Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - Jasmine Star’s Podcast Strategy for Smashing Business Goals

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Today’s interview with Jasmine Star will blow your socks off. There is just so much meaty goodness that I can’t wait to share with you.   I originally wanted to talk to Jasmine because she is the queen of Instagram — literally every business owner I know follows her — and I knew she’d share really good strategic and tactical advice to make Instagram work better for you. We do talk about this, but...   I’m even more excited to share how Jasmine used her podcast to make her latest launch of Social Curator such a smashing success.   In case you don’t know, Social Curator, which I’m a member of, helps small business owners elevate their social media presence and overall strategy for doing business on social.   In this episode, you will learn: how Jasmine used her podcast to prime people to buy during her latest launch of Social Curator; her podcast strategy, including who her ideal listener is and the kind of content Jasmine’s creating to help and empower her — and how this content is evolving; the difference between Jasmine’s free and paid content; The importance of having an email list to nurture your audience, and more.   And, we talk about Instagram, of course, and Jasmine shares a strategy to help us stay consistent on social media and tells us how to talk about our business without hard selling people all the time.   Are you a business owner who wants to use your podcast to make your next launch even more successful? Download my Business Pre-Launch Podcast Strategy Cheatsheet. *** Hello. I’m Sarah, your host and founder of Podcast Launch Academy. Are you ready to launch a podcast that builds your brand and business, connects you to your global community, and grows your influence? Visit sarahmikutel.com to see how we can work together. Here’s a special treat for you: Use my Buzzsprout affiliate link to sign up for their podcast media hosting and get a $20 Amazon gift certificate. I’ve gotten to know the Buzzsprout team over this last year and love their customer service so much, I moved my shows over there. sarahmikutel.com/buzzsproutDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

The podcast converted the highest. So now my focus, now my focus is like, now that I know that the podcast is small, small, small group converts really well. I need to go deeper with my podcast crew and say, let me speak to in a very different way because they are the most prime to become a customer. Have you been wanting to start a podcast for a while now, but something's holding you back? Maybe it's fear of putting yourself out there or confusion about the technology. I'm Sarah Micatel and on podcasting step by step, I'll break down how to podcast with a little loving motivation to give you the skills and the confidence you need to finally launch that show of your dreams. Let's get started. Today's interview with Jasmine Star is going to knock your socks off.

There is just so much meaty goodness that I cannot wait to share with you. And I originally wanted to talk to Jasmine because she is known as the queen of Instagram. Literally every business owner I know is following her. And I knew that she would share some really great strategic and tactical advice to make Instagram work better for you. And we do talk about this. But I am even more excited to share how Jasmine used her podcast to make her latest launch of Social Curator a smashing success. In case you don't know, Social Curator, which I'm a member of, helps small business owners elevate their social media presence and overall social strategy for doing business on social media. In this episode, you will learn how Jasmine used her podcast to prime people to buy during

her latest launch of social curator, her podcast strategy, including who her ideal listener is, and the kind of content Jasmine is creating for her to help her and empower her and how this content is evolving. Jasmine also talks about the difference between her free content and her paid content, the importance of having an email list to nurture your audience and more. We get into so much stuff. Of course, we're going to talk about Instagram and Jasmine shares her strategy to help us stay more consistent. And she also shares how we can talk about our business without always talking about our business and hard selling people all the time. All right, are you ready? Let's dive into my conversation with Jasmine. Welcome, Jasmine. Thank you so much for joining me on podcasting step by step.

you. I'm so excited to be here. I think I've said I'm so excited 18 times already. So forgive me for the repetitiveness. I'm so excited. Okay. So you are a business strategist, but you're also known as the expert at Instagram, like the go-to for entrepreneurs, especially female entrepreneurs. You have almost 400,000 followers on Instagram. I want you to take me back to younger Jasmine. What was 10-year-old Jasmine like? Oh, 10-year-old Jasmine was. Oh my gosh. Okay, let me go back to 10 because I actually didn't learn how to read until I was 11. So I remember probably 10 year old Jasmine was struggling to learn how to read. I was homeschooled and I was also struggling with my weight. I was obese as a child. And so this is where things like really kicked into high gear. I think that I turned to food as a way to cope with being behind the curve. My family was very poor. My parents are immigrant. My father's an immigrant. And so I think that food was the kind of. constant in my life. And so me and government issued peanut butter were like best friends. Like it's not like

