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Welcome to the socialized strategy. Happy Friday. I've been sitting here for 5 minutes waiting to start this episode, listening to sirens out my window and thinking, okay, I'll just start when the sirens finish. And the sirens have been going and going and going. And I realized that you probably can't even hear them because this microphone is pretty fantastic.
Helen:So it's probably even drowning out this, signs of sounds of the sirens. But it's unbelievable sometimes how it goes on and on and on for so long in New York city, the sound of these sirens. And it's a little bit more, I think, top of mind right now because we are in the midst of what's happening in the world, the problems and the fires in California and the scariness of of that. And, God, it's on my mind constantly. And so I wanted to start this episode because we are gonna get into a really good topic that is highly requested.
Helen:But before I launch into it, I just wanna say when there are things happening in the world and you feel like, what do I do? What should I post about? Do I need to address this? Should I not post? I I feel that we should talk a little bit about that from the standpoint of being content creators and especially people who are in a niche or they're doing a business and they have to keep the content going for their business.
Helen:It is sometimes really difficult to find that balance and figure out how to manage it. It really is. And I've I've you know, I had it today. I had to get on a Zoom. I have Julie in California in the midst of this chaos and I had a Zoom session that I had to be on and I had to post about the things that I'm working on because they're on a schedule and they're happening.
Helen:And I just started to think, my goodness. Like, am I being insensitive by just carrying on with my life while this other stuff is going on? And so I just wanna, I think, talk about it a little bit and, and explain how algorithms can be helpful at, in times like this. And so here's an example. On TikTok, when you post, a lot of times your videos that are being seen in the for you page by your followers are much older videos.
Helen:So on a day where something crazy is happening, somebody might pick up a phone and see my video from 3 weeks ago when I was dancing in Times Square. And I can't control that. So the viewer side of this is that when the viewers are watching videos and then something comes up on their feed about current events or news or what's happening in the news, they will tend to get more of that content. And they probably won't necessarily get the video of me dancing in Times Square. However, I can't control if that happens.
Helen:So I think what I'm I'm trying to say about that is it is very viewer driven. And someone might assume, oh, she's so insensitive. She's posting a video about dancing in Times Square when there's this tragedy happening in another state or in another country or whatever's happening. And in fact, that video was from 3 weeks ago. So I a lot of times we as content creators overthink it in the moment, and we think, okay, we have to pause everything.
Helen:But in reality, perhaps people are getting videos on their feed from us from weeks ago. And that's particularly on TikTok. Now with that being said, on Instagram, it, tends to be a little more time sensitive and things do go out to your followers right when you release them. So and also people that follow you tend to come to your page and see what you've posted recently. So platform to platform, things can be very different about how you might wanna approach content creation and posting at times where you might be posting and it's not really, and you're it seems insensitive to post about something frivolous when something much more meaningful is going on in the world.
Helen:And I spoke to my friend Alicia this morning. We were talking about it, and, that's what brings this to mind right now. We were talking about it because she said, did you post yesterday? And I thought, Interesting. Let me tell you what I did, this particular day where it was like all this was unfolding in California with fires.
Helen:And I didn't happen to post on Instagram because on Instagram, I had shared Julie's update about the fires in my story, And I didn't have anything pressing that was go needed to go out on my Instagram. On TikTok though, I realized that I kind of continued business as usual on TikTok because I don't think people there are paying attention to a timeline of when a video was posted. I posted the thing that I had scheduled to post because it was promoting a thing that I was working on, and I wanted to make sure I get my message out there so I can keep my workflow going. So what you need to think about is what is important to you in that time and how you feel about posting. So if you feel like it doesn't feel right to do it, then don't do it.
Helen:And if you feel like, well, I have to just I was on this schedule, so I might have to post it anyway. It's a good chance there's a good chance that your audience might not be paying attention to it. And it might get less views because maybe their feed is filled with what's happening in current events. So just some food for thought on how to think about it. It's okay to feel like don't post something on a schedule because it's seeming insensitive and it doesn't seem right.
Helen:I always say, listen to your gut. Your gut feeling will tell you what to do. If it doesn't feel right, skip it. No one's gonna miss it. No one's gonna think, oh my goodness.
Helen:She didn't post about this challenge, or she's insensitive because she didn't talk about the fires. Whatever the thing is, I think you have to stick always with what's true to you. And I have done this a lot. I've been pressured a lot of times on TikTok. You know, what's your stance on this and what's your stance on that?
Helen:Every time something comes up in the current events, when you have a 1000000 followers, believe me, you may, people are coming at you and they want your opinion. And a lot of times it's not something I feel that I want to talk about publicly for whatever the reason is. It does and it's maybe it's not in my wheelhouse. I don't feel articulate about certain things. And I don't want to pontificate about things that I don't feel very knowledgeable about or it's not my expertise.
Helen:I'm not doing it. And no peer pressure is gonna get me to do it. So sorry. Sorry to those people. And now without further ado, just to wanted to make sure we cover that, I wanna get into how to start an email list because that is a topic that has been highly requested.
