Creating Bingeable Content By Being A Business Freak With Donna Shannon, Host of the Tattooed Freaks in Business Suits Podcast

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazzard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all noise with the Binge factor.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Binge Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I have a really fun show title for you today. Tattooed Freaks in Business Suits. Does that not sound like a fun show? Like a show you should binge on? Like that sounds completely interesting. And I met Donna Shannon at the Dames, which is one of the networking groups as many of you know, who listen to the show regularly. I talk about people I've met on the Dames before and we've had a couple of other couple of other people who come from the Dames who've also been on the show as well. Now, Donna is a career coach, a speaker, she's a stand up comic. She's the president of the Personal Touch Career Services. She's been empowering business professionals with high quality classes, coaching programs since 2004. And she has eight years of experience in human resources and recruiting, which she talks about on her show sometimes. So you'll hear this interesting dynamic about recruiting practices and other things. And one of my favorite episodes, which you guys have to check out because I did not know it was a thing until I listened to Donna's show is that ghosting is going on in the recruitment world. And I thought it was going to be an episode about ghosting. Like the companies were like never getting back to you and you were never getting hired. But it's actually the opposite. It seems that the employees or potential employees are ghosting their future employees, their employers. So it's kind of an interesting episode. So those are the different types of things that she brings and she's got get a job without going crazy. She's the author of that and the host of, as I put it, Tattooed Freaks in Business Suits podcast. And she's presented in national conferences in Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Orlando. And her Personal Touch Career Services is Denver's top rated resume and career coaching services on Google with over 80 five star reviews. That's a pretty great resume. Donna, yourself, I love it. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

So what made you Decide to go for a name like tattooed freaks in business suits.

Well, you know, it's a silly name but a serious purpose. And as one of the tattooed freaks.

Myself, I can't tell because it's winter and you're all covered up.

But, you know, well, you know what, I'm Gen X. So there's a standing joke between Gen X and Millennials that, you know, Gen X, we always started our tattoos so they could be covered up when we got real jobs. But like Millennials, it's like on the hands and on the neck and. No, don't put a face tattoo on first. Sorry, just digress.

Lessons learned. Donna's learned.

Exactly. So it's really all about Gen X and Millennials that are stepping into these leadership roles and we still want to be ourselves.

I love it. It has a sense of the tone and the timing and what's going to happen and who's going to be on it. And we're going to get these really interesting stories and interesting people.

Yeah, I did try to bring in a pretty good mix about that. So sometimes we talk about dream careers or careers maybe you've never heard of before. We recently had a gentleman on talking about breaking into voice acting and voiceover work. It was a great episode. We do talk about those recruitment strategies, tips and tricks. We bring in real world recruiters as well as fellow coaches, and then really diving deep into some of the other just basic business leadership potentials, such as the importance of emotional intelligence and things like that.

I love that. I love that. What made you decide to start the show?

Well, one of the things that's not on my resume anymore, because I haven't forever and a day ago, is I actually used to be in radio. I was a morning show producer as well as working in the business office for many, many years. And honestly, I just love the type of radio format you get from that.

You have a really good voice, by the way. Like, it has that nice deeper tone that is so necessary for us women.

Oh. And if I really concentrate on it.

That's right. And you get in close to your microphone.

Right. Get all sultry.

So you sound like you had radio experience. So I would have guessed that.

Yeah. And what's beautiful about podcasts is there's so much freedom with them now and I don't have to worry about making a certain audience share. If there's a topic that's a little bit of an outlier or a niche market, I can totally dive into that and then bring it to a wider light. Really?

Yeah. I think that's really great that you sort of found that shift for yourself. Was there a reason you started it for business purposes?

Well, part of it, too, is increase awareness of who we are and what we do, especially since I'm a speaker and attracting clients and things like that. But it's always been part of my philosophy way back since 2004, is about providing quality content. Making sales is almost secondary. My biggest motivation for the past 15 years has really been, you know, that light when people get in their eyes, when they realize it's not them personally, that their career is not taking off. It has to do with their strategies, tactics, and just practical tools. And then those things can easily be changed.

