November 2018 Archives

How I Deal with Body Image and Fear of Being on Camera

How I Deal with Body Image and Fear of Being on Camera

A lot of people may not know this about me, but I have insecurities about being on camera even though I speak on stage and have a weekly Facebook show.

No matter how much I do it, I still have doubt about how I look and what I sound like.

I know this may be stopping a lot of you from getting in front of the camera, which can hinder your ability to reach your audience.

In today’s episode, I share the tactics I use to deal with my body image, fear of being on camera, and what people are actually doing when they watch your videos.

Are you scared to go live and create content because of your body image? Let me know about it in the comments below.

 

Subscribe to Facebook and YouTube to get instant updates when new episodes are posted!

Video Transcript

Hey guys, today I want to talk to you about image, more importantly, being afraid of getting in front of the camera.

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I actually have a lot of insecurity about coming to you via video. Even though I have an entire Facebook Live show.

I go live on Facebook all the time and I even got up and spoke in front of 3,500 people at Funnel Hacking Live this year. I still struggle with all kinds of fears and insecurity about how I look about how I talk and about my weight.

I know there are a lot of you out there that are not going live on Facebook that are not doing video content because you’re afraid of how you look.

I wish I had some magic bullet, golden nugget thing that would help reach through the camera and like take your insecurity away, but I don’t have it and that’s because I’m still working through it.

Every time I get in front of the camera I have to do the self-talk of like, it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong. Yes, maybe I look different than I want or I’m heavier than I want, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have something of value to bring to the world.

I also remember that people pay a lot less attention to you than you do to you.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the video and absolutely hated it and I’ll show it to Alex or friends or colleagues and nobody sees the things that I see.

I can pick out at least 15 imperfections and some of you watching might think I’m crazy, right? Because you’ll be like, of course, Julie, you look fine, you look great, but I can assure you that if you got on camera, I would say the same about you.

I hope that provides a little reassurance. I know it does. For me, I know that at the end of the day that the value I bring to the world is far more important than how I look or what clothes I’m wearing.

But it’s really hard to hold onto that truth when the media and frankly my industry, the marketing industry paints a different picture right?

You see it everywhere, you perfectly, you know, photoshop, selfies, even something like as cool as you know, Kate Middleton, having a baby and coming out of the hospital seven hours later looking better than I do on my best day.

There’s a lot of pressure for us to look amazing all the time, but it’s not attainable and it’s not real life.

What I can do is say to you that you are going to be more valuable to your followers when you show up authentically as you are than worrying and obsessing about what your weight is like or how you sound or how you talk or what you’re wearing.

And know that even the most put together of Gurus are probably hiding some pretty significant insecurities if you look below the surface.

I would love to know what you think about all this. I would love to know if you’re not going live or not doing video because you’re scared and feeling insecure. If you are, please comment below. Let me know what’s going on and know that I too am still struggling.

Even right now. I’m acutely aware of the things that are not perfect about the shot or about how I look, but I’m going to do it anyway and I hope you will too.

And as always, the best conversations happen after the camera stops rolling. So if you have any thoughts or you want to see more videos like this, you can go to Juliestoian.com.

3 Tips for Parents Who Work From Home

3 Tips for Parents Who Work From Home

When you become a parent, figuring out how to successfully work from home is a feat many strive for.

There are many benefits to working from home, such as…

  • Participating in school or outside activities.
  • Getting to spend quality time with your kids throughout the day, and not just during the bedtime routine.
  • Witnessing and celebrating their milestones.

But there are also challenges with that luxury. Things like…

  • Not having boundaries for work hours.
  • Figuring out how to handle interruptions during live calls or presentations.
  • Making time for daily chores around the house.

In this lifestyle episode, I dive into why I decided to pursue a laptop life and the top 3 tips I recommend to parents working from home.

 

Subscribe to Facebook and YouTube to get instant updates when new episodes are posted!

Video Transcript:

So he is one of the reasons that I actually embarked on the laptop life. He’s got two modes. He’s got either ignore us or completely steal the camera.

When I had my side gig and I got divorced, what really propelled me into this “I need to make this laptop life work for me” was my pregnancy with William.

I had a very difficult time finding a job while pregnant. And I also knew that once he was born I would want to nurse him and I just knew that being home was necessary if I want it to be the kind of mom I wanted to be.

All of that said, it’s actually really hard to be a mom and an entrepreneur at the same time.

And I feel like there are a lot of struggles and this goes for dads too, not just moms. Moms and Dads, but the people who choose to stay home and work from home, you get so many benefits. But there’s also worlds of distraction and it’s hard.

It takes a while for your family to adjust. I remember when William was born and Alex, my husband was taking care of him during the day. It was hard for Alex and William to adjust to the fact that just because I was three feet away didn’t mean that I could just be interrupted at any time.

