TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

You may think blogging is passe. You may think podcasting is the new IT thing. What about combining the two? Our special guest today is Leslie Samuel, and he is an expert on blogging and podcasting. I first came across him when I was desperately looking for shortcuts and tips on how to simplify my own podcasting process. Leslie Samuel, thanks for joining us today.

TJ thank you so much for having me on here. I'm excited to be here with you.

The podcast is Learning with Leslie. You can find that on itunes, Stitcher, any of the other normal places. The website is Blogger Coaching. You're an expert on blogging now. You came to blogging first. As I understand it, you're now podcasting weekly. That's how I know you primarily. But let's start at the blogging. How did you get into that?

I got into the blogging. This was back in 2008. So in 2008, I was teaching at a boarding academy. I was teaching science and math, and just out of college, just finished my master's degree. And while I was teaching, I started looking online for different things to do. And I stumbled onto something called freebie trading. Now with freebie trading, what you essentially are doing is you're signing up to a site, you're completing offers, and you're referring other people to complete offers. And then you might get like a free TV or iPod or you could make money by doing that. So I started doing that. And while doing that, I had some success with it and was able to make a decent amount of money with that. And I was teaching other people how to do that. Now the problem was I was relying on forums, and I was constantly in the forums and posting and answering questions and so on. And that's how I was building kind of people that I was referring. Eventually I stumbled onto this concept of blogging. And the idea, at least back then in my mind, was that you could create a blog. And instead of always having to go out there to find people, as you grow your blog, people would start finding you. And that was an appealing concept to me because I was tired of always going into forums and posting and posting like crazy. And I started a blog then about freebie trading. Then I got more fascinated with just the art of blogging. So I started talking more about that. And then I started a biology blog because I wanted to test out the same principles in something completely unrelated to business and marketing. And now I am fully doing Just teaching people how do you take something that you're passionate about and build a blog, grow an audience, monetize that blog? So that's kind of like the general story of the timeline of how I got into what I'm doing.

And you also give people a lot of advice on podcasting. You have your own successful podcast. I hear you on other top rated podcasts all the time. If someone comes to you today and says, I have a special interest in whether it's butterflies or collecting stamps, and I just want to reach a large audience, all things being equal, do you recommend that they start with a blog or do you recommend they start with a podcast? And with the caveat, we do have a bias here at speaking with TJ Walker in favor of speaking as opposed to writing. Because I do find that there's still as many blog, as many podcasts as there are out there, there's still 99% less competition than text based blogs. I found you by just searching in itunes for podcasting, whereas if I had searched for a lot of blogging experts in Google just typing in blogging, there'd be 10 trillion websites to compete. So that's a long winded question for where do you steer someone if they really don't have a preference and they're not the world's best writer, but they can write, they're not the world's best speakers, but they can speak with passion.

Yeah. The answer to that question is always, it depends. Now, you said all things being equal, so, you know, in terms of their skill, it doesn't matter there. I would encourage them to think about their audience and to think about how their audience consumes content and think about the kind of content that they want to create. So, for example, for me with the biology blog, for me, I would not have started with a podcast. And quite frankly, the way I started was with video, and I started primarily focusing on YouTube. Why did I do that? I did that because I knew that I was teaching a very complicated topic that was much easier to learn if you actually see what I'm talking about. So I started a video, a YouTube channel, and that channel has done very well. And that's how I was able to grow my blog and my business with that biology blog. I say it depends on the content and it depends on the audience. You said you have a bias towards podcasting, but quite frankly towards speaking whether.

It'S video or audio. That's traditionally where I've spent my time, because I teach people how to speak to the media and how to Give speeches. I've had a YouTube channel get to 3 million views. My main one now has half a million. It's not a huge, huge blockbuster, but when I compare that with the traffic to my blog, the blog just pales in comparison, you see?

