Hit The Mic With The Stacey Harris

Welcome to episode 329 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Okay, so we spent a lot of time this month talking about reviewing and planning because, honestly, that's where my head space has been. I want to wrap that up with, if all this planning, and all this looking back, has led to some changes, how to go about making those changes. I'm also going to be sharing a change that we're going to be making to the show with you at the end of the podcast, so stay tuned for that. Let's first talk about the importance of evaluating and looking at where you're at, and looking at the possible impact of these changes. Here's the deal. Changes are going to happen. It's just a part of evolving, of growing a business, of living a life. Your needs change, your customer needs change, the industry you're in may change. As someone who works in the social media space, I can assure you that changes are inevitable. They will happen. It's all about how you respond to them and how you d

Welcome to episode 328 of Hit the Mic with thee Stacey Harris. All right guys, as we have just a couple of days left in December, I wanted to sort of stay on this track that we've had going about reviewing things, and making sure we're on track for our goals. I'm talking about this around the New Year's because honestly this is when most people are most likely to take action on this content. This is something you can do anytime. If you happen to find this episode in June, do this then. This is not a, "Okay, well when December happens then I'll do this," or, "I'll pay attention to this next year." This is something that you need to be looking at and thinking about regularly. That's really around this idea of not making it hard for people to pay you. Not making it hard for customers to say, "Yes," for clients to book time. There's a couple of things that I want you to look at. We're going to touch on the most obvious one first. That&apos

Welcome to episode 327 of Hit The Mic with the Stacey Harris. Today, I want to talk about three things you need to know about your business. As we sort of refresh for the new year, and as we close up this year, there are a few things that sometimes in the course of running our business we forget, we don't give stock to. Today, I want to cover those three things. It's going to be a short, quick one, because I want you to take action on this stuff. Again, I want you to make sure you're sitting down and evaluating these pieces, because they will feed into all of the stuff we talk about in literally every other episode. Certainly going into some of the episodes we're going to have in January, I want you guys to have these foundations in place of knowing this stuff. It's easy to say, "I'm in year two, three, seven, ten. Of course I know this stuff." Are these choices the same as they were the day you made them the first time? Are you in the same place? Are you aligned with t

Welcome to episode 326 of Hit The Mic with the Stacey Harris. All right guys, today we're going to talk about when free advice is bad for business. Now, I want to preface this by saying I am all about giving it away. I'm all about providing free value. That's why we've done 326 episodes of this show. That's why I do guest posts, and I appear on podcasts, and I do all sorts of stuff. I do free challenges, and webinars, and speak, and do workshops and things like that, because I'm all about making this simple, making this easy, and giving you exactly, exactly what you need. However, there is a time, there is a situations were free advice is detrimental to your business, and where asking for free advice can be detrimental for your business. That's in these situations. When someone with an expertise has hired you to provide a service, do not then ask them for advice. If you're a business coach, and your hairstylist is asking for business advice, or you are a graphic designe

Welcome to episode 325 of Hit the Mic with the Stacey Harris. You know I'm all about making social simple, making it doable, and making it actionable. I want to talk about something that can get not just a bad rap, but also the positives can be over inflated. We're going to talk about automated social media, specifically the three things I want you to know about automating your social media. This is one of those episodes I really, really want you to make sure that you're doing what is aligned with you, what is aligned with your goals, and what's aligned with your strategy. Automation and social media are one of those conversations that can just, it can get out of hand, and it can get out of hand fast. I want to sort of bring it back in, and talk about some fundamental things that I want you to know whenever you're having those conversations in Facebook groups, with your biz BFF's, your peers, your colleagues, or even total air quotes here, "Social media experts," who ma

Welcome to episode 324 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Let's do it guys, let's talk about the money. I sit back at the end of every year and I try to pay attention to what I spend. I do this more regularly than once a year now that Charles handles the bookkeeping, just full transparency. I'm much better at it when somebody else does the day-to-day of it, but I do like to evaluate what's going out because I want to know that I'm getting the value and that value may not be dollar-for-dollar, but I want to make sure that I'm getting what I need out of the financial exchange. I sat down and I've been looking at the investments I made this year and so I want to tell you guys about the four best investments I made in 2016. I'm not going to be naming physical things you can buy, really more the mental investments I made that were financial investments as well, but they may be different for you as far as the specific thing. That will make more sense once I go on so I wil

