Hey this is Terry Bean coming at you live with another fun Business Growth Time. As always I’ve got my friend Janet E Johnson kicking it live at a Minneapolis, what’s up Janet E.
Hey, hey. We’re awake here, sort of, but we all have bags under our eyes because 3 to about 5am I know we had a storms coming through that were, kind of, it was actually mellow but loud enough to keep you awake for quite a few hours. So it was on and off, on and off. And really another one, it was about 4 storms ran through. My friend Gina who happens to be on, she lost power. So it’s a, you know, kind of
Does she have it back? Is she with power now or is she just reading us, listening to us mobily?
She might be listening mobiley. She said we lost power, yup. Do you still have power up Gina, that’s the question.
That’s what I want to know, is it back?
Is it back? Oh yeah, she got the power back, yes.
Good thing. Could you imaging like I only have so much battery life on my phone and I’m going to use it watching Terry and Janet. That would be like, man! That’s a testimonial right there. I’m going to willing to risk my battery life to watch Business Growth Time. That’s the kind of reading fans we’re looking at.
I don’t know. We’re not that great, yeah, but
No, no, no, save your battery life, seriously. It’s important.
But in all honesty we’ve got a lot of storms lately and it’s always at 3, 4 in the morning. But in the back of my farm fields, land here, we have, it’s amazing. It’s crazy. It looks like a light show. Just flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. And I wanted to scope it. But you know what, I can’t get out of bed to do it. I’m so tired.
You have to move out of bed. That was the
At 4am, I thought about it so hard. I’m like oh that would be a great scope but
Nudge your husband, tell him to go open the blinds and hand you your phone and put that boy to work, man he can do something! Come on Jeff.
So yeah, so it was fun. So our subject today.
It looks sunny now though, is it sunny now?
Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It’s supposed to be beautiful the next couple of days. We’ve had it pretty beautiful and warm so it’s going to be hot one when we’re on the boat, yeah.
That’s, I mean that what happens when you live in Camelot. It rains at night and then it’s sunny and gorgeous during the day. So good.
Exactly. Uh-oh, Terry froze. I’m not sure why. Let’s pray he comes back because that’s kind of the Google Hangout thing. Hopefully if you’re watching, oh come on Terry, come on Terry. He might have to hop out and hop in.
Totally lame, totally lame. I’m not frozen.
There you are, you’re back, you’re back.
Alright so I should stop singing and acting like I’m frozen? Coz the Periscope people are like you’re not frozen dude, trust me.
Exactly, exactly. Well on Periscope we would, the one thing about Periscope that’s different, and it’s always going to be different with the show recording but you want to keep your periscope short and sweet, 5-10 minutes maximum, is my opinion of it. And, you know, I take 10 minutes is good. One YouTubers said if you’re on Periscope and you want to re-purpose it to YouTube because of the size of these files, you want to keep it under 5 minutes. But if you’re not re-purposing it, you know, might not matter as much. But we want to keep it short so we will get moving on our subject. You’re echoing a little bit Terry, can you turn your speakers down a little bit?
Yup, yep, so that’s interesting because I’m looking at our Hangout and our subject is different on our Hangout though, we’re actually talking about.
That’s fine you know why because we can change that and it’s private. So nobody will
We like it, we like them mix it up and fool people. I think that’s fairly cool.
Yeah, yeah, that’s alright.
So that’s cool, that’s good. Alright so maybe I’m less echo-y now, perhaps?
You are.
Yeah I like it when a plan come together. Alright, so let’s go with E for engaging for today, you being very engaging, I like that — fun, engaging. It’s kind of a social media term on it. So Janet E – engaging Johnson. So our topic today comes from a conversation that you and I were having when I was calling you to say I was going to be a little late for this. And it was the idea of what the heck do you name your company. There’s a lot of small businesses that are in business or starting or thinking about getting in business. And naming your company is such an important idea. You want to be able to make sure that you get the domain, right? You need the .com. You want to have something that you actually be kind of represents who you are and what you do and you need it to tell a story, right? So all those things are important. So do you come up with a name that is a business corporate sounding thing or do you come up with a name that’s Janet E Johnson, as an example? Or TerryBean.com, by the way I couldn’t get because I was late for that claim. So what are your thoughts Janet, what do you get?
