Bret Shuford 0:00
Welcome back to the creative visibility podcast. I am Bret Shuford. If you're new to this podcast each week, I meet you here on Tuesdays and Thursdays On Tuesdays we focus on creativity and how we can unleash your creative side. So many of us who are entrepreneurs, business people, or or even performance can oftentimes get stuck on our creativity. And I hope to unlock some of that for you. So that then on Thursdays we meet, and we talked about how you can take that creativity and become more visible out in the world. Hence the title, your creative visibility, right. So if you're interested in growing your brand, if you're interested in growing your business, and you want some help on how to become better known online, using social media and other marketing tools, I am your guide. And I would love it if you subscribe and leave a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to this on. So today, we're going to talk a little bit about strengths because I recently was asked to be the keynote speaker for a social media event here in Houston, which is where I'm currently located. I was very honoured and my friend Brittany Crossen, asked me she's part of she runs a company called the Small Biz social society. And she has a great podcast as well. I'll link to that in the show notes here. But what was really cool is I had wanted to be a keynote speaker, I've wanted to do more speaking over the last few years, and to get to actually do it was really quite an honour. But even in doing that, like anything we do in our business there, we discover a lot of a lot of things, right? Like I learned a lot of what people who are in, you know, marketing and social media and trying to build their businesses, the things they struggle with. And ultimately, I heard a big question that I think was super important to discuss and talk about. And that is, what are my strengths, because so many of us are trying to so hard to look inside, for what those strengths are, what are the things I bring to the table, right? What makes me unique, what makes me different. And yet, there's so many other ways we can go about this, I don't think our strengths are something that are just a black and white, like, here's my strengths. And I do these things, right, it can be an evolution. And we can discover our strengths as we go. And so this episode, I'm going to give you some tools that I think are really important, and you want to stay to the end, because I'm going to give you what I think is probably the most important tool that you can use to help you discover your strengths. Number one, there's a great book called discover your strengths, it has a test attached to it. There's all kinds of online tests you can take to discover your strengths. Of course, if that's you, if you're somebody who loves quizzes, and you love to do surveys, this is a great tool for anyone who's really just starting out and like not really sure what you want to do at all, even as for a living, or how to monetize what it is you do, check out the book, discover your strengths. Now, if you're somebody like me, who's on an evolution of constantly figuring out what people need, what gap I can fill within the market, what things right, because that's really what we want to do here, right, we want to discover what problems people have. And then we want to be the solution to those problems. And the way we start doing that really is by looking at ourselves, it starts internally. And so there's some things that you know, like I said, You were always looking inside for this. But there are lots of people in your life, whether you know them or not, whether they just follow you on social media, or whether they are your best friends. And those people are wonderful resources for you to begin. There's also people who are searching for things, right, the beauty of these days is the internet. So the next tool, I would say to that I would recommend is going on some of these keyword research tools, the first one, which is totally free up to two searches a day that I would recommend. It's called answer the public.com. I want you to think about what niche you want to serve. If you've not discovered what that is, if you don't know how you want it what you want to sell or monetize doing, you definitely should check out my course the creative visibility course that is something I help people discover along their path. But if you're somebody who's already sort of there, and you're, you know what people what you want to do, we need to start to learn how to speak our audience's language. And so answer the public is a great place to start. You can go into that website and you can search for any question right?
Let's say your audience is looking for how to grow on social media. It's going to then give you all the top searched answers or questions that people have typed in to Google to whatever platforms that you can then take that and create content about it so endless content that is so specifically targeted to your audience. And what it is they're looking for. And it's totally free. There's other websites that people recommend something called S E. M rush, which is search engine. I don't know what it is sem rush, I find that one a little bit less user friendly. But my favourite tool for searching for questions is YouTube. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. And what's really cool is when you go into YouTube, you've probably discovered this, if you start to type in a search, let's say I type in how to, it's going to then suggest a tonne of ideas of what people are searching for. And those are the top searched words. That's what they call keywords. Keywords are words that people are searching for all the time. And those YouTube videos that are at the top of that link of that list. Whenever you click on it, they're keyword ranked like their top ranked, we want to rank in the top right. So if you're a social media expert, if you are an actor, even if you're a painter, or you teach painting, you want to start to figure out how you can start to use these keywords that people are searching for in your content that will then train whichever social media platform you're on their algorithm to then start to push people searching for those things to your content. Now this is true for pretty much any algorithm right? Instagram does this YouTube, especially does this but so so does Google right. If your website has these keywords embedded in its text, you're going to end up getting people searching for you know, Bret Shuford, social media coach, right, Bret Shuford, Achor, whatever it is you want people to be looking for. So I highly, highly, highly recommend that you do a little bit of research, it doesn't take much to start to look for the things that people are already looking for. Now, the third thing that I would recommend, and this is to me, probably the most important is to go to your people. Even if you have 10 followers on social media, those 10 people are invested in you. Ask them questions, go into your stories, ask them why do you follow me? What is it you want to learn from me? If you could save five things and this is my favourite thing to do? I would actually recommend you do this, go to your three to five best friends, the people who know you inside out, okay, and ask them if you didn't know me if I was a total stranger and I came up to you. And I said, Hey, tell me what Bret Shuford, five top things are like, what are the things he's the most passionate about that he could talk about for days, your friends will tell you, my friends would tell you right now, Disney Brett's a total Disney nerd. He loves to inspire people and talk about personal development and motivation. They know that I drink way too much cold brew coffee. Right. They also would say that I am a theatre nerd that I've been doing Theatre on Broadway that could talk about that for decades, right. And then also being openly LGBTQ, and in our content creation and social media and all the stuff I do with probably husbands, which is what I do for a living. So definitely want to have one of those things be the thing you want to monetize. If you start to ask the people that know you the best the things that they see in you, you're going to start to see patterns. And I want you to just take those and take that information and garner what you can from it right so if you have a list of three to five things that people know you the best as then you can go into answer the public and ask questions, right? Ask the things, gather the questions, come up with endless amounts of content ideas. Alright, I hope this helps you. I'm gonna put all of these links to these websites in the show notes. And don't forget to stay tuned for Thursday where we're going to talk a little bit about how you can take these tools and put them out into the world. I'll
Unknown Speaker 8:47
see you then.