PBNJ. Yeah, it's PBNJ. It's PBN Jasmine. That's how I rolled. And so I think I was a watcher. I was a looker. I think there is a power of being a wallflower. I started understanding the way that humans behaved with each other. And I didn't know then that I know now is that's probably the strongest thing that I have as an entrepreneur is understanding human behavior from a watcher's perspective. And then now as I'm an adult, and a strategist, I could watch, see, synthesize, and then deploy what I'm watching and seeing. That is so much to overcome. I mean, and I think that you're like a lover of reading right now. Oh, obsessed. Yeah, yeah. But you've mentioned that you're an observer and you went on to become a photographer. Could you tell us how you got there? Yes. And I always believe that like life will

give you breadcrumbs and they ultimately guide you to where you're supposed to go. So the childhood behaviors and mannerisms that I unknowingly and knowingly practiced really empowered me to do the same, but with a camera. And so I graduated at the top of my class. I went to the college on a full right scholarship and ended up in law school on a full rights scholarship. And I ended up dropping out my first year when my mom had a relapse with brain cancer. And it was really, at the time, I dropped out because I needed to be with her.

Doctors had set her time had come. She had an eight-year battle with cancer. and it was time for us to make funeral arrangements. And so when the singular person, like the person who's been your North Star, realizes that we probably have a couple months left together, everything changed as a result. And it was during this time that it forced me to reconcile how short life is. And I realized during this time that I wasn't doing something I loved.

I wasn't doing something that let me up. I was doing something because I felt like I had to or it was safe or this is what the daughter of an immigrant does. You get educated. That's how you get out of the hood. This is how you change your life. When in all actuality, I think that the only thing my parents ever desired for their children was to do something that made them happy and fulfilled. And it was during this time that I didn't want to go back to law school. And I made this like broad declaration that I wanted to become a photographer. And I had never owned a camera. And I think that was the start of really living a life of impossibilities and then figuring out how to make an impossibility a possible.

possibility, and I leverage that with free resources, things like social media, things like Google, things like tutorials that people were putting out on YouTube, and this is exactly what I champion. You don't need a lot of money. You don't need a lot of education. You can become a leader in your field by leveraging what you're learning for free on the internet and sharing it generously with others. So I've seen a few videos of you. I haven't had the pleasure to see you on stage yet, but I've seen videos of you on stage. And you command the room like nobody I've seen. You have such a great mixture of storytelling, but then also instruction and tactics people can take back to their businesses. How did you develop these skills?

By harnessing the same thing I did as a child, and that was watching, watching and analyzing and synthesizing. So far before I ever stepped on a stage, I had been in rooms consuming content. And when I had first the ability to step in front of people, now albeit it, it was, a stage of four or five thousand. It was a stage of four or five people. I'll never forget. I was invited to speak to a group of photographers in San Diego, California, and I was just nervous. I was excited. I was honored. And the one thing that I did in preparation of that event was really to understand what had resonated with me being the person sitting in the chair. And then I just started to like, right, like I liked personal stories. I really liked tactical things. I was never a feel good

person. Like, I do not want to pay money to sit in a chair to feel good about myself. Like, I want to pay money to learn something so then I can go and do. And that has then become the benchmark of, can I infuse personal elements into my story? Because since the dawn of human time, the way that we have, we as humans have learned, is by way of storytelling. So how then do I infuse powerful storytelling, not at the benefit of making me feel good, but helping listeners contextualize what I'm trying to say and then giving them a set of steps to go and deploy after. So the first time that I spoke and shared in front of like four or five people, it was pretty terrible, you know? I mean, I was, I was kind of bad. I was sweaty

palmed. I was talking in circles. And lo and behold, that, you know, your inadequacies can be completely covered when people actually learn something. And so if I hadn't given away tactical information, I don't think that my name would have been passed around to other groups. And so, you know, over the course of a year, two, five, a decade later, that those groups of four or five turned into groups of 20, 40, a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand over the years. And so it is just a practice craft. And everybody who starts at something new sucks. And then you get better. And this is the thing. People quit in the suck. And it's like, you just have to sit in the suck. And you have to just like absorb the suck, figure out what to learn from the suck.

and keep on doing it until you don't suck anymore. But that's like a life principle. That's not just an Instagram. We're talking on stage principle. Right. So could you share maybe some tactics that you've learned while speaking publicly that you're using on your podcast that other people could put into practice? The same thing.

