If you want to be well known online and intentionally grow your personal brand then a regular live stream can be a great way to be seen, heard and to command attention. It'e simple, easy and mostly free. But despite that a lot of people are more scared of going live than any other kind of content marketing.

This week I'm joined by Amanda Web who'd going to walk us through her live streaming journey and what it meant for her business as she grew into it.

About Amanda Webb

Amanda from Spiderworking works with businesses to improve their digital marketing ROI. When you don’t know if your marketing is bringing sales, or don’t know how to get more sales, she’s the person you turn to. Her content on the Spiderworking blog has won her awards nationally and internationally and she just loves to talk marketing. She has written for international websites including Social Bakers, Social Media Examiner and AgoraPulse. When she’s not working she loves watching Dr. Who, playing with her cats and watching films.

https://spiderworking.com

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Welcome to amplify the personal brand entrepreneur show. Today on the show, bob is speaking with Amanda Webb. In the past, I've seen, like, a lot of businesses, I've got an awful lot of work from referral, but I know it's you have had a lot of work. You'll know that a lot of that isn't right. It isn't the right people. When you're creating content to try and find those people, you're really focusing on on the customers that you want. Whereas when you get referrals from other people, they may have missed that. They may have missed the type of client that you want. And if it's not the sort of client you want, very often, it just doesn't work out, and it's not fun for everyone either.

And welcome back to Amplify, the personal brand business show. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week, I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise. Intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, they might still have your device in your hand. Hit the subscribe button, and that way you won't miss a single episode. And if you're a regular listener, then consider sharing the show with just one person, as it's the very best way you can help me grow the show and reach more people. So this week, I am really excited to be joined by Amanda Webb. Amanda is somebody I got to know a little bit recently. We've been bouncing around each other online for quite a few years, probably, but meeting you in person in San Diego, I need to have Amanda on the show. And the reason for this is Amanda's always got the good stuff first, and you got to find out all about that today. Amanda, for the listener who's maybe new to you, could you start just by telling us a little bit about who you are, where you are, and the kind of work that you normally do?

Yes. So, as you said, I'm Amanda Webb. I'm based in the Republic of Ireland. Obviously, I'm not from the Republic of Ireland, as you can tell by my accent, but I've actually been here, I think, 27 years now. I'm just one of those people that doesn't pick up accidents. And I work with businesses in Ireland, in the UK. And the United States to help them get more return on investment, on the time, the energy, the money that they are spending on their digital marketing. So people work with me one to one. I also do various training. I produce reports of people. I help them with their analytics. So there's lots of scope in that ROI.

I think ROI is definitely something that I want to talk about today. But first, I need to say thank you for joining me. I forgot to say that that's okay.

I was just listening to some of your previous podcasts and I know I'm in great company here, so I'm actually excited to be here talking to you.

Every single episode for me is exciting. One of the things a pardon listener. This is me going to reminisce a little bit. I think we're somewhere around 200 episodes now and not really one for keeping count, but I remember the first few episodes, it was just like jumping on a roller coaster. It was that thrilling. I enjoy meeting people, I'm a natural introvert, but one to one encounters like this, for me, they are where I feel right at home and it's still every single conversation like, this is so exciting, I am really excited to get to meet you. And I mentioned to the listener a moment ago, you're somebody who gets the good stuff first. And what I meant by that was I follow you on Twitter. And one of the problems with social media, digital marketing in general, is it moves so fast. For somebody like me, it's impossible to really stay on top of industry news at the granular level in terms of features of new products and things like that. And that's something you're always on top of and it's just really, really impressed me because I know how hard that is.

I simply mention that to kick things off, everybody likes a little bit of flattery.

Yes, thank you. I suppose that's just part of my main content project for the last six years, I think it is now, has been the Digital Coffee, which is a live show. When Facebook Live happened, I was like, this is the place I want to be. So I started doing a social media at the time news show about all the updates in social media and that's evolved over time. And it's really good because it helps me get customers. It's my number one top of funnel lead generation tool. And also it's really good because it keeps me up to date so that I do know even the stuff that doesn't end up on the show because I only include seven stories a week. It gives me the opportunity to stay on top of all the changes when they happen and how they're going to affect businesses and that information just seeps in over time, I find myself talking to people and go, oh yes, and Instagram are going to be doing this shortly. Which always makes me happy that I have that knowledge under my belt. And also, of course, it makes me happy that that's where my customers come from.

