Episode 184 – Hot In 2021: Freelancing and Video Content
It is the New Year and are up and running to achieve more and do more? In order to be successful, Adam Stott thinks you have to try the hottest things that we can do in 20201. Adam Stott presents the first installment of our Hot In 2021 series where he talks about his fearless forecast of what’s hot and what’s not in this coming year. Listen in as Adam Stott tells us why he thinks Freelancing and Video Content is an absolute winner for you and your business.
Show Highlights:
- How Adam Stott makes use of the beginning of the year to reflect and re-strategize
- Why do you need to avoid the Shiny Penny Syndrome or the Grasshopper Syndrome and how it hurts your growth
- Hot: How can you use Freelancing to your advantage as a business owner or a skilled person
- Not: Static content is DEAD
- Why video content is hot right now and how you can take advantage of its benefits
Links Mentioned:
Big Business Events Members Network
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam:
Hello everybody and a very big happy new year to start everybody off! Hopefully you’ve all had good New Year’s Eve! How ever you had it and welcome into the new year, good new year’s Day. I certainly did and I hope you did so. So I’m really looking forward to having a good chat meets and I’ve got some good recommendations, some good tips and some good things I think are coming into 2021.
We are going to talk about what’s hot in 2021. So it’d be really interesting to put these predictions out there and actually maybe have a look back on this video later on. I’m going to talk about some of the things that we’ve been working on behind the scenes, some of the places that we as a business see potential, and I wanted to then go and share that with all of you in the group all of us for any anyone that’s following where you fall in on the members group on the Adam’s stock page or the big business events page wherever you’re falling from wanting to bring these treats.
Hopefully we’re putting 2020, where it was. I think so much out there about people like, 2020 wasn’t that bad. I mean at the end of the day there was winners in 2020, there were some losers in 2020, some of us say have it hard, some of us didn’t have it hard. Some of us crash and wherever camp that you sit in for 2020, there comes a time when we got to wipe the slate clean, we gotta get on with it and we will go out there have a positive attitude. We’ve got a big year in front of us.
I think that we’ve certainly had our introduction in 2020 to some circumstances that we’ve never foreseen that never happened before and now we’re a bit more used to it. So hopefully you’ve got your systems, your processes, your strategies, kind of in place and now it’s time to gear up. Yeah, we’re going to go over what’s hot for 2021.
Tonight is all about focusing on the future. I’m personally really excited for 2021. Every single year and this is just something that I do personally, I do use it as an opportunity to re strategize and to reflect, so the first thing I’ll do is I’ll reflect right because I look back at the year that’s just gone and that’s kind of what we did in the last video. You never want to forget the stuff that worked for you. I think we don’t want to get that shiny penny syndrome. Any of you that have had that, as the shiny penny syndrome which is SPS in the comments if you have where you jump from idea to idea to idea.
You shouldn’t be doing that. You should first of all, look back and reflect and go, you know what, where I did well in 2020. What really worked for our business, what really worked within the circumstances and you want to continue using that and double down but it never ever hurts to bring in some new ideas to bring in some new strategies to your business, and I’m really 03:27 on you can do. A couple of our certainly our clients and our members would have heard me use the phrase grasshopper syndrome for a grasshopper syndrome is when your lack of grass or B can’t sit still you jump from idea to idea to idea.
That ends up hurting you as a business owner overall because really focus and focus and doubling down your efforts in the right places really gets you to better places very quickly. And that of course is super important. Shiny Penny syndrome is that syndrome where, you know, you might be on your way to a median and you’re walking down the street and because you’re about to go into, to go and do something where you could actually do get some real success and maybe do a big deal or whatever and you see a penny on the street and you stop and you go oh my god there’s a penny down there and you got to pick up a penny and you completely forget about what you were doing and that’s that shiny penny syndrome and so a lot of people were, you know, they literally come off their track and they lose focus where really what they needed was focus in order to push on. If we get the focus right and as we go through tonight the reason I’m pre-framing tonight with this and this is what I’m talking about before we even get started.