And that is for me, the types of podcast I like to consume. And furthermore, the barometer isn't what makes me feel good or what makes, you know, know, my friends feel good when they listen to my podcast. It's who is my dream customer? Because the podcast to do a podcast, it really is coming from a derivative of two things. It's either, I just want to create for creation's sake and I just want to use it as like an audio journal, which is amazing if you have the time and bandwidth. I am not afforded that luxury because I decided to use a podcast and use valuable time to create the podcast in relation to my business, as a funnel to my business, as a bridge to my business, I have to be extraordinarily strategic. So my

dream customer is who I'm creating the podcast for. And while my dream customer is somewhat interested, maybe kind of sort of in what I'm doing on a personal level, she is far more concerned with what I'm doing in a professional way, infusing personal elements. So if you were to listen to my podcast, we really focus on tactical things that listeners can do immediately following the podcast, but also infusing my personal perspective and personal applications within my business to make sure that people can contextualize why and what I'm asking them to do. Is your ideal customer still L? It is. Yes, she is. Can you share her story? Absolutely. So I really, like normally, I don't go in saying this is my dream customer. Normally, ah, so this goes back clearly, Sarah, into storytelling, right?

So normally what I say, and you will see me do this. Now that I've pointed out, you're going to see me do it a thousand times over. I usually will stand on the stage or I'll go into a podcast. I'm like, I want to introduce you to somebody. So you see, her name is L. and she's 33 years old, and she lives in Manhattan Beach, California. And she has two sons, ages three and five. And she's married to her college sweetheart, and he is a lawyer who works at his dad's law firm. And Elle grew up in Ohio, California, just south of Santa Barbara, at her dad's goat ranch. It was there driving around in his 1954 Ford truck that she would collect flowers all along the farm,

and she would drive them and press them. She ended up getting admission to UCLA, and it was there during her senior year that she rented a loft in downtown Los Angeles and began creating something from her heart, and that was goat milk soap based on the resources that she had from her Dodd's farm and her being able to build out something that was made from her heart. She would then create goat's milk soap and press dried flowers on top of them, and she was selling them at local farmers markets. It was there at the Manhattan Beach Farmers Market that a buyer from anthropology comes

across her soaps and asks, would she like to do a pop-up shop in a local and nearby anthropology? It's at that time that Elle realizes she doesn't necessarily have a hobby that she has the potential for a business. And because she has the potential for a business, she needs to know how to market her business online. And that is how she comes across my content. That is how she comes across my podcast. It's how she comes across my Instagram lives. It's how she comes across my YouTube videos. So every time I put out a piece of content, podcast to a video, to, to alive, I'm thinking, does this help Elle? Does it help Elle discover me? Does it help Elle move her business forward? And does it empower Elle to make big and massive changes in her businesses,

in her business to take it from a hobby into a career? And I love that you're using the verb help, because you're not saying, you know, is this going to entertain Elle or is this going to just, you know, you want to like specifically help her get her job done? If we can sit there for a second, Sarah, that you will have heard me interchange or strategically use two words, help and empower. So I want to make sure that we draw the distinction because some of my content is to help. Help means I'm going to walk you through it with you. I do a lot of that on the inside of social curator. We have challenges. We have accountability. Empower means I'm going to tell you how to do it. You're going to have to figure it out yourself. And I have to make sure that

the content that I'm putting out comes in two ways because when I am helping, when I'm taking more time to think and be closer and draw affinities closer to my paid members, I want to make sure that I'm offering more resources around that to ensure that there is a distinction between my free content and the paid content. I think that's a lot of question that a lot of people have. What should be free and what should be paid? Could you just speak a little bit more to that? Absolutely. And listen, you can ask 10 people this question and you're going to get 10 different answers, 10 different ways. and I can only really talk about what I have done. And my entire career, even before I knew it was a career,

the only thing I knew how to do was to share what I had been learning. Openly, candidly, authentically, and 100%. I was sharing what I learned. And unbeknownst to me that that became the benchmark and the foundation of my business moving forward. So it would seem counterintuitive for the thing that got me to this point, for it to be the thing I no longer. do. And so I am an average proponent of sharing everything you know. And Sarah, I know that you are

on the inside of social curator, but before you were a curator, you were just, I'm guessing, a viewer, a consumer, watching. And so I don't think, and you could correct me, I mean, hey, I love going toe to toe. I love hearing feedback. But I just don't think that what I'm saying on the inside of social curator is different, but what we're doing is providing resources, no excuses, accountability, coaching. These are all things that I do not do on the outside. So am I sharing anything different? No. Am I doing it differently? Am I closer? Am I providing turnkey solutions? Yes. And that's become my line of differentiation for what goes out on the outside, which is everything versus what I sell on the inside. It's a deeper relationship. It's a

It's accountability and it's also the resources so that people can actually do, do, do, and then do some more. The accountability is huge in my own podcasting course that I have. I think our once a week accountability sessions are the most popular thing. I think that's so important. So for people who don't know what social curator is, what is it? It is a monthly membership for business owners to build a brand and market on social media. So like what does that mean in like regular talk?

