Create Video Script Templates to Boost Content Quality

[00:00:00] Jen McFarland: The Women Conquer Business show is an educational, how to, women in business podcast that features stories, marketing news and real life experiences from fun and friendly hosts, Jen McFarland and Shelley Carney. Join us as we dive into the details so you can slay marketing overwhelm, streamline processes and amplify your impact.

You'll learn strategies and tactics, leadership skills, and practical advice from successful women entrepreneurs to help you grow, nurture, and sustain your business.

Hey, welcome to Women Conquer Business. I'm Jen McFarland joined by Shelley Carney on this week's show it is create video script templates to increase content quality. I think anybody who's tried to create anything knows how hard it can be. And well, one of the easiest ways to make it a little bit better is to draft an outline or a show flow or a script so that you know about what you're going to say when. So what do you say, Shelley?

[00:01:06] Shelley Carney: Good morning. And hello everybody. I'm Shelley Carney. Today, once again, we're talking about creating video scripts, but sometimes we don't even need a script. We need just an outline or, No, I know what I'm going to talk about. I'll just show up.

Make sure you have something written down that you can refer to if things start to go wrong and you get distracted. If you're doing a show, there's a lot of distractions and last minute things that you have to take care of. So you want to make sure that you have something to refer back to get you back on target.

That's what I say.

[00:01:39] Jen McFarland: I'm giggling for a couple of reasons. One, we were two minutes late going live because we forgot something on our checklist, which is funny. So we were about to launch and the banner was going to be for last week's episode. And two, I use podcasting as a way to release tension or whatever, just have fun.

And so I haven't had a real schedule or show flow until Shelley and I started working together. So this is an episode where Shelley's going to take the lead. And I'm probably going to talk about the downside of not planning because I have a lot of experience on that side of not drafting and having some shows that I think went really well because the inspiration hit and then some shows that maybe didn't go so well because I didn't really know how to frame the ideas that I had, and it can go either way. I just want to be really transparent with people that I am not always the big planner.

I know the value of planning as someone who has worked for several years as a project manager. So I think it's important to really frame this appropriately, where I'm not going to sit here as the expert on this particular thing. Shelley is the expert, and I think it's going to be a really great show because it really does make things easier, I think.

[00:02:58] Shelley Carney: Sometimes it's a personality thing. When I got married, I was 20 years old. I created an agenda for the evening. We'll be at the wedding. Then we're going to go to the reception and here's the things that are going to happen at the reception, and at what time about I want them to happen.

I did that because we had moving pieces. We had a DJ who needed to know, okay, these are the times that we want these songs, and this is when we'll show up. And then this is the dance we're going to do. So that he would be prepared and what was coming up next and that would help him to do a better job.

And it would also help everybody who was involved in the wedding party to know, okay, here's the series of events. So we didn't have to constantly tell people here's what we're doing and here's what's next, and all of that. I could focus on being at the reception and being in the moment instead of trying to communicate to everybody. Okay, don't forget, we're going to do this next. There wasn't a party planner. There wasn't an event planner there to take care of that. So I wrote an agenda, handed that out, and it facilitated all the communications.

[00:04:09] Jen McFarland: That's really great. And I would say that we had that for the wedding.

Let me ask for another example. Do you plan your vacations in detail?

[00:04:19] Shelley Carney: Depends. One time, Kevin and I, we went to Colorado and we wanted to do zip-lining, we wanted to do rafting, and we wanted to do the Great Sand Dunes.

And so we did plan that out. On this day, we're going to do this and on this day we're going to do this, but it wasn't like minute by minute or anything. I don't plan every minute. But I do say I would like to go see this. So let's do that on this day. And we look at the map and what's close to what, because then you can take full advantage of being there, whereas you don't get home and go, oh shoot. We should have done this other thing. It was right there and we missed it. We didn't even think about it. We didn't even know it was there. So yeah, you want to make full use of the time that you have. But I don't structure everything.

It depends on if we have goals to you. Like when we went to the conference, the She Podcasts conference, everything was very scheduled out for us and we just pick and choose what we want to do. Yeah, I created an agenda because there was three of us, again, we all needed to be on the same page and then we needed to slot people in for their interviews and keep all, 18 interviews within that agenda. So it really depends on what your mission and goal are and if you need to accomplish something, then you want to make a plan for it.

[00:05:33] Jen McFarland: I totally agree with that. In project management, we call that structured flexibility. And what that means is you have a general structure and then how you get there. Sometimes you have to be flexible. Like for example, in the She Podcasts or even vacation, like things come up and you have to have enough flexibility in your plan that you can go wherever things take you because you don't always have control over everything. I guess that for me, I do that kind of planning and everything.

I think I just view podcasting, because I was never a professional. Like you, you've worked in structured media and stuff. I view this as like an experience. I was talking to my friend Bridget this morning and I was like, sometimes I just don't know what's going to come out of my mouth.

