going to be to take your backstory and write it like a blog. And you could post all this to the Lovefluencer group. We're a nice, safe community. We'll give you some feedback. Write it like a blog, record it like a podcast, and videotape— you know, videotape, listen to me— video record it like a YouTube video. And then see what felt the easiest, the most fun to build. For me, I like video. Obviously, I like video. I like being in front of you. I like you seeing my expressions. I'm comfortable in front of the camera. If you are not though, maybe you're comfortable talking or maybe you love to write, whatever it ends up being, however this turns out, that's the vehicle you're going to take. And that's where I want you to focus all of your content development. And then I'll show you a trick at the end of today where you can take your content in whatever vehicle and you can promote it and repost it in other vehicles with very little effort on your part. So I'll talk to you about that at the end. So the first one is blogging. So I always talk about blogging because sometimes we have this perception, some of us who've been in this industry a long time, that blogging's kind of dead. It's old, you know, who reads blogs anymore? Um, and it's very interesting to me because that's not true. Um, I read blogs actually all the time, uh, and I'm a consumer of certainly technical blogs, blogs on like cryptocurrency, NFTs, blockchain. I'm always reading. Um, and it's a MacBook to, you know, to basically get information that's pretty quick, 500 to 2,000 words, right? Um, most articles, the high-read articles, are 5 minutes or less, right? If it takes me 5 minutes to learn something, oh, I'm all over that. So blogging— hey there, everybody, thanks for joining. When you're blogging, you have a couple choices. You can blog for the masses. Well, no matter what, you're probably gonna blog for the masses, but you can blog on platforms that already have an audience, or you can craft your own platform. Totally up to you which path you take. Doesn't actually matter which path you take. If you decide to go to a platform that already has an audience, this is known as basically you're renting their audience. Right? So you're going to create content on a platform like Medium or Blogger. Yes, it still exists. Right? Or, or LinkedIn and create articles and content on LinkedIn. So for me, I'm really passionate about enterprise AI. I just today was learning how my team advocates and demonstrates intelligent workflows, which is basically something that I'm super passionate about, you know, turning paper to automation. And I was like, oh my gosh, I should write an article about this. Right? And I'm not really a writer. That's not my main form. But sometimes you can, you know, craft a story a little bit better when you're writing it. And I recognize that. But I put all of my articles on LinkedIn and then I repost them to my personal channels like NoelleSilver.com or Noelle.ai. So this is— that's the choice you have to make. Yesterday, another part of our homework was to— your own domain, you could very easily, depending on where you got the domain, you could very easily post your content there, right? Create a WordPress site. WordPress is by far— I'll, I'll just tell you a terrible story. WordPress is the website platform that they teach ethical hackers to hack in cybersecurity first. So it is like the 101 of hacking to anyone who takes a class. So just keep that in mind. Um, I'm not— I love WordPress, but if you are going to use WordPress, please take some time to investigate how to keep it secure so you don't get hacked and your, your work goes away. It's really, um I've had 70 of my domains and I have like 200 domains. I have 70 of them hacked at one time, multiple times. And it's, it's heartbreaking. So, so I encourage you that yes, you've got a domain now, decide how you want to use it. You can also, like I said, go to Medium or LinkedIn and publish your articles there. One thing I always encourage people to do is look at content that's working. Do a search on the platform you're going to publish and look for content that's getting thousands of likes or hundreds of thousands of likes, or follows or comments, engagement, and find out what they were doing to generate that engagement, um, and model it. Don't copy it, right? Don't like copy exactly what they did. That's not you. But model those behaviors because you'll see the same results show up. Um, okay, next. So if you are catching me, uh, online in any of these channels, you could also see me on Instagram, which the feed is a little bit better. I don't know why, like, they're literally both doing the same exact thing, but one's really good and one's a little choppy. But oh well. Anyway, so if you are going— once you've decided your vehicle, whether you're going to write or not, or record or do a video, right, depending on how you're going to generate your content, I want you to go ahead and if you're writing your content, look at publishing on Medium or LinkedIn. The reason I do that is because you'll instantly have an audience. And LinkedIn could pick up your content and run with it, as they did for me. Thanks, Frank. Frank ended up showing me that LinkedIn had promoted one of my pieces of content. I was wondering, because that posted kind of, you know, you post it and you get some early engagement and then it died down. And, and then all of a sudden it kicked right back up again. And I was like, what's going on here? And so I found out the reason that that happened was because LinkedIn ended up promoting it for me. So that happens and it's free. Like, I didn't pay for that promotion. I just wrote good content that created good engagement. LinkedIn found it and repromoted it. So really cool. Um, okay, so those are my tips, right? Go to medium.com if you're not familiar with that platform. Sign up, become a member, sponsor, $5 a month, and use that platform to distribute your work. Create a publication. You can even find others to publish with you. Or, or, and I say and, go to LinkedIn use the article mechanism. Once you start writing a lot of content, you'll be identified as a creator on the LinkedIn platform. And when you're a creator on the LinkedIn platform, a bunch of other things open up to you, like the ability for you to create a newsletter and actually collect people's emails, which is pretty cool. Um, so that's pretty awesome. You could do that. The next thing— so that's— those are the two directions you could go if you want to borrow someone else's audience. To get your content seen by more people. The other thing you could do though is you could of course just start your own blog, create your own WordPress site, create your own, you know, go to GoDaddy, have it host a site for you. I like sites like that. It's more expensive, but is it right? Like, I— they take care of security, they take care of patching, they take care of all the things that hackers are trying to do to like take stuff down. In my mind, it's, it's safe.