So you can get a job, you can get your dream job, and you can still be that tattooed freak. I love that.

Absolutely. It's way more accepted now than it used to be, but it's still kind of by region. So I'm out in Colorado, and Colorado, by and large, is a very heavily tattooed state.

I did not know that, but that sounds. That sounds accurate.

Yep. But the further east you go, like, towards the east coast, you know, New York, Connecticut, Boston kind of areas are going to be more conservative. So it's not quite as accepted. I actually had one podcast guest on. She was a digital nomad international, so she would, like, bounce between New Zealand and Australia and Europe and all over the United States. And I talked about, well, how different is that in other countries? And she goes, oh, no, it is not accepted at all.

You have to cover up all of those tattoos.

I love that.

I love that.

I'm starting to feel like the outlier. Well, Tom and I have joked about this. Thomas, my husband and partner, we joked about this, that we're like the outliers in the family, that we're the only ones out of all of our siblings who don't have tattoos and what. Yeah, I know. And we went to art school. Like, we should have been the ones who got them first, like, before anyone else. And I think now it's like. It's like this thing of we didn't get one, so we haven't done it yet.

It's never too late.

There you go. Never. Never too late. I love that. Well, so what are some funny, interesting, different stories about, you know, podcasting? I mean, have you had some, like, big tech mishaps, some guests that just blew your mind? What are some things that have happened to you? Have you started this podcast?

So one of the worst things that happened was, and I always do things in redundancy so radio. Anything can go wrong. Right? So I was recording a gentleman who's a business leader here in the Denver market, and he just made a big impact in Denver on Startup Week and pretty well known voice and all this. And I normally record on Camtasia, which is like a heavy duty kind of editing suite, which you can also record direct from computer, as well as running my zoom recording. And I was halfway through the podcast and I realized neither one of them were recording.

Oh, no, that has happened to all of us.

And it was early, early in the. Just like my first few podcasts too. And I'm like, oh, my God, do I try to salvage it from this point? Do I just bite it and tell him I just made this massive mistake, or do I just act like nothing happened? It's like, oh, I'm sorry, Peter. Just. We'll get it posted next week. But I did not handle that one very well. I admit that. I admit that.

Yeah, you know what? It's better to be straightforward about it. I find that people are really forgiving.

But then there's also, like, the beautiful things about technology too. Like, I was speaking at a conference in Orlando for one of my niche markets, which is private service. So these are the people who manage multimillion dollar luxury estates. So like butlers, personal assistants. Like, yes, that's a real thing. Interesting. Yeah. And I was speaking with a lady that I've known several years now. Her name is Bonnie Lo Cremen. She teaches this personal assisting, and her program is be the ultimate assistant. She's taught it literally around the world. She was Olympia Dukakis personal assistant for 25 years, but she was the longest podcast interview I'd ever done. And we were just like sitting in the lobby running the tape from my phone, and I was amazed at how good the sound quality was for that.

Yeah, I know. Shocking sometimes that our lower tech just works out great for us and the high tech we sometimes make too many mistakes on. I love that. I love that idea. So, you know, you've gotten, you know, quite a few shows on your belt. Is there something that you love about it by now or something that you don't love? Like what's going, you know, how is it going for you?

One of the things that I do love about it and that my guests love about it is number one, I provide them an outline so that they know where they're going. And it's my job as a host to make my guest look good. So kind of old radio mentality. And based on My work, you know, with helping people with interviews just for job searching and things like that, is that how am I going to get them back on track? How am I going to make sure they're going to stick to topic and not go off on tangents? Unless the tangents are interesting. Right. So that's one of the things that I really love about it.

And what about things that you're. You're not in love with that you wish you could change?

Yeah, I am not good about advanced planning.

You know, you're not alone.

I know our podcast right now is once a month. I love to do it more twice a month. I know with consistency you get more listeners, but life invades and as a business owner, there's just so many things going off everywhere.

