There are things I don’t like doing in my own content: creating REELS and pitching myself to the media.

The dislike comes from pure fear - so I put myself through two experiments:

1. Can I learn how to like Reels? Do I need to? And if so, will it have an impact on my business?
2. Can I find a way to pitch & tell my story to media, journalists, & other content creators? And if so, can I do it in a way that feels good to me?

In today’s Content Creation Made Easy podcast, I walk you through the discomfort I experience in learning how to make short form content & being in the media work for me…

PLUS talk about the positive outcomes/wins that I tracked - to see if it was worth it…

AND some encouragement for you to give something uncomfortable a try - but only in a way that feels right to you!

There’s so much fear around content creation, pitching, putting yourself out, there, sharing your expertise, and telling your stories.

Today’s podcast is all about sharing what’s working, what I’m afraid of, and how I’m making it work for me & my business!

I hope you can find some lessons to help you take action & grow your business with content that helps your audience CONNECT & covert to customers!

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Full Transcript

Hey, I'm really glad that you're here for episode 167 of the Content Creation Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, Jen Liddy, and I want to talk today about two kinds of hard things that I've been struggling with within my business that I've been talking about, and I'm going to talk, and I'm going to break them down for you today. 

So over the past couple of weeks, I have interviewed short-form content expert Nika Stewart, and last week, if you were tuned in, I talked to Adela Hussein, who is a pitching expert.

She helps people find the right stories and the right angles to get their stuff on other people's platforms and in front of journalists in the press. Those are two areas of my business that I always feel like I don't want to do short-form content, I don't like pitching myself, lots of reasons - I talk about them in therapy.

Ultimately, I'm not a huge fan of being like, hey, it's the Jen show, right? Because I have this identity as a teacher, I want to teach things, so that's what I've been exploring in my own business. 

So I want to dive into two experiences I had recently, one around short-form content, one about being seen in a piece of media that's not mine, and I want to talk about what I did to make it happen and how it felt and maybe some lessons that you can walk away with for yourself. 

First, let's talk about the short-form content piece - starting in March, I committed to doing a 28-day challenge to post a reel every day. Now I have a team, my assistant, Jessica, is an amazing tech and social media manager, and so she's always running stuff in the background, but I wanted to learn how to do reels for myself. 

I committed to learning the house, to having some prompts, and to dealing with my mindset, which was mostly like, this sucks, this is an extra thing to do, what can people learn in 5 seconds or 16 seconds, and I don't want to do this. There was a lot of heel digging in for me, so I had to get over that, and I jumped in on March 1st.

Let's talk about some of the results of me committing to doing this and finding a way for me to do it myself, so I want to start by saying I did not lip-sync, do not point and dance, and I do not do productions where there's costume changes. 

It's pretty much me talking to the camera because that's what feels comfortable for me. 

The other thing that I found feels comfortable for me is using b-roll or maybe a video of the sky or a video of a tree or some kind of b-roll in nature where I'm able to create like a lesson out of it with some text. Those are kind of where I settled into my comfort zone. 

Is there anything wrong with dancing?

No, I just feel like an idiot doing it!

But there are so many people out there who love to perform and are using these platforms to find their creativity. And I want to just say, if that's you, that's amazing, I just had to figure out a way to do it for myself, so I committed, and I showed up every day.

And here are some of the results: I started with 953 followers, which is not a lot of followers on Instagram, I've been on Instagram for a long time, and I've been hovering around this 900 level for a long time, and in the course of the 28 days, I got to just over 1000 people, so it's about 50 people growth.

Is it a lot of work for 50 people? Yes!

But I'm hoping that those people are coming because the content creation content that I'm doing is resonating with them, and I always look through my new followers to see if they're a bot or some dude with no pictures of the private thing and I just get rid of those people.

I feel like the people that I have now following me are actually real followers, so from 953 to just over 1000. The other thing that happened was my views went from about 46 to 96 up to 1000, 1300,1700, 2600 - and the reels are getting a lot of views. 

Remember, Instagram has got the wind at our backs and is pushing this stuff now, so I just decided to get on the surfboard and ride the waves, basically.

To see a video get 1500 views, that is incredibly gratifying to me. I have no interest in going viral - that's not what my goal was, my goal was to increase my confidence, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. 

But I did also see increased sales of a digital product that I have, which is called the batch and repurpose content planning system.

So in the system, people learn how to batch and repurpose their content in a way that feels good for them. It's like a $37 digital program, and I got increased sales of that because I was talking about it in my reels. 

