Speaker 1Shut up, and sit down. Welcome to Being On Stage, the only podcast that gives you motivation, inspiration, and confidence to be better on stage. No matter how you entertain, sing, dance, band, comedian, public speaking, MC, drag, burlesque, performance art, or street performer,
Speaker 2this is the show for you. Hey, rock stars, Reggie Dawson, your host, the Being On Stage podcast. Oh, this everyday thing is feeling really, really good. If you're just tuning in, I am doing a podcast every day for the month of July, July, July, July 2019, unscripted, unedited. I take a few notes, or I have a few thoughts, and then I just grab the microphone and go. I talk everything about performing, anything that has to do with being on stage, performing on stage, confidence, motivation. Inspiration, all that stuff, that's my jam, that's my hook, that's my whatever, that's my niche, if we're talking business, if you know what I mean. So listen, social media can be hard. Like, I mean, hard. I've been looking into social media analytics and marketing and things like that, because I want to expand a little bit. Maybe not right now, because I started this podcast with a huge dream about a year and a half ago. I want to coach performers. I want to consult with them. Ultimately, I want to travel to them and, you know, coach them through every step of gearing up towards, you know, the big one or something. You know, something like that. I'm not picky anymore. Like, that was the dream. But honestly, with all the emails I received and the messages, it's just, I just want to help performers just take one more step, you know, because that's what it is. That's what this career is, is just putting one foot in front of the other. And sometimes you're doing it blindly. And when it comes to social media, I think most of us probably feel like we're just going at it blindly. Some of us take the route of we just post like crazy. Anything and everything we post, we just flood our page. Some of us take a step back. We post a thing here or there. Maybe we have a gig coming up. And it's tough to figure out what the right method is to promote your shows and to promote your performances and your gigs you got coming up. Or anything like that, you know. And that's something that I've struggled with. I've struggled with it most of the time through my performing career because, you know, when I started, we didn't have Facebook. We had MySpace. And if you do not know what MySpace is, man, did you miss out. MySpace was a platform where you could have a blog and a page and you could, you know, display who your top friends were. And you could have a news feed as well. Like you have your news feed, you have your blog, you have your trending topics. It was kind of like a blog and Facebook and Twitter all rolled into one. It was, I don't know, I thought it was amazing. Oh, and a website. It was like having a website, a blog, and a Facebook all in one platform. It would probably go over really well once again because that's what everyone's doing now is sharing more and more and more on multiple platforms. And, but anyway, so I worked with MySpace and I thought I was fairly successful at MySpace, I think. I felt anyways. I had a high number of friends. I had a good turnout for my shows, good responses. Facebook and everything I struggled to get into. I'm still kind of like, I don't know, Facebook I've grasped a little bit. Instagram, I'm getting. Twitter, I just, I'll be honest with you 100%, I can't grasp Twitter. I just, I don't. I don't get it. If you're out there and you can help me with Twitter, please send me an email. Reggie at beingonstage.com. I just, I don't get it. I know it's with hashtags and keywords and mentions, but I can't, I haven't been able to wrap my head around it. I've tried. So, I have found a little bit of success with Instagram and Facebook through, over the years, both with performing and with, you know, promoting this podcast. I also have another business on the side. You know, I've had a couple businesses here and there. That I've, you know, I've been fairly successful with on social media and everything. And Instagram, I'm starting to gain traction. And I think I get it. It's just applying it that I'm struggling with. So, I just want to share a few tools, I guess, that I've found to be, like, really good and have really helped me get better at social media. And it would make it easier. Social media made easy, I guess we could call it. So, yeah. Okay. Let me get into these tools. I'm just going to kind of briefly go over a couple of them. I mean, let's assume you have a Facebook. Okay. Number one, you have to have a Facebook and an Instagram. Those are the two I'm going to go over. The only thing I'm going to say about Twitter, and this will be the only thing, advice you ever hear me say about Twitter, is do your research. Keep up with it. And Twitter is all about interactions with people as well. So, it is truly meant to be social with the retweeting and the commenting. And it's truly about interactions. I don't grasp how they work and what the most effective way is, but that's what it's about. So, I encourage you to research Twitter. But