Tracy Hazzard Brandcasting: Content + Fans = Profit from FreeCon with Emily Leach

Hey, everybody, it is Emily Leach. I am here today with Tracy Hazard. She is one of our workshop leaders for this year's FreeCon coming up in, what, two weeks from today. Can you believe that?

That's right. Two weeks away. Two weeks.

I am both crazy excited and a little scared. So many little bits and pieces.

You and your team have done an awesome job, I have to say. I've been involved in so many speaking events, and you guys are so organized. You give us so much, so many ways to promote it, and I'm impressed. So I'm not worried at all. You might be worried, but I am not.

I don't know if worried's really the right word, because it's two weeks, and if you've not done events, then you may not really get what goes on this two weeks, because it gets put everywhere, Right? And all of our speakers are blasting about it. More people are seeing it. And so I get a lot of emails of, hey, can we grab a cup of coffee? It's like, really?

No, no.

How about next month.

Tuesday? I was like, yeah, I'm sorry. That's not gonna.

So before we jump into this interview, I'm gonna run over to Facebook really quick and go ahead and share this out. So if you guys are out there watching, go ahead and share this out to your timeline and it'll give me. Take me one second. Hopefully.

I'll do the same.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

I literally go right in here and I just share it out as public so we can do it super fast.

Okay, mine is done.

I couldn't quite figure out where to get the link.

But I'll have. Alex, can you find us on Facebook doing this interview and share it for me.

Yeah, there you go. That's the best way to do it. Hey, could somebody else in the office do this for me? That's fantastic.

I love it. Delegation. Delegation.

Thank you for teaching us a lesson. Super, super quick.

So I like to start the conversation out with something personal. So I was actually on the phone with a mutual friend of ours last night, and he said that you have been crazy busy getting the brand casting and stuff off the ground. So tell us a little bit about what's going on.

Well, you know, it's one of those things that our model of business is to really test things out, make sure that they're working. And we're kind of methodical about it, so. So we want to make sure everything works in the system, and then at the end, you know, get it all to the tied up with a Nice, neat little bow to the nth degree. Get everything accomplished. That's kind of our process. And so what we did here was then decided to rebrand at the last minute. So it caused a lot of. All we gotta do is.

Yeah, all we gotta do is, you know. Exactly. All this list. Oh, yeah. So, you know, like. Like one of these, you know.

Exactly. That's today's list.

That's today's list. Exactly. So, yeah. So, you know, that's kind of really been it, but it's just really taking off because brand casting, podcasting, video casting, what we're doing today live, you know, all of that is taking off so much that we're really. Yeah. That everybody's interested in knowing more. And so I've been invited to speak all over. I think I'm booked for the rest of the year. So, you know.

Nice.

And then we decided a different model of doing business because I want people to be able to make progress faster. So we've been doing these brand casting services that we provide, which is basically setting up your podcast or your video cast and just doing it for you over 30 days.

For most September, where we do it in three and a half days.

And then you. And then you post it out over a period of time.

Is that right? You're. You're going to do it forever. You know, you're going to do it as long as you want to, like, you. You know, an episode, a week or two, you know, two Facebook lives a week, whatever you're going to do. But it's a process of really setting up all the good practices and all the structure underneath you that you need so that you can be a great content generator and only concentrate on that because you know, you know how it is. You're building all the infrastructure. You're constantly remembering it. I call it the marketing roller coaster. So you know what I'm talking about. You're like, you totally know what I'm talking about. But it's like you market, market, market, market, market, because you're just so excited about everything. And you're trying Facebook and you're doing YouTube and you're, you know, and you're tweeting and you're trying Instagram and, you know, you're blogging because everybody says you still got a blog. And, you know, and then you're trying some SEO tactic that you just don't even know anything technical about, but you're reading up on it, trying to figure out how to do it. And so you're doing all of those great things for your business. And, and then great things happen. You get a lot of clients or you get really busy, you're doing a lot of business and you don't have time to market. And then at some point you find yourself on that down slide to that very bottom part where you're like, oh my God, I'm gonna crash. What do I do? I don't have enough revenue this month. Marketing revenue and.

Oh, I gotta market again. And then you get back on it. And so you never have that sort of steady growth that should organically happen from continually and constantly marketing. And so that's really what we want to do, is establish a machine for you, a brand casting platform, like a stage. Right. For you to be able to do that from all the time. And so all you do is live in the content and the connections that you make. Because that's the best part, right? Us networking, connecting.

And that's what you're going to be teaching in your workshop. You get a 90 minute workshop that you're going to be doing at the conference on brand casting, which is kind.

Of a new word.

I love that we have, you know, this new word kind of coming into it, right?