Helen:When I mentioned it in something and I had said if you want are interested in this topic, right respond to this email and I had lots of responses. So we are gonna talk about how to start an email list. It is easy and there's no reason to put it off because when I first heard somebody talking about it something like 4 3 plus years ago, on TikTok, I was like, oh, I'll start an email list. I didn't know what I was gonna even email to people, but I thought I should start curating my own audience. And I was very in hindsight, I'm really happy I did it then because not a lot of people were on TikTok doing it as much as now with this pending TikTok ban.
Helen:All the creators creators are trying to get their their audience over to either an email list or another platform or whatever. So getting ahead of that is good, but it's not too late. So you can do it at any time. Just decide, okay, I'm gonna do it and let's talk about some tips for doing it. And first, let's always start with the why.
Helen:Like, why do you wanna build an email list? Okay. Because if an app goes away, you'll have access to your audience. Because when the algorithms are not feeding the content to all your followers, your core happy people who are following your email list, you can put the links to your videos in there. You can keep them updated.
Helen:And this way you don't have to depend on an algorithm. So that is really helpful. It will also give you a direct line of communication. So you can guarantee even when you post a video, there's no guarantee that all of your followers are gonna see it. But when you have sent out an email, the people who are interested and watching your and watching their emails and reading them will likely see your content in email.
Helen:So it's really good. Now it's hard to get people to follow you on social media much less to then all of a sudden give you their email. So it does become challenging and you can't just say, hey, get on my email list. Well, why? Like, why do you why does someone want to get on an email list?
Helen:And a lot of people preserve their emails. They don't want more spam. They don't want more sales emails. So you really have to think about what's gonna entice people to want to join your email list and what are you planning to provide in it. And so first, you might not even want to start sending out a newsletter.
Helen:You might just say, I gotta figure out a way to collect email addresses for future. So I'm gonna give you a couple of tips that you need to almost create like an create an incentive for why you're gonna why people are gonna give the email. And that's really a lot of times it's difficult. Like for for us, when we when Julia and I started our email list, we were doing a deep dive into how to find trending music and trends. And then we thought we're doing all this work to find the trends for ourselves.
Helen:This is great content for social media managers, people who are creating content every week and they are they need to spend the time looking for the trends. So we do we're doing the work for ourselves. So let's make an email list and share those findings. Whoops. My microphone just went south.
Helen:That's okay. You know what? I have to Well, that was crazy. Okay. I'm back.
Helen:I'm organized. It was a domino effect and everything went tumbling down. But, I don't even know where I left off. But I think it was about the thinking about what you want to add value to your audience in your with your emails. So ours was sharing trends, sharing content ideas.
Helen:We were doing the work for ourselves and we thought this is the great this is a great plan. We're doing it for each other. We're sending each other trends and content ideas. So let's share it with an audience. And that's what we decided to do.
Helen:But you can decide within your niche what's something maybe that would be a value to your followers that they might wanna hear from you about without being too wordy, without being too much, without taking up too much of their reading time. You really have to gauge your your audience. So that is something for you to ponder. And if you're new to the email list world, subscribing to other newsletters in in general can help you decide, oh, here's what I like in a newsletter. Here's what I don't like.
Helen:And that really helps you. If you're a viewer of content, you can really start to think what kind of content do I want to make. If you're a reader of newsletters, you can think about what you like about newsletters and what you might want to do differently. So being a subscriber will help you to figure out what your newsletter might be about. You'll wanna determine how often you wanna send a newsletter.
Helen:So think about all these little pieces, bits and pieces, figure factoring in the time, how long it takes to write one, to how much do you want to quote annoy your followers with with, an email. And you'll start to see a pattern, like did they read it? How many of your people are actually reading them? You can look at analytics and you can start to get a sense if your emails are too much. And, we have a very high open rate on our emails, which is why we continue to send them on a cadence because I think what we're providing and the kind of value we're providing is every week we're telling giving people direction, telling them what they can do, giving them ideas.
Helen:So who doesn't want more ideas? We're out here floundering with content. So I think that's probably why. But depending on what you're going to do in your newsletter, just think about how often people need to hear from you so that you're not annoying your audience and causing an unsubscribe. And then you'll have to think about a platform.
Helen:Where are you going to What are you going to use? Are you going to use Mailchimp? Are you going to use Beehive? There's other ones, Substack, etcetera. Julie and I use Beehive.
Helen:We really like it because within the platform it gives you opportunities to have people advertising. When you get a large enough audience reading your newsletter, if you have enough subscribers, you can then have ads. You'll notice that occasionally, like today, we have an ad in the middle of the newsletter of the from the AI report. So you'll have the opportunity to put ads in and start monetizing your audience, which is a really kind of little extra bonus. So thinking about that, we can put a link to BeHive in the newsletter and in the show notes here for you.
