When you make it to TWO HUNDRED of anything, you celebrate that! And today is the 200th episode of the Content Creation Made Easy Podcast!

How do you even GET to 200 podcast episodes? You have to figure out how to take the pressure off so you don't burn out!

That's why today's podcast is filled with 4 lessons to help you:

-Stop feeling like you're feeding the endlessly hungry content monster
-Put an end to the critical thoughts that hold you back
-Know where to focus your attention & what to ignore
-Simply be NICER to yourself

Here's why it matters: If you go down in flames and burn out, you will NOT be:

Serving your audience with great content they needOR

Making money from converting that audience you've warmed up into clients, customers, or students!

Listen in for REALISTIC ways to take the pressure OFF your content creation life -

We're so grateful when you share this episode and leave a review: our goal is to make your life easier - and that of MANY other small business owners like you!

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Full Transcript

Hello. Hello. I'm your host, Jen Liddy, and this is the Content Creation Made Easy podcast. And today I'm celebrating my 200th podcast episode. 200 of anything is a LOT! .

And one of the things you need to know about me is I'm not really great at celebrating.

I'm often that person who is just noticing that something needs to get done, putting it on the list and doing it, and then crossing it off and moving on. I'm so terrible at rituals and celebrations and ceremonies.

That is not my thing and I'm fine with that. But when I saw that number 200 was coming up a couple of weeks ago, I was like, “Oh, what can I really talk about for this 200th episode?”

Because it's so much to do a podcast. Maybe if you don't have a podcast, you don't really think about all of the things that go into it.

If I'm doing an interview there's setting up the interview, all of the tech, all of the getting people what they need, the actual time that you have the conversation, all the stuff on the back end, then the marketing, the taking, the recording, getting it transcribed.

Like there's a lot of things that go into creating a podcast, which you actually probably don't know the depth of until you start one.

But I love doing a podcast because it helps me meet new people when I interview them and also get information out there in a way that I love!

I love to consume podcasts. So I'm hoping that you are a huge podcast consumer.

I'm happy to be here for my 200th episode, and I kind of can't believe that it is here. And so I thought “What could I share with people for my 200th episode to actually celebrate?”

I thought, let's talk about what I think everybody needs right now, which is how to take the pressure off of ourselves when it comes to doing content.

Because as you know, I think I say pretty much every episode, it is just a content machine.

With every update to an app, every new app that comes out, every new platform that comes out, there's so many ways for us to get our information out there and also for people to find us.

So it makes us feel like we constantly have to come up with something new and we have to be everywhere, which is completely unsustainable.

If I had that opinion or if I had that focus of trying to be everywhere, I wouldn't have gotten to episode 200 of Content Creation Made Easy.

So let's talk about these. I have four little nuggets for you today about how we can take off the pressure of doing content. Do it better, do it more easily, do it more effectively so that we can continue showing up for our audience without going down in flames and burning out.

Let's get started.

The first one I want to talk about is- I'm going to kind of quantify this as, What are you paying attention to?

I see a lot of conversations in Facebook groups I'm in and chats that I'm having with entrepreneurs where they focus on these things that don't really matter.

For example, last week I was watching a conversation happen about unsubscribes on an email list, and people were like, this woman was really freaking out about the people that have unsubscribed from her list, and she was making it mean a really emotional thing to her.

It was very upsetting to her.

I understand: you've worked really hard to get those people onto your list. You've had a great freebie or you gave a great training, and now they're just choosing to unsubscribe or even potentially mark you as spam because they're just not being thoughtful about it.

Right. Well, the question isn't, how should I feel about my unsubscribes?

A better question is, what do I need to know about these unsubscribes? Is there a problem causing unsubscribes? Unsubscribes are just information to you.

They aren't emotional, and often it's not personal.

Sometimes it's just somebody cleaning up their inbox or they've outgrown what you have to share, or they're just not interested in it anymore.

That can feel bad. But when you spend too much time focused on those numbers, you're not answering the question, which is, why are people unsubscribing? Well, what's the percentage?

Where am I losing them in my welcome series? Or did I send out an email that had a huge number of unsubscribes? And why did that happen? And is that actually good? Because now I have fewer people on my list who aren't perfect for me.

So rather than get emotional and look at numbers that don't really matter, pay attention to what's happening and then ask yourself strategic questions about how does it impact your business?