Yeah, that's so, so true. I love that life invades.

It's such a great term. Well, you know, this is the thing is that there are though some special practices and some best ways to do things. So I'd love to just go into our five things that we normally talk about that make our shows better. Sometimes they make our shows more successful and sometimes they're just special to just us and the way that we like to do things. So I'm going to start with the best way to get great guests. How do you do that, Donna?

I am always paying attention to the people that I meet at conferences, business meetings, what I'm reading in the local business magazines, and try to contact those people because that is right in line with what our show's purpose is. Early on, there were a lot of people who wanted to get on my show to promote their stuff. And I'm like, no, I know a lot of people through the chamber that just wanted to go on and talk about their real estate business. I go, okay, we can talk about real estate, but you need to talk about how do you find someplace that's affordable here in Denver and what are strategies that somebody needs to take? Give them key takeaways. This is not a platform to sit here and sell your stuff.

Well, yeah, especially when you're utilizing it for business purposes and you only are doing a few episodes at a time. You want to be really careful about curating those.

Yeah, absolutely.

So then how do you increase listeners? What are some of the best ways you've found to do that?

We have done a lot of cross promotion on multiple different sites. So we are hosted on Podbean. So that's our home. We have our own website, the Tattooed Freaks and Business suits dot com. So we keep that up and running. So you got the direct link where you're cross posted on Spotify. And my assistant handles all this stuff. Technically, she's my producer in this role, so she does all that for me.

Right. You're syndicated everywhere, right? And you should be.

Yeah, yeah. We also include links in all of our regular newsletters. We promote it on our Facebook and LinkedIn whenever we have a new episode drop. So the more exposure in multiple different channels, the better.

I love that. How about producing in a professional way? So you said you use Camtasia and some other things, but did you plan out how you produce the episode, how you wanted it to flow? What did you decide in that process?

A big thing is using the actual outline itself because I oftentimes deal with people who have not done a whole lot of voiceover work or radio or podcasts or anything. So they're all newbies in this to make them as comfortable as possible and get their minds off of the fact that they've got a microphone in their face, because that's not what it's about. I want to have a normal conversation, technical things. Yeah, we talked a little bit beforehand. Sometimes I invest in the most, bestest equipment I could ever get and then regret it.

Yeah, we were talking about microphones before we started and. Yeah, it's a common thing, right?

Yes. I have a Yeti blue, you know, like the intense hundred dollar microphone, which is awesome in some cases. But then I had to buy soundproofing.

Materials because it was bouncing off of everywhere and coming into your mic.

Everything.

Yep.

We have the same problem with lots of other clients. So you're not alone. I love that. Well, how do you encourage engagement on social and other places to hear if you're doing a great job on the show, if you're giving them what they're looking for?

Always getting engagement is a challenge, man. Anytime I get a like, I'm like, oh, somebody hit a like button. Right. If I can get them to do a comment, that is so much better. And then I always make sure to reply back to comments.

Any guests that I have. Whenever we're posting it on social media, make sure to tag them or hit them with a hashtag so that they know that they need to share the word out as well.

Okay, I'm just going to stop Donna right there because she just said the one thing that I actually find goes wrong really often. So a lot of times we'll be talking on the show. Sometimes a book will come up, an author's name. You mentioned someone, right? You Just mentioned someone on the show. I made a little note to myself to make sure I get her name spelled right so that I can tag her in the episode. But if you don't do that, you're doing all of this work and not reaping the benefit on the other side. So if you want to get the engagement and you want to increase the listeners and you want to get better guests, then you need to do a better job, just like Donna is of making sure that you're doing that. And I love the idea of hashtagging. I didn't even really thought about that. Usually I do normal tagging, but hashtagging makes a lot of sense because what if other people are out there searching for that person now your podcast is going to show up.

