Day 3: Today's Topic: How to Properly Prepare for Each of Your Live Broadcasts

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Are you prepared to go live on Facebook Live? Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the owner of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm the creator of this five day live video challenge. I want to welcome you to day three. Day three is about how to properly prepare for each of your live broadcasts. You know, you want to make sure you don't miss any of these important steps. And one of the things that I think stops people from doing live video is they just don't feel confident enough. So during this challenge, I want you to have the confidence and I want you to have, yes, the tools and tips and things like that to go, go live. But today is a key day in this challenge because I want you to have that confidence. At the end of day two, I kind of really went on a little bit of a rant. So if you didn't watch day two, I gave you 17 ways to promote your live video broadcast. And I got on a little bit of a soapbox at the end that you'll have to listen in. If you haven't already, make sure you get the checklist@shellyhits.com live video. You'll get access to my members area once you confirm your email address. And then in that member area you have the video replays and the 17 page checklist. This became almost a full blown training. It is a full blown training. Well, today is day three and we're going to start off by addressing the fear. So a lot of times what authors will tell me is, but Shelley, I feel timid or scared to go live. I think fear is an issue for a lot of things. That's why a lot of people never click publish on their book. Fear can stop us from doing so many amazing things. And I really believe live video can have an amazing impact for you. I mean, it's not for everyone, I'll admit that. But if fear stops you, it will stop you from reaching those people that need your message. They say statistically one of the top fears is public speaking. And so this is similar to public speaking, right? Speaking live to an audience. And even though you're not in front of that audience on a stage, basically this is my stage. Basically I'm having a live speaking engagement right now. And so what happens is some of those same fears I believe that we have with public speaking will come up with Live video. And so I want to address that today. That's like the elephant in the room, isn't it? The elephant in the room. Because if you're going to take action, you have to address this issue of fear. You guys, I make mistakes. I've made so many mistakes. I've had equipment come tumbling down on me during a live broadcast. I've unboxed a book on a live broadcast and it was the wrong book. It was some Japanese book. It was so embarrassing. And just the other day I go live in my private Facebook group for Author Audience Academy. But instead I made a mistake and I went live on my Facebook page and I started doing my live Q and A accountability that's supposed to be just for paid members. On my public page I was like, ah, in the middle I saw people commenting that aren't my members and I'm like, oh, I'm on the wrong place, I'm sorry, I gotta go. And I stopped and then I deleted the video. So we all do stuff like you just have to, I guess in the beginning just accept there are going to be bloopers, there are going to be times you can always go back. Like in that case I went back and I deleted the video from my page and now it's no longer on my page. We all do crazy stuff. We just have to give ourselves grace and realize like there's going to be things that happen. But anyways, addressing the fear. So a lot of my audience, a lot of my tribe are Christians. They are Christ followers. And so if you are a Christian, you know, whether or not you publish Christian books or Christian products, if you are a Christian, I still recommend that you have a prayer team. And, and if you have not listened to my training on this, please listen to this training. It's@shellyhits.com PrayerTeam and I recommend everyone have a small private prayer team that you can email maybe once a week or whatever frequency works for you. You can do it through text. In that training I share with you how to set it up. But if you're a Christian there is a very real spiritual battle. And my husband and I have been professional speakers for years. He's been doing it pretty much our whole marriage. We've been Marri 17 years. I've been professionally speaking since 2007. Professionally just means you get paid for it. And we've had so many things happen to us. Technology wise we call them tech demons. I'll go to set up for a speaking engagement. Everything's perfect and then I get Ready to speak. And nothing works. It's just things happen. Sometimes it's just life, but sometimes it can be a spiritual battle. And so why not be prepared for, for your live broadcast when you're going out there, when you're putting yourself out there, when you're using the gifts that God has given you, especially if you're sharing a Christian or a gospel message, you know, make sure that you have that covering and that prayer support. Actually, I just had an author, audience academy member recently talk to me about. He had some crazy stuff happen on his webinars and he's a pastor. And I asked him, I said, do you have a prayer team for, you know, your books and what you're doing? I'm sure people in your church are praying for you and for your ministry there. And he says, you know, that's a really good idea. I've never thought of that. So that's just tip number one for addressing this fear. If you are a Christ follower Christian, have a prayer team and make sure you get that started. The second thing is you can use affirmations. Now I know some people think affirmations are woo woo, but your brain is an organ. I studied gross anatomy. I was a physical therapist for 12 years. And in order to be a physical therapist, I had to take gross anatomy. And I loved it. I actually was the first one to cut open the the bag and to make the first cut. I was enthralled. It brought everything to life. I'm such a visual learner that to see everything and we took anatomy of everything and we had an entire course just on the brain. The brain is a living organism that has so much power over us and our thoughts, what I often call our stinkin thinkin' can get us into so much trouble. So I recently learned a tip from Michael Hyatt. You guys probably know him, and he was saying that he gets very nervous before speaking engagements. And an affirmation that's worked well for him is this. He said, this is my body's way of preparing for peak performance. And I was leading an entire one day workshop in my church recently and I don't know, there was just a lot of uncertainty of how many people were coming. I had just a lot of fear and nervous about it. And I use this affirmation almost minute by minute. Every time I feel those feelings come up, I'd be like, this is my body's way of preparing for peak performance. And it was such a freeing thing because you guys, our body does that. Our body goes into A almost like an adrenaline mode, like when you know you're going to go on a live broadcast when you know you're going to be live. I felt it today. It was like, whoo. And you may mistake your body's way of preparing for peak performance. The adrenaline you feel and the different things that you feel, you may mistake it for fear. And then instead of saying an affirmation like that this is my body's way of preparing for peak performance, you might actually say, I'm nervous, I'm nervous, I'm nervous. Oh, I'm scared. What's going to happen? What if something goes wrong? What if I say the wrong thing? What if I make a fool of myself? What if I fail? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if? And then you go down this whole trail.

