Awesomely Off-Topic: Books, Brands, Business and Everything Else We’re Not Supposed to Say Out Loud

🎙️ Episode 20: Hallowe'en Special - Burke and Hare Your Business

• Taz Thornton and Asha Clearwater • Season 1 • Episode 20

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HALLOWE'EN SPECIAL:

Let's get spooky for the season! In this spooktacular episode, Taz and Asha delve into the murky world of body snatching - snatching 'dead' parts of your business to create Frankenstein's lucrative monster.

Are you ready to stop being a ghost and start howling up a storm? That's the spirit! Let's gooooooooo!

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✨ Unfiltered. Unedited. Awesomely Off-Topic. New episodes every Tuesday.

Follow us on Instagram for more rants, rambles and random brilliance:
👋 @thetazthornton + @ashaclearwater

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to another week edition of List Willing refuses to stay in this way. Ex journalists and contents creators of chaos and breathing business on this. Each episode will go into the lots of books, branding, visibility, content, business. Wherever else I read the HD braids take us. This is unverted, unscripted, engaged me on the edge, and totally us.

SPEAKER_02:

People laugh. That's not Vincent Price, though, is it really?

SPEAKER_03:

No, it's just me, really. Okay. So what do we mean by Birkenhair, your business? Well dare you enter the dead zone. This is all about becoming a body snatcher and body snatching old bits of business that you've considered dead. And going all Frankenstein with them. Asher, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_02:

Well for me, the immediate thing that comes to mind for me is with a book. I've had so many conversations with people over the years since I've been helping them with the writing and publishing books, in that you've got all this material sitting there that's used on your social channels, blogs, blogs are fantastic. You know, if you haven't, if you're not sure what you're going to include in that book, what about looking at your old blogs and seeing how you can use some of those, if not all of those, to create a book? Because there's going to be themes through all those blogs, aren't there, right? There's going to be certain things that come up again and again, that problem solving that you do for your clients, your customers. So why would you not turn that into a great book? And actually half the work's done. Because you've got it, yes, it might need a little bit of tweaking, but actually some of the structure there is really easy to bring in at that point.

SPEAKER_03:

And actually it wouldn't have to just be blogs, would it? Because um, depending on how you do your social media, you've probably got long loads of long form content sitting there on LinkedIn as well. Yeah, LinkedIn articles would be fabulous. Yeah, or l newsletters, LinkedIn newsletters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

All of that.

SPEAKER_03:

Or any video files or audio files where you've done podcasts, for instance, or training programmes, what if you strip the the the audio out of that and get it transcribed? That's a really easy thing to do.

SPEAKER_02:

I say easy, it's it can be quite time consuming sometimes. You've got to go through it and edit, but actually, do you know what? Once you get you could um dedicate some time to that and within a few weeks you'd probably have a book or letter. Happy days.

SPEAKER_03:

Having said that. If you use Zoom for anything, you can in the settings, if you've got premium zoom, I think most people have now, because free doesn't give you long enough on your calls, um, or or let enough people into the room. Um, you can go into the settings of your Zoom and set it up so that it automatically creates a transcript of the meeting, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

Do you know what that for me is so useful. That's been a game changer, hasn't it, for you? For with clients, because we obviously do a lot, I do a lot on Zoom, and um yeah, it's fantastic for the client. Keep them on track and me on track so I can go back and you know and uh make sure that we've not missed anything from our last call. It's a really easy way to keep on track with that. So yeah, I love it. So yes, I think books are an obvious one for people. Whether you're writing a you know a smaller book or a bigger book, it doesn't matter, but that's a really good basis. You've got so much knowledge out there that you're sharing week to week. So why would you not turn that into something even bigger?