I 04:30 syndrome shiny penny syndrome is I’m about to show you some shiny pennies. And as I show you some shiny pennies, you know, the way that I look at shiny pennies is that if I’ve got a team, you know, I can go and get them to look at those ideas and develop those ideas, whereas if I was going to be doing it all myself I might be picking one or maybe two things that I was going to personally work on that when new ideas or new projects, I wouldn’t be picking 10. So the idea from tonight’s video is not to write down the list and go right I’m gonna go and do every single thing here, the idea from tonight’s video is to kind of give you a bit of an introduction so what I think is important.
Funnily enough, the first one that we’re going to go in and so is actually really useful for anyone that gets shiny penny syndrome anyone that gets grasshopper syndrome. You can love the first one, and it’s something that you wouldn’t expect right so that’s what we’re going to go first before we then look at a couple of those shiny pennies tonight. So the first one, number one is my what is hot and I’m going to explain this I’m going to give you some good detail on it, is what is hot for 2021 is actually freelancing. So that would be completely opposed to what you might thought we were going to talk about tonight.
I think this is really important in two ways. So we’re going to talk about this in two ways, I think this is super important right? Freelancing for a business owner right now, let’s say you’re a business owner, you’ve got team, you’ve got staff and you’ve got people in your business and you’re looking for new ideas in place, looking to push forward, you’re looking to get new things done, and go out and create great results, and you have this bit of an issue where you don’t know whether people are following down or whether to bring him back in, you don’t know whether, and you kind of juggle in your staff force. And what’s happening is you get little holes and you get things that you used to get done that no longer get done.
Those little jobs that are actually fundamental to the way your business runs and the way your business grows, and then all of a sudden these little holes start appearing within your business. Right. If you want to get your boat, made sure it’s nice and smooth. Make sure it can flow on the water if you bought a boat for a while you’re gonna have a problem right. And I think freelancing can actually fill those holes within your boat very quickly.
Now this is for the business owner, that has a team that has people that are furloughed there’s got these little issues appearing that maybe he’s got people that don’t want to come to work because they’ve not been well, or maybe because they’re afraid or whatever’s going on. You’ve got all these little issues appearing and you need to get those holes plugged. I think freelancing for that business owner is a really hot thing to look out for 2021.
Now there’s loads of freelancing sites that you can use if you’re not familiar with it, you know. And as we look at some of the ideas tonight some of the things that we do when I’m starting a new idea or a new project. I’m going to pull up this new idea this new project as a freelancer, and get them to start it before we even take it over, because I know that they’re going to make progress in that area for me. And it’s going to cost me a tiny bit of money to go and get that idea of progress then moved on. And then after that it progressed and moved on, we’re going to take you in house and then we’re going to push you on in a big way.
Once we see that it actually works and I think that is something that people just don’t do and that’s a little trick or something that I certainly do and I’ve done for years, where we use freelancers to dip in and dip out and I’ve done that many times over the years. We still have a freelancer that runs my podcast, completely right. There’s a very good and does everything does the transcriptions of the podcast, runs the podcast, does the audio and in the podcast and every touch the look or do anything with the podcast because he’s done right, and he’s very small amount of money invested to actually get a really good platform, you know, some of you might be listening to this after the fact on the podcast.
So, that’s kind of my first one for two reasons that’s for the business owner first one is for the business owner, second one is for all of you out there that have got skillsets and you’re hunting leads, you’re hunting work, and you’re trying to get more business, but you’re finding it difficult to actually go and get new clients.
Well, there are some massive platforms out there where you can actually offer your services up as a freelancer, do a fantastic job, go and start earning some money, put some money in build some relationships, and then use that relationship so then go and sign a normal contract. After you’ve proved yourself. And that’s a really good way of actually finding clients and I think that people you know I’ve said too many people over the years, especially for anyone that’s listening tonight that maybe does a service like ad or social media market, maybe you do podcasts, maybe do copyright maybe do email marketing, whatever it is you do you can actually go and use these platforms that have got all your clients in one place, looking for your services and get yourself out there and very quickly going get some new people.
