The Home Service Expert Podcast - Creating Content On Social Media The Smart Way

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Shaina Weisinger is the founder and CEO of Repurpose House (formerly Podcast Memes), a company specializing in teaching clients how to repurpose existing content, optimized for social media. She also hosts the Content Coalition podcast, where she has interviewed people from HubSpot, Godaddy, and other major brands and companies. In this episode, we talked about video marketing, social media marketing, content marketing...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey there, folks. Tommy Mello with the Home Service Expert. Today, I'm with

Shana Weisinger. And Shana has been very successful at content marketing. She does content repurposing and video production. She's the founder and CEO of Repurpose House, formerly Podcast Memes. She's the founder and CEO of Wake Brand Media and contributing writer at Digital Marketer and Buzzsprout. She's very popular on social media and helped many businesses develop more effective content and find creative ways to repurpose their assets.

She hosts the Content Coalition podcast where she interviewed people from HubSpot, GoDaddy, and other major brands and companies. She's been invited to speak at a lot of public events and she's the founder and CEO of not one, but two companies. Shaina, how's your day going? My day's awesome. How's your day going?

We're in the same boat. We're both busy people. You know, we talked last week and you said you barely made time for this and I really appreciate it. Yeah. Let's talk about where you're out of right now and what your plans are for the next couple of weeks. Cause I think it's pretty exciting stuff you're working on. Yeah. Thank you. So right now we're in Phoenix, sunny Phoenix, Arizona, where it's, you know, I'm freezing and it's like 55 degrees. So it's not too bad. I made out pretty well there.

The next couple of weeks are chaos. So we are going to Digital Marketers Conference. We're sponsoring, we've got a booth. It's called Traffic and Conversion Summit. So what's cool about that is we are, it's really our big unveiling, I guess you will, of Repurpose House to the digital marketing field. Like as you said, it was formerly podcast memes.

So we focused primarily on repurposing podcasts. And now that we are in the big wide world of all digital marketing types of assets, we're going to go and make a splash over there and hopefully, you know, create a handful of great partnerships, meet a lot of cool people. And yeah, so that's next week. And then the week after we fly to Orlando, Florida, where I'm speaking at an event called PodFest. We're also sponsoring that as well. So it's going to be a crazy across country type of two to three weeks. And then I get to move myself into a new house the week after that. So it's, if you're not packing it all into, you know, 20 days, then like, what are you doing with your life? Right? You know, I'm going 90 miles an hour burning the, I guess they say the candle on both ends,

but I kind of put myself in the situation like you do, but I love it. Like, you know, I used to bus tables and wash dishes and then bartend. And what I found is the busier I am, like I just, I strive better where I'm moving 90 miles an hour, but I get way more done on my mind's always going right. Right. It puts me in this better train of thought all the time, but you know, you've done a lot up to this time and I want everybody to kind of hear your story. And there's so much people don't know about social media and top of mind and Facebook. And, uh, we've got this triangle. Okay. And it kind of looks like this, right? And at the top of it are people who come to us and they're actually looking today to buy,

right at the top. The next one is probably 20% that could buy, but not right now. And I'm just kind of going for the crowd. Then you've got the about 66% of people that we're not even getting in front of that might want our product, but they don't know anything about it

and they haven't been educated. And 90% of stats are made up, so these might not be accurate exactly. But I know the funnel looks exactly like that and I can pull it up and I will pull it up here. But I want you to talk a little bit about your experience in social media, where you came, where you're going, and how important it is for us guys in home service to be a part of that. Yeah, absolutely. So my background was always video production. I mean, I was like the only person in the family

who knew how to work the video camera when I was like 12 years old. So I always had a camera in my hand. It was just something we would do little like skits with my cousin when we'd have sleepovers. I was just constantly using the video camera. Later in life, it's funny to find out how when you're a kid, all those things, generally speaking, start populating in your adult life. So we went ahead

and I started working as a freelancer for video production, just in general, for some coaches and whatnot. And that led me into a business that I was doing game footage for athletes. So we would film hockey tournaments. We'd be contracted by 100 different teams that were coming from all over the nation, Canada. And that was going really, really well. And then it got to a place where it was going to... I was getting a ton of need of asks. And I was just like, hang on. I've never ran a business.

I came from the restaurant industry also. So I was like, I'm getting to a place where I have to invest a lot of funds into not only gear, but people. And that industry was like before you could burn a DVD on site. You'd have to film a lot of funds into not only gear, but people and that industry was like before you could burn a DVD on site. You'd have to film and then take that stuff. It was a whole process before. Now it's a completely different game. But I kind of pumped the brakes and I was like, listen, I don't know that I have the know-how to build a company like this that's

happening very quickly. So I went into good old-fashioned corporate America and ended up doing video production for a race school and doing marketing with them. But what was so cool about that is I got paid to become educated on marketing and how video plays a role in that. One of my boss and... Well, I had a couple bosses there, but they all came from agencies. So it was really cool to learn how the thing that I was doing plugs into how to market a business. So I couldn't have paid for the education when I got there. I mean, I got paid to have it. Not very much, but I got paid nonetheless. And when I left that job, it gave me the background to be able to understand how to take my skills in video production and implement them into

digital marketing strategy. So that's where I landed on Wake Brand Media. I was doing some video production for a business coach at a conference called Icon. It's Infusionsoft. It's like a CRM software. And they do a big conference every year. So we were running around there trying to make a big hoopla out of this guy's coaching business and filming a bunch of people asking them, how do you enjoy life daily? And one of the things that I kept being approached about was video production. And they were like, hey, listen how do you enjoy life daily? And one of the things that I kept being approached about was video production. And they were like, hey, listen, do you do this for small businesses, medium businesses? We know we need video. It was like one of two trains of thought people had. They were like, they all knew they needed video. But either they thought it was way too expensive,