And I know I've said the same thing to you. And sometimes that is the lens that I go through with podcasting. But I will say that is not always the best thing to do. It's not always the best way to go into it. What we have, do you want to talk about how we kind of structure our show? I think that'd be a good lead into why it's something that people need to really think about.

[00:06:35] Shelley Carney: Yeah. So what we do is we start off with greetings and chat. So Jen and I will give some context to our lives. So we're not just talking heads that appear on your screen and start blathering about content marketing.

We tell you, like I just moved to Arizona for a couple of months to help alleviate some of the pressure that was on my dad and brother, because my mom is in a nursing home, recovering from a stroke. So I'm able to be there now. I can be there almost every day. I take off Wednesdays and Thursdays to do my shows.

Again, structuring. When I first got here, it was like, okay, I'm not sure what days I'm going to be here, what days they're going to be here. But as we do the first week, we come to an understanding of when people can be there, when they can't, and we develop a schedule together. And then we can start to stick with that and that's going to help my mom to know, who's coming in today? What time? What time are they staying? Because people change around her all the time and it's confusing for her. The nurse assistants come in and it's somebody different every day and that confuses her. So having that structure is very helpful for people like her who are elderly and recovering from a stroke. It's very good for children.

I used to teach preschool. So we had a very structured day, but you also have to have some some wiggle room in case you have kids who are wiggly, you can take them outside whenever you need to, things like that.

[00:08:05] Jen McFarland: Was I a wiggly kid? I probably was. Well, but I was also a nerd. So there was that. I wanted to pay attention. Okay.

But I would say that we also as busy business owners who have a lot on our plates, the structure helps keep us in line. And then the other thing that the structure helps with is it helps listeners and viewers know kind of what to expect. So we usually start with a chat. I am to just tell everybody where I'm at. I'm a little rummy today. I have been teaching. I think I've taught for nine hours of digital marketing over the last week. And when I said yes to everything, I didn't realize that it was two days in a row and then another day. And so as somebody who's just coming back from vacation, it's thrown all of my scheduling in a shambles where in the throws of figuring out exactly what kind of setup we want to have for Epiphany Courses. So that's all being reworked. There's just a time right now where I feel tired and like I have a lot of balls in the air. It's great and I feel a little bit like I have my hair on fire because I have a lot to do.

And having the structure is very helpful for me today because I kinda knew that this show was I asked Shelley to make a landing page and make a template for everybody. So everybody who's watching and listening has an opportunity to download a video script template and to start this process on their own.

But it was helpful for me to know that I didn't have a lot of pressure in terms of planning ahead of time, and really thinking about what it means to create a video script template and that kind of thing, because it's not. Our show flow the way it works, that's this is not my job. Shelley came up with the entire structure of... I come up with the title and the description and Shelley comes up with the structure. And when she presented it to me, when we first got started, I thought it was great. We just chat in the beginning.

We do some breaking news. There's a training piece, a call to action. Tweaks of the week, which are like the fun apps and stuff that we find and what's going on in the world. And then, an inspirational nugget, which is usually Shelley's inspirational. She's a life coach. So we want to honor like everybody's expertise and what they do.

And I think that's really the beauty of what Shelley's created here is that, everybody has their piece of the pie. And then it's also created, so that everybody, the listeners, the viewers and us as the host feels like they're being served in one way or another. Would you say that's really kind of part of the art of developing something like this?

[00:10:46] Shelley Carney: Yeah. I studied it for a couple of years. Of course, I've been live streaming since 2017 every week. You learn things, you learn what works and what doesn't. And then I studied other people who also live stream and their methods. And then I put the show flow together based on that.

And I try to keep it simple enough that it turns into the show notes because we can plug in the resources and that sort of thing. Having five segments keeps it in a container, that there's going to be five segments and you know that you hit all the high points and then you've done a show. You hit your mission, right?

[00:11:27] Jen McFarland: No, I think that it's great. I'd be curious to know if anybody has started watching or listening, since I think was it January when we started doing this? And if they, how they appreciate some of the changes. Because people who listened to the show in years past, back in 2018, when this got started, it's honestly, up until January, it was more of a I guess intuitive hits or thoughts or ideas that I was sharing. It was not necessarily structured. It wasn't always about marketing. It was like story time with Jen.

Sometimes I miss aspects of that because there's times for that. But the pressure of doing that every week was really hard. It was really stressful. And then I don't know that people really knew what to expect. So I think if it didn't hit, then it was hard to get people to come back because there was nothing.

[00:12:18] Shelley Carney: When you can come up with a theme, then it's easier to come up with individual topics. And once you've determined and landed on a topic, then you can pull out everything you want to say about that. And because you did that, for our content marketing theme, you picked out things, you put them in a spreadsheet. Because I was asking you every week, do you have a title and description yet?

Because I need to upload and I need to do the newsletter and I need to have a show flow.