It means we provide resources for people not to make excuses. We believe everybody should be showing up on social media every day for consistency. Because consistency is the way you grow. It isn't by going viral. It isn't having the most gorgeous photo with the most perfect words that you're posting once every other week. We know that consistency is queen. How you grow, how you go deep, how you get your followers to become customers is to show

up in their feed every single day to continue conversations, not about your business, but about what your business does for them. It is giving value and benefits and reminding them that they have all the tools to succeed and your product or service can help them get them to the next level. Let's talk about how to help people show up more consistently. So I really love your system for photos and captions. So you strategically use photo and caption categories. Can you walk us through that process? Yes. Okay. So we break that up on the inside of social curator. We break it up as photo topics and categories. So photo topics are things that you want to show that represent visual pieces of your business. For example, some of my photo topics are my dog. Like how,

what does my dog have anything to do with my business? I'm going to find a way to incorporate that by way of categories. We'll get there in a second. Another one of my photo topics is coffee. Like I don't make a coffee. I don't sell coffee. I don't roast beans. But I incorporate coffee. I incorporate the books I am reading. I incorporate my family to show visually what I do and who I am. Now, categories. Categories empower you to talk about your business without having to sell your business. Oftentimes, business owners will use Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter to just

say, buy the thing I'm selling. You can't keep on showing up only to sell. The way that you sell is to give value and benefits. And you do this by way of categories, talking about your business without having to sell your business, keeping that conversation going until you're ready to fully commit and ask for the sale. Give us a coffee caption example that ties back to your business. So we're at the time of this recording, we're recording on a Monday. And if I wanted to go on Instagram and take a picture of my coffee this morning, and you're wondering, how does Jasmine

connect coffee to being the CEO of social curator? I can take this in three different directions. Number one, I can give coffee its rightful place in my life. I call coffee my productivity juice. On Mondays, as the CEO of Social Curator, I have a day full of meetings making sure that the team is standing in our purpose. Our purpose is to empower business owners to have the confidence and the resources to show up on social media every day. I didn't sell Social Curator.

I talked about Social Curator, but I also incorporated coffee as the productivity juice around what empowers me to be the CEO that I want to be. Yeah, and that blend is key. So like you said, people are either selling or they're saying, hmm, I love coffee. And then that's it. Right. And they don't bring any business in. No, you forgot. I love coffee. Hashtag yum. Okay. What do I say about that? So you recommend having like a certain number of photo categories, certain number of caption categories. And then can we mix and match them? Can you get a little more granular on that? Yeah. So we have photo topics and we have caption categories. We recommend having any anywhere from nine to 12 caption categories. These help you rotate about talking about your business without selling your business. And on the inside of social curator, we provide seven caption

categories every single month. These are categories that have been proven statistically to perform extraordinarily well on social media. Things like behind the scenes. Things like the benefit of your product or service. Things like what inspires you, like AKA your why. Because Simon Seneck says people don't buy what you sell. They buy why you sell it. People, as humans, as animals on the internet, we want to be connected to the thing that we're buying because we're probably, chances are we're going to buy something along the same lines in general. There's a good chance that if somebody is looking for a podcasting course, they're going to find a podcasting course. But where do they want to spend their money? They want to spend their money with number one, somebody they trust. And number two,

somebody they know. And oftentimes this is the missing link with so many business owners, is that they're afraid to show who they are and what they do. And as a result, they just default, I'm just going to sell some more. So when you have your caption categories and you're empowered to talk about your business without selling your business, you can then mix and match with your photo topics. Now, phototopics could be anything that you feel is representative of your business. That looks so different for so many different people, depending on what you sell. But the key is there is no right and there are no rules.