they had gotten quotes, and they were like, I'm not going to pay five figures for one two-minute video that's going to sit on YouTube and do nothing. Or they got some awesome deal on it from their friend's nephew, who happened to have a camera and iMovie, and they got burned on it. So that became a little frustrating for me. But also it turned into me creating Wake Brand Media. And all that that was, was cost-effective, strategic video production for businesses. And we work primarily with medium and small-sized businesses to create really good plans on how they can create as much video content

in as little amount of time with a set budget and be able to make it span throughout their entire strategy. So that's kind of how video production landed in my life with Wake. Yeah, no, that's super cool because I'm a big fan and I want to talk about strategy here for the people listening because I've always been taught the best way to start with video production is come up with 10 FAQs of the biggest problems in your industry. So for me, how do you know, I'll give you a good example is my motors, I can hear it working,

but the chain's not moving. Well, that means there's a gear and sprocket issue. And there's, I can hear a buzz sound. Well, that's a capacitor issue. And like people know when you get found on these FAQs that you're the expert. And I'm known as the YouTube guy for a lot of garage door guys. They're like, dude, I see your videos. You've got over, I think 1.7 million hits for how to change a garage door spring. Awesome. I started like a little DIY side business e-commerce site. But needless to say, there's a lot of things, roofers, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, gutters. I can keep going. But how do you suggest getting started and why is it so important to start somewhere?

Yeah, that's great. Well, the most important thing, and you kind of nailed it, is to just get started. So it's like, I think a lot of people freeze because they think that they have to do all of this stuff. And it's like, no, just pick something that works for your industry and works for your audience and just start doing it. You're ahead of the game on knowing that value-based and educational content really does well for businesses. Right now, content marketing is the most inexpensive and the most effective form of marketing out there. So to be able to offer value, insight, education to a base of people who may be your client, your target audience, is a really smart way to start.

You obviously need some content that is who you are and why you do what you do. But you have to get them to care about that before they land on that piece of content. So that's where doing how-to videos, explaining things that people have questions about, having the, like how you had mentioned the 10 things that your audience has questions on, that's super smart because you can hit, that's 10 pieces of content then

that are all value-driven that make you an industry thought leader, which is super smart and can drive traffic to then your service or your product because now they value your insight. They've gotten something out of you that they feel is important, valuable to their life, to their business.

And they can see you as a source for whatever it is when they actually need to make a purchase. Yeah, there's a lot there. And if there was a spot to get started, what do you recommend in a home service space? There's Facebook, there's a lot there. And if there was a start, a spot to get started, what do you recommend in a home service space? There's Facebook, there's Instagram, there's LinkedIn, there's Twitter, there's all these things, Periscope, there's, you know, and I'm a big fan of Facebook marketing, but I think Facebook is more of a billboard ad. It brings name recognition and it's off the wall things that you don't know

that we can educate you about like garage door stories. We've got these tote slides that work well, but as far as like a broken garage door spring, you're probably not going to go to Facebook and be like, Oh, I need to get out of my garage. I need to go to Facebook. You go to Google for stuff like that. Right. So tell me a little bit about how we start with this video side of things, because I agree with you top of mind, and I know 10 ways to make money with videos, and we're going to go into that. But what do you suggest? Because a lot of people are out there going, man, I just don't think videos work for me. I've heard lawyers say that. I've heard investment bankers. I've heard my guy that

invests in my stock said, yeah, video sounds great, but it doesn't work for my industry. And I think that's a misnomer about the video industry. So let's talk about how we can get over this false belief that video doesn't work and where we should think about posting the stuff first. Like first, a YouTube channel or on our website or what works the best. So the strategy is always going to have multiple tiers to it and different prongs. So like you had mentioned, YouTube is going to be a place. First of all, YouTube is owned by Google. It's the second most used search engine on the web. So when people go in to search for something, Google's automatically going to populate a slew of videos that may also match that search term. I personally don't want to read a whole bunch of text. So I go straight

to YouTube to search for stuff. So if it's going to be something that's longer than a couple of minutes, that's actually like a walkthrough or something that's highly educational, YouTube is definitely the place you're going to want to put those on. Because you want to be indexed, you want to be searched, you want to make sure that people can find what they're looking for and that you have a resource for that. Then also putting those YouTube videos and doubling down on those and putting them on your website for SEO is really great as well. Because not only then would the video populate if it had the right search terms, but then your website will also populate if you're consistently embedding YouTube video into that. That's a really great way to start. Even if you don't do a lot of typing for

a blog, if you're doing videos and you're posting them on YouTube, then putting those on your website, the SEO will translate into the website as well, especially if you have them transcribed. So that's one avenue of making sure you're posting content. When it comes to social media, it's knowing where your audience is. So for service-based, I would assume that you would have a decent audience on Facebook. LinkedIn is more B2B, so business to business. Depending on if maybe you do commercial-type work, that's one thing. If it's home-type work, you're probably going to lean more towards Facebook. Instagram is heavily, heavily visual. So Instagram may be kind of like a... I'm not

quite sure. My gut tells me Facebook would probably be the place to just... If you haven't focused on any of them, maybe starting there. Facebook is interesting because you need to have an array of different types of content. You can't just post a produced piece of video and hope that that one video is going to do something for you on Facebook. Because a lot of times you have the people who are saying, you have friends who are like, video didn't do anything for me. But yeah, did you put up two videos and then hope that the masses are going to come banging down your door? That's crazy to think that that's how it would work. That's not how life works. So you have to think about it as building