And then you never go live. You never press that go live button because you just. Your own mind, that stinkin thinkin stops you. You know, whatever works for you. Choose something. Choose some sort of affirmation. You can create it into a prayer like, lord, thank you that you are preparing me for peak performance. Thank you that you're preparing me to deliver a message to my audience. Thank you that you've given me this gift of knowledge that I can share. Thank you that you've given me a gift of encouragement that I can share on this live stream today. All of a sudden I feel excited. Do you feel the difference in the energy between that and what if I make a mistake? What is going to happen? Is everything set up okay? Oh my goodness. What's going on? Oh, I don't know what I'm doing. This is so hard. Can you feel the difference of like the energy that it brings? So number one is the prayer to you. Number two is affirmations. This is all for overcoming the fear. Number three is choose a. Let's do this song. So what you want to do is you want to choose a song that you can play that gets you pumped up, that you enjoy that. Like, you know, if you're a dancing type person, like I am, like, it just gets you moving. It just makes you. It just makes you feel good. Whatever it is, it could be a slow song that just really fills you and nurtures you. Whatever it is, choose one song that you can play right before you go live. So right now my song is Unstoppable by Elevation Music. And I was just playing it Unstoppable. God, before I came on, you can kind of hear it a little bit in the background. I was literally just playing it Because I practice what I teach and I have a let's do it song. And I play this song and I get pumped up and I just get excited and I get some energy. If you want to move and just do a few jumps, just get your body moving, choose one now. Make a decision. People who are successful make decisions. This isn't a make or break a decision. So just make a decision. You can always change your song later. All right? And then the last little tip is, yeah, just do some jumping jacks. Jump up and down, walk around a little bit. Just get your blood flowing physiologically, like your body just getting your blood flow going. It pumps that blood through your body and it gets you going. Now, I'm not an expert on overcoming fear from public speaking. These were just a few tips that I have for you. All right, so the next thing we're going to do today is we're actually going to prepare for your live stream by doing some brainstorming. And I want you, if you are at your desk and you're able to take out a piece of paper, I want you to take out a piece of paper and create four different sections on that paper. And we're gonna do some brainstorming. All right?