So if you know that your followers respond very well to certain types of imagery, great. Find a way to incorporate that into your business and then use the caption categories to really remind people what you sell and who you are and the benefit to them. I love that you're giving structure to something that I think a lot of people find so hazy. I think that's why the consistency drops off because people don't, you know, don't plan ahead. So I think you're giving us a great structure to, okay, we're just going to sit down and like in 20 minutes writer photo categories, caption categories, and then what's the next step? Do you plan weekly on like a certain day? I do this and here's the thing. People are all going to find their own

cadence. I found it very helpful at once a month, like at the end, at the end of the month, going into the following month, I like to lay a framework for what's happening for me that month because if I'm going to be speaking in an event, I'm going to be there in person or perhaps I could be going on vacation or perhaps I'm going to go on a sabbatical. I need to know what my strategy will be for the month. So then I can say, oh, Jasmine, you're going to be in New York for these three days. While you might not be able to take a photo of a line of yellow taxi cabs, write that in your plan so that you know I need a photo of a line of yellow taxi cabs. Perhaps I want to take a picture at my favorite New York coffee shop. I can't take the photo

because I'm not there yet, but I have it in my plan so I go out of my way to make sure that I stay on my monthly plan. In all actuality, when it actually comes to doing the work. So my monthly plan, I'm looking at what photos do I need? Where am I going to be? What am I going to do? What national holidays do I want to make sure that I'm partaking in? What social media holidays I want to partake in things like national ice cream day or national talk like like a pirate day. I love talk like a pirate day because you can write a caption and like pirate talk. And so then you get to use pirate hashtags and then join the social conversation and have people discover your account that would have never discovered your account otherwise.

So this goes back to let's decloud what is once hazy. Finding a way to join. social conversations. And then what I'll do is every Sunday, I really lay out, like, what am I doing this week? What does it look like? What should I plan for? When am I going live? And then I can say, some post, I can write in advance. Like, if I know that I have a photo of a cup of coffee, I can write that caption in advance. If, for instance, at the time of this recording, I'll be doing a live chat with Damon John, one of like the sharks from the shark tank. Like, I'm going to want to share that on social, but because it hasn't happened yet, I'm going to put a little placeholder and say, okay, Jasmine, based on what you talk about during that conversation,

we'll go back and make a content piece around it. But I already know that has to go out on Wednesday. So thinking ahead in advance around content every Sunday to make sure that I could show up every day. So number one, you're thinking about what holidays are coming up, maybe what product launches you've got coming up. You're going to know what that is. And then you're filling in the other things after that. Yes. Great stuff. So Instagram has so much going on these days. We've got the feed and stories and live and IGTV. Is there a place that we should be focusing on? Is it everything?

Is there a way to do one thing and repurpose it to other places? I firmly believe that the only advice I have really is however much you can do, do that. And that looks so different for so many different people. I also believe that your actions map your ambitions. If you say that you have a personal goal that by the end of 2020, you want 100,000 followers, I'm not, who am I to say it's possible or impossible? I'm only going to assess your actions deploying against your goals. Because if you have 10,000 followers and you want to get to 100,000 by the end of the year,

they're not have to show up in a very different and strategic way. You can't keep on doing the same thing that got you to 10,000. You're going to change your strategy by a lot. It probably means you're going live every day. It probably means that you're spending an hour talking to other people and create engagement. It probably means that you're creating. videos for IGTV and then subpieces for stories. It probably means that you're creating stories three to four, five, six stories a day, driving engagement, talking to other people. I mean,

the strategy really does look different. I do not think there's one that's better than the other. It really depends on who is your dream customer, where are they spending the most time on Instagram, and how are you showing up there for them? So I have big ambitions for Instagram, but I also have just as equally big ambitions for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. So I need to make sure that I'm mapping my content to the things that I want specifically on that platform. Well, and you don't need to have 100,000 followers to have business success on Instagram, right? Oh, I don't think you don't even need a thousand. I have seen people have six-figure launches with less than 500 people, and less than 500 followers.

The quality of your followers, Dale Carnegie said it best. He said, your business will go farther being genuinely interested in two people than trying to get 200 people interested in you. Let's bring that into like the 21st century when we're talking about like the same thing except magnified. I still believe just like Mr. Carnegie, your business will go farther being genuinely interested in two other people, but the amendment because now our platforms have changed it than 2000 interested in you. It's no longer 200.