So that, again, increased visibility and increased sales for a passive digital product. 

That was awesome!

Yes, you can grab your own version of that and learn how to customize a batching and repurposing system for you at https://www.jenliddy.com/batch.

The other cool thing was I saw my organic opt-ins increase by 25% and one of my big goals this year is to grow my email list because I love being on email so much.

I love my podcast, I love my emails - those are the two things that's where you'll find me the most, and I increased that by 25%, so was the challenge worth it for myself?

Hell yes, those are all the quantitative increases. 

But let's talk about the qualitative increases, like the personal improvements, the ones that aren't so measurable. I want to say that after doing a reel for 28 days in a row, I am now way less scared of video now. You might be like, Jen, how can you possibly be scared of video? You're on video all the time, you look at yourself all the time, and you always get pictures taken with your branding photographer. I know, but I still don't love looking at myself in video, and I still don't like to get on video and feel automatically comfortable. 

I want you to know I really focus on content creation, and this is still something that I have to work through all the time. I will say I am way less scared of video now, especially that short video, like 5 seconds, 16 seconds, 30 seconds, and I have learned how to say something really valuable that connects within that amount of time.

The other thing is I started to find my fun zone, and if you've been listening to me at all, you know, like, I really struggle with having fun. I just feel like I'm responsible, I'm a worker, I get my tasks done, I'm a very one on the Enneagram, but having fun is not my natural habitat. 

So I started to just have some fun - I started like no matter where I was, I would see something like, for example, I saw an escalator, and I just took a video of an escalator. I'm like, oh, there's so much I could do because content can feel like an endless escalator to nowhere, right? So I started to just like look for those kinds of things that I could use in my reels in a way that felt fun to me and not performative.

The other thing is there's nothing more imperfect than showing up on video and doing it in a short form, but you might be looking at other people doing this with costume changes and immaculate editing and production and beautiful lighting, and amazing background. And you might be thinking I can't do my short-form content or anything until I have it looking like that. Again, I want to say another benefit I have found in personal improvement is I am just really leaning into that imperfect, get it out there, people will connect with you if you don't show up perfectly. 

That's a struggle for me that I've been working with, and I'm finding like, I'm taking more risks. Like, I'm saying things that maybe people won't like, or maybe people will be like, oh, I don't agree with that, and that's fine because then you can unfollow. 

I want to do more of repelling the people who aren't for me and attracting the people who care for me, and experimenting with reels has helped me do that.

That is the first thing I want to talk about - it's important to do things your way, but it's important to do things, especially when it comes to content, we have to show up. If you are waiting to be perfect or have the production value be incredibly high, or learn how to do it at a level that doesn't feel comfortable for you, you're not going to do it, so you need to create content.

You need to connect with your people, why not do it in a way that feels good for you? 

Let's talk about the next thing, which is getting your stuff out there in front of the world on other people's media. So I got invited in March, thanks to a connection, my photographer, to get into the Syracuse Women's magazine, it's a paper magazine that comes out once a month. It's very locally focused, and the photographer, Alice Patterson, does a beautiful job with the covers every single month. 

She suggested me to the Editors, and then a writer called me and interviewed me, and I want to be really clear. I'm like, why in the world would I be on the cover with anything? My story isn't that special, I don't have a rags to riches hero's journey - I'm just an entrepreneur who used to be a teacher, and that's kind of my story, like, I have this zigzaggy story. 

I'm going to talk about zigzagging later on in the podcast, but I want to just talk to you like, your story is not probably that special to you because you're like the frog in the water who the water has boiled around, and you haven't noticed it happening.

Your story is special, but it's not special to you because you've been living it and breathing it. 

Now maybe you think, like, I have a really incredible story, I have a story of incredible courage, and if that is you, I'm so happy for you, but if you're like me, my story is just kind of, like, basic and boring and not inspiring I just want you to take note of what I'm about to say.

You have lived your story for so long, you've just been kind of grinding along and going along, and maybe you don't see what makes you special, what makes you a unicorn, what makes you inspiring and motivational to other people. 

If that is the case, here's a suggestion, I want you to get with a friend and tell your story, and it could be a story about anything, because I'm finding the more I tell these stories about things that were very normal in my life, the more I'm realizing, like, oh, it's kind of special.

Let me give you some examples, the story that wound up being printed in the magazine is how I went from being an English teacher to being an entrepreneur and everything that happened in between. It was very zigzagging, and all of it kind of snowballed together to make me who I am today, specializing in what I specialize in today, but I don't see it as anything special.

It's just what I did! 