Well, I don't look at all of them as. I don't look at it as an either or. Right. If I were starting a podcast today, my blog would be where I'd be hosting that podcast. And when I say hosting that podcast, that's where you would go to see the information about the podcast, to get the show notes and all that good stuff, you know, My blog is called Become a Blogger, but quite frankly, I podcast more than I actually write, and I actually see the podcast as a part of my blog. I do also have that bias towards speaking because I believe it allows you to connect with your audience at a different level. If I'm listening to you for 30 minutes every week or an hour every week, that's a different level of relationship than if I just come to your blog and read an article that you have on there. So while I love blogging, I love podcasting, and I think it just all depends on exactly what your goals are, what your objectives are. You have to analyze that. You have to analyze who your audience is and what's the best way to reach them, and. And then you create content in that format.

How did you learn to love podcasting and more generally speaking? Because just listening to you, I can tell you're not somebody who has to be pushed in front of a microphone. I didn't have to beg you ten times to appear. It's not like we were friends and you owed me. I just went to your website, made a simple request, boom, you showed up. Which is exactly the attitude I teach all of my clients to have. Where did you learn an interest and a love for spoken word?

That's a great question. I think it had to do with my experiences growing up. I grew up in a church. That was a common thing for me in terms of being involved in different services, and I played the piano, and there were a lot of opportunities to speak. And I think for me, a combination of that. And also, when I was in high school, I wasn't the best student, but there were some subjects that I really grasped relatively quickly. And one of them was chemistry. And what I would be doing is, even though I wasn't a great student, because I understood the chemistry, I ended up working with students. And, you know, we'd have groups that would come to the library And I would teach them the information that was being taught to us in class. And that's when I realized that for me, it was more about teaching than anything else. I had a passion for teaching. I enjoyed doing that, and I did it well. And that teaching concept has been something that has traveled with me without me even really trying to do it. It just happened naturally. And I noticed that whenever I get into the teaching mode, I get kind of excited about what I'm doing. I get energized when someone asks a question. And I'm able to give them information in a way that they walk away with understanding. And I see that kind of light bulb moment happen with them that really energizes me. So it's a combination of growing up and doing different things in church, doing things, teaching at my classmates, and that followed me all throughout college. And I just enjoy speaking in a way that brings enlightenment.

And you grew up in the Caribbean. You're not as old as I am.

Correct.

Certainly when you were a kid, podcasts were not around. No.

But you know what was around?

Radio.

And I think there's so many of us that had this, you know, for me, this fantasy of being a radio DJ type of a thing. Right. And that is something that has translated into podcasting. When I started learning about podcasting, it was like, oh man, I get to be a radio dj and there are no gatekeepers. So, yeah, definitely.

And growing up, were the DJs your role model, or did you hear Larry King, where you lived, or Rush Limbaugh or the BBC commentators? Who did you hear?

I wouldn't say that they were my role models, not the radio dj, but there were people on TV that I did look to. For example, Oprah. I love the way she interviews and she asks questions, and I feel as if she's able to kind of dig into the person that is there so that the audience get something special from that encounter. So. So Oprah would be one and then there are other. For me, Larry King, when I was. When I was looking at interviewing and all that stuff, I went back to Larry King because I know he does such a great job at interviewing. And I think one of the things that he did very well was listen. Like to listen to what the person is actually saying and then ask the follow up question. That is just kind of like the natural progression and looking at what some of those. Those people that have been out there for a while doing and trying to apply it to when I'm speaking or when I'm interviewing. And then some Other podcasters that I've been listening to for a while. I love not just the teaching, but I love being able to extract information from people in a way that, once again, it's back to the teaching. So if I can extract that information from you in a way that the person that is listening is learning something, you just re energized me even more.

There's certainly a lot of different styles of interviewing. You mentioned Larry King. He certainly had a lengthy, lengthy career and is still going on daily now with his aura TV and his online videos. But his style was he wanted to be the everyman. He purposely said he didn't read the books of the authors coming on because he didn't want to know more than his guest. Whether that's just laziness or brilliance or both, that can be debated. Very different style from, say, a Barbara Walters who might write out hundreds of questions before she goes into an interview with Monica Lewinsky and. And just thoroughly, thoroughly prepared. A lot of different styles out there. Who of the current podcast, or someone who isn't, you know, Bill O'Reilly, who's known from TV but is a purely podcast creature, do you admire and respect the most?