a relationship. So if you're going to put content on a social media platform, you have to be consistent. And not only that, but you don't want to only put like produced video. You also want to do like the selfie style videos as well because people want to do business with people. And when they see that you're an actual human being and you have a personality

and like you mess up sometimes whenever you're talking to camera, it humanizes you and it makes people actually feel like you're a person instead of just a company. So an array of different things, like one of the companies that we do repurposing with is he's a landscaper. And so he will do in a backyard, a selfie video and be like, here are the top five things to think about when relandscaping your house. I don't know, whatever the topic is. And he'll go through all five of them and then he'll chop those up into individual little clips and put the little tip one of five on how to landscape

on Facebook on a part of the feed. So then when people see more of them, they know it's a part of a series. Or if they watch one and they're like, well, what are the other four? They're going to now go to his page. Or there's also a link in there that takes them to the whole blog article that's on his website. And now they get the full piece of content or they're diving deeper into some of his other content on his actual Facebook page. So Siri's numbers do really great, but he does that in addition to like organic type posts, which are, like I said, those selfie styles. Going live also is really great because live is interruption marketing. Facebook actually will stop people who are following you and give them a notification saying, Shayna's going live right now. And what better way to get in front of people that are holding

their phone than to have a notification with your name on it telling them that, hey, if you want to see what we're doing, check it out. And live can be terrifying. I hate going live because I'm all about video production and being able to edit things later. But it's just a matter of practicing and doing it and giving it a whirl and it gets easier and easier as it goes. I love this stuff. I feel like I kind of cheat when I do a YouTube video because I not only embed codes, I transpose it. I share it on the top 20 video sites, which are Dailymotion and there's so many of them, but I always embed the YouTube code in that. So the YouTube video is embedded not only in my YouTube them, but I always embed the YouTube code in that.

So the YouTube video is embedded not only in my YouTube video, but it's embedded in every other Vimeo and I could keep going. I mean, there's a ton of them out there. So those are like citation sites for videos. And when you transcribe it, there's services that do that. Google and YouTube love that.

So let's talk about what we can do. YouTube looks at certain things like how long did the people watch the video? So if you've got a bunch of friends, I know a lady, she's the YouTube queen and she's on my, I wouldn't met her in Thailand, but she hired all these 50 kids or friends of her daughters or whatever. And they all went in this basement. They didn't use the same IP address, but she said, just watch the full video. And talk to me a little bit about, I don't want to say they're cheats, but friends and family and customers will do this for you if you ask them. Okay. LinkedIn, you can post to people that are associated with you. They'll do you a favor.

Tell me some cheat. I hate the word cheat, but just real ways to let friends and family help you out to get ahead of the game. Yeah, you got it. So when it comes to Facebook, first of all, if you're posting from a business page or an influencer page or whatever it is, if it's not your own personal site, Facebook is very, very... It's a pay-to-play platform. So if you're on your business page and you post a video and you're thinking that all thousands... Let's say you have a thousand people who have liked your page. If you think all thousands of those people are going to see that piece of content you post and you are sadly mistaken, it's like 7% or less that Facebook will just natively show that piece of content to. So one trick to get more eyes on that piece of content is to ask for some sort of engagement

on that piece of content. So one of some sort of engagement on that piece of content. So one of the great ways is asking a question. So if you're like a top tip of installing a window, I don't know, what's something that you've done that has helped make this easier for you? And prompt a question because as people comment on your video, that video will then show up in their feed. So if you've ever commented on something, your friends are now seeing that you commented on this video. So be careful on what you comment on. Yeah. But also that's another way to get eyeballs that you wouldn't otherwise have because their entire audience, since it's a personal site, will then start seeing your content. So if you prompt people to take action on videos or on any posts on social media, then you automatically expand your reach of

views just by people engaging with you. So I like that stuff because Facebook, their algorithm's changing and Facebook Live is probably the coolest, most effective thing you could do these days. And I agree. And I've been doing a lot of Facebook Live. I'm used to being in front of the camera and they're not always, I always screw up, but I don't really care. That's good. You know, I use things like Hootsuite. I use a lot of posters that what's cool about Hootsuite is I can actually put everything into a poster. So it doesn't do the live stuff, but there's other ways you could do that. But as a company, I can put questions for customers like, would you rather have this wood overlay door or this? Would you rather have tile roofing or shingle roofing?

And start to get them engaged. And then you could tell a joke one day, ask a question one day. I like the ones that are engaging like one spring plus one spring plus one spring equals 30. A spring plus a roller plus a gearbox equals... Because people are like... And you put on the top like only 1 percent of the people will answer this you know right has a lot of engagement and that's what facebook loves is they're like this profile is getting a lot of engagement talk to me a little bit about a personal profile and i want to get back to video but this is all

part of it a personal profile versus your business versus your, you know, I've got like Tommy Mello, so many likes versus my personal one. Right. What do you recommend for a business? You know, you have to have a business profile. It just is what it is. But I personally get more engagement on my personal profile. Again, just because the reach, Facebook allows that reach to be a lot broader. So anything that you're posting on your business profiles, you can share through your personal profiles. Also, if you have a business that you have many people who work for you, with you, have them consistently share the content that the business page or that your professional page

posts. Because again, I can't stress enough that when you post on a business page and you don't put any ad spend behind it, very, very little people will be seeing it. So the more personal pages that share the post, comment on the post, whatever, the more eyeballs you're going to get on it. So I'm a bigger fan of the personal profile that shares the more heavy hitting profile. If you're going to go ahead and do ad spend though, if you're going to create a target audience, which you can target based on location. So if you're service-based and you know what area you're in, you can always create

content and then boost it or create ads that are to a very specific local demographic, among other things, then you have to have the professional profile to be able to do that. So it's good to have both. They both just serve very different purposes. So what I like to do, so I've got a Christmas light business as well. And what I do is I'll take these customers and I'll get a beautiful before and after picture and I'll embed like a picture of Santa and maybe their family.