Other places that I see this are with vanity numbers on social media or even a huge email list. Like you could have an email list of 10,000 or Instagram followers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, but how is that translating into whatever it is you want it to translate into?

Do you have 10,000 Instagram followers and zero clients? That's the problem.

Rather than looking at the things that don't matter, a better question is, “What is happening? Why is it happening? And is there some piece of it I can change?”

So what I'm really talking about here is taking the pressure off and what are you paying attention to?

What are you paying attention to in terms of your own content?

Some people are obsessed with thinking about who they used to be, who they were at the beginning of their journey.

One woman told me she scrolled to the beginning of her Instagram, another woman talked about the old stuff that's on her YouTube channel.

Again, is that worth paying attention to?

When I think about my podcast, I started in October 2018 and at that time I was doing accountability coaching.

Then I kind of morphed into more general business coaching and then I got really much more specific to talk about content and I've just really leaned into that even more into my lane.

And if I were to think back to what the hell does that first podcast sound like?

Well, I don't even want to go there because that's not where I'm headed and I'm not going to remove those podcasts.

They might serve somebody in some way, but I'm not going to put my attention there.

So I just wanted to start my 200th celebration by saying, you don't get to 200 episodes in your podcast and you don't get where you want to go if you're paying attention to things that just suck your energy and don't matter.

And you don't think about them strategically or analytically in terms of how they're helping you or harming you.

So that's my first lesson.

The second lesson, and this was a hard one for me and I'm still working on it, is the doing things imperfectly.

Now, you might have been listening to last week's episode when I was interviewing Jen Lehner, all about getting help in our business and what realistic help looks like and how do we get it?

Well, I realized in the last minute of our conversation, I realized I had the wrong freaking mic plugged in the entire time!

The story of my mic is I've gone through like five mics and none of them ever really got me what I needed in terms of the sound I was looking for.

I'm in a really old house. The room I'm in has a ton of windows. I just don't have other options unless I want to go out into the world and hire a room where I could find a specific podcasting place.

And I just don't want to do that because I want to be able to record my podcast whenever I want to be able to record my podcast.

So this mic, I had finally bought it!

I had gotten the tech all set up and I got through the whole thing and I just I couldn't believe it.

Imperfection is a huge piece of getting your content out there, actually.

It's a huge piece of running your business, right?

If you are really getting stuck in it has to be perfect before I start my podcast or before I start my YouTube channel or whatever your thing is, before I send that first email, before I write my new lead magnet, before I launch my program.

It's never going to be perfect.

What I do know about entrepreneurs and small business owners is they get bored very easily. So just putting it out there is the way to go.

Because your brain is going to iterate on it and tweak it and change it and learn from it and do it again better and better and better and better.

So if you are waiting for the perfection, it's never going to get done. I'm sure you've heard that lesson a million times.

The other thing around this not leaning into perfection, just like kind of doing the thing anyway is just do the basics that you can.

For example, if you've got a program out there and you're like, I know I need a sales page, but I just don't have the bandwidth or the landing page software or I don't have a copywriter to make it polished for me…

How about you start with the Google Doc and how about you invite 10, 15, 20 people that you know who might be interested and you just start with the basics.

It's not perfect, but frankly, it never will be because here I am, 200 episodes into my freaking podcast and I still just last week I had another glitch, and there's my voice cracking, right?

IMPERFECT!

So doing it as basic as possible until you get better, know better, have more help, it's a total requirement.

Let's move on to my little number three.

This is a thing that I think you only learn when you just get started and keep doing it:

There is room in your life for only so much and you are going to know when something's not working anymore.

For example, remember I just talked about the different versions of my business accountability coach, business coach, then kind of general content.

Now I'm really just focused in on the kind of content that we do in ordinary regular times where we're not necessarily launching - I’m talking consistent content.

So if I kept on to that accountability version of myself when it didn't fit anymore, if I kept doing a program that just didn't fit me anymore, I would be miserable.

But the interesting thing is every time I've let go of something in my content or my business, let go of a platform, let go of a program, let go of a belief, it only has opened up room for more to come in.

How this could look for you?

Well, if you have decided you're just not feeling YouTube, it's just not a good space for your content, it's not working for you.

And you'd really love to lean more into, I don't know, blog writing, really using SEO to make those super rich blogs…

Well, where is your energy going and what can you let go of to lean into that?

Can you give yourself permission to do that? The more you can give yourself permission to let go of what's not working, the cooler and more amazing things that can happen in order to do that!