Well, it absolutely gets noticed and it must drive business because that level of timeliness is really hard to achieve and it's hard to maintain. You mentioned the live show and this is something that I'm always intrigued people who manage to a do a live show and B they sustain it. It is something you've sustained and it's probably why I've been so consistently aware of you but could you perhaps unpack that live stream strategy for me? Because I know it's not as simple as simply rocking up on a Facebook Live. It's a little bit more nuanced and smarter than that. There's an element of multi streaming, and I'm just curious to understand what that looks like in 360 degrees, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, so I suppose when I started, it was just a bit of fun to see what this Facebook Live product did. And for many years it was just on Facebook. It was one of those things. The algorithms tease us and persuade us that we should do something and they give us exceptional reach. And back then, when Facebook Live was first launched, you used to get easily 60 people watching your live streams every week. And that's exciting. That gives you a bit of a thrill to do. So initially, I started it just off the cuff, just shooting into my phone. And then over the years, I started developing the strategy around it, because that's one of the reasons I teach people ROI now. I spent a lot of time not thinking about the ROI, so over time, I started repurposing it. So knowing not everyone could turn up live for the show, I deliberately started moving it into segments and moving it into seven segments per week. So I cover seven stories and there's a little trailer between each story. And that means it's very easy to repurpose each of those segments out, so that if you don't see the live show, you're going to see those snippets going out on Twitter, going out on LinkedIn, going out on my Facebook page as well.

So that brings me back to the whole structure of the thing. I need to prepromote the show. That's really important for live streaming because it's a set time every week. It should be like a TV show that people want to tune in. So I'll start promoting on a Monday for Friday show, which involves setting up the events. I use Restream, which is multistream platform in association with ECAM, to push it out now, because Facebook Reach is now not about live video at all, it's all about Reals. I need to push it out to more channels. So at the moment, I'm streaming to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. So it sets up events on each of those that I can start pushing people to earlier in the week on a Wednesday. Then that's when I construct the show. So unless a really, really hot piece of news comes out on a Thursday, wednesday is the day that I lock the show and I find those seven stories. And I'd probably find, from all the various sources, maybe 20 stories, and narrow it down to seven some weeks, particularly during the summer. It's hard because I struggle to even find the seven stories.

I write that up in notes on my Mac so that I can pick it up on my iPad and I have the notes that I can share during the show. There's a whole lot of other stuff that I do on a Wednesday to prepare it. Thursday is my day off, the digital copy. And then Friday at 09:30, a.m. Irish time, that's when it goes live, and then that's when I send it to the editor to get all the sections out of it. And recently, we've just introduced an after show on Twitter Spaces. Because, again, when Twitter Spaces came along, it was like when Facebook life came along. I want to play with this. So I do an after show, I have a cohost making sang, and we discuss the stories and we bring other people in who want to talk about it. Because I guess when I'm on my show, I'm voicing my opinion and sometimes people might not agree with that. I think the key thing that's changed since I started doing it is at the beginning, it was just any social media news. Now I'm really only interested in the bits that will change the way people are marketing their business.

So even though for the last. I don't know. Six months now. Since Elon Musk said he was going to buy Twitter. I could do an Elon Musk section every week. But I'm pretty much ignoring it because until we know what's happening. Until we know I mean. This week. As we're recording this. He said he's going to buy Twitter again. But there's no guarantee that's going to happen. And actually, at the moment, we don't know what that's going to mean for business. So even though it's a juicy story, I tend to leave it out of my show. I'm more interested in that Facebook has launched a new ad type that will allow you to request the callback from the advertiser. There's a whole lot of stuff that is relevant to marketing, so that's the stuff I tend to focus on, on the show.

So that makes a lot of sense. It's not the gossip news, if you like, it's the actual news. It's the things that have actually happened rather than just rumours. And because the problem with rumours is often they linger for a long time and the reality of what comes at the end is a bit of a letdown. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And it's the same with that Twitter edit button. It's almost every week we have a new story about that and still most people don't have access to it.

One of the things that you speak about a lot in your own content, and you've mentioned it at least a half dozen times since we hit record, was ROI. And ROI is such a complicated thing, actually, because some people measure ROI in terms of the long game, and then some people look at ROI as something they expect to see in weeks. So what does this conversation of ROI relative to digital marketing and social media looks like for you? What are the normal ingredients of the conversations that you're having with people about ROI around those topics?