My, you know, there’s two sides to the story. And there’s no right answer, at all. There’s no right, no wrong. I do believe if you want to market yourself as more of a speaker, author, consultant, that kind of thing, coach, you definitely could go with the name. It’s you are your brand and so that’s why the Mari Smith she’s Mari Smith. Amy Portfield’s – Amy Portfield. I could go on and on with the different name, you know, name people of their actual business. A lot of times they have another entity that would be like, you know, I’m just, now I’m blank on somebody that has a name. They use themselves, their name to market their business but they actually have a brand behind it, a different name. And that’s fine. You know, I think that personally I think like if you’re looking to be agency style, like an agency-type business, you know, larger like that, you can’t just be the name of you. Because you want to get to that larger entity and have people, a lot of people under that. So that’s a little bit tougher so I guess that’s something to look at where that would be the direction I would go.
Coz some people don’t like necessarily grow a multi-million dollar business, right?They just want a lifestyle business where its you own your own job and you have the ability to kind of stay stable from that perspective, right? And so I think that’s an interesting point, too. Sometimes our business isn’t necessarily all that it needs to be. It doesn’t have to grow as huge as it can be. So for me if I wanted to be a 1-person consultant shop for the rest of my life, which I would enjoy coz I don’t really like managing people that much, I could use Terry Bean. But if I wanted to have something like you were saying, that’s more scaleable and have something a little bigger. Mike Dooley is a guy that I think of with some level of frequency, right. Mike Dooley is out there, is a speaker and is consultant and thought leader in the law of attraction. But his business is not, not that capital, we need thoughts, right? And so he does his brand both ways.
And I see him many, many times, you know. We just brought this up so I’m trying to blank on many people but that happens a lot. It’s interesting coz we just had the conversation this morning and Terry and I have quite, they’re in my phone, quite a conversation about branding and humanizing. So I believe right now, in the world today, 2015, no matter if what your name is, if it’s your name, if it’s your running an agency, a business, you have to humanize your brand. So no matter what, if you’re the owner of that company you should be branding your name also, no matter what, so both side of things. So it might be, to me I thought I’ve had Janet’s Marketing Biz, I’ve had Local Likes, I launched a product called 15-Minute Social, even made that into a complete different brand. Hey we have Business Growth Time. I mean, that’s almost a separate brand. I mean look at all these different brands, you know what I mean. But all of it goes under one entity of Janet E Johnson. It makes your life a little bit easier. And Terry
You want to compare brands sister? Come on now! You don’t want to talk about this dyslexic brand, multi-personality, ego-driven, yep that ego-driven mess that I am. Motor City Connect wasn’t even the first brand, right? It might be biggest but it wasn’t the first, Networked Inc was before that and it has been around for a long time. I’ve got trybean.com which is fun. For some reason I’ve decided to have uNetworked for about a year because that wasn’t quite confusing enough but it looked like UnNetworked; 313DLove, that’s great, loads of fun. I’ve got a website at trybean.com. I’ve got a brand that I finally let the url grow this past month, For Your CNO, looks good for your Cheif Newtorking Officer and frankly nobody even knew about because I never even promoted it. I’ve got books, I’ve got same books under two different names because I have to re-brand my book. What is wrong with me?
Okay, okay. Well here is, okay, I’m going to give advice here. So if you had been doing all those different brands, everything that you did under TerryBean.com or trybean.com coz you can’t get Terry Bean and kept it as that name, that brand. Ohh he swore, lol.
Shhhhhh. I didn’t mean to, we can edit it, it’s only live. Don’t worry about it.
Periscope here. So what you could have had all those different brands under, sorry trying to keep my cat back here, he’s really bugging me right now.
Yes, he’d do well in videos, people love cats.
So you could have had all that under one entity like a separate page for, separate page for 313DLove, separate, and guess what? The power of the traffic being driven, all of it being driven to that one website would give you rankings through the roof. So
Go ahead.