And then I'll put another perfect install by stayofftheroof.com, that's our company. And then my personal profile, I'll tag them in because you can't tag them from a picture. And then they'll share that. It goes on to their profile. And then we pick up a lot of business. So personal profile is very, very strong.

Another thing that I like to do is you could go live or you could be, you know, pizza and beer will pretty much do anything in a business. I was on a podcast a while ago and I tried it last week. I said, listen, I'm going to make a selfie video of who we're looking for to hire because a referral is better than anybody. So I'll do a quick go live selfie, but I want everybody to come in here and share it. And I'm buying everybody pizza. So I stood in the conference room and I was like, you got your phone on you. I know you have it. If you want pizza, you got to share my video. Just kind of

joking around. But yeah, you know, we're not sure if we're going to do the beer thing because I don't want somebody to get an X like a DUI, but liability there. But you know, you can work a lot of things this way. That's very, very powerful. So I think we dove pretty far into social media. I love the idea of, so let's say one of the things I've done since 2009 is I used to have my old camera that was like two megabytes or something. And I used to just videotape them, but it was not perfect sound. And I'd be in their garage and I'd say, Hey, listen, repeat the question after me. So I say, Shayna, do me a favor. Did the technician come out on time? So they say the technician showed up exactly when they said they were going to.

And then you ask these questions and some of them look so goofy, but they look real when they look goofy. And then get a little sign off from them. And they look really professional in a way that they don't look professional. So it's like, I should say they look really real and it's not all staged. You're not wearing a mic and it's like so much better. So you could pretty much take a cell phone these days, put the thing on the equalizer, and give somebody a real cheap mic. And you got decent video. So, and you can take your software

and what you're doing and chop that stuff up and repurpose it, right? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's incredible to me what these devices have now turned into. Like when I started my video production company, thousands of dollars for video cameras that did less than this could. Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. So now it's like, with just a little bit of lighting, like Amazon has these little rings that you can clip onto the phone

that they will face you or the other direction, depending on what you're filming. And that provides enough light to make it look really great. I mean, any camera in the world without enough lighting is going to look like garbage. It's going to get pixelized and whatever. So even if you have a high-end camera, you still need to have the space lit. So if you light up a little area with your phone, if you have a little tiny mic, they have these little lavalier mics that will plug into the bottom of your iPhone through Amazon. It's like 30 bucks. It's crazy how well all of these little tiny tweets

make your video just like grow leaps and bounds in production quality. And it's, you can make something look really, really clean with just an iPhone. And honestly, you don't, the gimbals aren't even that necessary anymore for the iPhones because they have like internal stabilization now where they actually will make the video feel smoother than just like the shaky hands. Sometimes I'll film myself on the phone, like just for like a post on Facebook or whatever. And I'm like, oh my gosh, like I'm gonna get nauseous watching that

because I know how shaky my hand was. And I'll go and watch it back and it's smooth. Like what is this witchcraft that Apple has now implemented into their video software? So, I mean, there's so many like tips and tricks you can do just with like your iPhone or like if you're using Android, any of those, like if you're outside going under the shade is a great way to get awesome, beautiful lighting. Standing by windows is a great way to get good lighting. It's just

little tiny hacks that you may not really think of that make a huge difference in creating really good looking video on your phone. Yeah. And you know, what I do with mine is a lot of times I'll look at it and I'll make sure the lighting's what I want because you know, the screen goes both directions. So I try to get a good one. And a lot of times I'll be walking and talking and I love walking up on my employees and be like, what do you guys think? And they're like, because people hate being in front of camera. Cause it's almost like public speaking. But for me, it's not even close. If I'm up in front of 400 people versus like being on camera, I'd rather be on camera, but getting better. But you know, the trick is to know what you're going to say and have a plan going into it,

a content strategy, and know exactly these three things we're going to talk about. And I'm a pro at them. So I won't have a problem because I'm just telling a story. Storytelling is so powerful. Like the other day I was at this guy's house and he had a Harley Davidson, but I'm just making it up, but it's so easy to tell a story. And when you get on camera and you're telling a story and you can take as many times as you have to, and then you can share it live. There's ways to still go live without really being live. And there's some hacks. If you just look up going live with using an old video on Google, it'll show you how to do it. I'm not saying I don't mind going live every time.

And I like the fact that you make mistakes, like you said, because it kind of humanizes you. And the cool thing is if you're trying to grow an audience of people, just talking to them like a normal person in front of your phone and just looking at it and saying, look, today was a bad day. Yesterday was actually a really bad day. Yesterday, we had a truck stolen with a trailer for the Christmas night business. No.