I think you've nailed it, really. A lot of people think ROI is, I post something on social media today and I get money today. And that's not often the case. It can be for ecommerce businesses. I tend not to work with ecommerce businesses, but it can be. If you're lucky, you could post up a product today that lots of people like, and they buy it. But the long game is really where it's at, because you can have those fleeting moments. It's like Christmas. You can sell loads at Christmas and then not sell anything for the rest of the year, which is a real problem. So I think playing the long game is better. And I also think that people return on investment is about making more profit from your business. It's not about anything else. It's not about getting more engagement. It is about getting more profit. But once you've got that goal in mind, you can totally work it back and not ignore things like brand awareness, which traditionally you think wasn't something that somebody that was ROI focused would care about. But unless people know who you are, they're not going to buy from you.

And that's kind of why I do the digital coffee. If anyone looked at my stats for how many people watched that show, they'd see that it was maybe ten people, eleven people watching live. There's a handful of views on each video as well, and there's all the other ways that I repurpose it, but it's not huge numbers. And I've never out of all the years I've been doing it, only one time have I finished the digital coffee and my phone has rung and I've got a client directly. So a lot of people would say, well, you know, from return on investment point of view, that doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound like you're making a lot of money from that. But actually, every single customer that I get will tell me that they've watched the show, or they've watched a clip of the show. It is always mentioned. And when I delve into my Google Analytics, where are most of my lead magnet downloads coming from? They're coming from either the YouTube videos of the digital coffee or directly from the show itself. So it tells me that even though the numbers are small, this is the stuff that's really working for me, and that's why I keep doing it.

I think without those numbers, I wouldn't and I think that's also a lot of the time that people make mistakes is they'll act something like that that is really working for them. Because when they look at the numbers, they think other people can see there's only a few people watching it. This isn't good for me. And like you said, I'm here today because you watched the digital coffee. So, for me, that's why I spend so much time creating that one piece of content. And that's the sort of thing that we would look at for customers. We look at what's happening right now on their websites. We look at what blog posts are driving the most traffic. We look at what blog posts are driving the most lead magnet conversions, or if it's not lead magnets, inquiry form, quote form conversions. And then we look at how we could maybe optimise some of that content. So the stuff that's driving the most conversions may not be getting much traffic, and the stuff that's getting the most traffic tends not to get the most conversion. So we look at how we can play with that and see if we can improve that.

We also look at the sort of content they should be creating that could drive more conversions. So that's not necessarily a sale yet. It's getting them into the process, and that's the next thing. It's a process. It's like, what happens next once they've got filled in the quote form, or what happens when they land on your website? There's lots of places that you can optimise to make sure that once you've got someone there, you're actually capturing them as a lead.

I think it's really interesting listening to you. There is something that I often find myself speaking about with clients is a very simplistic view of digital marketing. And it goes a little bit like this. We have a simple equation. It's traffic plus conversion equals money plus retention equals growth. And what you described there was a very articulate expert view of sectioning off the various levers that you can pull in order to optimise a business, which I found really nicely elegant. And whenever I hear that, I know somebody knows what they're talking about, which is, I guess, enjoyable to watch. And from an expert perspective, from the nonexpert's perspective, I think something that you mentioned around the Digital Coffee was that it's very rarely the case that somebody will pick up the phone afterwards and say, I'm going to I watch the digital coffee. I want to buy ten from you, please. It doesn't typically go like that. It's part of a long term process of building rapport, building relationship, and building trust. And one of the interesting aspects of ROI is the eye is for investment and not speculation. And a lot of people think ROI in terms of short term.

But if you ask any investor who is looking at somebody who's coming into a marketplace, doesn't really know what they're doing, they will immediately call them speculators, because they came in to try and make a quick buck. And I think a lot of people come into content in the same way. They come in as speculators, not as investors. Investors are there for a long play, but they know over time, compound interest will kick in, and then they will start to win. And it's those who stay in the game for a period of time, the mature investors, we all look at it and think, wow, what's their secret? The secret is time. It's really, really important. So I went off on a bit of an angle there.