You know, if I look at my podcast subscriptions, there are two people in here right now that I find really do a good job at interviewing. One is Andrew Warner from Mixergy, and the other is Tim Ferriss. Now, once again, I love how they dig into their guests. Andrew Warner has a special way of getting people to say more than they intended to say. And I really. I really like that because it allows you to go deep. There are a number of podcasters out there that have a list of questions that they go through, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm.

I gotta tell you, I'm not. I'm not a fan.

I'm not.

I mean, here's my 10 quick questions.

That was the next thing I was gonna say. I'm not a fan of. There's nothing wrong with it, but I'm not a fan of that. I much prefer natural conversations to where you say something that peaks curiosity in me. And I dig deeper in that one specific point, and I think these.

As long as it's interesting.

Exactly. And as long as it's going somewhere, we have an idea of where we're trying to go. And. And based on what you're saying, I can kind of adjust so that we can get to that destination. And in some cases, you know, I did an interview today. This is the first time this has ever happened to me. But on the interview, we started with one topic and we never got to the topic. I said, this is what we're going to cover. But there was something that he said that was so interesting to me that I kind of. We derailed the entire interview and went in a completely different direction. And for me, it was still effective even though it didn't accomplish the goal that I set. But I think people are going to get more from that interview and than they would have gotten if we went in the direction that I wanted to go.

Our special guest is Leslie Samuel. You can reach him on Twitter Leslie Samuel or go to his website, blogger coaching.com he's got a number of freebies for our listeners today if you go there. If you really want to get more immersed and have a real strategy and a plan for going about your blogging, you should go to bloggercoaching.com you can also check out becomeablogger.com to find out more about Leslie. You're listening to speaking with T.J. walker. You mentioned Andrew Warner Mixergy. I have listened to his show before. It's been a while, but I have tremendous respect for him. He's been at it a long time. He really does a great job of putting a spotlight on entrepreneurs, especially tech entrepreneurs. And he's put together a pretty nice business for himself with a lot of different revenue models. That has to be fascinating to any communicator who's also an entrepreneur. And Tim Ferriss is also a fascinating character. I do listen to his podcast regularly and I would say I am mostly very positive on Tim Ferriss, although I do think his first book, four Hour Workweek, was kind of what I would call career porn. It's kind of like step one, quickly come up with an Internet business that kicks off 80,000 a year in cash. Step two, move to Argentina. Wait a minute, how do we get to step one? Because that was eight years ago and I know so many smart people and I like to think of myself as having a few smarts who spend 80 hours a week, especially back then, trying to make money on the Internet and came up with almost nothing or losing vast amounts of money. So I do think he's an extremely bright guy. He has fascinating conversations when he is excited about something. He's a great salesman. I mean his health book, I gotta tell you, I read it, I thought it was fascinating. I went on the Tim Ferriss diet and you know what, it works. And I lost a whole bunch of weight and Then end like 99.999% of people after six months, I'm like, this is crazy. I can never eat a piece of bread again as long as I live, other than on Saturday. And of course, I gained it all back. So I have somewhat conflicted views about. I think the vast majority of his advice is good, but he does occasionally latch on to really horrible ideas. Like, you know, his whole diet book, and it's, you know, 10,000 pages long. It basically says, don't eat anything white, don't eat bread, don't eat sugar. It's this long list of. And it says things like, eat the same boring foods six days a week and you'll eat less. Don't eat any sugar or bread six days a week, you'll consume fewer calories. Well, all of it's true. The problem is nobody can sustain that in the long haul, even with your so called cheat day. And I just think it's horrible advice.

Yeah. Quite frankly, I said I love his podcast and I do. The first book, I actually like the first book. Not because it gives you all of the information that you need, needed to know. But for me, back then, the concept of outsourcing was relatively new. So it opened my eyes to a potential process that took me on a journey to learn more about how to actually outsource the right way. And that has made a huge difference in my business. Some of the other things that he's done for our body and so on, I've heard him in interviews talk about them and I've disagreed with a lot of what I've heard, so I never even went there. But in terms of his interviewing, I love the conversations that he has and I feel as if I not. I feel as if I do learn a lot from those conversations with very successful people that are out there doing great things. So I think it's. I think it's a great resource for just soaking in knowledge from really smart people.