Yeah, and that's like one of the cross promotion things too. It's like LinkedIn has put a lot of effort in the past year of making their hashtags more responsive. So if a company page out there, that's another thing I encourage you to do. You can put in three hashtags that will always tie back to your company page. So you could post your podcast on your company page. Then within your newsfeed, you hit it with that same hashtag, it's going to not just be picked up by your own page, but by other pages that are following that same hashtag. And then you've gotten more cross promotion going.

So good.

And you know, that's everyone out there. Donna is an expert in resume building and career services and all of those things because she has her company personal touch, career services. So obviously LinkedIn is a big part of that. So you probably have a lot better LinkedIn skills than many of us. And so are you utilizing them to your best abilities on podcasts, on sharing your show?

I try to, and I will admit there are some areas that I am weaker than others. My Instagram feed sucks.

Yeah, it happens, right?

And that's like one of the things that we need to go back and do and, you know, repost or create the links for all of our, especially the most recent podcasts or the ones that have been the best, you know, our stellar ones. And I have Twitter. I. The only reason.

Yeah, you see Chrissy shook her. You can't hear. For those of you who are just listening, you can't see her like, almost shiver as she mentions the word Twitter, which is kind of my like, yeah, Twitter makes me twitch. Literally. Yeah, yeah, I have the same problem. You know, it happens.

So that's also understanding where your audience is going to be.

Yeah, absolutely.

Our business professionals. So that is why we hit LinkedIn pretty hard. Our Facebook, we know our followers because oftentimes we pick them up at my events. So we understand that they are going to be interested in it.

Absolutely. Well, so, you know, the last best ways we go out, the fifth one is the best ways to monetize your show. And in your case, you're monetizing into your core business because your core business is actually the sponsor of your show, which is an interesting way to go. Are you finding it translating into business for you? How is the podcast doing from driving that alternative monetization?

It definitely does help. And just like any marketing mix, you know, we engage in several different types of marketing. And the content generation is just so important for any coach out there, if we're not creating content, there's no reason for someone to keep coming back to us. I talked to a different career coach here in Denver. I'm not going to mention names because it's definitely to protect the guilty, but.

We'Re talking about books. And he goes, oh, yeah, I wrote a book too. He goes, mine was published in 2003, but things haven't changed too much since then. Oh, my.

Really, dude?

Well, I just released the third edition of my book in 2019. So it's like, the first edition was 2009, the second was 2012. And this is the Get a Job Without Going Crazy, which was released in 2019. And he's like, well, you know, LinkedIn. So there's that like, well, yeah.

Duh.

Wow. You know what the thing is? It's like, yeah, my listeners know that I have. My book is sitting on the credenza behind my desk. Not published on those books. It's the manuscript on that side of the desk. It's still sitting there. Because every time I go to, like, go to do the final edit, I'm like, oh, this has changed. And this has changed. This has changed. I can't even publish it because things are changing so fast in the podcasting industry. So in my industry, it's like too fast for books. So, you know, yeah, you're right. That's not okay. You gotta find a way to keep up. And if this is the media process by which you can content create, serve your audience and do that, that's gonna have to serve your business at the end of the day.

Right.

It's gonna drive the right people to you.

Yeah. And it's also understanding that the way people are consuming content has changed. So since 2009, I have led a job seekers networking group here in Denver called the Brown Bag Job Search Group. And I used that for a long time as way my content generation worked. So back in 2009 was the recession, right? We would get anywhere from 20 to 50 people in a room. Nowadays I'm lucky to get 10. But just a few months ago, we started adding a virtual meeting. So we do a virtual meeting once a week and then we or a month, and then we do the in person meeting once a month. And we're starting to see people log in for the virtual meeting from across the country.

Not just here in Denver, because it's so much more convenient to log in and still interact and treat it like actual humans talking to each other versus, oh, I have to drive halfway across Denver.

Well, and let's be honest, that's how Donna and I met, right? We met in a virtual networking event. We met in a virtual meetup. So, you know, that's exactly. I agree with you that I think that's the beauty of what we're doing nowadays is that these things have changed and they actually have become more convenient, more fun, and given us more of ability to reach farther. Right. Reach outside of our local communities. But the other thing I like to ask everybody on the show is how has podcasting raised your authority? Has it gotten you speaking events? Has it helped you get an article published, gotten you exposure? What has it done from an authority building standpoint?