SPEAKER_03:

So you're essentially gonna go and get all your old content that you considered dead and gone. Yeah, find out which bits are actually still relevant, non-time sensitive, or how do you tweak them to make them non-time sensitive? And then you've got to put all the different body parts together, like like Dr. Frankenstein, and create a beautiful monster.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. That's fabulous, isn't it? It's so easy to do, and it's amazing how when you start looking at those, some of that content, you can what I call top and tail it. So it might be. What I call you weren't a bit Miranda then. Did I? I've been listening. Well, did I really say that? I've been listening to Miranda because we're listening to her audio book as well, which is absolutely brilliant. I'd highly recommend it. Thank you, Sam Munslow, for the recommendation. I think other people too have recommended it. Tracy Baum as well. So thank you, Tracy and Sam, for that. But yeah, the um Oh god again, Taz, I'm glitching. Where were we?

SPEAKER_03:

Are you having a what I call a glitch?

SPEAKER_02:

I oh you never let me forget that now, will you? It's what you're gonna start saying believed.

SPEAKER_03:

You're gonna start saying Lady Gagar.

SPEAKER_02:

I am, I love Lady Gagar. Yeah, so you can easily get to the point where you can create your book. And it doesn't take a huge amount of work because the hard work, really, the really hard work's been done already.

SPEAKER_03:

It's not just books though, is it? Where else in your business? Can you go all book and hair and then turn into Dr. Frankenstein? What about anyone if if you've ever run any old zoom old Zoom training programmes and the video is just sitting there, either taking up space on your hard drive or sitting on the cloud? What if you put it?

SPEAKER_02:

What vision are you sitting on in the cloud then? Literally. Yeah, like your bitch.

SPEAKER_03:

That was my angelic voice, just in case you missed that. I should go higher. No, I shouldn't. No, please don't. But just holding the glasses.

SPEAKER_02:

Other on them, it's alright. It's plastic cups, we're alright. Well, I am a soprano in rock choir. Yes, I am just a lowly alto. Lowly autos of the world. Please talk to me if you're listening to this podcast. Sing to me beautifully. Sing to me beautifully. My angel of me was. Oh no, don't start to. Right, okay, go on. So what you were saying, so other things that you can you can resurrect, as it were. Resurrect.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, that's got a rude word in it. Erect? Yeah. Well, it's not rude if you're not. I was thinking about it.

SPEAKER_02:

Did you see the delay? Not really. No, okay. Right, go on. Unless it's pitching one. Anyway, thank you.

SPEAKER_03:

We did say awesomely off topic. Yeah, we did. You'd expect it. And I've been a bit nightmarish, but then it is Halloween.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

So from this ghost of an idea, see what I did there. See what that did there. If you go and dig out all of those old videos from your Zoom cloud, from uh Dropbox, from Google Drive, from your hard drive, all of them, how many brilliant clips have you got in there that you could be repurposing for social media?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_03:

If you pull those videos into something like Opus Clip, oh that's a good bit of keyboard. Opus Clip is brilliant. Now, yes, of course. Even I can manage that. I know. Of course, there is a free version. The thing with a free version is you only get so many clips and you can't choose your fonts and put the stick your brand in there. Um, for anyone who's seen some of the clips of us behind the scenes, the backstage stuff of us recording this podcast where it pops up with the little podcast logo and Ash and I sitting Smith and Jones styly. We've just lost all the younger views done.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, no, we're not sitting quite right for Smith and Jones. No, we can't because I'll be showing everybody my chins then.

SPEAKER_03:

I wasn't thinking I was that because we should be sitting opposite instead of side to side. We should, yeah, we should side by side. Yeah. Um, where was I going? Yeah, they've been done on our Opus Clip. And the great thing with Opus Clip is you can pull in YouTube links, you can actually upload video, you can pull in Zoom Cloud links, and it will automatically intelligently look through the entire videos.

SPEAKER_02:

Ooh, it's clever.

SPEAKER_03:

I know, and break them down into relevant short clips and caption them.

SPEAKER_02:

I love it. I love doing that. It was like this magical thing. I remember it's like I was saying to you the first time we saw like a digital mag magazine, and it was like this magical thing, and I just watched it as it brilliantly, effortlessly created these 30-second minute clips, and I was like, that would I look because I love the video editing side, I do like that, but the amount of time it's saved. What? Well, that told me then this news, didn't it? Thank you very much, Taz. Okay, I will do my best. But yeah, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_03:

I love it. Yeah, so as well as pulling out clips from old videos that are sitting there, if the training that you've delivered or the the awareness, whatever it is, if it's still relevant, what's to stop you repackaging that as a digital training programme that you can sell? If you've recorded it, I'm guessing that you'll have done all there's a replay available for people if they can't make it live. I do that all the time. But how often do we then revisit and go, how much of this is still up to up to date? How much of this is still relevant and useful? And how can I turn that into a digital training product that I can sell?