You know, looking at the SEO side of it and the website side of it, that could made a big difference for, and so that’s why I’ve started making sure everything’s under me, even Business Growth Time. We have a separate website for it because this is mine and Terry’s and we have two separate businesses. But on Janet E Johnson there’s a tab for the Business Growth Time. So you’re getting, I’m still drawing it in to my website, too. And sometimes I even put some of the interviews that we do as a separate blog post to re-market it to my own website, too. So you could bring your different brands in under it. I do want to, I have to pick on Terry because this was funny. This is how this whole conversation started this morning. I went to his LinkedIn profile, by the way if you haven’t checked your LinkedIn profile for a while, you may want to, now it’s making me want to go back to mine, too. I mean, you should probably be looking at that every least couple of months. And tried his links and 2 were dead.
What!
And that’s a big no, no. I mean it’s just like, you go, you know that might lose you business, to be honest. I mean, that’s a, that’s something that should be cleaned up immediately because it’s, they’re like this person doesn’t even have, and on top of that, Terry teaches LinkedIn so Terry go fix it.
Trash out the last part, you don’t have to add that coz it’s already bad enough. Hey now I don’t like to think of them as dead, maybe just sleepy. Maybe they were taking a nap.
Maybe, yeah.
If you look it’s like sts time somewhere. They’re on Spain, they’re stress. Maybe my life profile was insane.
Nah, nah. You’re trying but I will say there was a good thing here though. One very good thing about it was he has 4 links and one of them did lead to the right place. So,
25%, that’s pretty damn good.
The other LinkedIn profile. And then we got to this conversation about branding and his, you know, if he had just had those pieces underneath his main entity he wouldn’t have that issue. You know what I mean? Like it all would have gone to the same spot, so that’s a thought.
So I launched a company with my wife about a year ago. And I haven’t really told anybody about it, it’s just and it’s called beaners and we never put together the website, we didn’t do any of the thing. But the idea was to get everything under that. It’s just what we’re thinking
Oh he froze so if you’re on, I guess, yeah. Jack’s is, my cats becoming part of this. So while we’re talking I’ll wait for Terry to come back, there he is. Okay.
Did you lose me?
Yup, I did
I didn’t even know, so I was saying Networked Inc has been around for 13 years. I mean with a lot of history in global you kind of want that, right?
Uh-huh
Isn’t that the most important piece?
It’s great to have that longevity of a website, absolutely. So now you have Networked Inc and you have trybean.com. So what do you think you’re going to do?
I panicked, that’s what I’m going to do. You know trybean really was suppose to be about speaking and the consulting. Networked Inc was supposed to be about business development. So trybean was more intimate, talks about my goals. Networked Inc is available for consulting with business work. But it’s trybean I’m telling people my email address is tbean@networkedinc.com suck, right? It is so important that you have to spell it three times. Trybean.com, that’s try with a Y dot com, okay, got it.
Got it! Yeah, yeah, that’s true, that’s true. So you know, you can make that, that’s up to you if you want to put it under one entity or, you know, kind of keep the two the same. I do think the one lesson here, the biggest lesson is once people figure out what they wanted to do and how they wanted to brand themselves, and they put themselves on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. Now we, you know, we have now a new platform over here. There’s so many pieces you want to just have that one overall brand that at least shows in because you will have a lot of cleanup to do.
It’s a mess.
Yeah. It’s tough. It is tough. So the one thing that I suggest is auditing your stuff, looking at the web and looking at all those social that you could think of. You probably not even going to think of all of them, no. But the ones, the top ones that you’re using and the top ones that you think of, like fiends and clinked is a big one. That’s big for any of us selling, you know, ourselves. LinkedIn is obviously very, very important. So make sure that you’re audit, I would say audit minimally four times a year – once per quarter. Mark it on your calendar, you know. And I’m guilty, too. I mean I don’t know when was the last time, it’s probably been about couple of months since I’ve looked at my LinkedIn profile. But there still could be things in there, you know. I’m picking on you but I’ll pick on myself. Who knows, I’m sure I’ve found some things in there that might opps, that’s outdated, you know, let’s ditch that. So I think everything needs to be updated. I have a content guide. Guess what? I’m re-doing that. I’ve had it out there for about a year but now it’s a little bit outdated and I was reading through it and I’m like oh this piece doesn’t even apply anymore. Now I’m actually adding another category of content — live streaming. Because live streaming is a separate piece. I had podcasting in there, I had to add that later down the road after I’d started it, too. So everything needs to kind of be audited. And I know when we’re in business for our self, it seems like a pain to look at our self. We work for all our clients and sit down with them and do, you know, strategies for them but we need to take care of ourselves as a business owner, too.