We have this misnomer that more followers equal more customers. But that couldn't be further from the case. I have seen influencers who look like. they're living their high life and they're not making enough money to pay their $1,500 a month rent. Followers do not mean customers and followers do not mean money. It's like, do you have a business structure? If you have a business structure and you are currently turning followers into customers, then of course, I would say get more followers. But if you're getting followers and they're not becoming customers, what's the point of getting more followers? You need to fix

the structure. You need to fix how you're talking to people. You need to fix your funnel. You need to fix your follow-up. You need to fix the offer. So before people try to focus on more followers, I would say, how about you go deep with the current people who are at your party? Figure out what they want, serve them well, and they're going to be the people to help build your account by telling others about it. I've heard you say that your dad says dance with the boy who took you to the prom. Amen. You know, it's like so often, it's like this is like literally like one of those after school what not to do specials. It's like, you know, the beautiful girl takes the nerd to the dance because nobody else wanted to take her. And while she's at the dance,

She's looking at the quarterback being like, oh, I wish Brad would dance with me. And it's like, there's like Stephen who's just like, I gave you a corsage. And then Stephen ends up, you know, becoming like a software developer in Silicon Valley and is like a millionaire. And he's just like, see, you should have danced with me. At the end of the day, it's really important to say like, who's here? Who has expressed interest? How do I serve you well?

Because by serving people well, you then know how to serve a much larger audience in a bigger capacity. This is exactly the same as podcasting. And this is what I tell people all the time is. It's the same as business. You can have a small audience and still make money with your podcast. And also show the love to the people who are already showing up for you and who are your biggest fans. And don't go like spending all of your time searching for new people. You know, love up on the people who you have and they're your biggest advocates. And I love hearing from them. Okay, Sarah, I have to, can we geek out for a little bit here? Yes, please. Okay. So during our last launch, a social curator that occurred in May 2020, we were able to track, are leads. This means where were people coming from? So the way that we launched it is I taught a live one hour class and then I'm like, hey, doors are open for a limited amount of time. That was the whole

premise of it. But what we wanted to do is understand the quality of our leads. So we were able to track leads that came from YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, my own newsletter list, things of that nature. And one thing that we just tested for the first time because my podcast is new. My podcast isn't even six months old yet. So this is the first time we're able to try a specific podcast link. Now, of all the social media platforms, so the thing that converted the best was my newsletter list. People who consistently hear for me on a regular basis, no like and trust me.

So let's exclude that because those people have already said, hey, we want to go deeper with Jasmine. Let's just look at things that are free and somewhat social. Like a podcast, I wouldn't say is social media, but it's closer to social media because people can consume without following me specifically. They consume it without actually me knowing who they are. Very similar to social. The podcast converted the highest.

So the percentage of conversions on the podcast were the highest. Now, it had considerably less leads than Instagram and Facebook. But what did this show me? Is that the people who are consuming my podcast know like and trust me in a very different capacity than any other social platform. So now my focus, now my focus is like, now that I know that the podcast, small, small, small group converts really well. I need to go deeper with my podcast crew and say, let me speak to in a very different way because they are the most prime to become a customer. That's a very, very, very different game than what we talk about on social.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like you're already my best friend because I listen to you every week. It's like one of those situations that you don't know who I am. Well, that's what I just talked about, though, right? You feel, and then there is this beauty, there is this beauty with the podcast. And it was just something I just didn't know when I had created a really wanted a creative outlet. I wanted a space to feel like myself again, because sometimes I'll just be real, is that you have the luxury and the temptation to make your Instagram posts look really beautiful and to go live on Facebook in a very strategic way and to make sure that your YouTube videos are like primed

and shined. And it's like with the podcast, I was scared to do it scrappy. and messy and quote unquote wrong. And I loved it. And I think that what people see, or here actually on the podcast is a very different version of who I am. And it's like closer to who I am as a person as an entrepreneur. So for me, that's been the most valuable thing about the podcast. So I know that you wanted to do one for a really long time.

And you were just putting it off and putting it off. So talk to me more about that hesitation. You know, everything I say on the inside of social curator. And Sarah, you know this. It's like I say, do it messy, do it scrappy, do it scared, do it ugly, do it wrong, you know, do it imperfect. And oftentimes I need to teach the thing I have to learn. And for some reason, like I jump into a lot of other stuff, Sarah, like all the time.

I'm like, oh, who cares? Who cares? I'm like, who cares what people think as I'm learning it? But for the podcast, because I wanted it so bad, because it's been something that I've wanted to do for so long that I'm like, the story I was telling myself is like, you deserve to do it right. This podcast deserves to be done right. What the heck is right? Like, right doesn't exist. Like, I didn't even know what right was because what is right for you and what is right for Tom and what is right for Sharon and what is right for Stephanie could be the same or completely different

than what is right for me. I don't know what right would be until I actually started doing it. And it took me two years before I gave myself the permission to be like, listen. Because I think one of the things, too, I was like, oh, I felt like I'm late to the podcasting game. Everybody in their mother has a podcast and I want to do it right. And what is the mission of the podcast? You know, who am I speaking to? I really allowed myself to get caught up in my own trash.