No, but you're so right. And I think that's one of the reasons I work mostly with service based businesses, because it is a long sale cycle. I have people who have been on my email list for maybe ten years and will suddenly get in touch saying, I want to work with you. I've got this. Can we have a call? And we'll and they become customers after ten years. Ten years of them consuming my emails and my content online. And it's similar for a lot of service businesses, I think. Is there a level of trust there because people tend to be spending a bit more with services or they're devoting a lot to a service that they want to really feel like they know the person before they start working with them, which is, of course, where personal branding comes in. And I think it is a really long sales process. Now, thankfully, I don't have to wait ten years for every customer. It can happen a lot faster than that. But it's not the case of saying seeing something in a shop window, seeing something in an Instagram post and going, I'm going to buy that.

There's a lot more that goes into the decisionmaking process for service businesses.

So let me ask you this opportunity can come to us through one of four routes. It can come through outbound sales activity, it can come through content and content marketing. It can come through referrals, or it can come through paid content ads. What does that typically look like for you?

I'd say for the last year I've been doing a lot more outbound sales work. I know you had Jessica Laura on your podcast. I attended one of her workshops earlier this year, and I seem to get into a reading spree on sales content as well. So I'm doing a lot of I wouldn't say I'm doing a lot of sales calls, I'm doing a lot of relationship building because I don't want to be trying to sell something to someone who doesn't need it. I'm trying to, at the moment, connect with a lot of my LinkedIn connections just to find out, do I need them, do they need me? And actually having proper conversations with those people. And that without even trying to sell anything in those conversations. I've made sales as a result of that in the past. I think, like a lot of businesses, I've got an awful lot of work from referral. But I know if you have had a lot of work from referral, you'll know that a lot of that isn't right, it isn't the right people, because when you're going out and you're trying to find those people you are, or when you're creating content to try and find those people, you're really focusing on the customers that you want.

Whereas when you get referrals from other people, they may have missed that. They may have missed the type of client that you want. And if it's not the sort of client you want, very often it just doesn't work out and it's not fun for everyone. So I try to move away from getting referrals from people that really don't understand the customer I want. And I think that's a place where your content comes in as well. You need to focus your content on the type of customers that you want to attract. Otherwise you do end up getting a lot of really bad leads.

So is it fair to say that you don't have a dependency on outbound sales, but in order to control your.

I don't, but I am trying to do so. A lot of my work would be existing clients and I have a lot of work that comes in from the content marketing I do, of course, because if that didn't work, I couldn't be telling anyone else what to do. So that's my focus.

The reason I was trying to funnel you that direction, pardon the pun, is I've been speaking to quite a few people recently who that just isn't true for. If they're not doing active outbound sales, they're getting nothing. And for me, this is the power of your personal brand at the hand of your content, consistently showing up in other people's lives. Hey, you become much more referral because to destroy your own Burgundy, you're kind of a big deal within your ecosystem, if you like. And when somebody is trying to decide between you and some other random local agency, you stand out like a shining beacon as an authority compared to the other guy who's perhaps simply able to talk a good game and throw a proposal together and maybe some testimonials. And this is the result of the long game. It's consistently showing up, consistently building your authority, your visibility. It will mean that you can take the brakes off having to knock on people's door all the time and the world won't end. And when you do go out knocking on the doors, the conversations just happen because people spend two minutes looking at you and go, well, I kind of flattered she called me, rather than, oh, who's this hustling me again?

Which I think is most people's experience of sales, definitely.

And I kind of feel like a lot of people do sales the wrong way. But I mean, I am no sales expert. I'm going to give you my nine months of me Practising sales and tell you that I haven't done a hard sell on anyone yet. Very rarely do I actually get on a sales call. It is just the getting to know you and the relationship building. And I know when people are trying to sell to me. I've had calls set up with large software companies, for example, and they've obviously hired a sales rep and they book a zoom call and they don't switch their camera on. It's like, I'm not going to buy from them. What are they hiding? Immediately, you're kind of like, what are you hiding? If they booked a phone call, you'd think, Fair enough. But it seemed really bizarre for a zoom call that you wouldn't switch a camera on. So I think and also. You just want to get the measure of someone and that's where your content I've been doing video on social media since I started this business 13 years ago. And it's always had the effect that I can walk into a room in Ireland.

At least. Because we're a small country and people recognise me and know me straight away and have some sort of idea of what I do.