[00:12:47] Jen McFarland: We put the two flows together and my flow has evolved greatly since we started the show. So we needed a landing place. And I think that's really helped. What Shelley's talking about is we have a Google sheet. We met, we talked about all the topics we want to discuss. I have them all scribbled down on my remarkable tablet. I send them to Shelley and then I just started plugging in the titles and the descriptions because we carefully select titles and descriptions based on search terms. The title is create video script templates. We don't necessarily in our dialogue, call it a video script template, but that's a word that's searched a lot.

So if people are looking for video script templates, we want them to find this because we call it a show flow, but that's what this is. This is a template that people can use to script their videos. You can also use it to script your podcast. And so we use that then as a guide. And so that's like our topic and then I write a description based on that topic.

And then that goes into the spreadsheet and then Shelley takes that and pushes it out on Streamyard. And then we both think about the different elements of the show flow for how we're going to break it down and really talk about this topic in full.

[00:14:02] Shelley Carney: Yeah. And because we've done that because you've set up this spreadsheet of this day we're going to talk about this, this day we're going to talk about that. You can go on vacation. I can move. You can go do talks all week and then we can both show up and then we can go we know what we're talking about because we already planned it out in advance and we're ready to go. So it's just giving you that extra buffer to take care of life and then still get your podcast done. Yeah.

[00:14:32] Jen McFarland: Show up. Yeah. And I think that, again, I also think it has a lot to do with how to engage with people. People know what to expect. We haven't really talked about breaking news. I feel like I've been running my hair on fire.

You've been moving around and doing a lot. I noticed neither one of us wrote anything today for breaking news. I think that it's just, we appreciate everybody here. We appreciate that we're here. And sometimes that's the breaking news. Yeah.

[00:14:57] Shelley Carney: Yeah. My only breaking news is that Toby and I have also shuffled up our schedule again.

So we've got News and Views on Wednesday and Saturday nights, and we have moved Messages and Methods to Thursdays at one o'clock mountain. We're going to try it there for a little while. We had tried it on Wednesdays at one, and then we moved at Wednesdays at five. And now we're trying it on Thursdays at one.

We're going to see how it goes. Sometimes you have to do that. We know what works and that's News and Views is working very well. So we're capitalizing on that, keeping it where it was and giving that our full attention. Then taking the piece that isn't working as well and moving it around until it finds a home that really works.

[00:15:36] Jen McFarland: That makes sense. That resonates. Yeah. And I guess my breaking news is that my friend, Bridget Willard, and I decided we're maybe doing a podcast. I don't know.

[00:15:48] Shelley Carney: We're just discussing your show flow and now you're like, yeah.

[00:15:52] Jen McFarland: It's so funny, we've talked about it and talked about it and texted, and we're both like we don't really have any time, but we really liked to talk and we think that other people would think that would be fun.

So then today I was like, why don't we just record? Why don't we just meet Saturday and record? And she's oh, I would love that. And what we had talked about before was having something called it's called, so we've named it. It's 3 0 2 Marketing Redirect. So if you're a super nerd, a 3 0 2 is what you put in a website to redirect people to a new page.

And so it's basically after hours marketing. So we're just going to be talking about the things that I think it's behind the scenes and the things that we're thinking about, and we're going to do that. This week, it's on Saturday at five o'clock Pacific. She's in Texas. So it would be seven o'clock in Texas.

I think it's just going to be fun times. We're going to be talking and it's going to be, I think it's likely to be a lot less structured because neither one of us have a lot of time. We both agreed that we don't have time to market it, we don't have time to put a ton of effort into it, but we just love visiting and sharing kind of our thoughts about certain topics. And so we thought, why not put it out into the world and see how it goes? So it's an experimental thing. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Right before I came on here, I put it up on the YouTube channel. So if anybody wants to set a reminder, they can.

That would be the antithesis of having a show flow and a plan is the we're just doing the thing.

[00:17:20] Shelley Carney: It drags you back. You're like, oh we haven't done breaking news yet. Let's do that. And then we can move forward into training some more. So it's okay. That's.

[00:17:29] Jen McFarland: No, but I'm also saying we aren't really scheduling and going through all these steps that we're talking about.

But most of it is that we're just testing it out. We don't know how much time we have or if it's gonna work or not,

[00:17:39] Shelley Carney: and there isn't always breaking news.

[00:17:41] Jen McFarland: And there isn't always breaking news.

[00:17:42] Shelley Carney: So you can just it's a living document, just work with it.

[00:17:45] Jen McFarland: Yeah. So let's go like straight away into the training.

Where do you want to start with this? How do you want to share this? Where do you want to go in terms of how to really help somebody create a good outline that can really improve their content.

[00:17:59] Shelley Carney: Okay there's a couple of ways you can do it now, depending on how loosey goosey I am a public speaker, I've got this, you are, or I need extreme structure because I'm scared of what I'm doing and my first time so you can structure it the way you need to structure it. To give you that extra space or to keep you confined into, I don't want to go off on too many rabbit holes if you're a person who does that.