And what's what it is. That's what it is. Well, I mean, I think when our hearts are really tied into something and we really care, we tend to overthink things. And we get into this rabbit hole. and sometimes the easiest answer is right in front of us. You know, like, we need to get out of our own heads and think about who we're serving. And I'm sure, like, one of the things that was holding you back is, like, I know you're a giver.

And you're probably thinking, based on what you just said, like, I don't want to waste people's time. Like, a podcast is a long time. It can be, like, up to an hour, some of them, a lot of them. You want to make sure that you're delivering, but you know that you're going to deliver because that's what you do. That's the kind of work that you put out there. Well, thank you. I receive that. So it's crazy. We launched the podcast in mid-October. And the way that we're trending, we will hit 100 podcast and a million downloads at the beginning of July. And I think that what it actually comes down to is I'm thankful for what it was. And I'm also reminding myself that I'm here to stand in a purpose and I'm here to serve other people well. And by me giving myself excuses or back doors or waiting for quote unquote perfection, it meant that I was robbing

the world of the thing I was supposed to say out of ego and out of fear. And so if there are people who are listening and you want to do a podcast or maybe you just want to start an Instagram account or maybe you want to start a YouTube channel and you don't know how, the longer you wait, the less you are standing in your purpose. And so I just want to tell people like, you don't know how good it can be until you actually do it. Do you feel like starting a podcast has changed your confidence levels in any way? Or do you feel like you are already pretty confident? Oh, no, I'm not confident.

That's crazy. You would say you're not? No. People have that opinion of me or that thought of me. And I almost want to walk around and be apologetic about it, which is what I actually think has been really good about the podcast. It's like the podcast really does show an entirely different side of me that people just don't see in a static photo or in like an edited video. It's like they see a broken person who's

walking with a limp and still finding a way to lead. And I think that's what I want people to see is I want people to see that it's not always fun or pretty. It takes a lot of work. And I think that the podcast has really empowered people to see the work behind the scenes. And that makes me very thankful. Yeah. For me personally, it's definitely shifted my confidence levels. I was also scared. And I think this is a common story, especially among women who, you know, we think about it for years and we're afraid to put ourselves out there because we worry about what people are going to think about us. But since I've just done so many more brave things since starting it that I would not have done had I not become a podcaster. I love that. I love that.

So your show is doing very successfully. It's helped you with your launch. You mentioned you might be doing some changes to the podcast to sort of like go even more into it. So what do you think that would be? Oh, so I can give a real time example. So in addition to creating content that I know our dream listeners, aka future dream customers, would want to listen to its helpful, actionable tips. Like at the end of every podcast episode, while we don't expect you to take action, we're giving you a clear path on how to take action. So when we started like synthesizing, what could we do to actually empower people to get the results that we want? Like on the inside of social curator, we have a big, hairy audacious goal. And that is to empower 10,000. small business owners to create six-figure businesses by 2023. I believe that small business owners are the people who change the world. I believe that small business owners have the ability to change the trajectory of their families

and their legacies and to move people into different social stratas. I believe that small businesses democratize the way that voices are heard from black, white, brown, green, and purple. I believe that the small business owner is what America has built its back upon. So the small business owner is like my people. I believe it. I don't know how exactly we're going to empower the 10,000 to six figures, but like it's 20, 20.

I got three years to figure out that. So now that we have this vision, now that we have this purpose, now we think what we're working to, then what we want to do is to give small business owners the tools to help them work towards a six figure business. One of the things that had a profound effect on my business was building out a newsletter list. And I know it sounds so silly and so trite and so small. In the beginning, when I first started doing it, I didn't have a strategy.

What did I learn over the years? That's what I recently launched a podcast. Excuse me, dropped a podcast episode. I didn't even know the vernacular, Sarah. I don't even know how the cool podcast say. I'm like, I dropped a podcast, dropped an episode. I have no idea. I don't know.

Go with it. Okay. So we released an episode talking about how I created my newsletter list, the things that I learned, the things that I changed, and teaching people how to incentivize people to sign up your newsletter list. a.k.a. building out a freebie. So in the middle of the podcast episode, I'm like, if you're struggling to figure out what your freebie is, Jasminestar.com forward slash freebie ideas. So what we're doing is we're creating educational resources with a turnkey solution. And when somebody signs up for

that freebie, they're then put into my email list. And so that when we do launch social curator, they've already gotten a piece of the content that is just like, wow, she gave me an exclusive video, she gave me 10 ideas and I could listen to her podcast to get those ideas. And I said the whole like the CTA, the call to action was like, please sign up for the freebie. And then you follow along exactly what I'm telling you to do. Take the system. It's free. Just take it.