Yeah, I absolutely recognise what you're talking about with the so called sales professionals, especially in the software space, it seems to be. And, you know, as soon as they ask a question, Hi, Bob, how are you doing today? And you're supposed to answer, I'm really good, thanks. And then they'll ask you another question in order to make you say yes to something. And you know the game that they're playing, and I'm sorry if you're listening and you don't know the game that they're playing, but it's basic Sales 101. If you can get a customer to start saying yes to something when you ask them for money, they're far more likely to say yes. And it just kills me that there is no relationship with building. Sales is all about building rapport, building trust, getting to know people, understanding their needs, and then asking permission to have a conversation about what you do and saying, Would you like it? It's that simple. And you know yourself when it's not right to have that conversation, don't have it. Move on, get on with something else.

Absolutely. And that's what I mean. I can't really tell anyone they're doing, say it was wrong because I'm so new to this business. It would be like someone who started using Facebook, like, six months ago, telling me I've got my marketing wrong. But I feel like I've learned a lot in the six months I've been doing that. But it does tell you that I'm in this business 13 years and I've only really started doing sales this year. It just tells you that you don't necessarily always have to do it.

But what's interesting, though, is there's obviously a shift happened and there's this old I can't remember who said it, but if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. And I think that's the problem a lot of us have in our business is we grew the business, our business grew us at the same time. And you get to the point where you think, I want to change something, but momentum is already moving in a particular direction. So if you want to change that, and it might be the kind of client that you're working for, the kind of work that you're doing for them, that takes an act of will to move momentum, and it requires you to be having different conversations than the ones you were having before with different people. Perhaps. Maybe you want to level things up. You want to start doing corporate work. And this is where Jessica is amazing. It requires you to change the game, change the way that you're thinking about what you're doing, and change the activities. Because at the end of the day, if you're changing anything, it's all about an active will.

And 13 years of an active will. It's like shifting the direction of an oil tanker. Yes, I'm sorry, that was a random analogy.

But you know what it is? I think I don't like being stuck doing the same thing all the time. I'd like a challenge. So I think I've done various things over those 13 years. I started off just like 13 years ago. I was the only person I knew with a Facebook page when I started out. So that was what I did for people. I helped them set up a Facebook page and showed them how to post on Facebook. That's where I started. And then I got into I was like the Facebook person for a few years, and then I started getting into blogging, and I was the blogging person for a few years. I really feel like I've settled on the thing I love to do now, because none of that is important without making the money. So analytics and that whole ROI thing, I love seeing that making a difference. So now if I'm not going to change the type of marketing I do, let's see what sales does. And that gives me a real buzz that's like, I'm going to try something new. I'm going to learn this new skill. And I think that whole learning thing is the fun of being in business for me.

Otherwise, I would just have a job doing something static.

Well, I think there's maybe a little bit more going on, and you can tell me if I'm out of order here, but you've been doing what you've been doing for 13 years, and you got really, really, really good at it. But there's a particular subset of people for whom that skills of an extraordinary value. And unless you were to change something, to deliberately reach those people for whom you can monetize much more effectively, because what you do is that much more valuable for them, you're not going to fully leverage your opportunity. You have a unique value at the heart of your skill set. And I think this is true of most of us. We're really good at lots of things, but there's a couple of. Things that we do for one particular kind of person that's incredibly valuable, but we very rarely get to operate at our maximum at our optimum, because we're so busy doing average things for average businesses, whereas if we're doing specific things for specific businesses, suddenly we're much more valuable. Does that make sense to you?

It does. And definitely that has been part of it. Because I have made a shift in who I've been targeting with my products in the last year too. Which is a challenge in itself. Because not only is it finding new people to work with. But it's also changing the way my content appears to facilitate those people. Which has been it's been challenging and interesting. But like I say. That's why I'm in this. I like challenges, I like doing things. So the sales has definitely been part of that. There are people and that's why I focus on LinkedIn now. There are people that I've known for a very long time on LinkedIn I haven't spoken to in years and probably don't know that this is how I can help them now. So that's been part of my focus, is really I mean, LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for sales because nobody's expecting you on to randomly message some Facebook friend that you met in a bar ten years ago and say, hey, let's have a chat. That would just seem like you want to go on a date with them. Whereas on LinkedIn you can totally do that and renew that relationship and find out if you're a good fit.

And actually, it works both ways because I've hired people after having spoken to them on LinkedIn too. It's like networking in the best possible way. I can't believe for so many years I wasn't really paying any attention to LinkedIn. I have to say, I think it's.

