300: 3 Lessons From 300 Episodes: How to grow your authority with a podcast

300 episodes. 300. 300. Oh my gosh. Big learnings, big changes, big ideas, and an invitation to a different way forward. Let's go. Woo woo woo. Hey movers, it's Sally Koering Zimney with Be Moved. Let's go create some talks that will move this world. We're gonna talk with amazing speakers, share tips, tricks, resources, and we are going to be moved so that our audience can be moved. This moved me. What is moving you? Hey everybody, and welcome back to This Moved Me, a show all about the art of moving your audience with speaking. My name is Sally Koering Zimney, your speaker coach. And if you don't know me, I empower big-hearted entrepreneurs, coaches, and changemakers like you to leverage the power of speaking so you can massively grow your impact, your authority, and your revenue without sacrificing your authentic voice. That's right, because that is the key. In other words, I'm gonna help you grow your speaking business so you can grow your business with speaking. Both of those things. And we're gonna do it without you being smarmy and gross. It is possible. Yay. And today what is moving me is that this is our 300th episode. I cannot believe it. Whew. That's a lot of episodes, you guys. And have you listened to them all? I bet not. I mean, I make them and I never listen to them again. We don't have to talk about that. That's right. I have to tell you, I have learned so much over the last many years. It's been many years that I've been doing this. I've learned about showing up consistently. I've learned about what you want, how I can serve you best, how I can utilize this platform. So let's dive in on that right here in celebration of 300. All right, team, this episode is brought to you by the awesome power of Ecamm Live. Are you familiar with Ecamm? You guys, if you do any kind of live streaming, Ecamm is the way to make you look like a total pro. Now, I had heard about Ecamm forever in all the entrepreneur groups online. People were talking about, oh, well, you've got to use Ecamm if you're doing live this or video that, you've got to use Ecamm. And I was kind of like, ah, I kind of find my way. I don't really need Ecamm. And then I saw what you could really what do I do with it? And I've never looked back, team. I finally started using it about a year and a half ago. Uh-uh. That was like major pandemic time because I started really leaning into video, going live in my Facebook group once a week, turning this audio podcast into also something you can consume via video. So now I use it all the time. I use it for my podcast interviews. I use it for my virtual presentations. I use it for my keynotes. I use it to MC. I use it for my STS Showcase for my speakers who go through the Signature Talk Studio with me and more. It allows you to use all kinds of really cool things like overlays and graphics to shift the perspective of what people are seeing. You can show them a PowerPoint slide. You can show just you. You can go to a video. It's like producing your own event with the tip of your fingers. It's so easy. What's awesome is that Ecamm is one of our partners here at Be Moved by Sally Koering Zimney, and I have a free trial for you. So if you go to bemoved.com/ecamm, you will get a 14-day free trial to check it out before jumping in. Yay, you! Now, like all these partnerships, if you decide to jump in, I'll get a tiny commission. Really not a big deal, but I'm just excited about it for you. And I consider that a huge win-win-win. Win for me, win for you, a little bit win for Ecamm too, which is not bad. That's good. We want to support awesome companies like that. It's the best. I hope you come check it out. And P.S., if you want to see all the ways that I use Ecamm and all the ways that we can make this look awesome and use this tool, and there's probably so many things that I'm even not doing yet with it. I want you to come inside the Emerging Speaker Society Facebook group and see how I put this all to work. So join us there at bemoove.com/ess for Emerging Speaker Society. All right, now let's get back to the show. Way back in 2014, I felt this pull to create a podcast. Why? I honestly, I am not sure what pulled me out front in this way, because what I could tell you is I knew I did not want to do video. I was like, no to the way on the video. No way. I wanted to start sharing my own authority and my ideas and really build out and carve out a space for myself as a speaker coach. And around speaking. So way before people were listening to podcasts like they do now, I created This Moved Me, the show that you're listening to right now. And truth be told, I had no idea what I was doing. Absolutely no idea. I joined the Podcasters Paradise group way back when John Lee Dumas was doing that. It was truly, when I look back, that was my first big investment in my own business. And believe you me, I followed that thing step by step. And what's really awesome is I launched the podcast and within the first few weeks, my show had landed on the New and Noteworthy page of Apple Podcasts. That was a big moment. I thought, oh my gosh, this is really cool. It's awesome. Now, the idea of the show way back then was to simply talk to people who move their audience and to have a conversation about the The art of public speaking, which is really what we are doing. And I got to talk to some incredible people in those first few years. Jeff Goins, Rob Bell, Julian Treasure of like top 10 TED Talks of all