Welcome to episode 323 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Welcome, welcome, to another episode. This week we're going to talk content marketing, and really I want to talk about three things you must know when it comes to your content marketing, because there's a lot of information out there about how you have to do X, Y, Z. If you don't do A, B, C, you're going to fail terribly. I want to do a little reality check with what is actually necessary for your content marketing. We're going to break down the three things I want you to know when it comes to content marketing. Again, we're going to keep this short and sweet, because I want you to take action on this stuff. What I want you to do is I want you to do me a solid, I want you to listen to this episode, and then I want you to come over to Facebook.com/TheStaceyHarris, and let's hang out. Hit the post about this episode, and let me know your thoughts. How will you deal with this and if there are any truths I missed, and

Welcome to episode 322 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. It's once again that time, real talk time. I want to talk about membership sites today because we passed our year anniversary of Hit the Mic Backstage a few months ago and I have spent probably almost the entirety of the second half and for sure the bulk so far of the fourth quarter this year all in on making my community better in every way I can, upgrading things, like the sales page, like the checkout system, the onboarding sequence, all of that stuff because of these lessons that I have learned. The three things I want to talk about today, the three lessons that I want to talk about today are the things that I feel I don't get enough conversation, enough highlighting. I think we talk a lot about tech and plugins and content even, but I don't know that we talk enough about these things, certainly before you launch. These are things that I don't think I really digested before I started and so I want to talk about them with you

Welcome to episode 321 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. It's real talk time, guys. We're going to talk about the three things you must know about not having a Facebook group, because there seems to be this myth that the only way to get seen on Facebook is to have a group, and/or the only way to build your funnel or find success on Facebook or make more sales or grow your program or support your community is to have a Facebook group. It's not true. Even kind of true. Now in many cases, Facebook groups can be incredibly powerful. I've talked about them immensely on this show. We've got trainings about them inside Hit the Mic Backstage. I am a big fan of Facebook groups. I use them a lot; however, like literally everything else, there's not one right way and one wrong way to use these tools in your business. There's not a "You have to do this" and "You have to do that." No. It's just not true, guys. The first things you have to know is that you do

Welcome to episode 320 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.  All right, so recently we talked about repurposing content and recycling content for social media. Today I want to talk about actually breathing life into the content that's on your website. Finding new ways to drive traffic to it or just straight up reviving it, updating it, repurposing it. That's what we're going to talk about today because your value continues to be valuable. I want to make sure that you are getting every last drop of value for your own business out of the value you're providing your community because the struggle is real when it comes to creating content. As you may know, if you've listened to this show for a while, I'm actually recording this at the very beginning of November and this will go live at the very end of November and I am in ... This week has been back to back to back to back recording days where I'm recording 4, 5, 6 episodes a day of the podcast. That just reminds me how import

Welcome to episode 319 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. It's Friday and that means another 3 things episode. This week we're going a little bit left of center and we're going to talk about personal branding. I think this is such an important topic because there are some misconceptions around personal branding and having shifted to a personal brand a couple of years ago, I have learned a lot. A lot, a lot, so I want to share that with you because I know that there are a lot of questions about what's involved with being a personal brand and if you have any sense of yourself left. That's what we're going to talk about. These are the 3 things you must know about personal branding. Number 1, it's not actually about you. I know, it seems strange, almost counter-intuitive because personal branding, I'm a person, on the brand, it's about me, but it's not really about you. It still ultimately about how you serve your community, whether you are a company that serv

Welcome to episode 318 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. All right, guys. We're going to talk about sales funnels today, because I have been getting some push back on the idea of sales funnels. I was actually in a Facebook group, and I was talking about sales funnels, and stating that one of my goals was improving my sales funnels for Hit the Mic Backstage. I got some negative feedback about how sales funnels were, like, manipulative, and it was really, really interesting to me. I wanted to talk about this, because sales funnels are actually an amazing thing for you to do for your community, because they serve two purposes. One for your business growth, and one for your community. I want to break down those two things, and I want to just quick and dirty get rid of this illusion that sales funnels are bad. Sales funnels are your friend. All right? First, let's talk about how sales funnels serve your community. Here's the deal. No one, no one at all, knows your business, knows your offerings

Welcome to episode 317 of Hit The Mic with The Stacey Harris. Let's talk podcasting. I get a lot of questions about podcasting, especially now that we're 300, now 317 episodes into the show which apparently means I know stuff. One of the most common hurdles for podcasters, or wannabe podcasters rather, is what to talk about. That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about the 3 things you must know about choosing a podcast topic because A, it is not as difficult as you think it is and B, I want you to stop using this as an excuse to no hit record on a podcast because that's what some of you guys are doing. I know things. Let's talk about choosing a podcast topic and let's jump right in. I want to keep this episode pretty brief because I want you guys to be taking action on it, so we're going to jump right in today. Number 1, what problem do you want to solve for your audience? What problem do they have that they are looking to you for? That could