And I do think he's smart not to rush. We live in a world where everybody says, rush, rush, rush, shorter, shorter, shorter. Your YouTube videos have to be 90 seconds long. Exactly. I have clients come to me, say, tj, teach me how to be more concise in my speeches and more concise in my media interviews. And I always say, why you can be concise and nobody remember anything you say. Your goal should be to communicate and to actually be memorable. And Tim Ferriss, to his credit, if the conversation is interesting, he'll put three and a half hours out for that podcast.

And it's one of the only podcasts actually it's the only podcast that I listen to that ever goes that long. But I still listen.

Yeah, I think that the rule of thumb is go as long as it takes to be interesting. If you can say everything important and interesting in two minutes, end at two minutes. But if it's three and a half hours long, whether it's a Tim Ferriss podcast or the movie Titanic, if it's good stuff, people will watch and want more.

I am 100% with you there.

Same with everyone likes to reference Will Lincoln in his Getty Berg address was two and a half minutes long. The guy after him spoke for an hour. And what everyone always forgets is that yeah, but Lincoln would have never become president if he hadn't been a very good speaker in the format of five hour debates, which he did with Douglas and often speaking for 90 minute stretches himself without interruption. So it just as you said early on and because I listen to you, it just depends exactly what else do you think people need to really think about before they become a blogger? And I'll preface this with my own assumption that too many people go into blogging and into online businesses without really having a core, not just a revenue model but something they're actually good at. Tim Ferriss we were discussing was already a successful businessman selling nutritional products direct mail before he ever entered the Internet space. And I'm not as successful as Tim Ferriss, but before there was ever an Internet I had a core training business where I sold day long media training, crisis communications and public speaking training workshops. So when I entered the world of E commerce and online training and ebooks, I had a strong base of a real product that was sold in the offline world. It's certainly possible to just create a digital product and sit in your pajamas and get wealthy. But it seems to me that the vast majority of people who are just starting to blog or do something with E commerce would be much better off if they had a specific core high value service they could sell and that we're not just dependent on getting 50 cent and dollar crumbs from things.

Yeah, I agree with that to a certain extent. I think way too many people don't jump into blogging and they just choose a topic because either they find it somewhat interesting or they think they can make money from it. So you have a lot of people that are starting blogs about how to make money online when they've never made any money online.

Those are the worst and you can spot them a mile away.

I absolutely hate that because you can't teach Something that you don't know how to do. That should be obvious now. When I started teaching about what I was doing, I started teaching about something that I'd been been doing for a few months and I understood it better than most people. So I started to blog about that. That was the freebie trading. I didn't have a high value service to provide or anything of that sort. But what I did do was make some money with it and I was able to teach others who didn't know how to make money with it how to do it. And then in the process, I started learning about blogging. Not because I was just reading information about blogging, but because I was actually blogging. And I started to teach the things that I was doing, the things that I was learning, the things that I was trying and the things that were failing, but also the things that were doing well. And as a result of that, people started to follow that and I built up an audience and that's when I started offering products and services and all that stuff. So I think it's a good idea to come at it with some level of expertise. When I started a biology blog, that went very well, relatively quickly.

Why?

Because not only did I understand biology very well, but I also understood how to teach and how to break down a very. My idea is I should be able to teach neuroscience in a way that a little child should be able to understand it.

And you had been in the trenches teaching biology in front of real people in the real world.

Well, at that time in terms. Well, yeah, to a certain extent. The stuff that I was teaching on my blog was the stuff that I learned in college and. And the teaching experience that I had with that was from tutoring the students in that class. So yes, I had been getting that real hands on experience and that knowledge so that I was able to do that. And that's the reason why. That's a huge part of the reason why it was able to be as successful as quickly.

Leslie, you are a multimedia communicator. You're talented in many respects. You have videos on your YouTube channel, you're a regular podcaster, you're a frequent guest on other people's podcast. You communicate through your blog. How do you decide when you have an idea how to disseminate it? Video versus audio versus text versus all three. And what are the. You don't have to give me exact numbers if it's proprietary, but proportionally, how big are the audiences for your video versus your audio versus your text? Because I can tell you at the moment my audience or my audio that I've been doing just a daily podcast for the last eight months is bigger than the audience for my YouTube channel that I've been doing for 11 years.