time, Jenny Evans, Brad Montague, BT Harmon, so many really incredible people. And I surprised myself at how much I fell in love with podcasting. I fell in love with creating content. It was this creative outlet for me for years and years and years. So I went all in on this. And what's cool is that along with it being this incredibly fun, creative thing that I got to do, what I realized eventually was that it was also an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Duh. I mean, now we all know that. We all know that podcasting and having your own show is a powerful tool, but because I went all in on my podcast, a few things happened. People started coming to me to be coached. So there was something about just having a podcast that people thought, wow, she really knows what she's doing, which I do, but also just kind of comes with the territory a little bit. And I was able to take my freelancing business at the time I was Speaker coaching on the side when I could, along with coaching speakers, which was my day job. And I was able to turn that into a full-time gig. So what was I doing that my podcast helped me in my business? I wanna talk about that for a moment. As part of the lessons, as we look back at 300 episodes, I wanna share with you what some of those intentional pieces were. Because I wasn't intentional at first and I became more intentional along the way. Focusing on creating a good show each week was intense. At some point I was like, I've got to make sure that I'm getting something out of this. And I know you know what I'm talking about because we spent a lot of time as speakers out being visible, right? We talk a lot about visibility. We've got to be out and be visible, but are we being intentional with those opportunities and that effort to make sure that it is driving business for us as well. As speakers, here's the deal. It is so critical that we are building our authority. We know this. It's why we're posting on social. It's why we're doing Facebook Lives. It's why we find places to guest post and why we want to be on other people's podcasts all the time, because when we show up consistently, and share our authentic voice and our expertise, well, people begin to associate us with that idea and that builds trust and authority. That's what we are doing so that then people come to us and they say, oh, you need a speaker around this topic, check out this person, right? So as I was approaching episode 300, I thought about doing a lot of things, truth be told. Well, some of the ideas. Were really, really fun and brilliant. But as you know, I just got finished launching the Signature Talks Studio. And you launch things, you know. I just— I could not pull off a brilliant new idea unless we wanted to really celebrate episode 300 around episode 310. I don't know. I could do that. It's my show. I can break the rules. I just decided, nope. You know what? One of the things I can do is look back and share with you a few key lessons from the last 7 years of showing up consistently so that as you are out building your authority, you can do what I did. Learn from me. Not— I made a lot of mistakes, just to be absolutely clear. It took me way too long to get intentional, but once I did get intentional, I want to share with you some of the awesome things that happened. So you can do that too. So the first one is that if you can't find a platform to speak on, build one yourself. I didn't wanna wait to be invited to go speak. And I mean, I knew I had some skills to offer in this creative pursuit, but truthfully, I wasn't quite sure how to go about this, but I knew that I wanted to speak about these things. So instead of waiting to go and speak about it on other people's platforms, instead of waiting to build that out, that funnel and that whole experience on somebody else's land. I just decided, you know what, I'm going to build my own platform and control the message, create it to be what I want it to be. So if right now you're feeling like, oh, I'm frustrated because I can't seem to find any opportunities and I'm waiting for this and I'm waiting for that. Maybe it's time to stop waiting and create your own experience, create your own platform to speak on. One of my awesome speakers is doing that right now. He could absolutely go out and go pitch and I'm sure find some things, but he decided, you know what? Why am I tapping into other people's platforms when I can build my own? Now, the second lesson I want to share with you is that The best platforms are relationship builders. So as long as the platform that you create is a relationship builder, then it is a powerful thing for the long term. And it's not just about the content that you create and how it serves your audience in that moment. It's also about the relationships, the collaborations that happen because of the platform. When I was at a conference in 2016, I was sitting in the audience and I had one of those moments where I was like, I'm gonna speak there. I'm gonna be on that stage. I don't know quite how I'm gonna get there because I don't know anybody here. I don't know anybody who runs this conference, but I just know this is where I'm gonna be in a few years. What I decided to do was leverage my podcast. I got super invested in the conference. I showed up at lots of workshops. I talked to speakers afterwards. I, went to make relationships and connections genuinely. So it wasn't just like, I gotta find people for my podcast, but I was really looking to, to say, who has brilliant ideas that spark me, that