Welcome to episode 316 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. We all know that social media is a great way to connect, a great way to provide value, a great way to get to know your audience and their needs except what are you supposed to post? What are you supposed to share? Well that's what we're going to talk about today. We're actually going to breakdown building your content calendar because that is actually going to tell you exactly what to post. How awesome does that sound? Sounds pretty good right? All right, so let's jump in.   First things first, why have one? Why do this work? Real talk, we are very rarely creative on demand. Very rarely do I log into Facebook and I'm just struck by a wonderful amount of genius things to share. Even more rarely am I struck with something to share that's completely on point with the rest of the things happening in my editorial and marketing calendars, so I have a content calendar. Here's the thing. A content calendar is not the same

Welcome to episode 315 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. This episode is for those of you who feel like you just can't figure out where to get started. For those of you who are struggling along with social media, this is also worth giving a listen to because sometimes the struggle stems from a lack of foundation in our social media. I really want to talk about the three things you need to know, you have to know and you have to execute on when it comes to getting started with your social media because again, a lot of the struggles I see clients having, a lot of the struggles I see with our members at Hit the Mic Backstage, it really stems from not having those foundations in place. From not having these things figured out. Number one, I think this applies to literally everything and not just social media. That could just be me raising my hand on that one. Stop trying to do all the things. You don't need to be on every single network. You don't need to be doing social media 24 hours a day. Y

Welcome to episode 314 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. I'm really excited today because I'm going to empower you to really look at your Facebook page objectively. I'm going to walk you through the three things that I really want you to be doing whenever you assess what's happening with your profile on Facebook and by profile I should say page because remember we're using our Facebook pages for marketing and not our Facebook profile. Basically I'm going to teach you to DIY a Facebook page review. I love, love, love talking about reviews. We actually do them once a month inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. Every month we do profile reviews so members leave me a link and we review absolutely any profile. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through the steps I take and the three major things I look for. There's definitely other things I look for but these are the three biggest missteps I see people making and so I want you to DIY yourself an ob

Welcome to Episode 313 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. All right guys, so last month in Hit the Mic Backstage I answered a very common question by doing a training all around free challenges. We see these all over the place, they're a huge list growing opportunity. Basically, what they are is a challenge to actually grow your email list. You're providing value for your audience, you're getting them engaged right from the start, and it's totally free for them. All it costs is an email address. Usually this up sells to some sort of paid program or coaching opportunity, something like that. It doesn't have to I guess but generally speaking I like to do something on the other side of that opt-in, right? That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the three things you need to know about running a free challenge to grow your list. All right, let's do it. Thing number one that you need to know about running a free challenge is getting p

Welcome to episode 312 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Today we're pulling back the curtain on a big part of Hit the Mic Backstage actually. I get a lot of questions about running a membership and how I started it and things like that. What I want to talk about today is not so much how I started something but why I'm changing something. Up until now, the community part of Hit the Mic Backstage, which I guess I should rewind and say this. Hit the Mic Backstage is a private community full of a library of trainings on everything from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to SnapChat to all the major networks. Plus some content marketing stuff like blogging and video. We have guest experts who have joined us to talk about Facebook groups, to talk about getting publicity from major publications and finances and all sorts of things. It's a really cool part of my business that I absolutely love running. It's without a doubt my favorite offering. I have the most fun doing it. It's a little m

Welcome to episode 311 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Yay Facebook changes! I know you're excited, I'm excited, we can hardly contain it. Let's jump right in. We're going to talk about three big Facebook changes happening rolling out now, and over the coming weeks. They're all going to have an impact directly on you. I want you to pay attention. This one would be a good one to bookmark, and maybe highlight for your Evernote some spots in the show notes. We've got the full transcript. Because these are going to be some things that are going to impact you again as they roll out in the next few weeks.   Update number one. There are some brand new call to action buttons coming to Facebook pages. Up until now you could do things like visit a website, sign up, watch video, call, those kind of things. Now, Facebook is actually hooking up with some third party apps to make that call to action button even cooler. Right now, they're talking about the current list of services f

Welcome to episode 310 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. Let's talk hiring, so a lot of us tend to, and I'm totally raising my hand on this one, guys, wait too long to hire help, and so today I want to talk about some ways you might know it's time to hire help, and some different ways that you can get help, because I think there's a lot of perception around, "You have to have XYZ, and that has to work," and that doesn't necessarily work for everybody, because we all have our different needs. We all have our different strengths, and that's okay. That's totally okay.   All right, so let's start with how you might know it's time to hire someone? Number one, you want to make more money, and you have no time. Not in a you need to trade more of your time of money, kind of one to one thing, but it's hard when you're slammed with keeping up with the business you've got, to do two things. A, market your business, so you continue to have consist