BS'ing With Brandi

In this episode I am joined by Barb McGrath from Above the Fold Digital Marketing and we are going to talk about online course platforms - specifically our platforms of choice, which for Barb is Heights and for me is Kajabi.

Here’s a bit about our special guest today: Known as the #GoogleGirl, Barb founded the Get Found Digital Marketing program, and one of the first Google-approved agencies, Above the Fold Digital Marketing. After more than 20 years working with local businesses, Barb knows what it takes for local businesses to succeed and be on the first page of Google.

Barb has worked with some of western Canada’s most well known brands including Conexus Credit Union, Factory Optical, Optiks International and Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

In this episode we are going to talk about our online course platforms in the following areas:

• What kind/format of lesson content can be uploaded
• The overall structure of courses
• The ability to customize the look and feel of things
• Back-end ease of use
• Student experience of the platforms
• Related functionality
• And more!
  

Find Part 1 here.

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Try out Heights - you get a 30-day free trial!
• Get a 14-day free trial of Kajabi PLUS step-by-step guidance on how to create a digital product, design a sales system, and market to your audience. And get dedicated support along the way :)

In this episode I am joined by Barb McGrath from Above the Fold Digital Marketing and we are going to talk about online course platforms - specifically our platforms of choice, which for Barb is Heights and for me is Kajabi.

Here’s a bit about our special guest today: Known as the #GoogleGirl, Barb founded the Get Found Digital Marketing program, and one of the first Google-approved agencies, Above the Fold Digital Marketing. After more than 20 years working with local businesses, Barb knows what it takes for local businesses to succeed and be on the first page of Google.

Barb has worked with some of western Canada’s most well known brands including Conexus Credit Union, Factory Optical, Optiks International and Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

In this episode we are going to talk about our online course platforms in the following areas:

• What kind/format of lesson content can be uploaded
• The overall structure of courses
• The ability to customize the look and feel of things
• Back-end ease of use
• Student experience of the platforms
• Related functionality
• And more!

Stay tuned for part 2 coming out next week!

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Try out Heights - you get a 30-day free trial!
• Get a 14-day free trial of Kajabi PLUS step-by-step guidance on how to create a digital product, design a sales system, and market to your audience. And get dedicated support along the way :)

In this episode, I’m going to talk about why you think you’re afraid of tech, the consequences of this fear for yourself and for anyone you hire to help you out, and the thing you need to do to solve these issues.

Tell me if you’ve ever experienced any of these:

• You just don’t understand tech or it doesn’t ever seem to work for you
• You've had a bad experience with tech
• You’ve had a bad experience with a tech person
• You don't trust the tech experts
• You trust the non-tech experts too much
  

When you try to figure things out on your own you get frustrated and discouraged. When you try to outsource you often end up with a lot of wasted time and money and a sour ending to your relationship with your contractor.

Let’s dive deeper into why that is and the 1 thing you can do to avoid it.

Trust me, your contractors will thank you for it!

In this episode, I’m going to talk about some relatively simple ways to make your online business more accessible and inclusive. Yes, most of it will be tech-related, but I’ll probably throw in a few non-tech tidbits as well.

So first off, why make your business more accessible and inclusive? There are 2 reasons:

1. Be a decent fucking human being
2. Make more money so you can live the life you deserve
   

Sounds pretty simple right?

In today’s episode I’m going to talk about some of the areas where you have the opportunity to make your biz more inclusive so that you can reach more people and increase your profits:

• Remote working
• Closed captions
• Your website
• Your content
• Plus a few non-techie tips you can implement immediately
  

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Google Workspace*
• Slack
• Searchie*
• Descript
• Rev
• Kapwing
• Website Planet
• Compressor
• Grammarly*
• Textio
• Better Audio & Video Content with Transcriptions
• Easily Add Captions to Your Facebook Videos
• High Quality Stock Photos of People of Color

In this episode, I’m going to talk about why you should not create an online course. That’s right - the girl who helps people set up their courses for a living is here to convince you not to create one. So if you’re on the fence about making your own course, listen up.

The whole “infopreneur” industry has been blowing up, and once COVID hit a lot of business owners were turning into course creators in order to keep their revenue stream flowing.

A lot of things I’ve been reading in the last few months make it sound like a course is actually a must-have and without it your business is doomed to fail.

What a load of bullshit.

No two businesses are identical, and no two business owners are identical, so if you are considering creating a course I’m going to give you some reasons it might actually be a really bad idea, and what you might want to try instead.

1. You’ve never taught before, you’ve never lead a workshop or webinar
2. You don’t have any proven teaching materials or content
3. You honestly have zero extra time
4. You are scared of technology

Resources:

Ready to create your own online course? Kajabi* is my platform of choice.

