Andrew Bull
Hello, welcome to another episode of the interstellar business show. My name is Andrew Bull. And I’ll be your host on this journey of growing, working and living smarter. On today’s show, I’m joined by Arn Terry. We’re discussing everything to do with blogging, and especially how your team can get started with blogging and overcome some of the challenges that stand in their way of this amazing opportunity for your business. Right. I’ll be talking with our right after this message about a business report I have created for business leaders just like you. Are you

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a free thinking business leader, we have a report, you must see. It’s a personalized report that reveals your strengths and weaknesses. Head to Interstellar dot report and get your free report today. test yourself at Interstellar dot report.

Andrew Bull
So I’m very pleased to have on the show today on Terry who helps people demystify social media. Welcome to the show on.

Arn Terry
Thank you for having me on board, Andrew, gratitude, and I’m looking forward to this conversation. Okay, brilliant.

Andrew Bull
Can you share a little bit about yourself? Or what do you do?

Arn Terry
Yeah, just quick overview, husband, father free. And as I said, on the intro, I help people on social media keep it very, very simple. If you got a passion, or if you got a hobby, I’ll help you turn that into a profit, or just help you raise your social media presence on whichever platform is best for you.

Andrew Bull
Brilliant, fantastic. And like one of the things that we said we’re gonna really go deep on today in this episode is blogging. Right? And how and especially how people and business teams can get confidence with blogging. So here’s that slight. The big topic we’re gonna go into today is big myths around blogging.

Arn Terry
Yeah, a couple of the big myths that you see is blogging is dead. And that’s one big myth. Like, you know, what, why don’t you need to have a blog? Last massive myth. Another myth is blogging is time consuming. And isn’t isn’t worth isn’t worthwhile doing. So that that has to be the big

Andrew Bull
blogging isn’t blogging is alive and kicking is what what you’re saying?

Arn Terry
Yes. Okay. Absolutely.

Andrew Bull
And what I like, I mean, I certainly believe so. But like, how can we convince people? That’s the case? What, what, what can we do,

Arn Terry
and it doesn’t really need any convincing for me is, it’s just stating the obvious is a written word. So think about it, you know, if the written word, it’s literally there, it’s basically saying podcast. And, you know, one point people said that podcasting was was going to be a thing of the past, it wasn’t going to be something that was going to grow. And here we are, on the podcast, yo. And, and you know, just is the written word. And it’s something that can be put into different platforms, as well, just as you have your podcast show, you can get onto YouTube, you can stick on to Facebook, Instagrams, all the things. And just like when you’ve got a blog, you can, again, as I say, cross pollinate. And so you can pull that across different platforms to get your reach out to more people out there. And you know, people intake of information is different. Some people prefer motion picture, some people prefer the spoken word. And there’s a lot of people that prefer the written word. So we need to really identify that there’s a huge amount of people out there that still use the written word, which is very powerful. Hence, plugin is not dead.

Andrew Bull
Okay, fair enough. And also, I’d like to say it’s the foundation for all that other content as well. So even if you think your audience are more YouTube friendly, then you still need a script to work off, right. And a blog post can be your script for for your YouTube material. Exactly.

Arn Terry
Okay, cool. Exactly. And yeah, you put the pipe the pipe, they’re really really clear as well, because you’ve got a blog, you’ve got a written word there. And obviously, you’re going to be talking on your YouTube channel. So you just use the information from your blog, and just talk on on on YouTube. So it’s a great script, to as I said, Go on different platforms around him social media platforms.

Andrew Bull
Okay. And, you know, some people say blogs are boring, and I get I kind of get where they’re coming from sometimes. But I think we have to think that not all blogs are the same. I mean, when I first started blogging, some of my blogs are quite dense and hard to penetrate, you know, slabs of text, like you’re writing your university dissertation or something, but you which can be fine for certain audiences that Thick content will be what they prefer. But for other audiences, you can write more entertaining, engaging penetrable content, can’t you?

Arn Terry
Yeah, indeed, I will say like this, because my background from like, 15 years ago has been like sales. And when and I’ll get to that question in a second, but just to just to put some, some meat to it to the answer is back in the day, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, never, never would you put a smiley face on a message to a client? That was like, unheard of, it was like, you know, are you being unprofessional? You’re gonna pop a smiley face? Or a kind of, obviously, emojis, but then what emotions are there now? And there was very limited, but are you going to put some sort of emojis, okay, it was unheard of, if you did something, it was like you crazy, you know, you unprofessional to do something like that. Which leads me into the blogging now. And the way that blogging has changed, where, again, depending on what kind of people you’re targeting, if it’s obviously blogging about law, etc, you can still put a bit of tongue in cheek in there, and your personality, but I think what people get confused when the blogging is they’re trying to write like a dissertation or some sort of piece of, you know, art, even though it is art, you know, plugins are, podcasting is Apple, you need to put your own word, your own story into it. And don’t follow a format template, you write it how you speak. So it comes across more natural to the people. That’s, that’s, that’s reading the content. And so that’s why I believe, you know, if you do blogging the right way, it’s not going to be boring. But again, as you’ve said, it depends on the kind of message you’re trying to get out there. So smiley faces, or moles use whatever you want to call, it can get thrown in there, various entertaining pictures can get uploaded on there, as well as to break down the word in as well. And just to, you know, make it a bit more nice on the visual.