SPEAKER_02:

From a really vain point of view, not that I've got reason to be vain, but you know, if it recorded something. I feel very beautiful. Oh, so are you, my love. Love you. Um but but you know, if you recorded it when you were kind of fetal, you know, like 10 years ago or 15 years ago or something else, and it's video, do you not see an issue with that at all? No, it's just your ego getting in the way.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, there's a there's a video training programme I did about 11 to 12 years ago, where it's got baby Taz doing um information on on how to try shamanic journey and how to go and meet your parent.

SPEAKER_02:

I've got you with a dummy then and a little rattle, right?

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and that still sells and I still put it out there. And then the other thing with with Birking and hair in your business, um, some of you a while back might have seen the awesome alignment vault that I put together when suddenly I needed an injection of cash, and then well, what can I do? How can I suddenly create some programs? So I worked with uh ChatGPT and with Gamma, there might have been a bit of Claude in there as well, I'm not sure, and with um some of the Microsoft stable. Um and we pulled together loads of old things like that and Power Animal Training Programme. Um, we looked at what what else I had in my kit bag that I could turn very quickly into something like a cheat sheet or an explainer or a checklist. And we very, very quickly pulled together all of these PDF documents and Word documents and videos that all had different sections within that vault. We just dropped them into a box Dropbox folder. And before I knew it knew it, I had this really powerful collection of stuff on personal brand, confidence building, spirituality, journaling, mindset. And that thing with it within a couple of weeks, it may be about 2k. For what probably I don't know, maybe I sat for about four hours pulling it all together and creating it. If you use AI wisely and you don't let it take over and you remember it's an assistant and not a replacement, it can really, really quickly churn you out really brilliant on-brand documents. You just feed in your text and your content, and it'll just do its magic.

SPEAKER_02:

I was gonna ask you though, that's okay, because you're pretty tech savvy, right? Yep, and I'm not.

SPEAKER_03:

I'm a bit of a dinosaur. So for somebody You're not, you just like to say that you are, because then it gives you an excuse to not do that.

SPEAKER_02:

A diplodocus, I think that's about right. I'd have that lovely long neck.

SPEAKER_03:

I think you'd like everybody to think you're a diplodocus, but you're actually more of a raptor.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh T raptor. A raptor.

SPEAKER_03:

You're a velociraptor.

SPEAKER_02:

They're really fit, aren't they, though? Super fit, that'll do. What are the ones that spit? Velociraptors. And the big collar. Oh, yeah. Well they were made up. Were they made up for Jurassic Park? Anyway, with with anywhere. What was I saying? Yeah, so for somebody that's a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to creating these.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, but it's a really fit and cunning dinosaur that can open doors and shit.

SPEAKER_02:

So where would I start with that? Because you know, you say it took you about four hours. Yeah. Now the reality is that wouldn't take me four hours. That might take me six or seven hours, or maybe eight hours. So, how do I manage to do that without thinking I need to be doing something else in my business?

SPEAKER_03:

What were your simple steps that we could take? So, my simple steps would be number one, make sure that you are working with your um large language format. AI guide.

SPEAKER_02:

So, something like um What does that even mean, Taz? I don't know, this like you're speaking to me in a different language.

SPEAKER_03:

Large language model, an L L M. Um.

SPEAKER_02:

I could just be a large model.

SPEAKER_03:

Large language you're not large, large language platform, depending on who you're speaking to.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, but what does that mean?

SPEAKER_03:

They are the AIs that deal with language and the own large language. Well, no, what it means. I'm just trying to explain what it means by large language is not that it's great big words, not like anti anti-desestablishmentarianism or anything. It's yeah, that one. It's not the best song for Halloween, is it? No. What could it be? Don't know. Let's go. They did the mash.