Like sometimes we all do that. So one of the ways is to create a show flow that just gives you those key highlighted topics. Okay, I'm going to do this, then talk about that then talk about this, and then I got to do that and then close and then it keeps you in a structure, but not so structured that you can't, you have, oh, let me talk about this. And, oh I just thought of a story. You could throw that in there. Now, we don't actually script write word for word anything, except for things like intros and outros. So when we say script, what we really mean is an outline. And another way to outline is by creating a slide set and you can share that slide set onscreen with you to keep not only you focused on where you're at, but the audience, it gives them that visual learning component so they're not just looking at two people talking and gesturing. They're also seeing pictures and words so that the message really gets into their minds and helps them to implement it more easily. That's what Toby and I do for our Messages and Methods show. We create a slide set for every show and we work from that. It keeps us both on the same page. Sometimes we'll open up a slide and he'll start talking and insert and we'll go back and forth with the bullet points.

And sometimes I'll say all the bullet points and then he'll come in with a story or something. So it keeps us that structure, but it's still loose enough that you can do your public speaking. The alternative to that is to write yourself little paragraphs. Okay, I'm going to say this. And then I'm going to ask this question, and then I'm going to say this, and I'm going to ask this question and you can do that when you're starting out.

If that helps you to talk and to not be afraid that you're going to go blank. Because that is a fear, especially if you're alone, where you're just staring at the camera with dead air and nobody wants that.

[00:20:23] Jen McFarland: Yeah. As you were talking I remembered that when I first, so this podcast was originally way back episode one had two people, co-hosts, and then it became just me and I did script. Like I wrote out what I was going to say. And then I found out I was just reading it and I thought, that's not very engaging either. And then for some reason, instead of doing what we do now, I just went all the way to like nothing was written down. And it's actually not something I would recommend. I think that you can over script like you were saying, and then you can also go too far the other way, which is certainly where I had been, then after I went solo. So yeah, you have to go with whatever works for you, whatever makes you feel the most comfortable for sure.

[00:21:06] Shelley Carney: Yeah. Yeah. And I like slides. Toby and I've used them for years and they really help me think ahead. Okay. We're going to talk about this and I can do a little bit of research, I can say, okay, what have other people said about this and articles and blogs and stuff. And I can put those in as bullet points. Cause I've read the material. And I'm like, okay, I can bring that up. Then I can helps me to have a cohesive and coherent presentation when I do it that way.

[00:21:36] Jen McFarland: Yeah. And we've done that, I think twice, maybe on Women Conquer Business. And I think it's probably something that we need to incorporate.

I'm slowly getting all of these new systems in place. And it just takes me a little time to adopt it. I think that I've been resistant to the slides. I'll share with the we're sharing. Hey, let's share live let's workshop our show live now. But I've been resistant to that because I've thought if people are listening, are we going to end up talking about the slides in a way that if you can't see them, it's not going to be engaging. And that's been my resistance to that is I don't want to be like as you can see here, and then there's nothing for people to see. They'll be listening. So I feel like I want to do that, but I want to do it knowing that people are listening. And I think that in terms of my ability to think that quickly about a slide, I don't think I personally am in that place yet. But I do think that in terms of what you and Toby do, which is you create like a deck of shows, you plan out a lot of shows and then you turn them into books.

I don't think you could do that the way that we do a show. Right now. You have to have that structure and you have to have, the slides so that you're holding yourself accountable a little bit more stronger so that, like downstream, this is going to become a book. And if you don't do all of that, then, like we haven't created anything yet that's going to become a book at this point without heavy editing. We could but it would take a lot more time. Would you, is that true? Are the slides partially to guide you through writing a book?

[00:23:05] Shelley Carney: It's true. And I do blog posts from them as well. First I do a blog post. So I'll take and transcribe the podcasts that we've done and then I turn that into a blog post. So I've had to edit it and as I'm editing it, I'm learning. Okay. We need to get to the meat of the sentence here instead of a bunch of blah-blah-blah and then a choice, and then it's, ah, it's all over the place. It makes it really hard to edit it into an understandable, readable format, if you are not very focused. And that's one of the reasons we do it.

[00:23:40] Jen McFarland: I'm assuming the next thought on that was also then, so you can take it into the book format, make sure, And I think that there's a lot of value in that I watched your shows and like last night I was making pithy comments.

But I've watched them without saying anything and there is a structure. There's an appreciation I have for the slides. I want to make sure that I do slides with intentionality and that it's in a way that if somebody is listening, they can also capture it. I guess the alternative would be we create slides and then we make them available in the show notes or something like that. So then people can do it.

[00:24:14] Shelley Carney: The thing about slides, the slides are visual and some people who are listening to your podcast may say, oh, I need to go look at that so that I can see that slide. But at the same time, you need to make sure when you're doing the slides, Toby's you don't read the slides to people and I'm like, yeah, not when they can see them, you don't, but when they're only listening, I have to read the slides or they're not going to know what the words were that were on there. So we had to come to that place where we understood that I'm going to read the words on the slide for the podcast audience.