That's our new branding. And because originally it had really focused a little more on podcasting, but we really had so many video casters who we were doing business with. So we had a, you know, people who came with having done hundreds and hundreds of, you know, various videos that they had in their archives and they were doing nothing with them. So it works both ways. And so we thought, well, that's not representative of what we are. So we rebranded to brandcasting. That's really what we want, is we want it to be you brand casting out your original message, you brand casting out you.

Because especially for freelancers, because we are, you're running a freelance business. You are your business, you are your market, you are your brand.

That's right.

And so this is beautiful. So tell us just real quick, even just a couple of expectations for your workshop, you know, what they might walk away with, what they might get their hands dirty doing.

Yeah. So what I want to, what I'm going to really teach about is the components of really what that strong platform looks like. So you hear that a lot, that term. You need a platform for your business, speakers need a platform, authors and experts and consultants need a platform. You hear it all the time. But what is that? And so we're going to talk about what all the good components of that are and then ways in which you can Create them and set them on autopilot.

All right, awesome. Is there anything that they should maybe bring into this that would make it even that much better for them? Start a video in.

No, this is really great. I think that the big key thing that makes it so much easier to get going and really build a great platform that does a lot for you is to know exactly who you are and who you want to talk to. So if you understand your brand. I'm a brand. Every freelancer is a brand. I design products all the time, right? Those are brands. All of that thing is a brand representation. But a brand is not what I say I am. It's a brand of how you see me. So how someone else sees my brand and what they perceive that is. So we have to be really clear on our messaging, because if we want them to perceive a specific viewpoint on us, we better be clear about that. And so understanding that ahead of time and really thinking about who you are and what makes you special and who specifically you want to attract, because you don't just want to attract thousands of fans. So I have a podcast on 3D printing, right? It's really geeky, right? We talked about it before, right? It's really geeky. But I was able to monetize my podcast with 25,000 plays a month because my audience was so specifically interested in what I had to sell and what I had to say and what I had to. Had to share. And so if you want to attract people who are going to serve your business well, because otherwise it's a waste of time marketing if you're not attracting people who are going to hire you at the end of the day, as a freelancer, you want to be able to attract them to your message. So figuring out what that is, and it's okay to test it, you know, maybe it won't work. Maybe it will. That's okay. But be clear about what you want to do there. And if you are, it just makes it easier to hit the ground running.

Well, and I told. I literally told somebody, I think, two days ago, this one thing, and I'm curious to see if you agree with it, is, you know, sometimes when you start something brand new, there may only be one, two, or three people that show up to it, but you have to sit through those moments for those two or three or four people to speak to their three or four or five people, and then, you know, the ball begins to roll. But people. I see a lot of people. There's like three people showed up or.

Oh, it didn't work. Yeah. You know, and see, that's the thing is, like, there is an element of it doesn't work, but that's why I call it a platform, because basically, if you didn't have Twitter, if you didn't have tweets going out every single day on your Twitter feed, and I don't use Twitter actually actively anymore. We. It didn't resonate with my audience, so this year, we stopped doing it in January, but I set it on autopilot, so every time a blog post goes into my. Into my WordPress site, it automatically tweets something out. Why? Because I don't want to be out of business on Twitter. So it's a way of trying to decide, and sometimes you have to test that. And I spent a year actively trying to seek an audience on Twitter and said, hey, that doesn't work for me. That's okay. It just didn't work for the kind of people I wanted to attract. And so I turn it on autopilot so I don't have to think about it. I don't have to do anything, but I'm not out of business. Gotcha.

Awesome. Well, is there anything else that you want to share? I mean, we're kind of almost getting to our time. You're gonna have a great event. I just want to make sure you have the opportunity to tell us anything you want to tell us about your workshop.

Well, I'm just so excited to come because I know I'm gonna learn so much more from your audience and from all the people there is that it's gonna be just incredible. So I'm looking forward to that, to learning from you guys. Awesome.

Well, those of you guys that are out there watching, thank you so much for. For being a part of this. And again, thank you, Tracy, for taking some time out of your schedule. I know we had. So we have the storm coming in, and I ran into some rain, and.

So thank you so much for the information.

And it's. Yeah, I could go into that for a little bit longer, but those of you guys that have not yet got your ticket for the freelance conference, you can go check out more information. You can check out the agenda. And it is two days long. It starts on Thursday evening. We're going to have a set of games, and so definitely make sure you bring your game face. And when I say games, I don't mean game games. I mean fun games.

Yeah.

I like all your eyes.

Yay. Fun games.

Go out to freelanceconference.com. go find the information that you need.

Reach out to me if you need.

To, but buy your ticket because they're probably going to go off sale and be done here in a few days.

So again, going to max out.

So anyway, again, that's freelancecomforts. Com. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. And I think we have another interview tomorrow, so until then, have a great evening.

Take care.

Of.