Helen:And then you'll wanna start promoting your newsletter and figure out how to do that. So these are all the things you're gonna have to think about. Now, let me stop for a second because if you are so preliminary and you just want to start gathering email addresses for a future newsletter, you can do something as simple as offer something and then in order to download it, the person has to put in the email for you to send it to them. And this way you can start gathering email addresses, so that when you're ready to start your email list, you can email to your people and just say, if you remember I had to sent you such and such work, workbook or a p d the pdf of the how to clean out your closet or whatever the heck it is that you're gonna share in as your free giveaway, where they're gonna have to give you the email list in order to get the giveaway. You can do something as simple as collecting the email address on a Google form and do it manually.
Helen:You can make a little Google form, put a little link out there on your makeup piece of content and have a link in your profile and say, if you'd like this free PDF of how to clean out your closet, how to do a closet cleanse, you can, you know, drop me an email or drop me Yes. Well, you make the Google form and then you have They drop the email in in order to get the PDF. And then you can even do it manually, sending it out to people and put a little note and here's the PDF. Thanks so much. And you know, blah blah thank you kind of thing.
Helen:And then in the future in a month or 2 months or 3 months when you figure out what you wanna do about your email list, you can then start your newsletter. You don't have to immediately start a newsletter if you're not ready. So I wanna just add that in as a thought at the end. And then very lastly say that because all of these sound like a lot, it just sounds like like, oh my god, how am I gonna figure out all these things? And who's gonna hand hold me and walk me through all these things?
Helen:I don't even know what you mean, like get beehive. How do I start that? In the socialized studio this month, because a lot of people wanna start an email list, we're gonna be focusing on how to start an email list. And what I'm gonna do there is walk people through week to week with specific how to's and make tutorials showing here's how a platform like Beehive works. Here's how you were you're gonna start your email newsletter, and and we're gonna deep dive in and have specific ideas and help on how to start that email list.
Helen:So if you're interested in that, please look us up and start on the studio. But if you're not, the things that we mentioned here will take you through the process. Thinking about those steps. Why You know your why. What's your incentive gonna be to start collecting, to start collecting emails, to start getting people interested.
Helen:Watch what other newsletters are doing so that you subscribe and you see what works and what doesn't work. Decide how often you want to send your newsletter out because it's time consuming. You think it's gonna take you 5 minutes to write a newsletter. Even if you are an AI maven, you don't want to send out a canned sounding newsletter because everybody's gonna be able to see through that. So don't depend on chat GPT to write your newsletter.
Helen:You're gonna sound like everyone else. It's gonna be boring and bland to read. You're gonna need to really put some thought into each each piece of content that you're sending out in an email to make sure it's engaging enough and it keeps people interested. You need to pick a platform and then you need to figure out how you're going to get people to want to be on the email list. So there's a lot of steps and yet it's not that hard once you just take the first step.
Helen:Just like making videos, like you take the first step. You learn how to shoot, you learn how to edit, and then you figure it out. You say, oh, my lighting wasn't so great. Oh, my editing wasn't so good on that one. So baby steps.
Helen:You take it one step at a time. You do the first thing and then you get to the next thing and you don't get too far ahead of yourself. I would say the biggest part is figuring out maybe why you want to start the newsletter and what you're going to offer in that newsletter. Having that in the back of your mind as a starting point is probably the most important thing because everything else will will lead from there. So I'm thinking about people, for example, in the fit in the fitness space.
Helen:Say they wanna collect news their emails. People, like I said, in the fashion space, they're gonna maybe have they're gonna offer maybe a closet cleanse PDF or whatever. Maybe in the fitness space, you're gonna share simple workout tips on, a PDF of simple workout tips and we're gonna share I'm gonna share this like workout book with you. What whatever that or a healthy eating, I guess, meal plan, for example, that would be a great thing. Like a first step meal plan for if you want to eat healthy in in 2025.
Helen:Whatever it is, think about that that initial offer that's gonna get the person to give you the email so that you can then keep them on the email list and decide how you wanna move forward with your email list. That was a lot. And today was a lot because I had a zoom session for the transition challenge and it was so much fun just to meet the people who did the challenge. And I had one young person in there in her I wanna say she was 40, maybe maybe even younger. And I was so happy to see her because I know that I tend to, because of my age, I tend to attract people of my age or around my age because they see me creating content and they feel inspired and they feel that they can do it because of how I appear.
Helen:And they're like, if she can do it, I can do it. But it's really cool when I get younger people in. And then this woman was Emani. I don't know if you're listening. I hope you are, but you are lovely.
Helen:And she just went on to say that she is so thrilled to have discovered. She has always been a kind of a commudgeon when it came to content and learning how to do videos and transitions and just couldn't even deal with it. And she felt that the way that I explain it joyfully and clear just made a huge difference in her, her, desire to do it. And I just feel so grateful for that. So if Imani, if you're listening, thank you so much.
Helen:You're lovely. And everybody who's participating in the studio and maybe listening to this now, I just wanted to tell you again that it means so much that you're trusting me with your content journey and you're allowing me to be a part of it, a part of your learning, a part of your success, and just a part of your happiness in being a content creator. So that is it for this Friday. I managed to get through it without dropping the phone a second time. So that's progress.
Helen:Thanks for being here. I will see you next week. Have a great weekend. Bye.