Andrew Bull
And I think he make a great point about the humanizing of communication, and like, love or love emojis, they kind of do signify that breakdown of those traditional stuffy barriers of light everything by dear sir stroke, Madame, I wonder if I can help you with your inquiry today that we kind of, we’re kind of slowly moving beyond that, and not realizing Actually, that’s not how we talk on a daily basis to each other. And therefore our blogs like that as well. Like, they should be more like how we actually just converse with each other? And,

Arn Terry
yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Bull
And often a good way of knowing if your blog is any good or not, is reading it back to yourself. And, and like, just read it out loud. And then you’re like, Oh, this sounds really stuffy. And like, not actually who I am or what I’m trying to say. So that’s that’s quite a good way of getting over that. Should you should you just write for for search engines as well? I know, I’d say that is a mistake that some people made in the past, what how’d you feel about that?

Arn Terry
And I say write for yourself, do yourself over a serious over a series of time, I would say, don’t get technical, don’t go in, you’re on the SEO side or don’t go search and you say it will say this, it must say that because it’s going to take the phone away from it. So we’ll say initially, just write what is true to yourself, because you can actually get lost into your blog. And you look, you’re looking at books three months later, it’s like, I’ve created something that isn’t me, I’ve created something that doesn’t sound like me. And I’ve created something that I’ve just copied another, another blog out there. So I would say just create stuff for yourself or for your business. Again, depends if you know if it’s if it’s business, a blog about or office about your own personal brand or product. I will say create that content for your business or for yourself, because there’s too much people or just too much stuff out there, which is the same as every now So yeah, that’s the big problem, unique thing.

Andrew Bull
That’s the problem with chasing Google, right is actually that Google encourages, like homogeny and everything becoming the same, because everyone starts chasing the same search 10 terms. So you know, yeah, going after the big numbers where there’s like huge volume of monthly searches, by the mean that if we will go down that road, every single blog post would be exactly the same. Right? So I think you’re exactly right, having a unique take and then later on, you can go back and do some SEO optimization,

Arn Terry
is that right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And because you know, people, some people just greens, they’ll do it all the way around to, to chase the followers to chase the search. But I would say, No, just just keep your own kind of get your own flow into it. And you can also, you know, you can plug in the standardized searches of standardized blogs. And I feel like you’ll lose the message very quickly. If you go down the the drone route, let’s just call it

Andrew Bull
Yeah, yeah, no, I get Yeah, it becomes very, like sober and like, yeah, like, almost like it’s written. If you write for a robot, you’re gonna sound like a robot.

Unknown Speaker
That’s the reality in the

Andrew Bull
real person. And I think I don’t think even Google wants you to Write for Google, either. And they’ve put a load of stuff into their algorithms to discourage that as well. You know, this is why this is why two tags no longer have value on blog posts, or people just stuff, their blog posts with them, and all that kind of stuff. But let’s just jump ahead, what I want to talk about now is the myth of who is a blogger, or who are actually who is a writer, because this is something I see, I see. And I’ve done this myself, people spending a lot of time answering queries from clients, or customers or other team members about how to do things, right, and you invest half hour in writing a care or maybe longer writing a careful email or someone’s that person, about a process about how you do X, Y, or Z, right. And then you send that email and you probably forget about it. And then in six months time, someone else comes back to you have a similar query, and you have to write the same email again. So it becomes a huge waste of time. And that what I find interesting is some of these people who write these emails are afraid of blogging or don’t think they’ve got anything to write about. And what I would say to them is, take these emails that you’ve been writing, and remove the specification towards individual customers, or people and turn them into a blog post. And then whenever that query comes up, you can you can send them the blog posts, and and you’re also getting a double benefit, not only saving time, but you’re also can attract people who are searching for things around that on on Google as well. I mean, what do you say? What do you think about that? Yeah.