In this episode I’m going to talk about how I record videos that require almost zero editing. Because I’ll be honest, if I had to edit all of my videos, I’d never make one.

I spent a lot of time figuring this out because I knew it would be worth it in the end. I’m going to explain exactly how I do it, and then you can copy me or tweak what I’m doing to suit you best.

Here are some of the common reasons you might need to edit (I know I certainly do these things)

• False start
• Losing your voice or needing to cough or taking a drink break
• Noise interruptions (phone ringing, partner calling for you, loud TV, etc.)
• Orienting yourself after hitting the record button
• Fumbling for the stop button after you’re done
• Losing your place
• Flubbing a line
• Filler word bad habits

Listen now to find out how I’ve solved these problems for myself, plus what tools and tactics I use when I do need to make small edits.

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Zoom*
• Loom
• Monosnap
• BigVU
• QuickTime
• Descript

In this episode I’m going to walk you through my own course creation journey - specifically what did and didn’t work for me, what I would do differently if I could, and what set me up really well for a public launch.

So I recently finished the pilot launch of my new course Systematize Your Online Course - the development, creation, launch, and delivery took a little less than 6 months in total. But before you start beating yourself up for not having your own course launched yet, I want to take you back four and a half years and tell you all about the mistakes I made and what it took to get me to this successful launch.

I tried to launch four different signature courses before I finally got to this one. Some of them got abandoned before they left the ground. One even had paying students that had to be refunded when I quit.

Online courses are a lot of work but the pros make it look too easy. Here are all the sometimes embarrassing, hopefully-valuable nitty-gritty details behind my course creation journey - from choosing the wrong topic to being bad on camera to underestimating the work. Enjoy!

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com. On the website you can also find show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best figuring shit out and getting shit done.

In this episode I’m going to talk about that whole word of the year thing that some of us love and love to hate. I’ve also got phrase of the year, because I’m not one to be satisfied with just a single word.

I’ll talk about how I came up with both of them and how they are going to be driving my business in the next 12 months.

But before we dive in . . .

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #FigureShitOut and #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today I’m loving coconut and oat milk coffee creamer and Star Wars.

So word of the year. This became a big thing about 5 years ago. I have no idea who started it, but I really liked the concept. My problem? No matter how much thinking I did or how many challenges I participated in I could never come up with a single word that felt right or really resonated.

So I gave up. And every time December rolled around and people began posting about their words I would just roll my eyes in fond amusement and secret envy.

Have a listen to find out:

• How my word “magically” appeared after several month of hard work I didn’t even realize I was doing
• How my phrase of the year is going to enforce that word and be the driving factor is what I say yes and no to for the next 12 months
  

Resources:

• Systematize Your Biz
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about my blogging system. I’m going to describe to you in detail, how I create my blog from planning to writing to publishing to promotion, and then I want you to steal the entire workflow or at least cherry-pick the parts that are going to apply the best to you.

And if you are one who doesn’t really want to sit here and frantically take notes, not to fear - every single thing I’m going to talk about today is documented inside my resource library which you can access for exactly zero dollars. All I’m asking for is your email, and I’ll put the signup link for that right in the show notes.

Here are the types of tools & tech you need to think about:

• Blogging platform
• Graphics/stock photos
• Docs for writing
• Task management/content calendar for tracking
  

Here are the processes you need to consider:

• Planning your topics
• Actually doing the writing
• Creating promotional material (graphics, social media posts, etc.)
• Publishing
• Promotion
  

Now that you have an idea of what you could include in your system, you need to figure out:

• What tech you’re going to use
• How much time do you have? How long can you spend on each post, and how frequently can you publish?
• Where can you do your braindumping?
• What parts of your process can you batch?
• How are you going to timeblock and manage due dates?
  

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Resource Library (you’ll be able to find a transcript of this episode in there!)
• All the Places to Find Free Quality Stock Photos for Your Business
• High Quality Stock Photos of People of Color
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about ClickUp. And if you don’t know what ClickUp is, it's a task or project management tool.

So how do I use ClickUp?

• Task management
• Project management
• Content calendar
• CRM
• Weekly and monthly client reporting
• Time tracking
• Business planning
• Team chat
• Internal resource libraries for tutorials and tools
  

Disclaimer: ClickUp can be super overwhelming if you haven’t taken the time to develop a task management system for yourself. It's crazy flexible and you can do so many things with it - so if you don’t already have a plan or a goal for what you need, you may struggle with the initial set up, but there are templates you can choose from to get you started.

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!

Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk(*). If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.

Resources:

• Get ClickUp* for free today
• Get Trello for free