And then he's going to tell a story for all our audience so that it brings everything together. But it's not something they have to see, they can hear it and understand it.

[00:24:59] Jen McFarland: That makes a lot of sense.

Let's go back for just a second. So it sounds like you come up with your theme for your show, what you're going to talk about. We have, for our show five buckets, you could have, how many buckets could somebody else have for their show?

[00:25:11] Shelley Carney: You want to stay no more than seven, three to five is really good. And these are shorter and more concise.

[00:25:20] Jen McFarland: Yeah. So these are like five topics or buckets, or however you want to put it, of things that you could be talking about, and then what is it that somebody should put in it? So if you set up the five buckets for us, it's opening chat and then breaking news, presentation, call to action, tweaks of the week and inspirational nugget.

So then what should, if you've never done this before, what should people be putting into that draft outline after they've come up with their buckets?

[00:25:47] Shelley Carney: First off before you even get to the buckets. Now, those are good to keep in mind for where you're going to go. But to start off with, you want to say, okay, am I teaching something?

Am I training on something? And if so, what information does my audience need and how can I best present that? And then come up with three main points to teach that topic. And that's, what's in the free download that we're offering today. It helps you to really coalesce that thinking into three main points and how to present those and how to engage your audience at points along the way so that they feel like they can add to the conversation. It's really geared for live streaming. This particular show flow that we're showing and sharing with people.

[00:26:35] Jen McFarland: I think that's really great. And one of the things that people maybe don't know, and I don't know how much you paid attention to it, Shelley is this podcast is a fairly highly rated show.

And our primary category is actually how-to. It's not business, it's not marketing. I had a really clear intention and I did this a year and a half ago, that's what I was doing. It's how to it's about lessons and things like that. So having a training in the middle and having shows that most of the time start with How to, it's entirely by design.

And I did it because how to educational, is not as competitive. How many marketing shows are there out there? There's not as much competition to be talking about some of this stuff. So sometimes when you are designing these things you have to keep the end in mind. This is what we do. We are a, how to show and we have buckets that are entirely designed around how to do something.

[00:27:35] Shelley Carney: And that's your starting point is the training itself. And then you add on the other pieces. So the chat is to get to know the hosts. The breaking news is to draw you in and give you that I have an opinion on that.

Oh, that sounds awesome. I want to learn more. It draws people in and then you do the training once you have their attention. And then you end that training with the CTA, the call to action, which gives them a resource or a way to work with whatever it is that you trained about. So today, of course, we're going to have that free download. That's our CTA. And then we do tweaks of the week because it gives us that credibility of being experts who actually do the work ourselves. Hey, this new thing happened and I learned this from it and it's really great. And you should try it.

Or on our other show, instead of doing that, we do a trivia question and that brings people in because they get excited about I want to know the answer, or I have a good guess I have an answer and then they win a prize.

So they feel like, oh, that was really worth my time because I went there and I felt smart and I won a prize. Then we end with that inspirational nugget so that everybody feels uplifted and happy group, I'm glad I showed up for that show. I'm glad I was there live.

I'm glad I participated. I feel really good. So that they want to keep coming back.

[00:28:58] Jen McFarland: Exactly. And I thought all this time, I thought we did breaking news and tweaks of the week, so I could talk about nerd stuff, but yeah, you're right. It makes us seem very professional. But I thought it was, I honestly thought it was in part due to for talking about apps and stuff, because I always have a new app that I'm trying and things like that, but we all, I think it is truly that we're in the weeds, just like everybody who's listening and talking about it is helpful. It's helpful. Okay.

[00:29:26] Shelley Carney: People are always asking, they're always asking what email providers should I use?

What streaming providers should I use? What's the best social media platform? They want to know. So it's included in your show, the things that people are always asking.

[00:29:40] Jen McFarland: Yeah. Oh that's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've drafted the outline. How do we use this?

[00:29:47] Shelley Carney: Every week we start out with the template part and then just change the things. We'll put in the title, we'll put in the description and then Jen is really good about including what we're going to talk about in her description. So I'll just pull those pieces out and stick that into the training so that we make sure that whatever she said we're going to talk about, we do talk about, cause it's in our training section. If I have something that I want to share, like I just moved to Arizona and I'm helping with my mom and I'm driving her Toyota RAV4 around town. It's pretty cool. I can stick that in there. Jen can write in there things that she wants to talk about so that we don't forget. So that it's right there in front of us and we don't go, oh, I forgot to mention this. Shoot! We have it down and then we'll just go in throughout the day or so before we do the show and we'll add in things that we've come up with. Sometimes we don't have time for that and we won't do it until the morning of, but that's okay too. We just fill in the blanks. So we fill in what I'm going to chat about.