Arn Terry
That’s exceptional. And this is one piece of advice I gave to my commander, which which company it was, and what someone was in the customer service. side. So this ties in really nicely to what you say. So someone’s on the customer service side of this business? And I said, Well, if you create the blog, every answer to, you know, customer service question, you could create a q&a site on the blog. So then exactly what you said when someone gets in contact with the company, or someone sends you a message. And all you need to do is refer him to the page of that post or the article. And not only you’re helping them, obviously with the answer them on your blog post, you also get people viewing your blog as well. And so I say that’s, you know, phenomenal advice for anyone who is writing information out there on the company, especially if your customer services or our complaint side, it’s really useful to have a blog, because you can use Python to your question and answers and, and help the many and obviously, get people viewing your blog post as well.

Andrew Bull
Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that example. That’s a really nice example. And also, you can take that one stage further, right? Because let’s say you’ve got multiple products, right? You can actually then link to your two blog posts about other products on that helpful blog post page. And Pete, your customers can organically discover other things about your business, or they can share that expertise with other people that they know, let’s say, you know, they need help with installing a firewall on their server the right way, if they, you know, that’s helpful for your customers got that problem, but they could then share it to their friend who owns another business who’s got that problem. And they can share your blog post. And it’s, you know, it’s so much easier, right? And actually with GDPR, right? It’s hard to share other people’s emails anyway. Right? So actually, you when you put stuff out in a blog post, you kind of sanitize things and got away from that. Anyway,

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Andrew Bull
right, let’s let’s jump forward now into 2021 is fast approaching. I mean, this podcast, if you’re listening to it in the future, at some point, let’s hope we make it to 2022. At this rate, it’s not looking too good, but Fingers crossed. Come on, guys. It’s got to be a better year Come on. Right. But even if you’re reading this in 20, you know, in a couple of years time it is this is still going to be relevant because we’re talking about kind of the trends over the next five years or so. But what trends are going to be affecting blogging. In the next couple of years, then sorry, are not on.

Arn Terry
So what trends are going to be affecting plugging in? What were you in the way of your time or technology,

Andrew Bull
technology or social or financial?

Arn Terry
Yeah. So Well, the first thing, I’ll go back to what I initially said the way that you know, some people and the uninitiated, and for that blogging was dead, it’s gonna get even bigger, because a lot of people have going through pain due to 2020. And a lot of people want to talk about pain. So some people again, may not feel comfortable with doing a podcast, some people, you know, the listen to the voice of God, I hate the sound of the voice on the podcast. And some people are too scared to visually see themselves on a YouTube channel, because they don’t like the way the look. But what is safe and comfortable, is just writing because when you’re writing something, you can check it, you can check the grammar, punctuation, etc, etc. So I believe the spoken word by way of blogging is going to become even bigger. For that reason as well, because it’s pushing us more to social media is pushing us to talk most pushing us to communicate more. And because we have been social distance for gosh, you know, close to a year now speaking in December 22. And people aren’t socialize with each other. So it’s quite kind of funny to use the word social distance, because we’re not socially, we’re not socializing. But yeah, go into my point, I see blogging, in you know, skyrockets in, just like having a YouTube channel, just like having a podcast as well. And the consumer, a lot more investment in technology. And first as well, because a lot more companies trying to capitalize on how they can monetize and blogging. And because what, what I coach people on is doing it on not paying for it by going to a various website to do it. And not just like zoom is free, obviously, the other business side of it as well, making more money, I can see a lot more companies now try to invest in some sort of tool on how to help people by blogging, and how to make money from it. So I can probably see a lot more, they’ll probably people like me popping up here as well. And say, I can help you create x and y. And by way of word of mouth, by way of blogging.

Andrew Bull
Yeah, so I suppose so. You know, big a big thing is obviously with distance actually, having a blog presence gives away people for people to connect with you, at you as an individual and your business online, when you’re not able to connect with connect with people. So that could give you an advantage over other businesses, right? If you’ve got a good, got a good, you know, if people are waking up to vendors, like two possible businesses, who they’re going to go with, they’re gonna go with the accountancy firm, who just have a sales page, or the accountancy firm has a sales page and loads of blog posts, which demonstrate their expertise and accountancy. I mean, they’re gonna go with a with a blog, and it’s almost like,