Because for a lot of people, it wasn't very trendy. Yeah, there's lots of reasons to hate LinkedIn. I could spend the whole afternoon talking about that. But what I'm definitely finding, and this is the thing a lot of people will tell me, all my customers aren't on Twitter, all my customers aren't on TikTok, they're not on Facebook, I'm not going to go there. That's dangerous. I have a client who will tell me, adamantly that his customers aren't on Facebook. The thing is, his customers are all human beings and most human beings are on Facebook. It's the same. Some people will tell me, my clients aren't on LinkedIn. Virtually every person that's in business or has a job is on LinkedIn, so of course they're there. It's just where you decide to put your time and your energy. And I think you can't go to all the parties, you just can't you can't be present in three rooms at once. So where are you going to make the decision to be present? And I think, like you, I'm looking at Instagram thinking, you know, it's a lot of fun. I'm looking at TikTok and I think this is absorbing.

It's like a rabbit hole. I'm looking at Twitter thinking, I can have real conversations here, but I look at LinkedIn, this is where people want to pay attention. It's quite different. So I'm looking at LinkedIn like you, as where I want to make my longterm commitment to regularly showing up, because it's where people seem to be paying attention at the moment. And I guess for me, this is the thing, it's the platform where they're in the right mode. On TikTok, people want to be entertained, on Twitter, it's chatty, but on LinkedIn, people seem to be ready to pay attention would be the way I would put it.

It's definitely become very content centric as well in the time that I wasn't using it, which is nice, because I find myself that is my main place that I will consume content. And that could be said, that's the thing that's wrong with LinkedIn. I'm reading the content in the feed, I'm watching the videos in the feed, I'm not clicking away to anyone's website. That is the big downside from LinkedIn. It's not great at driving traffic at all, even from the ads, to be honest. But it is a fantastic place to gather all this business content together, which is one of the reasons I'm really enjoying it now, which I hadn't previously. But just to go back to your previous point, I kind of agree as well that your customers are everywhere. So one of the things I always do when we assess with clients which social network they're going to focus on, because we usually just start with one, maybe branch out into two. So we'll go through all the options, we'll look at where their audience are, we look where their existing customers are, where they found them, all that information. And then the final tiebreaker question that I will ask is, which social network do you enjoy using the most?

Because I've struggled with LinkedIn in the past, this is probably my fourth or fifth go at giving LinkedIn a go, because I really didn't enjoy posting there. So if that's the case and we suddenly choose a social network that they just feel depressed when they go to, they're never going to make an impact on their marketing. So that's always a tiebreaker question, I think.

So one of the things I would maybe like to understand from you, and this is, I think, really important, when people are listening to people like us, they will assume that there is a legion of helpers, that we can't possibly do all this content on our own and continue to serve our clients and be doing the sales in an average week. How much of your time goes into content and what does your team look like?

My team? I would love to be bigger, but I think outsourcing is one of those things that you dip your toe in and then you slowly expand your team over time. So the first person I hired after an accountant, which I would always recommend, I mean, why would you put yourself do throwing your own tax return? The first person I hired was an accountant. The second person I hired was somebody to answer the phone because one, I think you mentioned earlier that you're an introvert. People might not think that about me, but I am. And one of the signals for that is I hate the phone. I despise it. I don't ever want to ring anyone or be wrong. And it also takes you away from the work that you're doing today. So that was the first person that I hired for someone to answer the phone. It rarely rings anymore because my content now is driven towards other ways for people to get in touch with me. Then that same person does my book for me. So now I have an accountant and a bookkeeper. Then when I started doing the repurposing of the digital coffee, I started doing that myself because another of the things I dabbled in was before all this, I decided when I was a child I wanted to work in film and television and that's where I went to college.

So I do all my own video editing. But it would take me 2 hours a week to do that. And it was a really simple job. So I outsourced that. And I also outsourced to my web developer who I built the site many years ago. But now I have someone that maintains it for me and anytime I need something fixed, they do that. So that's my team at the moment. I am looking to expand that in the future, but that's where it is now. And like I say, as soon as you start getting people to do the work, it is very addictive if you never want to let go, because that's the stuff that gets in the way of all the work that I need to do. So go on.

I was going to say it's actually quite a modest team, but go ahead. I think you were going to tell me next how much time you actually spend on content.

Yes. So I would say two days a week I have marked off for content. So the digital coffee takes five to 6 hours a week and then I have my LinkedIn content on top of that. And part of my LinkedIn content is making a video. But it's a very simple editing job. I've kind of learned not to try and do too much with that. So all in all that and all the social media scheduling I do is probably two days. I could actually go and look at my toggle now, I could tell you, but it probably comes out of two days, which I actually block out.