SPEAKER_02:

They did the monster mash. I bet it was Monster Mash. I bet the Monster Mash would be lumpy. It was a graveyard smash. I can't stand lumpy mash. Sorry, I'm a bit sniffy today because I've got a bit of a I'm a bit bung bonged up in my nasal area. Um you have a spirit, it's ectoplasm up your nose drills. Probably. Thank you. Um, yeah, so come on, tell me.

SPEAKER_03:

So large language doesn't mean big words. What it means is those AIs have been able to scour everything on the internet and have consumed more. Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay. They have consumed more text-based, language-based content than you or I could ever do in a lifetime.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. So quite a bit then.

SPEAKER_03:

So that's what large language means when it comes to AI.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

So that will be things like um Claude and Chat GPT are the two that people are most familiar with. Yeah. So whatever you're using, and I'm a big fan of Chat GPT, I'm a big fan of Claude too, but for me, they fulfill slightly different roles. Yeah. Make sure you've put the work in for it to know your voice, to know what it is you do, and for it to have been able to pull out of your your mind, your body, your soul, all of those areas of expertise that you haven't quite recognised that that you're holding on to. Okay. So, you know, a a good chat GPT prompt for something like that, just an off the cuff one to start exploring, might be something along the lines of um, from everything that you know about me so far, what's my hidden superpower that even I am not aware of?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, that's sexy.

SPEAKER_03:

What are the yeah, or something like, what what what are the skills and knowledge that I'm holding on to that I could be turning into saleable products?

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

And just let it come up with ideas for you. And from there you work between you to come up with um, so what's one of the things that I did very, very quickly. Uh, I put together um a document that was how to sell yourself as a speaker without selling your soul. Okay. And I put that together in the spur of the moment, because I happened to be in a room where some other so-called speaker trainers were doing everything I absolutely abhor.

SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if that might be selling from the stage, Teddy.

SPEAKER_03:

It might be a little bit that.

SPEAKER_02:

Anyway, I wonder how I could have.

SPEAKER_03:

I saw them talking, speaking to this room, and people being caught into the run to the back of the room thing, and I belted off to my hotel room, I sat with with Chat GPT, I spoke into it into it a few minutes and told it to look at all my speaker resources and this, and could we very quickly come up with a usable document that teach that teaches people how to sell themselves as a speaker without selling from stage or without selling their soul.

SPEAKER_02:

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_03:

And within about 10 minutes, we'd got a really useful document with how-tos and steps and advice that was pretty much in my language, did a few quick tweaks on it, copied that, opened up gamma, gamma.app, I think it is. If you haven't used gamma yet and you are in the business of um coaching, training, anything where you might want to provide materials to other people, gamma is a no-brainer. There will be lots of others that like it. Gamma's the one that I've got most I feel with so far. If you think Canva is easy, when you get your head around gamma, you will feel like oh, Canva becomes the literary, the equivalent in literary works of something like Dostoevsky. It's just it's not easy. I hate Canva with a passion, by the way. Unless they want to sponsor us, in which case I love it. Learn it. What gamma does, it will enable you to create presentations, websites, or documents in the main. If you're on the paid for version of Gamma, you can program it with your brand, so your colours, your fonts, your logos. It has AI imagery tools built in that you can use, or you can put your own images in. You can use it as a large language model platform as well. I don't like using it in that way. I like to create the text outside of gamma with something like chat or just writing it, and then select the option to create, for instance, a document where you paste in the text you've already put together. You tell it how many slides you want, or you can allow it to free flow. You paste in your text, you tell it which design you want, which will be the one you've designed for your business in your brand colours, you hit a button, and within a couple of minutes, you have a really wizzy and sexy, ready-made PDF document that looks like it's been professionally designed with your words in it, with flow charts and graphs and different signposting and any type of images you've asked it to create, or you can add your own. If that, you can be downloading that PF PDF and vlogging it.

SPEAKER_02:

But again, we're going away a little bit from the Birkenhair thing, because this is to an extent creating some of the things you're creating or creating new.