Yeah, I think it all depends. So if you're talking about my biology blog, of course, that's actually my biggest audience. My biology blog has. My YouTube channel has 105,000 subscribers and maybe 10 or 11 million views. That is a place where I have the biggest impact. However, that's also the place that, quite frankly, gets the least amount of focus. I haven't really done anything significant on that YouTube channel in the last four years. And four years ago it was at 30,000 subscribers and now it's at 100. But because the content that's there is that helpful, people keep sharing and more people keep subscribing. And the more and more people subscribe, the more people get exposure to the content. Unfortunately, I'm not creating any content, but that is my. Those videos, that's where I touch the most people.

Well, you're going to come back and do a whole show with us on how to create a YouTube channel that generates 10 million views, because very few people can do that. I constantly see seminars being put on by Public Relations Society of America, which is a good group, and I work with them and other trade associations, and they have someone announced to do a seminar, a workshop on viral videos and how to do video marketing. Invariably, I go to their own YouTube channel and they have a grand total of 10 subscribers and 50 views. So when I hear someone has 10 million views, it really gets my attention. Especially since I'm assuming it's not a humor site. You don't have scantily clad Kim Kardashians on the site. You're actually having to generate eyeballs by being interesting and engaging.

Yeah. And here's the thing. I think a lot of people try to look for the viral videos. I've never created a viral. Well, I've created one viral video of my. My son when he was one, playing on a violin. But that's totally unrelated. It's not for me. It's not about creating that viral video. It's about providing that value consistently. And I think one of the things that we underestimate. When I. When I wanted to start, when I was thinking about starting the biology blog, the first thing I did was I really looked to see what was out there. And I asked myself one question. What could I do that's slightly different? There's something significant about being different that makes you stand out from the crowd. So while there were a lot of biology blogs out there and biology websites and all that good stuff, I went to those blogs and I saw that many of them had, like, really long research articles, and many of them had maybe shorter articles, but they were kind of hard to understand unless you had a background in biology. And then some of them were just very simple. And there were all these different types of things. And I said to myself, I haven't seen anyone out there creating a really short, concise videos, taking really complicated topics and making them very simple. So when it came to, for example, explaining the action potential and how the ions move across the membrane, I had some little marbles and a line on my table, and I was moving these marbles around to illustrate how the ions are moving around a cell membrane. Really simple concepts like that made my videos stand apart from all of the other content that was out there. I had. I have thousands of emails with many people telling me I've been struggling to understand my teacher all semester. I watched 15 minutes of your video, and now it finally makes sense.

And you were using marbles, props, not special effects and animation, or were you using both?

Oh, man. So the video. Most of my videos and my most successful videos are me drawing things. And I am a terrible artist. So it was really simple. You see a black screen, you see me drawing a neuron, and it looks not like a neuron, but kind of. It was the simple things that were the most effective. And I remember I did an experiment once where I hired a professional video editor, and I made videos of me explaining a concept, and he would bring in all these animations and all this fancy stuff. And when I saw it, I was like, this is awesome. And I put it out there and I asked my audience, what do you think? And the response was, this is great. Your other stuff is great. The information is there. It's what we need, so it doesn't matter to us, essentially. And I thought to myself, wait, I'm paying all this money for this professional to come in and bring in all these animations that don't make a difference. I realized that the core of the value that I was providing is the concept. I mean, is the content and how I was simplifying those concepts for my audience.

And this is essentially the same approach that Khan Academy is. Khan Academy has had with so much success. Simple drawing.

Yep. I actually made videos for Khan Academy. They flew me out there to work with them for a few months, and then I stopped doing that because it was taking Me away from what I was doing. But yeah, that's where I saw the concept and I decided, I'm going to do this. But specifically for biology, there were some differences between how I do it and how he was doing it. But it's a similar concept.