Arn Terry
exactly, and it’s like, you document your, your journey so that the best way I can, I’ve explained to a few people as well is know your business only you’ve got your company, small or large company, today, think of it as your curriculum at all in Latin, well, that’s Latin, but in English, it’s your life story. So think about your business as your life story. And you can start blogging about your company. So when you was first founded what you do, your first hires, what you overcome, you know, the challenges that you overcome the first tech technology, first technical equipment that you purchase, why you had to upgrade the technology, you know, because you were building your team so that technology now became obsolete or your technology. So you can create a lifestyle from that as well. So you can help others follow if you did want to give away your playbook or your platform and some of that information away. And again, like you said, when you’re pitching to another company, as well, you can speak to that business and say, well have a look at our blog, it gives a really good story of where we’ve come from, you know, the blog explains it all. So there’s different areas where a blog is so useful for and you touched on it as well on the sales side as well. Then you can plug in links to your products and services on your blog. And so to purchase, just whatever you’re selling and promoting at that time. And again, it’s there forever. Once you’ve got your body. It’s there, you know, as we know, the internet never sleeps. So it’s a really good idea. If you’ve not started blogging. It’s a really good idea to start with blogging to get you out there. Yes, people may disagree and say, but I’ve got, I’ve got a website, why do I need a blog. And for that very reason what I’ve just said, you can give a stronger lifestyle in your blog on there as well. It can be separate to your business could you can put a bit more of your personality into the blog, or the business person’s into blog as well. And it just, you know, creates another platform for people to find you.

Andrew Bull
And, yeah, I love that, like that advice of putting your own heart, you know, sharing some of your personal story, because people want to have a relationship with you. I mean, that’s a key, I think that’s a key trend and advantage that people are going to have moving forward. In fact, it’s something that small businesses and entrepreneurs have over huge companies, right. It’s hard to compete with mega corporations. But one advantage you’ve got, is being personal. And, and having that showing that human side, which these big brands can’t, so make them make the most of it right of that edge. Indeed, yeah, sure. What what mistakes Do you think people make when it comes to blogging? Do they take on too much? Or, you know,

Arn Terry
what would you say? the mistakes that, yeah, the mistakes that people make is no start. And that’s that stating the obvious, and thinking that’s too complicated. So I guess these these kinds of beliefs are that their belief system thing is too complicated. It’s too time consuming. And, and also, as I said, just just peeking, try it in the wrong way, not not catching your audience. by speaking how you would speak or by speaking how your business would communicate with our customers. I think they’re some of the mistakes that I made on there as well. And again, just just under estimating the power of, of blogging, I would say that, that the key mistakes, just not being serious enough that blogging is you know, it’s been around for a while, and it’s here to stay. And it’s just going to get bigger and bigger. You know, you can see it again, don’t take my word for it. Do your own research, in terms of, you know, the amount of blogs and people starting to blogs going up the amount of people starting a podcast have gone up smart people start a YouTube channels gone up. So again, just start now, don’t wait for tomorrow, start now. Just literally, even if it’s a couple of paragraphs, you know, you’ve at least done something.

Andrew Bull
Yeah, yeah, I think i think that’s that’s the thing, sometimes people envision these things as being too big, or they compare themselves to someone else, they might see someone who’s written like a 3000 word blog post, I think that’s where they need to start, you can start with 300 words is a perfectly ample amount to start with, or just start just by having a new section, like on your blog, and like, then you can just put up a picture of something and a couple of like, you say, a paragraph, right, and then build build from there. Exactly. It doesn’t have to be loads, loads and loads, and you can experiment as well and find what people want. And one mistake that I think people make is getting writer’s block. And I think the reason people get writer’s block, is because they haven’t done enough research, right? They sit down at their keyboard. And think, I don’t know what to write about. Well, the reason you don’t need to write about is because you haven’t read enough books recently. You’re not Yeah, you know, you haven’t invested anything into the topic that you’re going to write about. Yeah, or you haven’t sat down and done like a brainstorming session. And like, you know, unpacked your own mind with things that you could talk about. So I think if you’re having if you’re making that mistake, you’re getting blocked, you need to do more research beforehand. And they’re like, just, if you if you made it if you’re going to start blogging this year, get by two or three books that are really interesting on a subject, right as a starting point, I think it’d be a good point, reading those books. And those will probably give you a year’s worth of content ideas that you could unravel, unexplored and play with, I think that’d be a good way to start. Do you read? Do you read a lot?

Arn Terry
And quite funny, at 10 years ago, the old the old, our mother said, I hate reading, I never would have believed I would be consuming as much information as I am now. So keep in a very long calculable compensation on this. Give them a very long conversation short, I’ve got books on on astrophysics. I’ve got books on Medea meditation, manifestation to social media to ology to various different sacred symbols out there, you know, 10,000 years old, etc. Because I invest a lot in my mind, you know, the way that I see Mind is a muscle. And you know, we see these people going to the gym and constantly working out every day or they’ll travel ons and stuff like that I do the same thing with my mind. And so at the moment I teach myself to play golf, the the ball game. And so to anyone that’s not familiar with go with like chess bot on on natural. And so yeah, I invest a lot of my time and energy into things like that, but I’m way way big now into kind of quantum mechanics, quantum physics, quantum entanglement. But yeah, it’s it’s, it’s very interesting. And that’s really, really strong panel you mentioned when when you invest in your, in your mind, buy books, journals, and wherever your fingers it gives you so much content out there. So the amount of content I can post now is just infinite, because I’m constantly just now before this podcast, in fact, defines podcasts. I was not sure, really with the book, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, but there’s a there’s a new one that she just published a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve just finished that just now. And I’ve just forgot what it’s called. But yeah, she’s just got a new book out a new secret book, which is just

Andrew Bull
your title.