SPEAKER_03:

But the Birkenhair bit came in because I pulled in lots of old content I had and added some new bits of content. Birkenhead, them all into a dropbox folder. I thought you said Birkenhead, as in Liverpool then. I was like, what? What's that going to do? Birkenhead. Not Birkenhead. You mean Birken Hair.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh no, she's doing the Liverpool accent. I love a Liverpool accent. Go on. Yes. Okay. Okay. Chicken, say chicken. Chicken. Yeah, okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_03:

So um enough now then, thanks. You had enough. Enough now. Yeah, enough. Yeah, I'm using me like he. So yeah, I'd put them all into a drop box folder, which I referred to as the awesome alignment vault. Yeah. And then I just sold people the vault with some old, some new. We'd Frankenstein'd it all together. Yeah. Made a new beautiful monster that was very useful. Yeah. And that's how I did it. Put the bolts in. Stuck the bolts in, tightened them up a bit. Yeah. Rob's your uncle, Fanny's your granny, job's done.

SPEAKER_02:

And Frankenstein's there.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

In all its glory. Yeah, so you know, Frankensteining, Birkenhairing can be putting, you know, some bits of old bodywork and some new bits all together and creating a beautiful mashup.

SPEAKER_02:

So what about um in terms of um that Birkenhair, Frankenstein thing, about uh you know, when you say about old stuff, what about because we as we as our brands evolve and grow, yeah, obviously sometimes our opinions, uh experiences are all going to be changing. As they should, yeah. Yeah, so again, is it good that can be good for like timeline stuff too, right? Of course it can, yeah. So could you give an example of that where you might be able to revisit that?

SPEAKER_03:

When they first start out, they're doing a lot of their own brand development, a lot of their own uh graphics, because frankly, they don't have the budget at first to be outsourcing it all. And a lot of people I come across get a bit embarrassed and start deleting the old stuff. Whereas I'd much rather see you leaving that in. If you look at the my brand transition from when I first started, I look back at stuff at the beginning that I thought was really cool and look at it now and cringe. But instead of deleting it, I will sometimes go and get a really early, yeah, I don't know, a Facebook post or graphic that went with it and do a then and now. Like a throwback Thursday.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, this was me ten years ago. I'm just thinking, actually, which is making me laugh, of that moment when um when we had the stuff done when we first were working on Tiger. Yeah. We had we were all we had the turquoise look, didn't we? Then do you remember? And you had the turquoise hair and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03:

Well before the turquoise hair, we still had long blonde hair with some red flashes underneath. Before even those days, there's a vi an old video of me sitting there somewhere where I was doing quick transitions, changing my outfit when I clicked my fingers, you know, before the days of of all the the wizzy transitions we get now, and every now and then I reshare that video and just say, Look, this used to be my brand, you know, polo shirts. We've always done the t-shirts or polo shirts, but look how far I've come.

SPEAKER_02:

So you can have a lot of fun with that too, can't you? It can be a nice fun post, but also showing people about how you have how you've evolved in your business, you as a person, you know, what you look like, your opinions, all the rest of it. Yeah, you can go back and use that, and it's a really easy one, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

To include in your marketing. Yeah. And another great thing we can do to to book and hair things a little bit as well, is the way graphics and and imagery needs to be created for social media now has changed.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So it's been through phases where there were better landscape, particularly video. It's been through phases where there were better square. And of course, now, led by the the the Instagram generation, really, portrait rocks. Portrait is where it's at. Yeah. Um, so if you think kind of Instagram story size size image, and honestly, sometimes I'm a bit lazy and um chuck them out and they don't quite fit, but hey, that's that's me being lazy. But if you go. Sounds like somebody just fell down the stairs. I don't think they did. It's a ghost, it's the Halloween episode.

SPEAKER_02:

So what would it be like here at night time? What if the lights here?

SPEAKER_03:

What if what if we opened the door and it was night? That would be really like Freaky Friday, Freaky Friday. That's not really horror though, is it?

SPEAKER_02:

It depends on your view on the film.

SPEAKER_03:

But the original Ooh with Psych Ooh Jodie Foster Foster.

SPEAKER_02:

Baby Joe's. I didn't talk about Jodie Foster the other night. Did you? Okay. We shouldn't talk about it. She looks amazing.