You really need to tap into your own intuition, your own feeling, like, what's happening in your body?

What are you resisting?

This always reminds me of the story when I was still a high school teacher. Actually, I had moved on from it when I was teaching high school, and then I was also teaching community college.

Every day I'd be in the shower washing my hair, thinking, would it be easier to go in and face the kids, or would it be easier to get a sub?

That was like an indication to me that something was wrong. Right?

Or that time in my first business when I felt jealous that a colleague of mine was a fitness business that I co-owned and another colleague in a different fitness business. She was selling her business, and I felt jealous.

And I was like, “Oh, I don't usually feel jealousy. This is an indication to me that I need to let go of something.”

Within four months, I had let go of that business and got myself out of it completely.

So the third lesson is, what can you let go of that's not working for you? It's not working.

Maybe the numbers aren't working. It's not converting.

But also it doesn't feel good to you.

Which leads me into my last piece, which I think I will die on this hill for the rest of my life:

How can you lean more into your YOUness? Because it doesn't matter what the trends are.


Knowing your YOUness and being more about what you stand for is probably the most important, confident, creating thing that you can do, especially when it comes to your content.

I'm going to go back to 2020 when everybody was on TikTok and we were all stuck at home and everything was about, you know, TikTok is fun and it's a lot of dancing and it's a lot of lip syncing, and it was a lot of pointing.

That is not necessarily the case anymore here in 2023, but in 2021, and a lot of the ‘22, a lot of people were still doing lip syncing, pointing, dancing, and I just was not having it.

It's not my personality. I wasn't ever going to do it.

And I really leaned into that. I just felt like it wasn't what I would authentically do, and I wasn't going to do it for some bullshit app that told me that that's the way it had to be. It wasn't how I was going to grow my business.

Here we are in 2023, and literally this week, the head honcho at Instagram has said we've leaned too much into video and we kind of overcorrected for video. And now we're going to try to balance out more static posts with video.

So is video still important? Sure. Yes. And they've realized they overcorrected for an emphasis on video.

If you go on to Reels or Shorts or TikTok or any of those anywhere where you're consuming content, you're seeing less and less of the trending sounds, where people are lip syncing and dancing.

And it's more, I think in 2023, what we're looking a lot more for is connection and storytelling.

You're going to have to lean into your voice, especially with AI really being at the center of so much of what we do.

So if you can lean more into what is a non negotiable for you, what is your voice?

Actually, next week, I have an amazing guest coming on talking all about how to find your voice and hone your voice and what the hell voice is. And I've talked about this before, but I actually have somebody who does this for a living coming on, and I'm super excited about that and how important all of this is in an AI world.

The more you can lean into not only how you want to show up, but the kind of work you want to do, like, what's a non negotiable for you anymore?

This year was another year I realized, like, “Oh, I love working with groups of people. I love working with people, but I don't want to hold space for a huge group of people.”

That just doesn't work with my personality or my energy. But I have lots of friends and colleagues who do that & it’s their superpower, and that's what they should be doing with their time, right?

They don't even do one to one work anymore, and I've gone back to one to one work.

So the more you can tune in and lean in to your YOUness, the thing that makes you special, the less pressure you're going to be putting on yourself.

Because I still remember those stupid TikToks, and I was like, I felt pressure that I was supposed to put those out there, and there was a pressure of like, but you don't want to. It was like an inner pressure and an outer pressure.

I don't want to, but I “should”.

The more you can stand in your integrity and be more authentic to what it means to be you, the less pressure you'll feel when creating content.

So, please celebrate my 200 episodes with me!

And also, what can you celebrate in your own life and your own business? What have you been doing that's working?

What are you going to let go of?

Because that's also something to celebrate.

I'm going to log off here today and just say, please start to acknowledge that you don't have to step into the pressure of content, content, content.

You can do less and impact more. And that's what I'm going to be talking about this year, how to have maximum impact with minimum content.

You don't have to do it in a way that doesn't feel good to you.

What would really feel good to me is if you could leave me a review.

It's so helpful for the algorithm speaking of AI, to help push my content out there and help more people who feel so stuck with their content…

who feel like they're wearing cement shoes with their content…

or like they're feeding the machine all the time or are doing shit they don't want to do.

I would appreciate that so much! I’ll see you next week with an amazing interview all about how to find your authentic voice and how that looks an AI world. I'll talk to you then.

Bye.