And simplicity to me, I think is the key. I always stress to clients who come in to workshops with me and they've got these wildly complex produced PowerPoint slides, animation, you know, 14 different colored coded bars, going every month back for 19 quarters. Whatever you're trying to explain there, how about just walking up to the flip chart? Here's one. Magic Marker. Now tell me what's the most important thing exactly? Invariably, everyone in the audience then gets it. To me, it's simply a function of. Human beings are not able to draw more than one thing at a time. So when you give somebody a clean blackboard or a clean white sheet or whiteboard and one marker, they're only able to draw one thing at a time. Focus on one thing at a time. Talk at one thing at a time. The very power of the computer that allows you to draw a wildly complex graph makes it too complex to actually be of any use in most presentations. And it sounds like your own experience.

Validates that as well to a certain extent. I think I've seen a lot of presentations where I've thought to myself, this person is very smart and they want us to know it. And that doesn't necessarily accomplish what you are trying to accomplish when you are presenting. When you are presenting, you want to get a message across or you want to educate your audience, or in some cases you may want to entertain your audience and you don't have to show them everything. Get to the point.

I forgot if I'm jumbling it, but a wit once said about Prime Minister Gladstone in Great Britain that, yeah, when you talk to him, you're convinced he's the smartest man in the country. But when you talk to Prime Minister Disraeli, he convinces you that you're the smartest person in the country. And the greatest communicators do that. They're not focused on me, me, me. Look how smart I am.

Exactly.

I love that we're speaking with Leslie Samuel. He's an all around multimedia expert and guru. He is the host of Learning with Leslie, the podcast. That's where I first encountered him. He's also the prime force behind becomeablogger.com and he has some special tips and giveaways for us today@blogger coaching.com that's3ws.bloggercoaching.com you're listening to speaking with TJ Walker. Leslie, one of the things I found that resonates with my audience is, frankly, when I tell them when I screwed up, it's not about, oh, I gave this standing ovation and everything went perfectly. Yeah, yeah, fine. But when I talk about my mistakes, my blunders, and what can be learned from it, that's what people like. So I'm wondering, you do a lot of public speaking, you speak on video, you speak in the media, radio, you host and you guest. What's been the worst either media or speaking speaking experience you faced in the last five years or your lifetime?

That's a good question. Speaking. Since we're talking about video, one of my most popular videos on YouTube right now has to do with how blood flows through the heart. And in that video. I'm sorry, I said one of my most popular. It is the most viewed video I've ever created, and it has such a huge, glaring mistake in it that makes it like, if you're an educated person about the structure of the heart and you go and you watch that video, you're gonna think to yourself, man, this guy doesn't even understand the basic structure of the heart. What in the world is he doing teaching this content? But I've left it up there. I have an annotation with the correction and all that stuff, because quite frankly, mistakes happen. And I've come to the place where I am much more comfortable with my mistakes today than I ever was before. And that frees me up to do what? To create more content, to make more videos, to do more speaking. Because even if I make a mistake, which I will at some point, and I have done at many points in the past, it is okay because it's a learning and growing experience. That's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about a glaring kind of problem with content that I've put out There.

Now you arouse my curiosity. What did you do, say the right was six inches to the right in the middle of your chest? Did you say the blood is green? What did you say?

I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. I haven't looked at it in some so long. But it has to do with the vessels that are coming to the heart and how I named them. I named them according to the vessels in a different kind of animal and not a human being. Okay.

I wasn't even thinking of a video that you'd produce. Thought was great and put up. Although it does remind me my most successful video. I didn't have millions, but it had a hundred thousand or so views is I gave a speech as a different character and I tried to make every single mistake that normal people make and I made it a contest for people. I said, if you can spot the 10 errors in this idiot boring hack speaker and it was me then I'll give you all these prizes, you know, PDF of my book, an online course, this. And people love.

Yeah.

And I got responses for years and years. Unfortunately it was on a channel that is no longer up. But people love looking for that mistake or that hidden thing. I mean I remember as a child, this was 45 years ago at the doctor's office. You get the highlights children's magazine and they have the hidden pictures where you see the crayon is hidden in the picture of the woodcutter. It's something to look for. How about when you're giving a speech or an interview and you know, when.