In the police, policeman and one of my guys walks in and says, hey, there's a detective on the phone for you. I grabbed my jacket. I was about to sprint out of here. I wasn't sure what I did. I'm just kidding. He said, there's a detective. I was like, okay. And he's like, yeah, we've got this stay off the roof trailer in this truck. I was like, so I call one of my partners. He's like, we kind of got it on camera, but we can't really tell. So they're investigating, got a lot of stuff stolen out of the trailer. And then we had just some website, major issues with a couple of websites. And then my partner got everything robbed out of his storage unit. Oh man. Personal storage unit that he didn't have insurance on at one of those just rental places. But he had the worst day ever. And I feel so bad, but I was like,

the good news is things could only get better. And nowhere to go but up. So you're an asshole, dude, but that's cool that you look at it that way. But I'm like, you know, some days you have those days where it feels like everything in the world could come down on you. And it's like, you sometimes wonder what the heck's going to happen. And, but you just, you survive. And that's what it means when you own a business is that when it's good, it's great. And when it's bad, it's horrible. And we chose this and we deserve the rewards when you make it. And everybody thinks, well, maybe I'll just start a business. And I'm like, go ahead. You got nightmares of a day and you've dealt with those, haven't you? Oh yeah. Like everything that could go wrong,

will go wrong. Oh yeah. This morning started out a little bit like that. So I was like, all right, we're going to do a little meditation. We're going to drink some Pellegrino. We're going to hop on this podcast. And it's going to be awesome because we have nowhere to go but up. It really wasn't that bad. But, you know, like, yeah, I get it. Pops up, but you get through it. And then, like you said, the triumphs are even more sweet whenever they happen because you go through those trenches and make it out.

So, yeah, it's peaks and valleys. And you don't know what's good until you realize what's bad. Yes. You know, I always talk about the day I got this phone call and, um, it was like a dominoes. Hey, one of our trucks broke down and I think it's a bad engine. Okay. I got six more of those calls with breakdown. One of them was a flat tire. One of them was a fender bender, but literally it was seven trucks down in a day. And I'm like, oh my God, I think that was about a $50,000 a day of damages. But what I've learned is, I'll tell you this, I've made every mistake in the world. The difference is that I don't make the same mistakes twice. And that's what learning is, is I've learned from experiences.

And I think everybody out there can attest when something goes really wrong, does it happen over and over again, or you change the process and it's really process driven. So what's a good process? You know, I wanted to dive into a process to get on a content strategy. So what do you recommend the process be? Do you recommend sitting down once a month and whiteboarding? Do you recommend, like if you had a new client and just, let's just use a landscaper, for example, since you're familiar with that. Where do you start?

And then how do you continue to keep the rituals going and make sure that it stays current? Yeah, so consistency is always going to be key in any strategy. It's real easy to get excited about creating a content strategy and then starting and making four pieces of content and then becoming overwhelmed by trying to keep up with it. So front-loading is a huge deal when it comes to creating a lot of content. And what I mean by front-loading is make as much of it that

you can in advance as opposed to thinking that every Tuesday, you're going to be able to film this. And every Wednesday, you're going to be able to post that. And every Thursday, you're going to make life happens, especially if you're a business owner, as we are saying. And I can't imagine if you had like a part of your content strategy while, you know, 84 trucks broke down that you were going to make time to go on Facebook and create a video.

Like that's unrealistic. So, and maybe you did, and maybe it was about the trucks breaking down, but ultimately you don't want to feel like you have to. Some of it is, you know, part of your content strategy is going live on like Tuesdays or Thursdays, but you don't want to trap yourself in like a daily routine of having to create content. So front-loading content is super, super important. So sitting down and looking at your calendar and saying, okay, how many times do I need to post to what platforms and starting to fill in the blanks on what that looks like. Literally a calendar is what you'll need to make that happen. Once you kind of decide like what

your post schedule is going to be like, you can talk about the types of content that you're then going to fill in the blanks there. So like if you're doing how-tos, like you need to figure out when you're going to film those types of things, where they're going to land. And if you're going to repurpose them onto different platforms. That's another thing. You can put some of this stuff on YouTube, the longer form stuff, and you can pull smaller pieces out of them and then use them on Facebook. So being really efficient with your time and the content that you're already creating, even if it's stuff that you've already created. Let's say you have a blog that you have done a ton of work on and it's two years

old and you've got a post a week. I mean, that's a lot. That's a ton of content. But you can take older articles and either repost them or do a small little video snippet of a piece of that blog post that then drives traffic back. Don't think that you always have to be creating new, new stuff. Because if you've already created really impactful pieces, utilize them consistently. But yeah, it's kind of like being smart and efficient with that calendar saying, okay, on Mondays, I'm going to post a new post about X, Y, or Z. Wednesday is going to be when I load to YouTube. Thursdays is when we're going to repost a blog post from last week. And then just using a scheduler like you had mentioned, Hootsuite, there's a handful of them

that are really great. You can sit down the month in advance even and log in all of the different things you're gonna post on all the different platforms social media wise you have to actually go into YouTube but you can schedule YouTube posts also the same way you would schedule on Facebook you know like we schedule our video podcast episodes well in advance on YouTube and we just know that on Wednesdays at 2 a.m, they go live and then it populates on the website. And like, it's a whole trickle effect of sitting down in advance or having a VA do it. So there's a lot there for a business owner in the home service space. And I'm not saying some of them are super technology savvy guys. And some of

them, some of the guys and gals out there might not be. I think the main thing I would do is if you were to put out a ad for somebody, I mean, some of these people could be on all of them at once and be chewing gum and playing a video game. So is it good to hire out for the postings and getting somebody savvy? Or is it good to just hire a VA on Upwork? Is it good? You know, there's five or there's different places. What do you recommend to get the foundation? Because I think there's a lot there. So I'll start with that question. So it really depends on how much or how little you want to be involved. With a VA, you're going to have to do a little bit of handholding at the beginning, which is fine if you already know the platforms that you work with. If you're just like, I don't have time for this. I don't want to deal with it. Like, I don't know how to use it. beginning, which is fine if you already know the platforms that you work with. If you're just like,