And so a lot of advice I’ve given out to moms and dads over the years who are starting their laptop life and it is to make sure that even if you do work in the living room or in the dining room, you have a dedicated space where it’s, “I can’t be disturbed.”

You just don’t want your clients and your customers to feel like your brain is only half there and you need to be able to concentrate.

And so as much as we want to enjoy this lifestyle of, “oh, we’re just sitting here on the laptop while the kids all play on the floor,” we all know that that’s not reality. Right?

And so the first thing I did was make sure I had a dedicated space. And then the second thing, and this goes really well for toddlers, parents of toddlers, if you keep just a few toys that they don’t get, I mean you can see there’s like toys all over my living room right now, but those few toys that they don’t get unless they’re at your desk or in your office, if there are ever times when you have to just deal with them.

I remember Alex got stuck somewhere and I was on a Webinar, I was on a meeting and William just had to be right there with me.

Pull open that drawer and take out those secret toys because parents, you guys know that kids find new toys interesting.

That was another thing that I did that worked really, really well. Eventually, I needed help and now I have a nanny.

My husband doesn’t work full time anymore. Once you get to the point where you’re really scaling a business that’s multi-six and seven figures, you really need to think about hiring out those things that may feel luxurious at first.

I remember when I hired my nanny and I asked her to also do some cooking and I hired a housekeeper, I thought, “well, I can do this stuff.”

But at the end of the day, if I’m spending time in my business, the time out of my business, I want to spend focused on my kids and my spouse, and so all of those other activities are distracting me from that quality time that I can have.

So if you’re a mom or a dad and you are trying to live your laptop life, that’s exactly what I was doing before my business blew up and that’s what I’m still doing today.

I’ve created a community of people who are living their laptop life. It’s called Create Your Laptop Life and it’s a community and weekly coaching with me where you can ask any question about your online business.

There’s tons of training and I invite you to check that out. I give people a $1 trial for two weeks. Come check it out.

There’s almost a thousand members, other moms, and dads, entrepreneurs like you living their laptop life in the midst of the chaos, and I would love for you to be a part of it.

As always, if you have any questions at all, just leave them in the comments below or you can check out more at Juliechenell.com. I’ll talk to you guys soon.

traffic secrets to grow your business

Episode 25: Traffic Secrets To Grow Your Business

I just came back from the Traffic Secrets event in Phoenix and want to share some key takeaways for your business.

Subscribe On:

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Subscribe on Stitcher

Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, hope you’re doing amazing. I just got back from Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve been there for the last four days. I was at Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets event. For those of you who don’t know, Russell Brunson runs the famous coaching program, Two Comma Club X. I’m one of his head coaches and I went out to Phoenix to listen to him talk for two days all about traffic and if you run an online business, you know that traffic is life. Traffic is like oxygen for your business. So I was there with the express purpose of taking notes on all of his talks because these talks are going to become the outline and the content for his new book, which is coming out late next year in 2019.



So I thought what I would do today is give you a few of the nuggets and the quotables that I got sitting there, paying attention, taking pages and pages of notes because I will be ghostwriting this book, helping him get it out to the world. And I thought you guys probably want to know some of the cool things I learned.

Alright, so I’m going to give you just a few because there are so many. It was very hard to narrow down what to talk about today on the podcast, but these are the things that really hit me in a new way.

I work with Russell Brunson every single day. I have been in online business for a long time. I have my own customers. I know traffic, I understand how to move people through funnels, and yet there was something about this particular event that really brought back the fundamentals for me.

And the biggest fundamental is that traffic is just people. I think whenever marketers start talking about things like ads and lead flow, traffic, we get all this technobabble, right? And it’s a shame because traffic isn’t really an elusive graph. It’s not a pie chart. It’s not click-through rates or earnings per click.

Traffic is people, human beings.

So if you want to learn how to master the game of traffic, you have to master people. That’s it. Because when you can understand people and you can understand how they behave, how they congregate, how they buy, then you can master the traffic game.

Another thing that I learned that you know I’ve known but it was simplified for me, was that there are two types of traffic behavior. There is search and interruption.

One is based on need and one is based on desire.

It’s hard for me to keep this short for you, but search traffic are people who are searching, right? So like if you’re on Amazon or if you’re using Google or Pinterest or YouTube, people are searching based on need. They know they need something. Either they need a solution or they need to figure out what the solution is to their problem, but it’s driven by need.

Search-based traffic has its advantages because people are usually hot to buy. They’re ready for an answer. The downside is that search-based traffic typically will compete on price.

The second type of traffic is the interruption and that this is based on desire. In order to really master interruption marketing, what you have to understand is where are these people just hanging out? Right?

We call them scrollers, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Instagram, we’re going to interrupt them with our marketing and we’re going to pull them into our funnel. But in this case, it’s not really pulled by need. It’s pulled by desire.