It happened it was a blunder. There was actually one recently because life has been really hectic for me. We just had the birth of our daughter a few months ago and so on. And there's an event that I went to speak at and literally right before the day of the speech, I hadn't really prepared the speech as yet. So as I'm walking towards the walking to the place where I'm going to be speaking, I'm jotting down these notes and all that and I go up on stage and this is just recently, within the last two months or so, I go up on stage and I start to talk and it's going very well. And then as it's coming down to where I'm supposed to be wrapping it up, I didn't get that far in my presentation because I didn't have much time to prepare it. And I remember that I just started rambling and I'm talking and I'm trying to figure out how should I end this. Not very sure how I should end it. And I started, I don't get nervous on stage as much anymore, but I started to get nervous and feel that anxiety of man, what am I gonna do? And eventually it came to an end. And I don't think think that the people that were there picked up on it too much. But for me it was a nerve wracking experience.

So how did you handle it?

I just kind of at some point I just closed the speech. I was talking about, I was talking about blogging and how you can be successful with blogging. And at the end I just kind of, you know. So that's how you do it. But I didn't feel as if I got the message across the way that I should have and the way that I would have if I actually prepared for the. For the talk. So preparation is so essential. And usually I'm very prepared for my talks. This time, absolutely not.

It is a good reminder, no matter how experienced you are as a communicator, no matter how many tens of millions of views you might have, you've got to prepare for every single speech, every single presentation. If you try to phone it in, there can be a disconnect, literally in figuratively.

And why that was significant for me is because I can easily get up on stage right now and do a talk about a topic. And because of that, sometimes I don't prepare as much as I should. But this was one of those times where I didn't. And the results was not up to par. It was not on par with what I normally did. And I don't like that. When I am presenting at an event, I want to put my best foot forward. I want to have an impact. I want to be able to say, you know what, I did my job and I did it well. So it's just a reminder that you always have to prepare.

Here. Let's go back in time to a place when you actually were nervous and maybe you were 10 years old. Some people don't give their first speech till they're 50. Some of us started very young. I was a quiet, shy kid, but I did start giving speeches and Boy Scouts when I was 11 years old and running for student council at 12. And that's probably the last time. I really remember being very nervous, but I got over it because I was just speaking a lot more than any other kid. How did you do it?

So for me, speaking on stage was not as difficult even from the very beginning. What was difficult was performing on stage. I played the piano as well, and I'd been doing that for a few years. In the beginning, I was nerve. I mean, it was a nerve wrack. I remember the first time I played in public and it was just terrible. But because I'd been doing that so many times, by the time it came to speaking, I was. I was fine. I can't look back for me personally and think of a time where I was on stage speaking and I was freaked out. It was just kind of a natural progression for me.

And do you see that is applicable to a lot of. So many people say, oh, I would never sing on stage under any circumstances. And yet most people do have to speak in front of people. Even if it's just 10 people in their office. It certainly sounds like a great experience for you just being in the spotlight. What's your advice to people who their whole lives have shied away from any sort of entertainment spotlight, but now find that they do have to speak, whether it's representing their company on a podcast or speaking at a conference?

Start small. I think that's the best way to do it because the more you practice, the better you get at it. So if you start by teaching just a small group of people, like for me, I was teaching at my high school, I was teaching students in a room in the library. And that kind of gave me some experience with speaking to people in a different format than just one on one conversations. And the more of those smaller things that you do, the more you get experience, the more you build your confidence, the more you see what you can improve in an environment where it's not as high risk. And then go from the five person to the 10 to the 20 to the 50 and kind of work your way up. Now, I don't think that the fear is necessarily a bad thing. The fear is an indication that you're stepping outside of your comfort zone, and that is a great thing. And the more you do that, the more your comfort zone expands. So for me, it's just about practicing and doing it more often. And if it's something that scares you, maybe that's an indication that that is what you're supposed to be doing more of.

Now, I'm really curious, I hope you don't mind me asking about how your music background has perhaps had a positive influence on your speaking. I didn't know you had any music background, but there is a fluidity with how you speak and almost a musicality. And I don't mean to say there's any other similarity, but I do think of someone like a Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who was a calypso singer. And even though I'm not a big fan of his political messages, he's a fantastic speaker. And there's a rhythm and a musicality to the way he speaks. And I'm just wondering if you feel any that your music background has influenced your cadences and. And how you actually speak.