Another example is I was talking to a therapist, and we were talking about, like, the food story. All of us have these little personally expressive stories about different parts of our lives, like our money story, maybe our food story, maybe an abuse story, maybe a relationship story. 

We have these stories that we don't really think about because they're just how it went for us. But I was talking specifically about the food story and the money story of how I grew up and what it was like money wise when I was growing up and what it was like food-wise when I was growing up and when I was growing up, there was never enough of either of those two things.

We didn't have any money, we didn't have enough food, and our food was hidden from us, and money was kind of this secret thing. I was just talking about these two things with this therapist, and they seemed to be very separate, and I could see how they kind of came together.

And that my very zigzagged journey, both with money and food, has caused a lot of little t trauma, drama, pain, discomfort in my life, and how we were basically talking about ways to overcome that, but it was a story that I had. 

I feel like we don't examine our own stories enough, or we don't give our stories enough credit, because sometimes our stories are just not that heroic or exciting or dramatic. 

I just want you to know that even if you don't have some incredibly dramatic story that took an incredible amount of courage in your mind, somebody else can resonate with that, and it is your story.

And all of the things that you've done along the way have snowballed to make this story yours and personal and interesting and incredible.

I know that you are probably listening to me right now thinking, no, Jen, you don't really understand, my life is very boring, it's been very straight now, and I want to say it really hasn't.

There have been pieces and parts along the way that when you pull them apart, you're like, oh, this is my perspective and my thing that happened to me. I was really resistant to getting interviewed for this story because I seriously thought like, what in the world could be interesting about a teacher who became an entrepreneur? 

Then when the guy interviewed me, and I told the story, I was like, oh, I can see that this isn't a choice that everybody would have made or everybody could have made, and the twists and turns that I've taken in the pivots and the swivels and the hard rights and the hard left, like, those are not things that everybody would have taken, so it does make it my story. 

I'm just hoping that somebody out there can resonate with it and say, hey, I really want to do my thing, and I'm going to do it my way, and this story inspires me. 

This is the place where I tell you to start thinking about your story, and if you can't do it yourself, sit down with somebody else and pick one little piece of your life to tell your story to somebody else. Now pick somebody who's a really good listener, pick somebody who can hear you and ask the good questions and doesn't jump in with their story or like topping you just who in your life could hear your story?

And if there's nobody, then I want you to start thinking about saying your story into the recorder on your phone, saying it into a Zoom call where you sit by yourself and you just tell the story and do all the things that go along with that story or write it down your story - it deserves to be told. 

It really does because we all have a story that inspires somebody else. 

I mean, if nothing else, your kids, your family members, your best friend, there's stuff that people want to know about your story because it helps inform who you are now and how you like to be related to. And when you can tell your story in front of somebody else, then it helps you earn that media, right?

Then you get to be on other people's podcasts and other people's masterminds, where you'll be able to share your story or write your book or be in a magazine or be on a news broadcast. 

That might not be your goal, but I do want you to know when it comes to even the content that you're posting in a reel or in an email, or in a blog, your story is important to the people who care about you. 

These are the two things I want you to take away from today: get started doing something that scares you a little bit, for me, that was real. Get started telling your story, even just about one little piece of your life or your business or your journey. Just get started doing it in a safe way with a safe person, and I promise you, you're going to be like, oh, this is a thing, and all of those little things weave together. 

I was kind of saying to my son just yesterday, I'm like your story is like a snowball that gathers up leaves and pebbles and snow and ice, and it just gathers and gathers and gathers as it rolls down the hill, and it's all part of the story that is you. 

And if you aren't doing that for yourself, you're thinking you're so boring, you're thinking there's nothing to share. I just want to encourage you to do something that scares you a little bit and to have a place or a person to witness it for you. 

It's really very powerful, and when I got actually just last night, I got the hard copy of the magazine, and it was hard to look at because I'm like I'm on the cover of a magazine, it's just so silly, but I'm trying to receive it and say thank you to everybody who made that happen and thank you to the people who care about the story.

Thank you to you, the listeners, and viewers of the podcast because the fact that you show up every week and want to listen to something I have to say is an incredible honor that I just do not take for granted, so I hope this has been a helpful episode for you.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me, my email address is [email protected] .

If you have a story that you want to tell or this resonated with you, I would really love to hear what your thoughts are about everything that I shared today in the podcast. 

Doing something scary for me, doing it imperfectly, letting my confidence increase, and receiving the fact that other people might be interested in my story, and I ask you to do the same. 

Thanks for showing up. I'll see you next week. 

Bye.