Arn Terry
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s called memory block now. But yeah, so yeah, I’m just constantly investing the time in, in various books out there. And again, anything from like Grant Cardone, TEDx to, you know, sales, etc, etc. But that’s what I do, because of what and coaching the mindset for meditation, except for to get people in the right state of mind to start and stuff. So now I go above and beyond just talk about social media, it’s the deepest set into it as well, which is obviously your mind the mindset.

Andrew Bull
Yeah, mindset is key, right? a mind that is, is ready is ready for anything. So let’s move on to team team blogging, unlike, you know, it’s obviously good as an individual, if you’re a solo entrepreneur, you’ve got your own challenges, but teams have got their own challenges when it comes to blogging as well. It’s blogging a good fit for organizations for teams.

Arn Terry
Yeah, 100%. If you’re not doing it, do it, have fun with it, enjoy it. And the great thing is, if you’re a team doing a blog as well is for one, you’re not by yourself. And you’ve got a you know, I was free the magic number. If you’ve got three different people, for example, it could be like sales, customer service, and maybe operations. And then you can basically collaborate together and see how to get the best out of your out of your blog. So hope that that’s that’s making sense. Yeah, yeah,

Andrew Bull
no, I like the idea of having the three different angles as well to diet for your customers. That’s really that’s really, that’s really helpful

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Andrew Bull
I think about the pitfalls that teams might come across, when they’re when they’re trying to blog are, you know, have you? For example, one account when I came across the other day is that not everyone actually wants to do the content creation? Like some some people, some people will some people might feel unconfident and shy about doing content creation. But other people at this stage, they just don’t want to do it. So how do you think you can get around that goes?

Arn Terry
And well, my main mantra, first of all people may like it, some people may hate it, is it’s none of your business while other people think about you. So that is there. When you’re writing something, you’re putting content out there. It’s none of my business what people think about me, it’s none of my business what people think about me, and that’s just to get over the other person that you know, if you stick your name by that blog article, always someone’s gonna think that it’s worthwhile to someone when they feel that the content is right, is someone gonna pick up any grammar or punctuation issues that I may have may have missed? Again, it’s nothing your business what other people think about you, the thing that you need to think about to get you off your butt and do it is you are helping someone you know, you’re going to help at least one person out there. You’re going to give information to at least one person out there. So don’t do it for you. Because I don’t do any of this stuff. May I do it to give back to people. And so when I’m blogging, I want to do me YouTube channel, I’m gonna play content out there on Instagram, you know, I’m just looking to help at least one person out there. So if you just focus on that, because that’s why hopefully you set up a business. This is to help help people to be of service, to give service, and to serve whatever category you want to put under. And, you know, you need to fall back into wine, you’ve started that job, while you’ve taken that role, which is a serve and Bill service. So putting a blog out there is again, it’s just for me, it’s a no brainer. Okay.

Andrew Bull
And so I, you know, one of the things that I think you can do when you have some people who don’t want to blog on a team, and some people who do is assign different roles to people, as well. So not everyone that has to actually write the blog post. I mean, everyone could be involved in ideation and coming up with ideas, and like getting your content calendars gamma, but maybe some people write a post, some people proofread, some people like edit, and then get the post uploaded. So I think everyone can play a different a different roll out, but what, you know, why should you go on,

Arn Terry
like I’ve said to another company, as well, is everyone assigned their role. So one person who wants to do the blog, they can, they can be the blogger, in terms of putting information from keyboard keypad to post, one person can, as you’ve said, viewer, some person know that person may be better on the grammar, punctuation, or if you’ve got anyone that does want to blog and put the post out there, you just do on a cycle. And so for the first free, one person will do it first free, first free, and just rotate and freeze rotating ones, whichever works for that business. But the first thing we work in in teams is just like when you start up your organization, you’ve got your Gantt chart, you tell them someone did what your role is, you do the same thing. But when you create the teams on your blog, so you know what your job is, and there’s no confusion. Okay,

Andrew Bull
and what what should team, why should team members care about blogging? I mean, I’ve already got mine, let’s just say, I’m used to having my regular jobs that I do nine to five. And now my boss comes to me, he goes, Oh, Andrew, I want you to start blogging. I like well, this isn’t why you hired, this is why you hired me, why should I care about doing this?