Well, it definitely has given more depth through spreading goodwill. And I'm kind of a pay it forward kind of person. And one of the things that I always encourage job seekers, and this falls in the same category too, is you want to do favors for people. You want to give them something of value. You don't want to just always be contacting somebody and say, hey, can you put my resume in front of the hiring manager? It's like, dude, I don't even know you. I just connected to you on LinkedIn. Why? Why would I do that? So a good example of this is Yvette Costa, who was on my show talking about emotional intelligence and yoga between those for senior leaders is very cool.

I'm part of one of the SHRM chapters here in Denver, the Society of Human Resources Management.

Because I knew her work, I was able to recommend her when I saw that she was applying for one of our speakers spots and we snagged her for, we're going to do like this really cool, innovative thing that the team has never done before. And then I saw Yvette and she's like, thank you so much for just doing this and supporting me. And I'm like, my pleasure, of course. And then we get the reciprocity of that. Right. Where others are willing to share our name, our voice, links to our podcast, and that's the organic growth side of things, which I think is really important.

Absolutely. So, Donna, every time I talk to someone on the show, obviously the show's called the binge factor. So to identify their binge factor, and I think for you, your binge factor is that you are so very tightly focused in a niche that you are so very focused with, providing great career advice, professional services, giving them exposure to how the workplace is working right now, and yet allowing that for that person who says, I really need a job, but I'm really not so sure that this is right for me, because I still want to be me at the end of the day. And you've given them that viewpoint on that can happen. And so once we tap into a single episode, we go, Donna's really got this, like, she's guiding me with the right advice and the right people, and I feel at home. So you've given, you know, that tattooed freak that. That person who feels that way, like the outsider. You give them this hope, and so they go back to the beginning and they listen to all your episodes.

Yeah. And we talk about tattoos.

You do, because that's just totally fun anyway. Right, right, right.

So that was the binge factor.

So one of my big regrets is that I was asked at one point to, quote, a job to design a tattoo chair, and I totally wanted to do it because I thought these poor. It was the tattoo chair, not for the person getting the tattoo, for the tattoo artist.

Right.

And I thought, these poor artists are, like, hunched over, like, they need support. Like, this could be such a great, challenging chair for me. I didn't. The quote never went through into a project, but I'm. I'm disappointed. I thought this would have been so much fun and would have been, like, the great resume, you know, like, oh, look, I designed a tattoo chair. Like, just kind of fun conversation piece.

Yeah, but you don't have a tattoo.

But I don't have one. It would have been a good excuse to then go get one. You know, the funny thing is back to that story about us not having one. Is that because I'm an artist, because I went to art school and I'm a designer, that it was picking a design that kept me from ever getting one. And then it got to be the point where, like, everyone around me had one, and I was like, well, now it's not so rebellious and not so exciting. So I just never even went farther at that point. So I think I'm going to wait until I'm like, you know, another, you know, 10 years older or something, and then go get a tattoo. Old, like, you know, like, it's like, this is the cool old lady thing to do something like that. Yeah. Try to make it cool again for me.

And I think it's really interesting, too, when. Because I asked for the stories behind them and do they have meaning and things like that. As you know, you get a certain point of view when somebody's talking about their business or what they do, and then you ask them about their tattoo. And now we're diving into something. Well, in my case, most of my tattoos all have meaning.

Right.

Have some that are just jokes, which is like, who spends several hundred dollars to get a joke tattooed on them?

I love that. That says a lot about you, Donna. I don't like a good friends, not.

Like, trip for, you know, who's on first or whatever. But it's. Here's a meme that you can go look up. So, like, the face huggers from Alien, you know, so it's a little face hugger, and he's holding up a sign that says free hugs.

But it was like, I totally trapped myself because people look at it because he's also surrounded by flowers, because that's ironic, too. And they go, oh, look, free hugs. And then they hug me. But it was all supposed to be so people would not hug me.