move me, and I want to share them with my people. So I went to a particular workshop with one of the main stage speakers, and I went to his workshop because he was an awesome speaker, and I was like, Well, sometimes workshops are really bad. So I was like, I know it's gonna be good for him because he was awesome. So I went to his workshop and I approached him afterwards and invited him onto the show. He was jazzed to get the invite because what you're gonna learn is that when you have your own platform and you invite people on it, it's truly one of the easiest asks you'll ever make. And even though, guarantee, he had no idea who I was or the quality of my show, I mentioned a few people who had been on it. And he was like, awesome, let's do it. So I followed up a few days later, I, with the official invite, and I made the most of that podcast conversation when we had it. And all I was really focused on was getting really curious about who that person is and building an authentic, genuine connection. Because once that connection is built, he became an advocate for me and my show. Afterwards, he introduced me to a handful of people and said, this person would be great on your show. And one of them was the conference producer of the conference that he had spoken at. I had him on the show, and now I have a connection to that conference with that person because it is a genuine connection. It wasn't transactional. Ultimately, looking back, I was like, oh my gosh, look at how that worked. All because I had my own platform that I could use and leverage for growth. The third and really important lesson I want you to take from the last 300 episodes— I almost said years, it's not a year— 300 episodes is once you have a platform and once you are building your authority consistently and you're showing up and you're being visible and you're doing all the things, Allow yourself to evolve and to change. Because if you look back on my 300 episodes, for a long time, all I did was interviews. And then I realized that I was interviewing people about things that actually I knew quite a lot about myself, and I wasn't really sharing my own expertise. And people started to say, well, what do you think about this, Sally Koering Zimney? So then I shifted that a little bit to some interviews, some just for me. Then I shifted again and I started really embracing video. And now at episode 300, I am shifting again. More on this in a moment, but it's a reminder to you, just like with your talks, it is important that we continue to evolve, that we change, that we stay really in tune with what our audience needs. And the response you're getting from your audience, but also do you need, what do you need right now? And does this align with who you are, your values, and where you're taking your business in the present moment? Because not only is it okay to evolve, it's really important. Your audience appreciates it too, because they are also evolving. Nobody is stationary in this world. Don't go crazy and change it up all the time because then people don't know what you're doing and they're having a hard time keeping up. But also don't be afraid to change when you feel a pull towards something new. You get to have a place where you can experiment and play. In fact, John Acuff talks a lot about just having a part of your business that you are willing to play in. You're as a laboratory of sorts. And when you get your laboratory going, guess what? That's when sometimes the most creative stuff happens. Episode 300 is kicking off a new way forward for This Moved Me, and I am thinking of this as laboratory time for the next chunk of months. I don't know when. We'll see. I wanna experiment more with my content, and I was gonna just decide and say, here's what I'm gonna do. But actually what I wanna do is try a bunch of things and get your feedback. What are you loving? What are the episodes that you're like, more of that please? And what are the episodes you're like, ah, less of that please? So I'm gonna be doing lots of things. There's gonna be some Ask Sally segments where you're gonna send in your questions to me and I'll answer them for you. There's gonna be some episodes that are just this moved me moments. I have 300 episodes. I have a whole content library. Full of incredible This Moved Me moments that you probably haven't even heard of. You prob— my guess is you haven't gone back and listened to all 300 of them. So I'm gonna be pulling out some of the genius ones from the past and looking at them now from a future perspective, or like a present perspective. It was a future then, but you know what I mean. And saying, interesting, look what we were talking about in 2017. And now here's what I would say to add to that. Or whatever, who knows? So in the spirit of this next chunk of episodes being a bit of an experiment, a bit of a laboratory, I want to invite you in to evolve and change with me. Yay! I can't wait to hear from you about what's working. What are you enjoying? What do you love? What do you want me to do more of? Uh, be on the lookout for lots of fun and different interesting approaches to our content here on This Moved Me. If you have something for me, if you have an idea or a question, just reach out. You can send me a note over on Instagram. If you are in my Emerging Speaker Society group, and if you're not, you should be, send me a message over there as well. You can join us over in the ESS at emove.com/ess. All right, friends, this is Whitney. What is Whitney? See you next week.