SPEAKER_03:

She does. She does. Which means that you do, obviously. No. That's another story for another day. Yes, anyway. Ask Asher if she was ever signed up as a to a look-alikes agency at any point in the world.

SPEAKER_02:

It was for work. It was for work. I was a reporter, I was a feature writer, I was writing a feature about look-alike agency.

SPEAKER_03:

This is something for Halloween. Thank you, a horror story. Well, that image of you as Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs is interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

Really bad hair. Really bad hair.

SPEAKER_03:

Anyway, sorry, yes. If you scroll back through all of those old graphics that you think you can't use anymore, what if scroll back through all the old images that you're just thinking they're no good now because the shape's changed, blah blah blah, and just go, well, is that still relevant? Was that a really cool thing to say? Redesign it. Find old posts that are still relevant, redesign the graphic that goes with them, bring them up to date a bit, and again, bosh. I love that. That would be really good. And you could do it, you could have a lot of fun with that, couldn't you, too? Yeah, I've done that a few times. Just can't think of what to say. Like, right, let me scroll way back a few years. And sometimes, do you does any listeners, do anyone any of you feel this sometimes? You read something that you'd forgotten you'd done, and you can't go, oh wow, that's really good. You've said that.

SPEAKER_02:

Did I read a podcast? We've seen that a couple of podcasts ago. I know that you think, oh crumps, did I write that?

SPEAKER_03:

Sometimes you open an old journal and go, Did I write that?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Goodness me, what was going on for me at the time? Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02:

And then you yeah, but then you look at the images and go, ah.

SPEAKER_03:

So there's all kinds of ways that you can you can book and hay your business and go all Frankenstein. I love that. Old press cuttings, if you've ever secured any media coverage, don't forget that you can reshare them. Anniversaries. This was me seven years ago, this is where I was at. So where you can go onto Facebook, for instance, and and do the kind of on this day, which remember, how many times have we talked to you about um a new social platform or new model popping up, and then everyone copies it because it's foppular.

SPEAKER_02:

Fopular. It's popular. Is that because you're being foppish? Fopish, foppish. That's a good word. Oh no, and now I've hit the table, not with my boob. Just want to say that now.

SPEAKER_03:

Dear listeners, you may notice that we're not having mentions of furry mic anymore. It's because we've recognised No, we've retired him. We've retretired uh Furry Mike. Was it Fairy Mike or Harry Mike? It's Fairy Mike, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Because we've realised my bag over there.

SPEAKER_03:

Fairy Mike has still come in with us for the journey.

SPEAKER_02:

But we've realised that actually using this desktop snowball microphone and uh Yeah, we just had to add the word in microphone because otherwise people might have a weird visual of a snowball just rolling across.

SPEAKER_03:

A blue snowball microphone. Maybe that's just me. We've realised that this gives a better sound than than Lavelier mics. Who'd you think it? I know. Yes. You're glitching again, I'm not glitching, no.

SPEAKER_02:

You are. You're fantasizing about furry mic. I I love furry mic. I miss him. I used to like stroking furry mic. Anyway. Okay. So So what else can we do?

SPEAKER_03:

Where was I just going with that? I'm so sorry I've taken you right off track now, haven't you? Yeah, I was talking about how sometimes a new social platform or a new kind of bolt onto a social platform pops up and it starts to change the way that the others operate because they want to compete. So if you remember, way back before On This Day on Facebook, he remembers Time Hop.

SPEAKER_02:

Time Hop. Time Hop is still available, it's still there. Yeah, I've still got the app on my phone. That's funny. I'd quite like to go back on that because all the shit my wife says stuff on there as well.

SPEAKER_03:

But you'll get that on On This Day on Facebook in the same way. Okay. But yeah, that's Time Hop led the way for On This Day in the same way. In the same way that TikTok pushed the other channels to do more video. And the way that TikTok and Reels have dictated that we move from a landscape to a portrait photo uh uh landscape to a portrait what? What's the word? I don't know what orientation.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's a big sorry I swore there.