Yeah.

So it's not a case of I need to create that content. There's no way that it would be very rarely, the digital coffee wouldn't happen. Something big would have to happen to stop it being on. So that takes priority over everything else, even client work.

To some people listening, that would sound like an awful lot. So what would you say to those people who say, well, why don't you just put all that time into client work or sales?

Well, I suppose I wouldn't have any clients. Three days of client work a week is enough for me. And I think I used to spend even more time on content, and I used to work way longer hours. So now I'm quite disciplined with the time that I work. I work five days a week. I work from 08:00 A.m. In the morning to 06:00 p.m. In the evening. And if I'm pushing at 07:00 p.m., I don't work weekends. Whereas previously, when I was creating more content, I was working. I wasn't getting much sleep that way. And I don't think that's not a life that we should be leading. So I've narrowed it down to the content that's working for me, and then I have three days to work on client stuff. And sometimes that would be a day's training and various other projects that I'm working on. But I actually think if I was working five days with clients, I wouldn't have had the energy to put into five days worth of client work, whereas three days I can really focus on what it is that they need to make sure I'm delivering the best value.

And pricing is important. Then you need to make enough money in those three days to give you the two days to do something.

That's exactly where I was going to go next if you've got your pricing right. And I think a mistake a lot of people make is they put all the time into content, but it's things like vaguely anonymous blog posts that don't really do anything to support the growth of your personal brand and the authority that goes with that. And creating the value proposition, increasing the value proposition through your personal brand, it means you don't manage to it sounds crass to say raise your prices, but you sell different things to different people for whom the value is different, so the price can be different. That's what the content allows. So you can make more money doing less, if you see what I mean.

Definitely. And you are. Honestly, if I was working five days a week, the energy wouldn't be there to devote to, because I'd need obviously more clients to fill that in. And I like the number of clients I work with now that's just perfect for me, that I can have enough attention for each project that I'm working on.

So I want to ask you this question, and you may not have an easy answer, but what is the biggest bit of social media or digital marketing bullshit that you regularly hear and you think people need to stop that, I'm.

Going to come to really petty things, which is one thing that constantly frustrates me and everyone can disagree with me, that's fine, I'm okay with that. But I think people chase the algorithms way too much. And one of the things they do is all the social networks have a link style of post apart from Instagram. But even now you can do that in your Instagram stories and people constantly try to think, well when I post a link, I don't get much reach. So instead of that, they'll post a photo and they'll post a link in the description. Or what's really common on LinkedIn is they'll put the link in the first comment. Now there's lots of reasons I hate that. Number one, the algorithm will show link posts to people that will click links. And luckily LinkedIn have actually made link posts a lot more attractive recently. They've got this new link sticker that's a bit like Instagram. But secondly, you're making people do an awful lot of work. You put everything into your sales pitch to get people to click this link and then you're telling them, oh yeah, but I'm not going to show you the link.

What I want you to do is I want you to go in, I want you to scroll through the comments because LinkedIn just puts them in a completely different order to find where I posted the link. And that frustrates me. Like I say, it's really petty, but that frustrates me beyond belief and they do it on all social networks. Just please just start posting links. Not maybe, not just test it, something. And you know, the thing is, the algorithm will show link post to people who click links. So you'll actually get more clicks. That way you might not get as much reach, but you'll get more clicks. And I will live and die by that.

So essentially trust the algorithm to show the content to the people that like that kind of content. Give the algorithms a little bit of credit and stop trying to trick them because nobody likes being tricked and you'll probably end up getting punished.

And you know what, I know that we can't really trust everything that all the social networks do, but it is in their interest to show posts that people will engage with to the people who will engage with them. So just I know this is a really petty thing to like say, this is the thing that irritates me the most, but I swear every single day I have a little rant to myself about it. And I was just about something specific just before we got on this podcast recording. So it's the one that came to mind.

So I want to go back to the live stream and this is a vaguely selfish question, but I'm sure it's one that probably a lot of people are thinking. If you were to start your livestream again, what would you do differently? And if you were giving anyone a piece of advice that was thinking, I quite like to start a live show, what would that advice be?