Arn Terry
fit. First thing is, if you are a business owner, or senior management team, and you’ve got the authority to create the blog, and I was in the worst thing you can do is go and tell your staff that you’re going to do this. And it’s this then goes into the care. And knowing your team and knowing your staff. Because hopefully, again, if you’ve seen a member of Team, you know more about your team, you just you know you more than that the first and last name and the date of birth, you know what their kind of their hobbies are, and what they’re into, or what they may want to get into. So it may be worthwhile, have an initial conversation with your team when you’re doing your, again, hopefully you’re doing your quarterly reviews at the minimum and finding out what their hobbies and interests are, you know, is it social media? And what do they go to in their spare time? Would they be interested in in the book, so what you do initially, again, there’s information gathering around their personality, what they would like to do, because that’s how you’ll find someone who is more into critiquing. That’s how you find someone who is more into actually writing a blog post. That’s how you find someone who’s more interested in just getting everyone together and a collaboration. So please do not just go and tap this year, your team member on the shoulder and say, Radke, you’re doing a blog now, you kind of ease them into it. And being a business owner, or a senior member of Team, again, you need to do it as well, you need to be part of this, not just throw onto the people, you need to be kind of the the properly the base by starting off. But if someone wants to take advantage of it and own it, this is how you can actually create a sense of belonging to your staff, because you may have a staff member who would want to own all this. And that’s again, knowing your team knowing your stuff by saying Well, okay, this is something I know you’re going to excel in, and I know this is the kind of responsibility that he was wanting to do. And then you can actually be in charge of x. And then it just it just, again, it’s just about knowing your team, knowing your staff member. So again, just to go again, don’t just tell him to do it. They need to, I don’t want to have to do it as well. But you’ve cracked you kind of build that community up together by saying that it’s helping Business is for the greater good, whatever your what’s the word, whatever your mission statement is, go off your mission statement. And again, if you don’t have a mission statement as a business, and you really need to look into your business internally, because your staff members should be bought into the mission, and not just go in there, and you know, just to pay the bills as well. But again, we’re dealing with people, so you can never gauge how they’re gonna react.

Andrew Bull
Right. I think that’s brilliant advice on thanks for sharing that. And I think you’re right is key to empower your team members and get them on board. And, and it goes into this thing, I like to talk about encouraging people to achieve outcomes. And like you say, achieving the outcome of the shared mission of vision, which hopefully they bought into, and like letting them talk about the different ways that they can achieve it, maybe they’d prefer to do it with YouTube videos, rather than blog posts, which if they feel if they’re fully permitted to do that, then great, let them do that to 200% power, rather than saying, Oh, you’ve got to do blog posts. So yeah, I think giving giving ownership to your team members is, is key. And it’s also if you want to start if you’re a business leader, or business owner, and you want to start working less, and stop having to do so much, then giving ownership to people is is is a huge part of it as well. And I’ve got another podcast episode coming up after this one, which is going to be all about how you can build a winning management team, so you can stop doing so much as well. But let’s, let’s go back to this episode. So how can teams get started with blogging? What are the what are the first steps of the process that they need to go through? What would be the first one it? Would it be? Would it be determining what they want to achieve with the blogging?

Arn Terry
And first thing I would say is don’t overthink it. First thing I would think about first of all is fun. How can we have some fun? And let let’s be honest, it’s been challenging for most of us out there in 2020. So the first thing is okay, how can we have some fun on this blog? Right? Okay. So we will we’ll write the word fun on the whiteboard, we’ll put a big circle around it, and then we’ll kind of diagram off it. Right. Okay, what else can we achieve? So, again, I’m not saying this for you, too. As a topic, I’m just giving an example. You’re out the word full circle it. Right. Okay. What do you want to achieve? and service? Okay, service. Okay, what do you mean by service, helping others advice, information, products, sell it, etc. So a candidate diagram by the diagram kind of grows, this is his legs from there. And so that’s what you start with. So you’ve got, again, that should only really take, you know, when I’ve led meetings and stuff like that, you know, 15 minutes, 20 minutes at the very, very, most don’t need to be too, too time consuming. That’s right. Okay, we’ve got that, you’ve obviously got the name of the business anyway. So you pull it into into the blog post, but then I would say use blogspot, which is owned by Google. So blogger, sorry, and which is owned by Google. And so create your blog, and then obviously, put it all together. And then it’s a case of again, one thing that I teach some may agree Some may disagree is you don’t have to have your own your, do all the posts yourself, you can go into different articles. And you can put their articles onto your blog post, as long as you link it back to the source as well. So again, you need to decide how you want to start again, I would say start with your old stuff, we are all messaged first, but if you want to go down the excusive, we haven’t got enough time, we’ve never got enough time, you have got enough time. Because there’s ways that means by using other articles and put on that blog post, and just linking it back to the source. And so yeah, so going back to your question, the first thing is, I would say is, is form, advice, helping others serving, and just start from there. And so hopefully, that’s kind of what