SPEAKER_03:

For videos.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and that's a big word for you, Tan.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. What about audio then then, Ash? If we've got old audio files or audio-only podcasts, what could we do with those? Oh we could do so well, we could do so much because we've got I don't know what do you what do you mean in why?

SPEAKER_02:

How can you burke and hair them? Burke and hair them. We've talked about researching on video, but what about audio? You could use a voiceover for to go with some pictures as well. Yeah. You could take it out and strip it out to use it alongside you know relevant images. With one of those little graphic equaliser bands like the clips we create for this podcast. I was gonna say I do that for some of my pet channels as well, and it's really interesting to do because it's lovely. You get that, you get an interview, and then a little and you can turn it, you can put them into your brand colours as well, which is fabulous. That's really good. Yeah. Um what else? What else? Um obviously you always talk about the um is it the BBC Radio upload um site?

SPEAKER_03:

BBC Uploads. Uploads. You wouldn't necessarily want to be d uploading old stuff onto that though, would you?

SPEAKER_02:

No, no, I'm just thinking, but are you able to retrieve that from there? Is that retrievable like six months or is it only there from BBC? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Um you'd have to go and find the episode that you're mentioned on. Yeah. And then recycle it. But I just wondered. If you record it at the time, keep that, then that that will start popping up on the on this day thing or the time hoping, and you can recycle that as well. So what else are you thinking about with audio? Um you again, transcripts. Yeah. Also, in podcasts that you've perhaps been a guest on, remember that you know you might want to ask permission to be polite, but you can always capture excerpts from those as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I love that too. That's a really easy way to do it, isn't it? Yeah. And of course, if you're using something like StreamYard as well, that's a good thing, isn't it? Anyone you use StreamYard? I use it fairly regularly for some of my clients.

SPEAKER_03:

You particularly want to hit more than one channel at once and you want to branded.

SPEAKER_02:

I like that as well. And I love the fact that you can be so interactive, you can have live comments and put them up on the screen as you can.

SPEAKER_03:

And again, those links from StreamYard can be pulled directly into something like Opus Clip to create you all those clips.

SPEAKER_02:

I love all that. And that's a that is a really simple thing, isn't it? It's literally click and press a button, upload, upload your your audio or your video, and then it will just break it into 30-second minute clips. I think it's a brilliant piece of git.

SPEAKER_03:

Another quick tip on Birkenhair in your business is um scroll back through the old photos on your phone.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

Go back through your old videos, old photos, what could you write some content around? Even if it's only as a prompt and you don't end up using the picture, what does it conjure up for you? What can you use? There's so much that we can do.

SPEAKER_02:

That's a really good way of looking at it, actually, isn't it? Sometimes if you do go back in time and look at some of the content you've already done, it might not be that it's a straight kind of I'm gonna put that online again and use it as it is, but it will give you an idea for a new version of that. Yeah, I like that. And you could actually compare and contrast, couldn't you? So, for instance, I'm trying to think of a good example of that. So it might be something around a programme that you've got that you launched in 2022, going really well, but now out of that programme has come something else. So here's the original post, this is what I was doing then, here's the one that I'm doing now, and you can see how it's evolved.

SPEAKER_03:

Showing how far you've come. So, again, we will every now and then talk about the big one, which is the 30 months virtual empowerment programme we run, and we'll talk about the first year that we ran that was me running it with but with you coming along then because you're like, I don't want to be one of the bosses, down with the management. And now it's Asher's baby with me assisting her, really. But if you look back at the first one of those programmes I ever run, I think it'd got about six people on it. It didn't even always cover its costs. Sometimes I ended up out of pocket by the time I'd I'd I'd paid the venue, and I remember one where only a couple of people turned up, so I ended up ended up with like four of us, me, you, and a couple of the delegates never feels like the right word for that. Um, but when I talk about that a lot because people get so demoralised so quickly because they'll they'll see all the shiny stuff appearing online, because obviously everyone's setting up their own business should be earning seven figures within the first two and a half days. Um and when they can see that that barely barely covered costs, there was hardly anyone one in it, and now this is year thirteen, fourteen, something like that. Thirteen, I think. And it's it always fills up ahead of schedule, it's always fully booked. We've we always have to say, I'm really sorry you you can't come this time we're full. We cap it out at 21, and that that number is is there for a reason. It's we've we've found it's the about the right number for us to give enough one-to-one time for everyone, and for no one to feel like there's too many cliques or they're not heard. But it fills every year.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think that's a great example actually of repurposing content as well, evergreen content, because when we a few years back now, we did a beautiful um uh video, didn't we, of the place. We did record, you know played with the gimbal for the first time. We did the gimbal and the gimbal is so much fun, so much smoother, and we were going round round the site because it's like a 17-acre site, I think something like that. Um and we still use that because it's still got it's you know, it's still a wonderful reminder of what the place is like and you know, encouraging people to come along and experience it for themselves. Yeah. So yeah. So there's loads of things you can do.