Fill in any breaking news. We fill in any presentation or training information and resources. If we come across a really good blog or article or a video or something that we want to share, we'll put that link in our show flow so that we can share it on the screen. We can get it into the show notes for people to click on.

We come up with a CTA. Jen asked us for a download this week. So we put that together and gave her the link that's in there. And then for tweaks of the week, what did I do this week? That was really cool online or with my computer? Or what did I learn? And stick that in there. And then inspirational nugget? Very often, I just take whatever I was learning in My Daily Stoic today or sometime this week, grab it plop, put it right in there and it's super easy. And then it's there when you need it.

[00:31:42] Jen McFarland: The way I use it, like I just added something. I just remembered what my tweak of the week was right now. So I don't know how Shelley's setup is, but right now in front of me, I have, the lights, the cameras.

Action! No. And the computer and the mic and everything, but I can see Shelley and myself on the Streamyard feed, and the next to it. Cause I don't have multiple monitors. Next to it is the weekly show flow. So I'm glancing over and keeping track of what we're talking about. I also have it up next to me.

So that then like when I came up with the tweak of the week for the cool thing have been using this week. When we're up here talking it's easy then to forget what you were going to say or forget what idea you had. And so if that's happening, you can also have it open.

It not only keeps you on track with the buckets, but also keeps you able to think about things and put them in on the fly, if you didn't think of them ahead of time. So

[00:32:38] Shelley Carney: Alternatively, you can print it out and just make handwritten notes on it, if that's easier.

[00:32:43] Jen McFarland: Yeah. Yeah. This desk is not need any more paper on it,

[00:32:47] Shelley Carney: Which Toby likes to do. He likes to print everything out. He likes to have a hard copy and because if we were to open it, it would be on a screen that would be just a little bit away from him. So he wouldn't be able to read it as easily. So he likes to have that hard copy.

[00:33:00] Jen McFarland: Sure. Yeah. I need two monitors, but I whatever it is, what it is.

And I heard you have a pretty hot computer over there. I talked to Toby this week.

[00:33:09] Shelley Carney: Oh yeah. My brother donated it for while I'm here. And then eventually my parents will get a new one. I'm hoping they'll get a desktop. They have an old laptop, so I'm hoping they'll get a desktop instead, which I think would be faster for them.

[00:33:23] Jen McFarland: Toby promised he would send me pictures and a video of your studio that you two created in Arizona. And for those of you who didn't watch the earlier show about setting up your at home studio you might want to go back and look at that cause they stood this up within a day.

And then Shelley is in a studio now that was created in Arizona. So that for the next two months, she's able to navigate and do everything that she's been doing in another location. So there is a reason why we talk about this stuff, why we write this stuff down, why we do it, because then it's able to be replicated over and over again.

And so that's the beauty of it, okay. So what about the script? Like how do you actually create your own script templates?

[00:34:08] Shelley Carney: For things that I'm going to be reading as a script, I'll say an intro or a promo, I'll be using more marketing language. So I will write that out word for word, but I'll keep it to a minute or less.

And then I'll just read that. We'll record my voice and then put it together under a video so that it's voiceover. That's the only real scripting that I do. Other than that, we use either slides or show flow. Yeah. What about you?

[00:34:42] Jen McFarland: Makes sense. I fly by the seat of my pants over here.

I did in the past do some scripting, like I said. It's just that then if I have too many words in front of me, like these digital marketing courses. I have been teaching those and iterating on it for several years now. I know what the slides say, but if I'm creating slides every week or I'm creating a script every week, I don't have the time to really learn it cold.

So then I found that I was stumbling over words and it was a little bit more difficult to have a script in that regard. Then I'm a perfectionist and I get all flustered if my reading didn't go. For me, fewer words are better. There's a downside to that too. But having these buckets has been incredibly helpful for me. And I think that's why it was so important to really talk about it. And I think that a lot of people don't talk about these things. I feel like the show a lot of times talks about the unsexy parts that are so essential. People need these things so much.

And because nobody's talking about it, because everyone wants to sell you on the latest funnel or something, not a lot of people are getting the real nuts and bolts of what it takes to put content out there. And people think that it's all done just on the fly when really the really good content creators don't. They plan everything out and they have a real idea of what they're doing and then what comes next. And that's one of the great things that has happened now is we have that spreadsheet and we know what's coming next, and we can really talk about it like next week, we're going to talk about YouTube.

Do you know that? Did you know?

[00:36:18] Shelley Carney: I haven't looked ahead. I've been busy, but yeah.

[00:36:21] Jen McFarland: Yeah. I looked ahead cause I was like, oh. So I'm excited to talk about YouTube because there are aspects of it, even though we use it that are not as intuitive. So I'm going to spend some time this week learning about it and see what I can bring about how to use YouTube even, like kind of the novice, how to do it and navigate it.

