Tracy Hazzard Brandcasting: Content + Fans = Profit From FreeCon With Emily Leach

When it comes to brandcasting, the formula for success is simple. You start with content, then add fans and then you have profit. In this episode, we learn more about building your brand for success via brandcasting. Emily Leach, the founder of FreeCon, sits down with Tracy Hazzard as she shares her secrets for success. Tracy talks about the process of rebranding, creating your infrastructure and content, and the marketing rollercoaster. We hear Tracy’s thoughts on sending their brand’s message across and how people’s perceptions of the brand are created. Listen in and learn how to build your brand effectively using brandcasting techniques.

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It is Emily Leach. I am with Tracy Hazzard. She is one of our workshop leaders for FreeCon. I am both crazy excited and a little scared.

You and your team have done an awesome job. I’ve been involved in so many speaking events and you guys are so organized. You give so many ways to promote it. I’m impressed. I’m not worried at all. You might be worried but I’m not.

I don’t know if worried is the right word. If you’ve not done events then you may not get what goes on because it gets put everywhere and all of our speakers are blasting about it. More people are seeing it. I get a lot of emails of, “Can we grab a cup of coffee?” I’m like, “No.” “I was hoping next Tuesday?” I was like, “I’m sorry. That’s not going to happen.” I like to start the conversation with something personal. I was on the phone with a mutual friend of ours and he said you had been crazy busy getting the brand testing and stuff off the ground. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on.

It’s one of those things that our model of business is to test things out and make sure that they’re working. We’re methodical about it. We want to make sure everything works in the system. In the end, tie it up with a nice neat little bow to the Nth degree and everything we accomplished, that’s our process. What we did here was, we decided to rebrand at the last minute. All we have to do is all this list. That’s been it but it’s taking off because brandcasting, podcasting, videocasting, all of that is taking off so much that everybody’s interested in knowing more. I’ve been invited to speak all over. I’m booked for the rest of 2021. We decided on a different model of doing business because I want people to be able to make progress faster. We’ve been doing these brandcasting thing services that we provide, which is setting up your podcast or your videocast and doing it for you over 3.5 days.

Brandcasting Formula: We have to be clear on our messaging because if we want them to perceive a specific viewpoint on us, we better be clear about that.

Do you post it out over a period of time?

You’re going to do it for as long as you want to, like an episode a week or two Facebook Lives a week, whatever you going to do. It’s a process of setting up all the good practices and all the structure underneath you that you need so you can be a great content generator and only concentrate on that. You’re building all the infrastructure. You constantly remember it. I call it the marketing rollercoaster.

It’s like you market because you’re excited about everything and you’re trying Facebook, you’re doing YouTube and tweeting, trying Instagram and you’re blogging because everybody says you still got to blog. You’re trying some SEO tactic that you don’t even know anything technical about but you’re reading up on it trying to figure out how to do it. You’re doing all of those great things for your business and great things happen, you get a lot of clients or you get busy. You’re doing a lot of business and you don’t have time to market.

At some point, you find yourself on that downside to the very bottom part where you’re like, “I’m going to crash. What do I do? I don’t have enough revenue this month. I got to market again,” and you get back on it. You never had that steady growth that should organically happen from continually and constantly marketing. What we want to do is establish a machine for you. A brandcasting platform is like a stage for you to be able to do that all the time. All you do is live in the content and the connections that you make. That’s the best part.

That’s what you’re going to be teaching in your workshop. Get a 90-minute workshop that’s going to be doing at the conference on brandcasting, which is a new word. I love that we have this new word coming into the event.

That’s our new branding. Originally, it focused a little more on podcasting but we had so many video casters with who we were doing business. People who came with having done hundreds of various videos that they had in their archives and they were doing nothing with them. It works both ways. We thought that’s not representative of what we are. We rebranded to brandcasting because that’s what we want us. We want it to be you brandcasting out your original message. You brandcasting out you.

Especially for freelancers because we are running a freelance business. You are your business, market and brand. Tell us even a couple of expectations for your workshop, what they might walk away with and what they might get their hands dirty doing.

What I’m going to teach about is the components of what that strong platform looks like. You hear that term a lot, you need a platform for your business. Authors, experts and consultants need a platform. You hear it all the time. What is that? We’re going to talk about what all the good components of that are and ways in which you can create them and set them on autopilot.

Is there anything they should maybe bring into this that would make it even that much better for them?

The big key thing that makes it so much easier to get going and build a great platform that does a lot for you is to know exactly who you are and who you want to talk to. I’m a brand. Every freelancer is a brand. I design products all the time. Those are brands. All of that thing is a brand representation but a brand is not what I say I am. It’s a brand of how you see me. How someone else sees my brand and what they perceive that is.

We have to be clear on our messaging because if we want them to perceive a specific viewpoint on us, we better be clear about that. Understanding that ahead of time and thinking about who you are, what makes you special and who specifically you’d want to attract. You don’t want to attract thousands of fans. I have a podcast on 3D printing. It’s geeky but I was able to monetize my podcast with 25,000 plays a month because my audience was specifically interested in what I had to sell, say and share.

You want to attract people who are going to serve your business well because otherwise, it’s a waste of time marketing. If you’re not attracting, people are going to hire you at the end of the day as a freelancer. You want to be able to trap them to your message. Figuring out what that is, it’s okay to test it. Maybe it won’t work, maybe it will. That’s okay but be clear about what you want to do there. If you are, it makes it easier to hit the ground running.

I told somebody this one thing. I’m curious to see if you agree with it. Sometimes when we start something brand new, there may only be three people that show up to it but you have to sit through those moments for those 3 or 4 people to speak to their 3, 4 or 5 people. The ball begins to roll but I see a lot of people there are three people who showed up. It didn’t work.

There is an element of it that doesn’t work but that’s why I call it a platform. I don’t use Twitter actively anymore. It didn’t resonate with my audience so we stopped doing it in January of 2021 but I set it on autopilot. Every time a blog post goes into my WordPress site, it automatically tweets something out. Why? I don’t want to be out of business on Twitter. It’s a way of trying to decide and sometimes you have to test that. I spent a year actively trying to seek an audience on Twitter and said, “That doesn’t work for me.” That’s okay. It didn’t work for the people I wanted to attract. I turned it on autopilot so I don’t have to think about it and do anything but I’m not out of business.

Is there anything else you want to share? You’re getting into this great event that I want to make sure you have the opportunity to tell us anything you want about your workshop.

I’m so excited to come because I know I’m going to learn much more from your audience and all the people there. It’s going to be incredible. I’m looking forward to learning from you.

Those of you that are reading, thank you so much for being a part of this. Thank you, Tracy, for taking some time out of your schedule. For those of you who have not yet gone through tickets for the Freelance Conference can check out more information and check out the agenda. It is two days long.

We’re going to have a set of games. Make sure you bring your game face. When I say games, I don’t mean game games, I mean fun games. Go to FreelanceConference.com. Go find the information that you need. Reach out to me if you need to buy your ticket because they will probably go off sale and be done. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. We have another interview. Until then, have a great evening.

Take care.

Watch the episode here:

FreeCon

Emily Leach