I don't have time for this. I don't want to deal with it. I don't know how to use it. Then possibly hiring an agency to at least get you started. And then they can get you started on a game plan. We used to specialize in creating the content map for you and saying, this is how you post. Here are the platforms. And then a great way to do that is to record those conversations. And then if you want to hire a VA, it's just a matter of showing them how to post. Ultimately, if it's just posting to platforms, you don't have to be a trained expert in this stuff. It's just being trained on how to do it. So you can go either way. It just depends on how much or how little you really want to be involved. As far as the content creation part,

that's really going to... Depending on what you're trying to post. If it's you as a business owner who wants to be on camera doing this stuff, again, that's where the front-loading stuff would be great. Every Monday, you want to post a how-to. Why don't you sit down at the beginning of the month and film 4 of them? Maybe change the shirt. And now you've got all 4 pieces that you can then either send to the VA or send to the agency. And they'll lock and load it and you don't have to worry about it now. So it's just

really about upfront knowing, yeah, how involved do you want to be? And then, you know, I will be honest, the less involved you want to be, the more money you're probably going to spend on making it happen. But that's a sliding scale, you know, of what's your time worth and how much do you want to be involved? So there's a lot to be said there because the and how much do you want to be involved? So there's a lot to be said there because the larger your audience, you got to get the audience involved, right? You want to make sure your customers are seeing the stuff. One of the things we built into the CRM that we use is we actually require videos and before and after pictures. And that gives us a huge array of stuff to pull from because you can make a nice video out of pictures. Right. Absolutely. And then you get a couple of customer testimonials. And then what I've learned

is if you make a beautiful blog with videos and pictures and give the link credits where they're done. I had a, I have a partner who made garage door repair Phoenix rank number one with one blog post and it got so much social shares and so many links and just everybody it was crazy what happened because he did a lot of pr around it so basically he he posted it on pr newswire there's a lot of these places but people were like this is super cool it was like how to build the coolest man caves and it was garages nice it was pictures and there was some videos and it got so much social media, so many links because he spread it right.

Well, people don't understand. You could take a blog or a podcast we can make into a blog. So now we're getting the content by transposing it, cleaning it up a little bit. So, and then you just fill in there's, I don't want to go too crazy, but then you've got keyword density, certain little things that a professional knows how to do, and they make it interesting. So people actually enjoy looking at the stuff. And here's the deal is I really believe that if you don't want to get involved in this stuff and you just say, forget the website, forget the videos, forget the social media, you're missing out on a huge thing because more millennials bought houses last year than baby boomers for the first time in the history of mankind. And if you don't understand the buying decisions are switching and you don't want to get involved with this stuff, be ready to sell within the next five years because your

company is diminishing in value and it's diminishing very, very fast. So I recommend either get involved and hire the people that get involved in this and actually take it seriously or be ready to sell soon because it's not going to happen. Even the baby boomers are getting way more involved in social media. They're learning.

And billboards, radio, and TV are not the same as they used to be. They still work, but the acquisition cost is too high. Now they're getting into programmatic Hulu and all these different places you could go, Amazon Prime. And you could show it to people of your demographic. Like they know how old I am. They know how much I were off Prime. They know how much I added to the cart. They know how long it takes me to finish an average order. You know, the conversion rate on me adding to the cart.

Now they've got Amazon Home Services, which we've done some courses on and you've done some courses with the same people I've done courses with. So, you know, what other advice could you give us? Because I think that if people want to get ahold of you and actually get you involved, because you come up with a strategy. I mean, tell us everything that you do with your company now.

So like you said, we have two companies. And actually I'm going to share a couple of hacks with you guys. If you know you need to get in this game, you're not in this game or you are are and it's just a lot of work. We partnered with a couple other companies that are similar to Repurpose House in the sense of we're there to hold your hand through the creating content process. I'm one piece of a puzzle with Repurpose House. But there's a company that we partner with. They're called Content Cucumber.

They're awesome. They do blog posts. You literally submit a topic and your keywords and a couple of items that you want out of that blog post. And by the next morning, you'll have a blog post sitting in your inbox. If you want longer posts, it's going to take a little bit longer than one day at a time. But how we've utilized it is I've done a bunch of video how-tos. And they take those videos and turn them into like SEO optimized blog posts. And they're awesome. Or you can start from scratch with them. So it's like, if you don't have the time

to sit down and write this stuff, you can go to them. So that's one way to at least start getting the SEO piece rocking on your site. After that, then you've got a business like mine, Repurpose House, where we take all that content and we'll turn like a blog post, we'll turn 100 words of a blog post

into a really cool optimized video with a big bold text on top, flashing text that is whatever was in that blog post video to go with it. Or if you've got existing video that are your how-tos, we'll do the captions on it because 80% of people scrolling on social media are doing it on silent because they're probably not supposed to be on social media in the first place. But if they're looking at talking heads with no text surrounding it, no captions on it, they're just going to keep on scrolling. So making sure that everything is optimized for the platform it's on. If it's on Facebook, you should have a big old bold thing that says like, top three tips of XYZ so they know what they're getting into before they dive into that whole video that you've got. But then also making sure that there's captions on it so

they know what you're saying when they're watching it on silent. But then doing that same video on YouTube, you only want the video. It's just knowing the difference between the platforms and how to post them on each. So yeah, just taking it as your content, repurposing it, making one piece of content, be able to spread across all the different platforms in the way that they're meant to be shared.

And then the hardest part is really outside of that, if you're already having all the content made and repurposed, it's just posting it. And that's really something as simple as like we were talking about, a VA or, you know, an agency that will do it for you. And you could hire somebody to teach you or teach one of your most technologically savvy person.

And they just, once it's set up, it'll automatically feed into your channels and you learn where to tag stuff, you geotag it. There's certain things you want to do with certain things because it helps you rank in the little thing called Google Local. It's a GMB, Google My Business, and it's ABC. And that's where you want to be found.