Yeah. Cherry says I pray before each broadcast to calm down. Absolutely. That's why I mentioned the prayer team and prayer. I believe for me personally, that's number one. You know, having that. So get out your pieces of paper or you can do it online, too. I love having markers and all sorts of things. We're gonna start with topics. All right. In the first box, you're going to write topics on there. Now, I just want to mention a couple things before we do the brainstorm. I want you to think of topics that are must have content for your target audience. And you need to know who your target audience is. If you don't know, then you need to go back to my author platform challenge. It's@shellyhits.com platformchallenge. Day two. I take you step by step through really diving, dialing in and narrowing and figuring out who is your target audience. So once you know who they are, what are their pain points? What's keeping them up at night? I heard someone say, use the cry test. The cry test simply means, what are they crying about? Like, what is. Like they're pulling their hair about. They're crying. They just need an answer. They need a solution, they need motivation, they need inspiration. They need taught from the Bible in that area or whatever it is. What is a pain point? You Want to have must have content that adds value or it entertains. You can also have entertaining content address a pain point. Now I want you to have a place where you can keep adding topics. I'm personally using Google Keep right now. I have used Evernote in the past. You can use Google Docs. I like those three different tools. There's Trello, there's Wunderlist, there's so many. But I like those tools because I can access them from anywhere, from my phone, from my computer. And so lately I've been using Google Keep. So what I want you to do is have a place that you have that list and then you keep adding to it. I get ideas at the weirdest times. So I'll be taking a walk. Well, that's not really a weird time. Like that's a typical time when I get ideas is when I'm on a walk and my brain is just clearing out and I. So then an idea will come to my mind. I'll capture it. I'll put it in Google Keep. I have a separate little board or whatever they call them for just topics for my live video broadcast. So whatever you do, take this list and capture it somewhere else. All right, so the second thing we're going to do is we're going to brainstorm stories. So put stories in the second box here. And now we're going to brainstorm stories for a minute. So the stories are going to be just random stories from your life. They don't even have to directly apply, but you can then think later, like, how can they apply? So for instance, my mom's house got flooded when we were in Findlay, Ohio. My boss at the time, I was still working as a physical therapist. He let me out of work early. My husband and I literally waded through knee deep water in my mom's street to get to her house. It was crazy. And then we went to her house to save her stuff. We had to raise everything up and she was out of town. Well, I used that story in an email recently. Some of you may have heard it when I talked about the power of community. Because we saw the power of community come together that week. And I see the power of community in my Author Audience Academy private Facebook group. So that's just an example. That story, you would think, oh, what does a flood and wading through knee deep water have anything to do with author coaching? But I just want you to think of just the random stories, the things that have happened to you. Like maybe you got locked out of your house one day and you couldn't find your keys and something happened. Maybe you had a certain injury happen. Maybe there was something that happened to your kids or to your family. Maybe it was something that happened on vacation. You know what I mean? It's just random life stories. And what these do is when you include stories into your live broadcast or your emails or any of your marketing, it helps your audience to connect emotionally with you because they get to know you and it doesn't have to be your deepest, darkest secrets. Just like I mentioned having a place for topics, I also like to have you have a separate place for capturing stories. Topics are different than stories, but a lot of times they'll go together. So you'll have a story that you integrate with a topic. Does that make sense? Keep brainstorming. And I just, I have lists. And when I did coaching, I paid thousands of dollars to a speaking coach. And when I did coaching, this was one of the things she said, Shelly, keep a list of stories. And it was one of the best tips. I did my coaching with Felicia Slattery. She's awesome. Okay, so the top two, we have topics and stories. Now we're going to go into more like the types of events or types of live broadcast that you could do. So this bottom corner one, go ahead and write challenges on that title. Now I want you to think just like I'm doing this five day live video challenge. I did a five day author platform challenge. You know, think about what kind of challenge could you do. I like the 5 day for live video broadcast because then you can do it Monday through Friday and you don't have to get into the weekend and all of that for live video, especially for your schedule. But whatever works best for your schedule. You could even do a mini three day challenge. Could there be a certain challenge that you could do? I'm even thinking about doing a prayer challenge for Christian authors. Something where my husband and I actually take you through a few days of what to pray for as you're writing and publishing and all of those things. So think out of the box. I mean, it doesn't have to be business related. It can be any kind of challenge. It could be a five day smoothie challenge. If you're in the health and fitness realm, it could be anything. So I want you to start thinking out of the box. We're going to brainstorm what kind of challenges could you do. I don't want this to be your very first broadcast you do as a result of this challenge, but I think down the road it would be really cool for you to do your own challenge. So. So how many different types of challenges did you come up with? And did you come up with something that you didn't even think of before brainstorming? Was there something that just popped up and you're like, oh yeah, I could totally do a live video challenge on that topic. I have a seven day writing challenge. So writing. There are so many different challenges you could do. My writing challenge is on productivity. So you could do something else like the proofreading challenge and have people go back through some of their writing from before. I mean, there's so many different ideas. All right, so the last box is promotional events. And I talked about this the other day, day one. But I want to review the types of promotional events and then I want you to brainstorm during this minute what type of promotional events you could do. So a promotional event could be a book launch and it could be a relaunch. So maybe your book has been out there, but you're doing a relaunch. It could be a book promotion, so you put your book on sale for 99 cents for free. A group promotion. It could be that you're doing a contest, you're doing a