And I know that you have so much expertise in this too, that I think that we'll do it. And

[00:36:43] Shelley Carney: I think what we can offer is Jen has a channel that was under a hundred subscribers when we started. Now it's over a hundred. She can talk about how to grow a small channel to make it bigger. And mine isn't really growing, but we have several channels.

[00:37:01] Jen McFarland: You have several channels

[00:37:02] Shelley Carney: On the other channels that are monetized, I can talk about what it's like to be monetized and what are the other things that are available to you once you become a YouTube partner. I think that's going to go really well.

[00:37:14] Jen McFarland: It's going to be a great show. Okay.

We've been talking about this free show flow template. How do people get to that? What can they expect? I actually saw a preview of how you're going to, you can talk about this last night in that I think it's really great because it's a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about.

It's a template that people can use, but then it's also, you've done a great write-up at the end, I think, to really help guide people as well.

[00:37:41] Shelley Carney: Let us take a look at, if you go to show flow dot AGK media.studio, you'll get to the landing page and let's show what the landing page looks like. And for those of you just listening, you'll have all these in the description box.

You'll see all of the information there. So this is the landing page, the show flow template with instructions. Design the flow of your show that you will follow. This will help your audience to follow along with you, and it will help you plan and stay consistent.

The show flow may change over time as you see what works best for you and what might need to be added or deleted. Use this worksheet to get. And then you just fill in the information and you will be taken to a Google doc that you can then copy to your own Google drive and you'll have it on your drive and you'll be able to make changes, fill it in.

And however you want to use it. It starts off with a show flow for a solo presentation, and it helps you to really think about the things that you're going to need to include. What does my audience want to know? What does my audience need to know? And what do they not need to know? Because too much information is not helpful.

Then we have the show flow, which tells you, okay, start with a teaser or a hook, today we're going to tell you all the ways you shouldn't do blah, blah, blah. What's a quick rhetorical question you can ask? Have you ever had this happen to you or something of that nature and then a short introduction of yourself.

I'm Shelley Carney. I'm a content entrepreneur and I'm here today to tell you all about blah, blah, blah. Quick engagement. How many of you feel successful and happy? How many of you believe that you're a content entrepreneur on the rise? Just anything to talk to your audience about this. Then we get into your teaching points. Include with your first teaching point, include an anecdote or a quote, and that helps to make it more personal.

Break for engagement. And this works not only as a show, but really it also works as a webinar or something that you might do in front of people or you can do it online. So this works really well for that. Helping you just hone your message. Your second teaching point can include a story or a testimonial, somebody that you've worked with or helped in the past or something that happened to you that worked really well. Then again, break for engagement. Ask the audience what do you think? Have you ever had this happen to you? Things of that nature. And then third teaching point, you want to engage the senses and the emotions through specific details. So it smelled like roses or I wanted it to smell like roses, but it smelled like a nursing home.

So I had to bring in Febreeze. Just engage the senses. People can feel like they're there with you. And that is going to create that bond. And then break for engagement one last time before you then do the call to action. Ask your audience to take a specific action and then close with an upbeat close. Help people feel good about the time they spent watching your show. The second thing on here is how you would do the same sort of thing with an interview presentation. If you're bringing on a guest. I'm not going to go through each point of that because it's pretty much the same thing, but we're incorporating a guest. And then we have a show flow template and instructions.

So this is the one that Jen and I and Toby and I use. It tells you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, connection, breaking news, training and advice, call to action, tools, tips, or trivia, inspirational nugget. And then I gave you a blank form that you can fill in yourself. And because, like I said, it's a Google doc if you just import it into your own Google drive, you can change it and fill it out however you like to do it.

[00:41:32] Jen McFarland: I think that's wonderful. Yeah. I think that it really, I love all of the detail. I love everything that you've put together. I think it's so flexible, like you said, it could be for a webinar, it could be for a podcast. It could be for live streaming. Like we have.

If you just want to prepare you know, you could use it also for preparing for a talk or anything that you're working on. Please do go to show flow dot AGK media.studio, and that's where you'll find that landing page. And you can download that template that will help guide you through some of these things.

I feel like it's a really good accelerator for moving your content forward in a way that maybe you've never done before. It doesn't have to be a heavy lift. It's just a place really where you can brainstorm, put some things together. So you have a way to wander through all of the topics that you're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for making that. Shelley, you bet. And and also

[00:42:29] Shelley Carney: These are things that we've used with our clients in the past, so it was easy to put it together. Yeah.

[00:42:34] Jen McFarland: Yeah. So it's very generous of you did put it together for free other people can use it. So yeah.

So do you have anything else to share about the show flow?

[00:42:43] Shelley Carney: No, but if you look at that show flow and you think gosh, I could do that. I want to start my own live stream, but I don't know what to do. You can call us, you could schedule an appointment at calendar.Agkmedia.studio, or you can reach out to Jen and where should they find you Jen?

[00:43:02] Jen McFarland: Women conquer business dot com.