I don't know if I'd do anything differently, because it's always that thing, isn't it, that you've learnt from what you've done? But at the beginning, I had no goal for what I was going to do with this live stream, and that was the place I was in when I started it. I wasn't really focused on how the content I created would have an effect on my business, so I was very lucky that it had a positive effect. So I would say, before you take on a project like that, you want to go through, and I do this with clients frequently when they say things like, Should I start a podcast? I never say yes or no. I'm always like, well, what's your goal? What is the reason that you're doing this? So it could be that you want to get more brand awareness, or it could be that you want to connect with more potential customers. It could be something along those lines and then we would work back our expectations, how much time that's going to take, and really put a plan together for it. And I wouldn't take on a new content project as big as that now without doing a lot of planning, whereas back then I was a lot more, well, let's just try this out and see what's going to work.

So I think that would be it, really.

But I guess this is for anybody listening. Not the kind of planning that just sends you in a tailspin of planning and planning and planning and planning and planning. At some point, you need to take some action. So just a bit of warning.

That's so true. And you can just end up having something in plans for years. It just needs to have those basic things. Why are you doing this in the first place? If the reason you're doing it is to just have a play with a new tool, that's also fine once you know that that's the goal that you're planning it for, but have a reason to do something and have a reason to know, maybe to review it, so that you decide whether you're going to keep doing it after a period of time. And that's just because I do pick up things and go, I'm going to do TikTok or whatever and get really excited about it for about a week and that's it.

I was a little bit there with Reals. I was just about to start doing reels on a regular basis and suddenly the floor fell out of reels overnight.

Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? I could give you my theory about why that happened.

Go ahead.

So, suddenly, Instagram made every video that you upload to, instagram a Real. So it took away. The thing that was good about reels, that they were these short thumb quirky videos, and suddenly we were getting everything the wrong size. We were getting little slices across the screen of a horizontal video that they turned into a reel. So now we are overwhelmed with really poor quality reels. Nobody's interested anymore. I may as well go to TikTok, where at least the content I see is good. So I think that's part of it. We've got too much content.

Speaking of which, it's been awesome getting to know you in this episode. I think a lot of the time, I don't know my guests at all. And that's always exciting when you know somebody a little bit getting to not really go deep with them on a podcast is a little bit of a double edged sword. Because by the time you get to the end of an interview. I really want to do another one. Because actually. Now I know the questions that I would really like to ask. But I can't do that. Unfortunately. But I can have you back sometime.

Yeah, absolutely. It's been great.

So if people are listening thinking amanda webb. ROI spiderworking. I love the sound of that. What would you like them to do? How can they get a little bit closer into your world?

Go to my website, widerworking.com. You'll see at the bottom of the home page, if you want to just get a taster of what it is that I help people with. I've got an OnDemand webinar, which you can sign up for, get instant access. And that takes you step by step through the process of measuring the ROI and building a content plan about round the ROI of your digital marketing. So that's a really good starting point. Of course you're on my website, then, so you can get in touch with that. Or the best place to connect with me right at this moment is LinkedIn, which is what we were talking about. So you can look me up there and I'm happy to connect. Just let me know that you came from this podcast.

Amanda, what's one thing you do know that you wish you'd started five years ago?

Well, I think I already talked about it, which was the planning. I definitely, instead of just taking something on a whim, I do spend a little bit longer deciding what the value to my business is for doing that. And that's all, really, because I don't want to work all the hours that I used to. I want to focus on the things that are actually delivering for my business. So definitely thinking, at least for a moment before I start a big new content project.

That is a really good answer. But again, it comes with a warning for people like me, if I'm honest, no over planning a plan. Yes, but no over planning.

I hear you completely, because there is that scary thing where sometimes you create a plan and you feel really good that you've created the plan and then you don't do it, that happens a lot, right? So it is a case of just taking a step away and taking those key factors. Why am I doing this in the first place? Does it fit my business model? I think you don't need to go too deep into it.

So, Amanda Webb, you have been great fun. I've really enjoyed myself and thank you so much for coming on the show. Like I said, I would love to have you again some time.

I'd love to come again. It's been great.

So that brings us to the end of another episode. Thanks to you for listening and if you did enjoy the show, I would like to gently encourage you to leave a five star rating at five with an F and it's 12345, like the fingers on your hand fivestar rating wherever you listen to podcasts and share it with one person. If you did enjoy the show, then you will love the personal brand of business roadmap. It's 100% free as a gift. For me, it's 30 pages of everything you'll need to start to scale or just fix your expert business. Click or tap the link in the show notes or visit amplifyme agency. Thanks again for listening and see you next week.