giveaway. Any of those things would be great promotional events to include on a live broadcast. It could be a product launch. It could be that for your product, you've had a new bonus added. I shared this on day one, but Amy Porterfield recently did this in her recent launch. She came on live and shared about a new bonus that she just added. And that was a really cool thing. And then she used that video as an ad and she said it worked really well. You could have a speaking engagement where you're somewhere you're speaking and they're just broadcasting you live from that event. It could be from a book signing. The options are limitless. So I want you just to think about for your particular situation, for your particular business, what kinds of promotional events could you include in live video broadcast? And when I say promotional event, I usually mean like integrating it still with teaching moments. Like, you don't want to just be coming on here as a billboard and an ad. Buy my book. Buy my book. You want to have a teaching tip and then transition into what you have to offer them. So this was day three of the five day live video challenge. Day three is all about how to properly prepare for each of your live broadcasts. You want to make sure you don't miss any of these important steps and these sometimes get overlooked. You want to just think of Equipment and setup and all of that. And yet you need to really think about, okay, what is stopping me? It's that fear. So addressing the fear and then really brainstorming and really thinking outside the box, like what kind of topics and stories, what kind of challenges or promotional events could I do using live video marketing is really interesting. Marketing is trial and error. Sometimes I think something's going to work in it, but bombs. Sometimes I just do something last minute and it's like, yes, it works so well. And that's what happened with my last live video challenge. I decided to do it last minute, my author platform challenge for my new print book. And it did amazingly well. And I was able then to do a promotion for Author Audience Academy the next week. And so sometimes you just don't know what's going to work. But what I like to encourage you to do when you're thinking about marketing and video broadcasts are part of marketing is trying to think a little bit outside the box. How can you differentiate yourself from your competition? What is something you could do just a little bit different? You don't want to copy them. You don't want to try to be like them. You want to be you. You want to be yourself. You want to let your personality shine. And that's why integrating some of your own stories, integrating some of your own experiences really makes a difference. And if you're enjoying this challenge, I'm giving you tons and tons of content and I am just wanting to give you some of the best content I have about live video. If you're enjoying it, you can repay me just by simply sharing this challenge with your author friends. You can share the link shellyhits.com live video or you can even share the videos that are on my Facebook page. I would love to just have even more people join us. More people overcome the fear, More people press that go live button the first time. I love for you to be able to share and just give this content to those who need it. Just like any skill, it's something that you can develop over time. I have in my prayer journal right now, faith is a muscle that needs to be, I don't know, something developed and flexed, something like that. And then I have out written out a bunch of different affirmations based on scripture and different things that I'm reading over every day. And they're just based on what I believe and faith and whether it's faith or whether it's a skill. I mean, any of those things can be practiced. And yeah, it's like a Muscle that can be strengthened. What's coming up next? Tomorrow is day four. Day four, we're going to talk about the exact equipment and setup you need to broadcast live on Facebook. It's much simpler than you think and you can get started so much easier. Simpler than you think. It's interesting because ideas come to me and sometimes I'm just like, no, no, no. And then I try it and it's like, wow, that really works. But then keep a list of ideas because you can't do everything. It's the 8020 rule. 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our results.

I have really been in the past a workaholic and I felt like I needed to do everything, but I'm realizing I don't need to do everything. There are a small amount of tasks that I do that yield really good results and so don't feel like you have to do every idea or everything. Write it down, capture the idea and then move on. Stay focused to your highest impact tasks. When you do that, you're going to see the biggest yield of results. You know, when you are scattered and when you're all over the place, that's when it's hard for you. You may want to work with a coach to really identify what are my highest impact tasks. If you're in Author audience Academy, we can brainstorm that in the private Facebook group. Just start a new thread. But I'm excited for you guys and I'm excited for you to go live as a result of this challenge. So that's what this challenge is all about. Again, my name is Shelly Hitz. I am thrilled that you have joined me for my five day live video challenge. I encourage you to come back tomorrow where we'll be talking all about the equipment and setup. And then day five is about going live. And I have some tips and things that I've learned the hard way I want to share with you. Day five. So make sure you go through all five days before you go live. And yesterday I spent a couple hours recording bonus videos for you. These are videos that you can get for free just by being a finisher of the challenge. So these videos are my live video blueprint. I intended on creating one video and I realized it was an advanced strategy that most of you would not be ready for. It's the strategy I use right now. So I created a second video. So I have video one of strategies you can do. You can take your live video broadcast and what you can do right away, seven ways you can get more exposure. You can Use it for more profit. You can use it in so many different ways. So that's Video one. Video two is the exact system I'm currently using for content marketing with my live video broadcast. In order to get those bonus videos, you need to go live and you'll fill out a form on day five. But make sure you go through all five days of training. Do it the way that I teach you and you'll be able to get those bonus videos at the end. I hope you guys find a so much value in that as well. I spent extra time recording those for you and like I said, I could be charging for all of this training. But I want to help you. I want to help you reach more people with your audience and I want to give value so you know that I care and that I know what I'm talking about. I have expertise in this area and that you may want to join me@authoraudienceacademy.com it's my signature program. It's where I spend 90% of my time and I would love to invite you if that is the right fit for you. So be looking for the bonuses on day five and I will see you tomorrow. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.