[00:43:04] Shelley Carney: There you go

[00:43:05] Jen McFarland: So we can totally help. I don't have a special download. I just have a newsletter at womanconquerbiz.com slash newsletter. If you're interested in that, getting updates on all things marketing and episodes. Shelley also things about the Women Conquer Business show and all the shows that she's doing and hot tips about live streaming and content marketing.

And then did you have a tweak of the week? I came up with a tweak of the week during the show. How do you like that?

[00:43:34] Shelley Carney: See, you can do things on the fly when you have the rest of it all mapped out. You can fill in that. Oh yeah. Here's something.

[00:43:40] Jen McFarland: What I discovered is something called Canny. So last week I was talking about Heartbeat. It's a community platform that's offered on AppSumo right now. I've adopted it for Epiphany courses. As we prepare to roll out this new subscription plan that we have and all of this content that we've been preparing. In there once you log in and you have a account with Heartbeat, then they're like do you want to tell us about any bugs or anything that's going on?

And it takes you to this other page and it's called Canny. And that's the name of the template. Now you've seen these before. A lot of times startups use it in their like Trello boards and they're sharing the roadmap forward. And it's also a place where you can do bugs or things. So for Epiphany courses, we're going to use Canny.

It's free unless you need like a ton of bells and whistles. But we're going to use that for people who are logged in to our membership, then to give us course suggestions. And that's how we're going to use it. I figured out how to do it so that it's only public to people who we want to be able to give us suggestions.

So it's a neat tool because it's behind a wall. And then for large corporations or larger startups, they use Canny. So places like, Click Up and bigger organizations, they use Canny to communicate between if you had an app and customers, they could share bugs and feature requests, and then you can put like your roadmap.

I just think it's a neat way to keep track of things. And what I've found I've been doing this week is I've been using Canny during the presentations. I'll write down ideas that people have or things that could be classes. And I've just been typing in all these course ideas that I've had into Canny. And then as we start to onboard people into our membership, then they can vote and tell us if they like some of the ideas. So it's a way to validate ideas as well 'cause people can upvote. Anybody who's in there can have a course idea. As the owners of the board, we decide what's in planning, what's in development, what's delivered. But it's a way to communicate about what it is that you're working on. What's in production. What's not. I thought it was just a really good tool. I haven't seen it a lot for course creation. It's mostly for apps, but I adapted it for something to communicate with our members about what we're working on now so that they know what to expect. So that's called Canny. If you go to Canny, let's see, I think it's just canny.io and like I said, it's free. It's customer feedback. There's a lot of customer feedback software out there. You can certainly use it in different ways.

It's really hard if you're doing like one-to-one services to use it in that way. I think it's better if you have some sort of customer service base or something like that, that you want to do it. Yeah. And you can pay a lot of money for it, or you can use the free one. Anyway, that is my tweak of the week.

It's a different thing. But I think customer feedback is really important. It's one of the things I train people about all the time, and this is a pretty slick way to integrate it, where somebody is logged in, they have a link available to them and they can provide feedback and ideas. Anyway, that's a neat thing. What you got?

[00:46:59] Shelley Carney: Something that we're going to talk about on our show today, we're going to do a little presentation and a demo of Formly.

[00:47:06] Jen McFarland: It could be like Jot Form Type Form, a product that I use is Paper Form. And it, you can also take payments. It's pretty slick.

[00:47:14] Shelley Carney: So this is a, of course, AppSumo.

[00:47:16] Jen McFarland: AppSumo? I hadn't even noticed that. Yeah, I got Paper Form on AppSumo now it's $300 a month or something ridiculous.

So yeah, you get those little tips and then you run with them. Cause some of them really take off. We're up for bumping up against the hour, which is okay. Cause we were actually late getting started. Would you like to close this out with the inspirational nugget?

[00:47:34] Shelley Carney: You bet. Now this was from My Daily Stoic and there was an astronaut who was interviewed back when men first started going into space and to the moon.

And he said in outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. So we want to ask ourselves where have I lost the forest for the trees? Remember that it's important to take breaks and celebrate wins when they happen.

The same is true of working in our business. The day-to-day work doesn't seem to matter, but when we look back at the portfolio of content we've created, we can see it all adds up. And when we have people reach out to us for a consultation or a proposal, it feels like sometimes it's just out of the blue. Hey, I got a call! Yay!. But I know they've been thinking about it for weeks, months or years before they're finally ready to contact us. And so if we stop making offers and stopped doing our business, they wouldn't get the help they need to move forward. We wouldn't be here and still doing things for them to be able to reach out to us.

So they'll go find somebody else. So make sure you stick with it and take a look back every now and then and say, look what I've done. Isn't that awesome?

[00:48:53] Jen McFarland: Yeah. That's great.

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you everyone who's watching or listening. Have a great week and we will see you next week to talk about YouTube.

[00:49:06] Shelley Carney: Thank you for joining the Women Conquer Business podcast hosted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland. Please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem. Then share this podcast with family and friends so they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the world.

Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.