Now, the reason I think it’s hard. And the reason I think is hot for 2021 is because, you know, with everything that’s going on in the world, people started to change the way they are, they start to change the way they work there’s more people work from home, lots more people working from different places, and you’re just seeing that that flexibility is something that business owners crave within their businesses. And I think if you can tap into that, either as an individual, or as a business owner, that I think is a really good one for you to actually say you know what, this might not be something that I’ve done before but this is definitely something I’m going to do in the future. That’s my first one, especially for those business owners that I’ve never considered before. Maybe I’ve done it before there’s something that we want to consider for 2021.
Now, the next one is, I want to be quite strong on this, right, because I’ve been saying this for the whole year during 2020. And I’m just going to start a lot stronger now and this is something that, you know, I think I’m just gonna get a push, static content on social media is finished, 10:18 you know, heading stay, don’t get me wrong, I wrote it when I was driving my car business we just basically use static content all the time as much as we ever did.
And off the back of that, you know, we did over 50 million pounds in sales over a period of years, and it was great, right, but static, and I’ll explain what I mean by this in a minute but static content now it’s pretty much finished, the whole game now when it comes to marketing is based around conversation based marketing. So if you’re still posting pictures, if you’re still ticking boxes, if you still writing stuff out long form, and you’re not using video, the static content, it just gets scrolled past now, nobody’s watching these static images, nobody’s watching static image, people are consuming video, they’re consuming video in all different ways right.
This is a thing, people just scroll past it and there’s a lot of people that think that part of their social media game, you know, and they always carry this into 2021. I want to change you change your mindset, I want you to change what you do because the whole point is that’s going to be what makes you more successful, how we change is how we succeed, the things that we do differently are going to be the things that get us to the next level, you know, but literally if you’re going in 2020 has been we’ve got posts on this social media site got posts on this one got post there is one, and we need to tick this box over here and we need to tick that box over there. It’s done. 11:44 you know when it comes down to now is how you are having conversations with your audience, as people are watching you and getting to know you and getting to know your business.
It is a million times easier for those people to get to know you by using video. And that doesn’t mean you’ve got to become a master live video, it doesn’t mean you got to do live video every day which I know terrifies people. If you’re afraid to live video maybe go and put it in the comments and I’ve been telling people this all year since the beginning 2020, but now I’m going to just got over a stronger statement just totally static context that I tell my marketing team, that won’t see any of it.
The only time I want to see static content is when we’re telling a story with that static content that is linking together what happens so maybe some static content on Instagram on Instagram stories, You know, I don’t want to see any static content, other than that I want everything else to be used by video. And I think that’s going to be a big game changer in a big way and it’s something that I encourage all of you to do, as well.
The reason videos where is that is number one, you get to have a conversation. You can’t put your message across. In a static image, you can’t influence, you can’t persuade, you can’t convince somebody that you’re the right business to do business with, you can’t convince somebody in a static image that you’re the right person to do business with, you can’t convince someone in a static image that, you know, why they should contact you is just so much more difficult to achieve than it is to use video. And as you see these new social media platforms everything is moving towards that conversational based marketing. And we need to make sure as business owners we get that.
Now, this is the thing. If you don’t know how to do it easily like tonight. I’m doing a live video, and this is on YouTube. This is live streaming on the business events group. So you put 13:39 if you’re watching on the group for us, so we can see, if you’re watching on my Adam Stott page. And if you’re watching on 13:47 but we’re going out on all these different channels, as we’re making use of multi-channel we’ve obviously the one video and we’re using a platform to do that, the platform we’re using is history now which I recommend.
We also use restraint, a lot which is really good. I mean, and there’s just these different channels, and these different platforms that really help you to make video content and make it really good and make it really quickly, and now those videos are recorded will be used and have 1000s of conversations, 1000s of conversations, and that means 1000s more people getting to know who I am, getting to know who my business is, getting to know the business events and getting to know what we do is an absolute no brainer. It’s a no brainer because if you can go and get more people to learn about you and actually get 1000s of people to learn about you, why wouldn’t you do that, you know what, why wouldn’t you do that, and you can’t let your fears hold you back. I’ve said this ton of time as well, tons and tons and tons of times, it’s really in life.
You get to choose what you want, you can either take your fears, or you can swap your fears for your success by overcoming your fears.