And so all of a sudden, if I'm giving people tools to build a six figure business, how I built a six and seven figure business, I think it's to be really important to give those tools, build trust so that when it comes time for me to sell, aka invite people into social curator, they know. like and trust that I'm going to deliver on the inside what I've delivered on the outside. How else did you announce your launch on your podcast? What did it look like to get those leads until your launch? That's great. Okay. So we have what we call a launch runway. A runway is leading up to the actual opening of cart. And so in our business, we have a five day open cart period. So in five days, we want people to make a decision. If you don't want to make a decision the five days, no problem. We're closing enrollment and we're moving on. So leading up to those five days is what we call the runway. And we knew that we dropped two episodes on the podcast a week and we wanted that

runway to be four weeks. And so even though we had people opting in for the CTA at the end of the podcast, in the beginning, we would front load it with, I'm going to be teaching a class, be sure to sign up. And then after the enrollment closed, we edited out that front, we called it a bumper. I'm sure that's not what you call it. In the podcasting land, I'm sure it's a cooler. We called it a bumper. We took out the bumper so that we kept the podcast episode evergreen. And then as we went into the webinar, we had very specific topics that were to refute commonly held beliefs.

Commonly held beliefs as to why somebody would not want to invest in social curator. I don't have time. So we have a podcast episode about making time and productivity. I don't know what to do. Here are the tools. if you don't know what to do and how to build out your social media plan. So we're refuting on a subconscious level any reasons why you would say no to investing. And then what we also tried this time around, which I thought was really cool.

I mean, I don't know. I'd still try it again. But we actually took the audio from the webinar and we turned it around in a day to make it a podcast episode. So we opened enrollment on Monday. And we knew we were going to close enrollment on a Friday. So we turned around the webinar audio on Monday night, upload it on Tuesday. So then we know that most. of our downloads come in the first two or three days of it. And so we just gave it a run. And we

definitely said, like, hey, this is going to expire. You know, I think it was, I think if my memory serves me correctly, it's like Friday, May 6th or something like that. And so now if people, you know, listen to that podcast episode, they will know we're closed in enrollment, but they were able to still consume the webinar information. That's excellent. And was your webinar in Instagram live or how did you do it? It was on Zoom. Okay. Yeah. So it was straight up traditional. webinar. I'm so used to seeing you on Instagram. I can't picture you on Zoom. It's so crazy because the way that people like where and the way that people discover or like go

deep with me is the way that they assume like oftentimes. So if people find me on YouTube, they think that the webinar is on YouTube. It just depends on like where you find me. Like I go live also every week on Facebook and so people think that the webinar is on Facebook too. So it's really interesting. We just try to meet people like where they are and then making sure that we're guiding them on the path that we need them to. Well, final question. What would you go back and tell 11-year-old Jasmine about life, about where she was going to end up. I would say it's going to be better than you think, and it's all going to be okay. I think that as a child, the narrative of the things was going on in my mind was I only knew

how to dream so big. And I thought, like, if this were to happen, and now that I'm much older, I could look back and say, I was dreaming so small. Like, that was the day I dreamt the smallest. And the thing I tell Jasmine of 11 years old is the same thing that I tell myself today. It's like, Jasmine, remember this because this is the day that you dreamt so small. And it's going to be better than you think. And I think that that's a thing that keeps on pushing me forward. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jasmine. Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate it. Oh, my goodness. I think that was my favorite podcast geek out session of all time. I was so excited that I forgot to ask Jasmine where we can find out more about her. So I will tell you that right now.

You can follow Jasmine on Instagram. Her handle is Jasmine Star. And definitely subscribe to her podcast, which is called The Jasmine Star Show. It is one of my all-time faves. It's definitely worth a binge listen. And if you especially loved our conversation on how to use pre-launch content to prime your podcast listeners to buy during your next business launch, head on over to Sarah Mycatel.com slash business launch and you can swipe my pre-launch cheat sheet. Thank you for listening to Podcasting step by step. You are now one step closer to launching that podcast you've been dreaming about, but I want to get you even closer. I created a free guidebook for you with actionable worksheets called eight mistakes new podcasters make and how to fix them.

To find that, head on over to sarahmicatel.com slash fix. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot. I created a free conversation cheat sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahygotele.com slash blank no more.