Andrew Bull
I mean, I like the idea of like, starting from the the point of view of fun, I think that’s a great idea. And I here’s a top tip for people as well. There’s a free app you can use called otter.ai. Like all these apps, there’s obviously a paid version, but the free ones pretty good. And if you if you’re struggling with sitting down in front of your keyboard and starting to write, then just get this app, start recording your voice and just start talking about the subject. Start talking about the problems that that surround the products or the service or the idea the ways that that those things can be solved. And before you know it, you’ll have 2000 words of you know, audio which has been automatically described, which you can then Edit together into a blog post. And that’s quite a nice, that’s quite an easy way of actually just getting some words down on a page. And it’s I think, is much easier once you’ve got 2000 bad words down on a page even. And I think that’s fine to be like, oh, I’ve put down 2000 bad words, well, guess what, you’re one step ahead of the people who have put zero good words down on the page, you’re one step ahead of those people. Because it’s like, you know, it’s like being chased after a lion, right, you don’t have to be faster than the lion, you need to be faster than you know, you do need to be doing more than your competitor, who’s trying to also run the line. So so you don’t need to be the best blogger in the world. You just need to do some blogging. And and except, you know, and don’t get caught up in perfection or everything having to be absolutely perfect. It doesn’t need to be. And even if you publish your blog post, right, and afterwards, you go, Oh, my gosh, I put, you know, this is the big one for me would have been there and bear, you know, different ways of spelling that as you like three different ways. Right. So that’d be an easy one. Don’t worry about it, you can go back and change it afterwards. It doesn’t matter.

Arn Terry
Yeah, exactly. And once you’ve just posted as well, there’s not gonna be too many people looking at your article anyway. And so you’ve kind of got the forgiveness that you’re not well established initially. So you can make those mistakes and learn from those mistakes, which is the main thing.

Andrew Bull
Yeah. Okay. And so one of the things I want to talk about is blogging confidence, because I think a lot of this also comes down to a confidence issue. So sure, you’ve got some people who just on your team who don’t want to blog, fair enough. But once once you’ve decided that blogging, or whatever other form of content production is the thing that you want to do. A barrier might be confidence that your team feel a bit, not sure, worried that they’re going to look a bit silly. But I think is key to I think it’s important to know that everyone starts off as a newbie, and you don’t need to be a world class blogger on day one, right?

Arn Terry
Indeed, exactly. I say, going back to Delphi, but there’s so many examples where you can help with someone’s mindset because guess what this is going to lead them back to the books that are that are read. And absorb is you helping someone overcome a belief system Bs, as I call it, and that they are not good enough, or that they can’t do it. So as helpers with the mindset, first of all, by getting some key examples of different ways you can do this, you can talk about yourself as a business owner, again, depending on the relationship that you’ve got with your, with your key member staff talking about where you’ve where you’ve started, and the journey that you know, you may have been broke, you failed so many times, you know, you have to get the boss to, to work and how you’ve overcome that is by believing in yourself, when you believe in yourself, you can literally achieve anything that you want to so you can talk about that. Or you can go on to other things by bringing up key bloggers out there at the moment by saying, by just getting some stories of bloggers out there, who’s literally started off with nothing. And you know, given that you give them a high level overview of their bio, of how they start and the mistakes that they’ve made them look at. And now you’re the never fault because there’s some great stories out there about, you know, bloggers and people being dyslexic, really struggled with spelling, grammar, punctuation, but but look at him now. And so it’s basically bringing them back, or bringing the so called celebrity social media, people down to the level that they’re just people like you and I, and they’ve all had their limited beliefs, but and until they started believing in themselves, that’s when it started to take off. So that’s what I believe what we need to and again, business owners, especially what’s going on now needs to focus on the staff with a mindset, just with a culture and abilities and letting them know that what they want to achieve that they can achieve it Don’t let their limiting beliefs stop them from even this because again, you need to inject some of your own energy to your staff and say you believe in them you believe that they can do it. And so that’s one way you can do it and and also you know, you can have like fun and games I guess as well you can get your team to again dependent on your staff to have like little contests a plugin and then the you know, the best person who comes up with the best blog post gets to feature or they get, you know, a crate of wine or beer or that or they get like some vouchers to go away somewhere. So what you’ve actually done, you’ve made again, this one type of form where people don’t realize form pays a lot, you know, just before we came on level, you know you mentioned football, these guys haven’t fun, you know, the plane, the game and again paid millions of pounds. Having fun. So the way that you can incorporate food into your corporation is you can have a blogging contest, and put up whatever prize you want to put up there. And the best blog gets this. But then what you’ve also done, you may have another 10, or 15. Again, depending on the team size, have another 15, blog posts, and you’re thinking, ah, you can use this for Episode Two, Episode Three, Episode Five, Episode Five. So what you’ve done within a short space of time, you may have, you know, six 710 15 different blogs that you can actually put on there. But obviously, the winner are first, second and third, get a prize. So that’s what I mean about fun. So it’s kinda like tricking the mindset. And, and then when someone’s having fun, they tend to drop the barriers or their bs their belief system into thinking, Oh, I can’t do this, or I shouldn’t do this, and just have fun doing it. Interesting. That’s