And it backfired on you.

Oh, no.

I love that, Donna. But see, that's the case. It's like, that's what Donna brings right there. You hear that? That's the binge factor that Donna brings. She brings the humor, she brings the fun. She brings that sort of comfort zone of, I can be me, I can have my stories, I can be myself. I don't have to assimilate to go get a job.

Exactly.

What are your job prospects? What do you think about the podcaster as a job? Are there good prospects out there? Should we hold back? Should only certain people start?

No, I say everybody go for it.

But like anything, you need to learn what it's about, and you need to be able to define your audience and how you're going to go after. I am a huge welcome to Night Vale fan. If you're not familiar with it, I.

Know what it is.

Yeah.

I'm not a fan, but I know what it is.

Yeah. So for anybody who doesn't really know what that is, it's kind of like a Cthulhu type town out in the middle of the desert. And then there's a break off from that. That's called Dream Boy. And warning, sexual content included. I was, like, listening to Dream Boy one day, just working my office, and all of a sudden they get into the hardcore. I'm like, oh, my God, that's porn.

I'd mike, turn it off, Turn it off.

But they are very clear on what makes them successful. They have a quality product that it follows a set format. The listeners know what to expect. As far as, you know, oh, this is porn.

Yeah. They're like, oh, this is going to happen. So, yeah.

Or those. No. Welcome the Night Bill is not porn. Just so you know.

No, it's different. But these shows. You're right. You're right. There's so many different genres and different types of shows out there that as long as you've really defined it and you know what it is, there are good prospects for you out there. There's a place for it to work for you. There's also a place for it to work for you in terms of building up your authority, building up your resume in a way of saying, hey, look, I could be a great speaker. I can be a great salesperson. Look what I can do.

Yeah. But it is like running a business. And you do have to keep in mind, okay, what are my metrics? What are my targets? What's our revenue goals? If that's tied into it, whether you're monetizing through clicks or they're generating business itself, you need to watch that stuff. It's like, my first degree is in music business management and audio engineering. So I always like to point out who's the best guitarist in the world.

The one who puts the many, many, many, many hours in.

Not necessarily. So the best guitarist in the world, nobody knows who it is.

Oh, because they don't know their name. Yeah.

Because they are sitting on their couch playing guitar right now.

They're still putting their hours in even though they don't need it. Right, right.

Or they're not, because they're not getting up off their butt to promote themselves and go play shows and get their word out and get their music out.

Yeah.

Difference between success in a creative industry where you control everything 100% and not such good advice.

Well, Donna, I'm so glad you came on the show. I'm so glad we got to talk about tattooed freaks and business suits. And I'm glad we got a little more time together than we get in our very short virtual networking. So that's always the other fun part about doing a podcast, right? We get to relationship build a little further and get to know each other.

Absolutely. Love it.

Well, you all can find Donna's show on your favorite podcast player because she's out there syndicated everywhere. Tattooed freaks and business suits. Be looking for her next episode and go ahead and subscribe and binge listen to it and check out some of the really cool tips and interesting things that she talks about on the show. Thanks so much for joining us, Donna.

All right, thank you.

Thanks everyone for listening to the Binge Factor. I'm so glad I could bring you Donna and I could bring these interesting shows, tattooed freaks and business suits. I just love to get new titles and new exciting shows for you and very different people all over the place who are doing wonderful models of podcasting in the business world and in turning it into money making for their business, alternative monetization, different ways to grow their brand authority, all these different models that might work for you and ways at which you can be more successful in your podcasting journey. So if you have a show and you'd love to be featured on it, make sure you apply@the bingefactor.com make sure you also go to the bingefactor.com, check out the blog post for this episode and all the links to catch up with Donna and her show. Thanks so much everyone for listening. I'll be back next week with another Binge Factor.

You've been listening to the Binge Factor Podcast. For more information on podcasting and videocasting success tips and tactics, please go to the bingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed you'd brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.