Instagram and Facebook, I found a couple of things to be really helpful, as well as just communicating with my followers and my fans and, you know, my listeners now as well. Oh, by the way, if you want to be communicated with, I have an email list going. You can go to beingonstage.com. There's a section that says, want to get paid to perform? I'll send you 10 ways to get paid for performing. Just put in your email, and then you'll be on my list, and you'll get all my emails. But, so, there's just a few tools that makes it easy. And that's, I mean, the things you see me share on social media, the emails you get, this is what I use. So, I'm kind of giving you my secrets, I guess. So, one, after you have a Facebook, you need a Facebook page that's a little bit separate from your profile. And I would recommend a personal. I mean, you can go either way with Instagram. You can do a business Instagram and connect it to your page for your actual, like, your act, your performing. Or you can stay personal with it and just have a personal Instagram that you update separately, which I'm going to tell you an easy way to update it separately. So, once you have a Facebook page and an Instagram and a personal Facebook, these are the tools that I found most helpful to just, like, make it easy. So, first we have Buffer. F-F-E-R, Buffer.com. I'm not, oh, and I don't, I'm not making any money off this, guys. All these tools are free, 100%. So, I don't, I'm not making anything off of this. You can go there and just use it. So, Buffer, you connect your social media accounts. And what you can do is you can create the posts that are going to go on them. And it'll just, it'll schedule it. With the free account, you can schedule up to 10 posts per social media platform. You can pick the days of the week and the times that it posts. So, it's kind of all-inclusive. You can just go up to 10. But you think, if you can schedule, you know, two hours a week, one on Sunday and some on Wednesday, you can set up 10 posts over the course of four days and an hour, you know. And, you know, so that's your, that's Buffer. And you can do that for a Facebook, a personal Facebook, a Facebook page, a Instagram. You can also do it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr. It has all of them, really. You can only hook up three of them on the free. So, like, I wouldn't go crazy. I'm not going crazy with all the social media platforms. I do Instagram and I do Facebook. And I may explore Snapchat at some point in the future. But that's just not where I'm at right now. So, Instagram and Facebook is, like, my go-tos. Because I feel like that's primarily where my audience, where my listeners are. So, Buffer is really cool. Helps you create the posts. Now, a lot of the posts on Instagram, you need a picture. So, if you're not a YouTuber, you need a picture. So, if you're not always wanting to post pictures of yourself and selfies. Well, that is pictures of yourself. But if you don't always want to just post pictures of yourself and what's going on around you, you can also make little graphics and infographics. You can make the graphics with the words. You can make, you know, find other pictures that aren't you. I use Canva. C-A-N-V-A. Canva.com. That, they have a, I mean, I use the paid version. I'm not going to lie. But they do have a free version. You get access. You get access to, like, thousands of stuff. And it has, you know, pictures of other people. Ha! You can add words and text. And you can, you know, adjust the picture. It's kind of like a Photoshop, cloud-based Photoshop type of way. But it's a little limited. But it's not, like, it's not completely limited. You can adjust a lot of things. You can add text over pictures. You can, I've created logos. I've created my podcast cover art that you see every time you click on the podcast. Anything you see on social media. I've created all of that in Canva. And a lot of it, I created on the free platform. So, something to think about is Canva.com. You may already use it. But if you need a little help using it, if you go to my Facebook, the Being On Stage Facebook page, if you scroll down a couple of months, there's a Canva tutorial video, sort of, to kind of show you how to make a basic graphic. It's, like, 12 minutes long or something like that. So, the final tool that I'm going to go over, and then I'm going to wrap this bad boy up, is if you want to build an email list. And that's kind of what I'm doing. You know, earlier in a podcast, I told you to go put in your email address. Well, as you're performing, you may find people that want to know more and, and be connected to you, but they don't necessarily listen. I've, I actually have someone that I'm connecting with through email that, cause they don't have a Facebook and that's, that's their preferred contact method. So depending on, you know, I mean, a lot of times it's going to depend on the age group of your audience, but you're going to reach everybody. So eventually you may have somebody that just, they want to be on an email list. So I use MailChimp, M-A-I-L, MailChimp, like a chimpanzee, C-H-I-M-P, all one word, MailChimp.com. MailChimp is