SPEAKER_03:

There's loads of things, and again, another thing might be to go through old notes on your phone or old journal entries. Again, not to necessarily share your your journal entry, but you might want to say something like, Look, six years ago, looking back through my old journals, I can see that I was in a real funk. I really couldn't see how I was going to make this work today. So just show that transition, it's another way to to book and hair your business. You can book and hair it without Frankenstein in it. I you can recycle some of the old body parts without necessarily needing to put them together with something else and create Frankenstein's beautiful monster. Love it. But I hope we've covered loads there.

SPEAKER_02:

That's been that's been about a half hour, I think. So, and it's only a few days away to Halloween, I believe, because I think this will be going out just before won't we? So, um yeah, whatever you're up to.

SPEAKER_03:

What it what are we doing for Halloween, Taz? Well, we'll either be hiding at home trying to stop the trick and treat trickle treaters from scaring the dogs.

SPEAKER_02:

We have a lovely way of dealing with that, don't we? Little tip for dog owners who dogs might be a little bit.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, we've dressed the front of the house with lots of automated motion centre stuff.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

We've got a great big box of chocolates, great big bowl of all kinds of different different treats, including some group gluten-free and fruit-only snacks and things like that. Um we sit them out the front, usually being held by something like a life-size werewolf.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Do you say werewolf or werewolf? Werewolf. I say werewolf. I've just realised that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

It's an accent thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Why have I never noticed that before? Well, werewolf, we are wolf.

SPEAKER_03:

Werewolf. Werewolf, where is the wolf? And then you have a hotspot. If you meditate at the same time, then you're a werewolf.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm having a Halloween hotspot.

SPEAKER_03:

A woke wolf would be a werewolf. You're having a Halloween hotspot, aren't you?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I am. I'm having a power surge.

SPEAKER_03:

Um so yeah, so yes, with a sign up, with a sign on the boxes saying please don't help yourself, don't be greedy, please don't wake our sleeping werewolves. And you always do a lovely illustration with it on the front there, don't you?

SPEAKER_02:

So people can look at it. And sometimes, yeah just to be a bit naughty, I go and stand out at the front, all dressed in black with various weird masks.

SPEAKER_03:

Which is why I was saying it depends, we'll either be doing that or we'll be doing our best to scare people. And it's always the parents that get scared.

SPEAKER_02:

Parents that scare them, not the kids, the kids just point and go, ah, that m they moved, it's a person in under there. Well, I'm not sure about that.

SPEAKER_03:

So I think I think we should also be flooding our channels with a few spooky stories and a few spooky anecdotes around for Halloween this year. Or sowing, as we like to call it. Definitely. Soin, okay. Beautiful word. Simply because of the spelling.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's beautiful. I love that. Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

Segway, that's another beautiful word because of the spelling.

SPEAKER_02:

You're off now, aren't you?

SPEAKER_03:

Speaking of Segways, we should move on now and record the next episode.

SPEAKER_02:

And in the meantime, we will see you next Tuesday.

unknown:

Woohoo!

SPEAKER_00:

You've been listening to Awesomely Off Topic with Taz Daunton and Asher Blue Water. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to connect, you'll find us online. Just search for our names. Stay awesome, stay off topic, and we'll see you next time.

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Asha Clearwater

Host
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Taz Thornton

Host