Yeah, I definitely think that it has influenced influences the way you know when you're doing music. It's a performance, and it's more obviously a performance to many people because you've practiced something and now you're going to play it. Like I said, my first experience was excruciating. I was not a good pianist. I was just learning how to do it. And I remember I played in church for special music where everyone is listening to you and I am so freaked out and I'm making so many mistakes. And at the end, I mean, it took so long for me to get through the song and people stopped listening halfway through. And at the end when everyone was supposed to give the round of applause, no one was listening. So they didn't even realize that I was finished. And I told myself I would never play in church again. But then I did it again.

Well, you just gave me a flashback. I had completely forgotten this for 40 years. But I actually had my. My musical debut at the. I think it was the Westwood, not Westboro west or Wedgewood. It was the Wedgwood Baptist church in Charlotte, North Carolina, probably about 1972. And I played the drums during a church service. That's where my family was a member and my mother was a member of the choir. It obviously was not a great performer. I think I was so scared. I only used the brushes instead of the drumsticks and nobody heard anything. It was the beginning of a non existent music career. Yeah.

You know what it did for me is it allowed me to experiment with performance. And after doing it for a while, I got so good at playing. And this is very significant for me. I got so good at playing and I play by air so that someone can come to me and say, hey, I'm going to be singing a special music in a few minutes. This is how it goes. Can you accompany me? And I will say yes. And they would start to sing and I would just kind of fill in, even if it's a song that I didn't know. And there was something significant about that for me because it allowed me to kind of experiment and test different things and make mistakes in front of a lot of people and kind of recover from those mistakes and learn about how you perform in a public place.

You must be a popular guy at a party. That would be a great skill. I have very few regrets in my life, but one of the regrets is that I never really learned to master music at even a basic level. Don't read music, don't play an instrument. Other than my very short run drumming career, that must be a lot of fun.

I can't live without music. Music is something that drives me in so many ways. And those experiences in terms of the performance has allowed me to look at what I do in speaking as a performance and in some ways to also go by air there to a certain extent, but still within a certain structure. So I definitely feel that there's one influences the other.

Leslie, One type of speaking performance is the pitch. Now, talk show producers always tell guests, no pitching on my show. I'll mention your blog site at the end. We're a little bit different here because this show is about speaking, spoken communication, sales, presentations and pitches. So I'd like to give you an opportunity to just pitch this audience. So if they come to bloggercoaching.com or becomeablogger.com and let's say they fish around, sign up for your website, call you, what are the sorts of things you say to them to pitch them on your services and feel free to pitch here.

That's a great question. Pitching is something that I used to be so uncomfortable with, but I've come to realize that it's such a vital part of what we do. It's very simple. When it comes to building a blog, there are so many things to take into consideration. And what a lot of people do is they go to Google and they do a search for how to start a blog. And when they do that, they're going to get millions and millions of search results and then they're going to start to read one and go to the next one and see that they are conflicting. And then they're going to start to realize that, man, there are people out there just trying to sell them stuff and that they get this that they don't really need and all of that. And what ends up happening is you end up wasting a lot of time.

Six months go by, your head is still spinning because every blog post contradicts the previous 10 blog posts.

Exactly. That's one option. Option number two is that you can look for someone that has done it multiple times and that has helped many other people do it and that has had success with it. And you go through their training in a way that it is step by step. So what you get when you go to blogger coaching is you get access to my four week jumpstart where I walk you through the process of deciding on what you're going to be blogging about, deciding on the right platform. We spoke about podcasting, speaking versus writing and all that good stuff. How do you know which medium is best for you and for your audience? How do you determine who your audience is and really iron out the details of their goals and their struggles and all that good stuff stuff and create the best content for them. And then how do you get people to come to your blog? Because yes, you can put a blog out there, but if no one comes, you're not going to build an audience. So how do you build that audience and how do you monetize that blog and turn it into a business? You're basically going to get me. You're going to be looking at my screen as I walk you through all of these different process and show you one step at a time so that you don't have to go to Google and wade through millions of websites. You have a plan to follow and you get my support in the process.

If you want more information, we've linked to this in the show notes becomeablogger.com as well as blogger coaching.com you can reach Leslie on Twitter Leslie Samuel. Leslie Samuel, thank you for being our guest today on speaking with T.J. walker.

Thank you so much for having me on here. Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.