super amazing. Two, there are multiple reasons, but I'm going to cover like two basic ones. First, you can build a landing page and that is something that people can click on from your social media to put in their name and email. That's also something that you can promote on social media as like an ad, if you really wanted to get into ads, which we can get into ads. Like I'll, I'll talk ads with you all day. Okay. Maybe not all day, but I'll talk ads with you for 30 minutes. But yeah, so on the landing page, you just, you know, you, you can build a basic one where it's just like a picture and a overlay and a couple of words of text and a email entry, or you can build like an extensive, like advertisement. Add for yourself, like for your upcoming gigs, be notified, that kind of thing. Like you can make it a whole little page for yourself. And that's on the free version of MailChimp. And then from that page, I said, people can put in their email. You can then, it also houses your email list automatically. And you can add people manually, like if they add themselves at your show, or you can, you know, people can sign up online to be on your email list. Now the kicker here is you then have to send a few emails here and there. I wouldn't recommend more than one. Okay. I don't do more than like three to four a month. I don't do any more than like two a month. Maybe I only send out emails occasionally. Listen, I'm not, we're not, you know, cause you're not selling anything. You're just, you're inviting people to your show. You're inviting people to experience what you're putting out. That's it. Like it's an invitation. You're not really selling anything. You can always plug your social media. If you have merchandise, you can plug the site where people can purchase your merchandise, but it's not like, that's not the purpose of your email list. Okay. So you're really just keeping in touch with people in another, in another way. Now with the email list there, you can listen, you can do all sorts of things with this email list. You can tag people on your list so that you know what show they were at. You can, you can have multiple lists. Like you can have lists for people that signed up online and a list for people that signed up at a show. And it's, it's pretty cool. I recommend watching some of the tutorials and reading some of the tutorials on MailChimp site, but that's the thing I use for my email list. actually when you go to my website and put in your email that little box is actually brought over from MailChimp like it's connected automatically so if you have a website you can if you or if you eventually want to have an actual website and not just a landing page you can build that into your website as well and it's already set up so the last thing I kind of want to go over kind of a bonus if you will I like giving away bonuses when you do social media a lot of times you're going to want to post some videos Instagram can go up to a minute unless you're doing a live and Facebook can just go on and on forever there's probably a limit but I haven't found it yet but I would get I would get some sort of video editor there's a lot of decent apps you can even edit videos that you make right on your phone shorten them clip them add text to them it's something simple like that because a lot of times you're going to need to at least trim the video for Instagram down to a minute and you may want to add like a hashtag or a text overlay or something like that I've used Premiere Rush through the Adobe suite so if you if you know if you're paying for the Adobe suite or if you can afford to pay for the Adobe suite there's a lot of cool stuff in there but Premiere Rush is a pretty easy video editor if you're looking for another easy video editor through the Windows platform I use crazy video editor it's actually what it's called and it's pretty decent if you are uploading to YouTube I think YouTube is the best way to do it but I don't think it's the best way to do it but I think it's YouTube has a pretty decent pretty good video editor inside of it and then you just make your videos downloadable and just redownload them after you edit them on YouTube that it does give you another platform to put yourself out there so all right so I know I ran a little bit long but I love sharing this stuff with you guys because I you know anything that's going to help you move forward anything that's going to help you build your fan base that's what we're doing we're blasting off your career on this podcast so keep at it and if you want to really blast off let's talk let's talk what we can do to you know get you to that next step get you to that that place that you want to be that performer that you're supposed to be hit me up you can jump right on my calendar and I'll call you choose the date and time beingonstage.com calendar and let's get this thing happening for you you know what you're a rock star you deserve your dreams to come true I just want to aid in that happening I just want to sit on the sidelines and watch cheer you on all right as always thank you so much for listening and keep on shining
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