Andrew Bull
great. That’s really that’s really helpful advice. And I think encouraging, cut, you know, fun is great, also encouraging people, giving them positive feedback, telling them, telling them, what you like about the content they’ve created, I think is also massively valuable, you know, don’t they’re your team members create an amazing piece of content, or even it doesn’t have to be amazing, and okay piece of content, and don’t then not feed back on it. Because, you know, you’re not encouraging them to go off and do the next piece, then it’s kind of like working in a vacuum. I think everyone could do a little bit of praise now and again, and I think in general, in life, taken a moment to say, I like this, because of something is such a powerful thing to do on a human to human level. And I encourage everyone today, just after you’ve listened to this, just go and tell one other person about one thing that you’d like about them or that they’ve done because it will just totally make the day, I think you should also encourage your team to work together and support each other, just what you which is what you’ve, you’ve said as well. And like make sure people got the right resources as well. Whether that’s, you know, proofreading tools, the right training, which doesn’t have to be you don’t need loads of training. And but time is another resource, right? Obviously, you can’t expect people just to write a blog post in five minutes, you need to allow your team members actually time to do it. And also, don’t be a perfectionist I’ve worked for perfectionist, perfectionist can be really hard to work for. Because they’re always shooting things down. Things are never done to a good enough level, which totally kills the confidence kills the fun, as you’ve said, and really demotivate people. So you’re going to have to accept six out of 10 pieces of content from your team members, and be happy and appreciative that rather than push them for 10 out of 10. And you’ll never be you’ll never be happy anyway. And your team will be like absolutely killed if you have that approach. Let’s wrap this up. And and i’d love people to be able to connect with you on after today because I’m sure people have enjoyed all your blogging insights. You know how to get their teams blogging, how they can start blogging? Where can people learn more and connect with you.

Arn Terry
I would love people to find me on YouTube. Type. My name is Alan Terry. I’m a company name, which is Freetown mindset. And we’re going to talk about a lot of the mindset stuffers of it as well. And I’ve got some tutorials on there free tutorials of how you can literally create your blog from from start to finish as well. And but LinkedIn, I’ve been hanging out on there for about 14 years now. So you know, find me on LinkedIn. And again, Instagram of us want to jump straight in and view my online course. It’s free town mindset calm. And but what I always say is, wherever you hang out the most just send me a connection on there. And we can have a nice introduction conversation to see how I can help and assist.

Andrew Bull
Brilliant. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. And I hope to see you again soon. Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode, I had a lot of fun. Talking with Arne, he certainly got a lot to say about blogging and mindset. And yeah, you should definitely go and check out his content and connect with him. I think it’s really important if you want your team to start getting going with blogging or any content production to really get them on board with that process. So I would encourage you as a starting point, to have a meeting. We just have a really open conversation about content that you talk about the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve from doing content production. Could you perhaps achieve those outcomes from another way instead of just blogging or maybe you could use you do YouTube videos? Or maybe you can do some kind of streamed live events instead. There’s many different ways of achieving the outcomes that you want, and that those different ways might better suit your team. So if they love video, then YouTube might be a thing that you want to do, and get them over those mental roadblocks of having to sit down and write 1000 words, and especially if that would be a better form of content for your audience as well, because everyone loves video, I think the main thing is to sit down with your team and have that conversation. You know, talk about what you use a business want to achieve from from content production, and then talk about the different ways you can go about doing it. And then stop giving ownership to people and giving them you know, responsibility, and also the power to make choices and start shaping the content that your company makes. If you bring people on board, your results will be so much better. All right. Thanks for tuning in. To this episode, really appreciate you having you here. Here’s a short message about report I’ve created especially for business leaders like you, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks for being here.

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