I thought that was just a super simple way to understand the difference between a traffic strategy on YouTube where people are going to be searching for an answer versus a traffic strategy on Facebook where they’re going to be scrolling in a hangout situation and you need to interrupt them and woo them through desire.

Next, Russell talks a ton about the Dream 100. And if you don’t know what the Dream 100 is, unfortunately in internet circles it’s kind of been watered down a little bit by saying, “oh well the Dream 100 is just a list of 100 people that are big influencers that you want to attract. And so you mail them things in the mail and hopes that they’ll become friends with you and maybe help you leverage their business.

That’s like one percent of the Dream 100. At this event, we really used the Dream 100 as kind of the foundation of every traffic strategy paid and organic. That was kind of an Aha.

So the Dream 100 is really a list of a hundred congregations of humans that are already gathered in one spot under a particular influencer. I’m going to say that again.

The Dream 100 is a list of a hundred congregations of humans that are already gathered in one place under a particular influencer.

So this could be under in a group, on a page, and a podcast. We’re looking for the influencer that has created a congregation of humans and has them in one spot.

That’s it, and that becomes the foundation of your entire traffic strategy. Because if you’re going to run paid ads, you want to run it to that congregation of humans, right? You want to run ads to Tony Robbins followers or to Russell Brunson’s followers. If it’s an organic strategy, you’re going to want to hang out and invest your time and your posts and your platform to attract those people.

I guess that kind of leads into my next point, which is, you know, your owner show your own platform, your own social media presence is the best way to test your material because every offer that you have that you want to sell is going to have multiple stories that you will use to sell it.

And every story has multiple hooks. And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so true. Every offer has multiple stories and every story has multiple hooks.

Just like a comedian who tests his jokes over and over before finding the best ones. How are you going to know which story or which hook resonates with the congregation that you’re speaking to at that time?

So if I’m selling something like let’s say Create Your Laptop Life, my membership community, if I’m selling that and I go to an influencer who has a big group of virtual assistants, I’m going to tell a story about being a virtual assistant that’s going to resonate with them, that’s going to pull them in differently than if I’m speaking on the Funnel Hacking Live stage and I’m speaking to all of the funnel builders who want to have a laptop life. It’s totally a different story based on the congregation. So you need your own show and platform to really be able to test that material.

The next thing that I thought was amazing was Russell was talking about how in when you retarget, right? When you follow up with people, these are people who get into your funnel and then for whatever reason fall out. So retargeting through ads, retargeting through email, any kind of retargeting traffic campaigns, should hit three hot spots in the prospect, the emotional close, the logical close and scarcity and urgency.

So when you’re creating an ad campaign for your funnel, do you have a retargeting ad that hits that emotional close? Is it a case study or a testimonial? Do you have an ad that’s a logical close, which is with evidence or stats or reasoning to help you know, kind of support the decision to buy and do you have urgency and scarcity, some sort of ad that has doors closing. You really need to hit all three points for an effective retargeting strategy when people fall out of your funnel.

Lastly, what someone sees or feels before they get to your funnel is as important as the funnel itself. So the content that you put out on social media, whether it’s an organic post or a paid ad, doesn’t matter. It is the frame under which someone buys.

I know that sounds kind of nebulous, but if I give you an example, when you introduce a friend, right? Hey, this is my friend Amy and Amy saved my life and Amy took care of my kids when I was sick and, and Amy was there for me in all these ups and down moments. You’re going to like Amy because of how I framed her versus if I said, hey, here’s Amy. She stole all my money and had an affair with my husband, right?

Now you’re going to hate her. So the frame matters. Everything you put out into the world on social media creates a frame and it determines whether or not the prospect is going to buy once they get to the page.

So if you have ads and people aren’t buying but they’re clicking, there’s obviously something about the ad that’s resonating, but it’s not framing the sale correctly so that when they get to the page, they fall off. Now of course, what’s on the page matters too, but I think people forget framing a lot when they’re doing traffic strategies.

That’s just like three or four nuggets of days and days. I’m throwing out a little tease here that Traffic Secrets is coming probably not till September of 2019, so you have a little ways to go.

However it is going to be an amazing book because it’s not just the technobabble, it’s not just about what are the latest and greatest tactics because at the end of the day, tactics change every five minutes and you know if you are on Facebook or Instagram, things get updated constantly. Zuckerberg decides he’s going to change the algorithm or he doesn’t like a certain type of business and it’s over.

So it’s important to remember that traffic is people that you can find congregations of people through the Dream 100 and create an entire paid and organic traffic strategy around that one concept that will immunize you from all of the ups and downs of algorithms and fickle social media and new platforms that come and go. So I hope that was helpful for you guys. Have an amazing day and I appreciate you and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.