You want to get good reviews, long reviews with every single thing from the experience to what they installed with as many keywords, springs, rollers, cables, roof, what kind of roof? How long did it take you to get out there? And then I want to tell these guys a little bit of a hack too. So when you're building blogs and you're building videos, find things like if there's a business that was huge in the seventies and eighties, but then they went out of business like 10 years ago, you could actually make content around their business. And now when people search because of the stickers and everything, who do you think pops up? Like I come up number one, there's a Wayne Dalton iDrive

and they're extinct. They haven't made them in about 10 years, but I rank number one for them because people search it all the time. And that gives me a few jobs a day. There's another company that went out of business called Anazira. It's Arizona spelled backwards, but it was the sticker on every door when they used to put them in. So I was like, I wrote a long blog about it. Now we rank number one for that. So think about things, businesses that might've gone out of business, things that people don't search, things that might be extinct and where no one will search them, but everybody's searching them. The consumer's still searching them, but us in the business know, well, they don't make that anymore. So that's a little hack because a lot of us think, yeah, I keep going to these jobs,

but they're out of business. We'll rank for that stuff. Right. If you guys get in trouble, no one's going to sue you. They're out of business. So there's a lot of things you could do when you blog and you build videos. And what'll happen is when they search

and you pop up number one, then a video comes up number two, then a citation site comes up number three, and all these different things pop up and you're the company on all of them. That's what it could work together. It becomes this equilibrium, this huge, powerful thing. And you're right. I'm a video guy. If I search now, I'm searching most likely videos. And here's what I search for for videos is I search for the most views usually, what's near the top. Typically, what's the shortest amount of time?

So if I got to choose between a guy that's going to explain how to do it in 20 minutes or three minutes, what am I searching? So think about when you make a video too, is don't make this long ass video that everybody's going to be like, well, it's good to be precise and labeled, but it's also good to be short amount of time.

So you rank number one, because those will get the most feeds if you're on the first page, right? Yeah, absolutely. And also another, to piggyback on that, if you do have a longer-ish video, inside the comments, you can put like, at 32 seconds, we talk about this.

At 54 seconds, we talk about this. So people can scroll to the place in the video of what they're really wanting to find instead of like, I'm so impatient. I mean, I'm the epitome. Yeah, I'm like, I don't want to spend two whole minutes. Like that's too much for me, right? So if I know that you're going to talk about the thing

I need you to talk about by like the 57 second mark, I'm going right there. Another thing is don't make these obnoxious 30 second intro stings on all of your videos that are talking like that's your logo doing craziness for like an eternity because people will click out of that. So I'm the first person to click out of it

and I used to do it in my business. So like, you can always be like, I do that. But I mean, a little bit is fine, but it can be like, hey, this is our company. Okay, on to what we're talking about, you know, because you're just,

the bounce is so high if you start having people like waiting and waiting for, because I do a lot of patience anymore. You're absolutely right. And a lot of the stuff that I click on is more about technology. Like I'm like, how could I export my Google contacts, import them? We're going on some crazy stuff right now. But what I hate the most is when I get something that's not current, like this is the old user interface of Google or something. And I'm like, it bugs the crap out of me that that stuff still ranks. I want to like flag that stuff.

But there's so much here and there's so much we could dig into. Let me ask you this. What are some good, if somebody just wanted to go learn, maybe read a couple of books or books that have really influenced you. I think there's so many things we could learn about. Maybe a video or something. Where would you recommend them going to? More about the social slash video slash, and it doesn't, it could be a little hack or an article, or it could just be something off

the top of your mind that you've learned a lot lately that has nothing to do with this stuff. You know, from a lot of my reading has been more about like scaling and recurring business models. So it's kind of outside of the scope of what we're talking about just because the new business is that. So automatic customer. Yeah. No, I haven't, but it's on the list. I told you about that the other day. Yeah. Yeah. So like things like I'm not a huge fan of sales. Most of my business with Wake Brand Media came from a lot of referrals. So like Ultimate Sales Machine was one that I was like heavily engaged in. I keep going back to it for like tactics. That's a great one. Is it up there? Is it over there? Hold on. So this book, Chet Holmes,

it's called The Red Bible for me. I just met with Amanda Holmes and she was on my podcast. Yes. But it's his daughter, but he passed away of cancer. And I got to go visit her. I was just there like three weeks ago. Crazy. He's on to like Harmony and stuff, but he owns Chet Holmes International. She took the company over. But it's the 12 lessons, 12 key strategies.

And it's all about, I got so many things to share with you about staying top of mind for customers, but it won't be here. So what else? I love this stuff. Perfect. Yeah. So USM's on it. I use the Libby Journal. Have you done the living your best year ever? I think that's what it's called. We call it Libby. It's really cool. It sets like goals out for the whole year and then breaks them down into quarterly, monthly, weekly, up to daily, like weekly rhythm register of things that will change your life. And being able to do that has blown my mind on what you can accomplish in such a short amount of time when you're hyper-focused on what your daily results need to be to achieve like the

monthly result, the quarterly result. That's been a huge... Yeah, kind of cut it to get back where you need to be. And then kind of say is like, you know, one of the things is where do you want people to remember you when you're dead, when you're 90 or 60, 50, but what are you doing today to get there? And that's different from what you need to do from month to month. But we have a thing called the Trello top five board, where we look at the top five things that's going to save us the most or make us the most and have the most impact in the business. But I'm going to check out living your best year ever journal. Yeah. I'm going to show you what it looks like. It out living your best year ever journal. Yeah. I'm going to show you what it looks like.

It is living your best year ever. This is the jam right here. Oh, Darren Hardy, Darren Hardy. And this is what your pages look like every week. And it works really well if you have a, is that in Latin? Crazy Shana cursive. It works really great if you have an accountability partner. I have an accountability partner I meet with him every monday and we go through this and we give each other shit about it when we didn't reach our goals

And um, because it's real easy to make excuses for yourself If you don't yeah, yeah, you I could condone anything i'm like well Oh, yeah up late so I should be able to sleep, but you know, yeah, I get it Yeah, there's an excuse for everything. I did not accomplish in that book But paul makes sure that I know that there are no excuses. So- How much is that book? It's probably like 20 bucks.

It comes with like a CD or DVD or something that is irrelevant now. I don't even have a disc drive anymore, but- You know what would be cool is if the people out there listening, if you bought two of them and you found the best person in your life that doesn't mind

telling you no and that you messed up and buy them one as a present and sit them down for dinner and say, this is what we're going to do together because you keep me accountable and I keep you accountable. So I bought you this in the one condition that you're going to actually do it for the first three months. We're going to see what happens. I love that. Do it. I did that with my director of ops and she and I have like, our relationship is awesome, but that really helped improve us. Like be able to call each other on our shit and be like, we have goals, big, like personal and professional goals. And it's cool to be able to like, understand where people are coming from in their personal life too. So it's a great resource for

sure. So what kind of like personal stuff, like going on dates and like working out? Well, I mean, it depends on how. It depends on if it's, yeah. I gotta decide who I wanna do this with. Yeah, right. You gotta be strategic in who you choose, but you gotta be willing to open that closet a little bit. That's awesome.

This is great. So what else? Is there any other books or anything or a video that you recommend that... Where could they watch some of your repurpose videos? Well, repurposehouse.com has a bunch of examples that are ours. I just launched my personal speaker page. We're going to be doing a lot of speaking gigs this year and educating. Everything I speak on is about educating people how to do stuff. Because I just feel like if you teach people

how to do it, either they're going to want to do it themselves or they're going to be like, that's great. I'm glad you know how to do it. So go ahead and we're going to use you as a service. So my personal pages have a lot of like how-tos. We are in the middle of creating a resource page on Real Purpose House that will teach you literally how to do everything, like how to go into a product called Headliner for free

and do all the captions on your videos and do the cool titling and do the waveforms for audiograms, like the best practices on how to use Canva and make really cool image quote cards. Anything you can imagine, that resource page is going to be launched at the end of the month. And then they do it. Here's what happens with me is you do it for a week and then you're like, it's kind of like a gym membership for most people. It's like, the gym makes money. And I can't wait to share with you something when you get back, because I know you're a busy gal, but you got what,

about a month until we meet again. So other than that, you know, I like to leave the audience. First of all, is there a place that they can get ahold of you if they want to reach out to you? Is it LinkedIn? Is there an email? Is there a good way that you prefer to get ahold of? Yeah. Well, I'm on all the platforms with the exception of Twitter because Twitter has like a 12 second, like you're only on the feed for literally, I have a stat sheet and it's like 12 minutes total is the most that a Twitter announcement or whatever, a tweet. I'm in social media. I don't know what it's called. That's how long it lasts. Right. But on every platform outside of that, I'm Shana Weisinger. LinkedIn is a great one. I'm starting to put a lot of content on LinkedIn, but I respond to all the platforms because if you're not responding when

people are reaching out to you on these social media platforms, then what are you doing really? So there's that. Shaina at repurposehouse.com. S-H-A-I-N-A. And that's a great way to get ahold of me too. Okay. I did a presentation one day in my MBA program and I walked in and I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and flip flops. And it was Facebook. So it was Mark Zuckerberg. And I was like, everybody's wearing a suit in my group. And I was like, what would Mark Zuckerberg do? I told the teacher that he was sitting in the front row and he was like, he was like this guy from India. But he was like, hello, Thomas Meadow. And Anyway, I said, guys, I had this weird dream. And I looked this up online. This is not mine, but I was like, so crazy.

I was like, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook combined to form this ultimate social media. And they're like, what, really? And I was like, yeah, they call it my TwitFace. So stupid, but I had the whole class going. We got an A in that class, by the way. There you go. Yeah. So that's great. Is there one last thing before we go that you'd like to share with the audience that maybe we didn't talk about or something that gives them value? You know, I just, I really think that just getting started and not getting frozen in fear on how to

get started is just the best thing. Pick one thing that you know that you can do consistently or you know that you can do a bunch of upfront and then just post consistently. So if that's like a how-to video on like three different topics, then just do it. Like the hardest part is getting started. Don't worry if your video is perfect. Don't worry if the audio isn't perfect.

Like just stand in front of a window that has the light facing you or stand in the shade. Be close enough so that the thing can hear you. If you wanna buy like a little mic on Amazon or whatever, do that. But honestly, like your phone like this is just gonna be good enough to make some sort of impact online.

And just be consistent. Be consistent, be yourself, and just like be present on these platforms. That's really all that it comes down to. There's no better time than now to get started. And I always talk about the MVP, minimum viable product. Just get going. Don't order that microphone. Look, just before you order all the right gear, just do one and see if you're actually going to do it. But yeah, definitely get a hold of Shaina. And I appreciate you jumping on today. I know you're a busy gal. And when you get back, we're hanging out.

I'm taking you to lunch. Yeah, I'm excited. Let's do it. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you. Have a great day. I appreciate everybody being on and we'll see you next week.

Hey guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I wanted to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Alpac and of course, Ara, the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation.

Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working.

And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.