So did you ever have a Plurk account? How long have you have you been on Twitter? You can tell how long someone’s been on Twitter.
I never had one. But first couple of weeks I was on Twitter.
March, like I got in March 08 and in the summer of 2008 Twitter was broken all the time. It fail more than you can send a tweet. So Plurk was a service that was very similar so everybody bounced and went over to Plurk for awhile. And just talked about how much they miss Twitter when Twitter was down. And it was such a crazy time. So when you think about all the different social media sites and tools that you’ve used, your platforms that you’ve dumped to. So I agree with this, social media audit, I think that’s a great idea, great tip. But I would worry about the ones that are are relevant and important and hope that nobody ever finds the old stuff you have on.
Yeah. You know what I, my guess is I have set up probably a hundred different profiles in different places easily, if not way more than that.
Do you go to vimeo anymore? Vimeo was
I have a Vimeo account, too, yup, yup. I’m even on MySpace still. I had a product back in 2000 something where I started a blog and it was called fashiontidbits.com. It was all about fashion. And that thing is not existing anymore because I made big mistakes with it like I, I actually built the website through a company that owned that website versus building my own, hosting my own domain. And they owned me so I decided to just dump it, it was an affiliate product type thing and it just wasn’t bringing enough money. I’m still on MySpace and I’m sure I’m still on other places under Fashion Tidbits. So I mean, you know what, I don’t care, that’s just, it’s the way of life. It happens.
Coz I don’t see, oh you’re back, hey. You went frozen girl.
Well this thing is freezing in and out, in and out, in and out. Well our main point was talking branding and how to keep up with, how to choose a name, how to keep up with all these branding across the web. I believe the answer is audit yourself every, if you can do it every month, fine. But you know, minimally every quarter just to make sure that. And if you change things and you know you’ve changed it, like we went from Social Media Hangout Time to Business Growth Time. We changed the show name. I knew I changed it so I went across the board and audited all the different pieces at that time. So you know if you’re making changes then go make sure you’re auditing yourself.
And that’s a big one, you just got to jump on that one, too, right? Coz you’re the one that’s in control of that change, you know you did it. So that’s definitely a trigger to do things.
And the other side of it, if you launching a product.
We should probably list, right. We should probably have like a spreadsheet of all the different social media platforms and tools and maybe hide your backlinks, too, because I know if you make some changes you probably need to get it right.
You are right. You are right, yeah. Every time you set that up you should have some sort of spreadsheet. Are we all that organized, not necessarily. Maybe we come up with something like that, you know, have as a free tool for people because I think it’s very very important. That’s a great point for even my program that sets up the strategy and stuff that, that would be a great worksheet to do. Just to have that spreadsheet and make sure that they, you know, are filled in as they go. So there you go. You just gave me a to-do and we will share that with our audience on Business Growth Time when it’s launched.
Oh, what is Business Growth Time? What’s that, that sounds like fun! Is that a Facebook page, maybe? It might be where to find us.
Maybe, maybe. It’s a group. So yeah.
It’s a group.
Yes, we will put that in the group because that’s the only main spot other than the website that you know, we have. So we can actually put that document in the group. And how they find it is they just search Business Growth Time, you got it.
Search Business Growth Time on Facebook, go into and we’ll let you through.
Exactly.
Have we declined anybody?
Okay, I hit ignore on a person accidentally and they never came back and I don’t know. I didn’t know. I just clicked in and oh no, oh no. So sorry to that person. I couldn’t even find the name once I hit ignore. So so sorry but that wasn’t meant to be. So anyway we do let everybody in, that was a total accident.
Perfect! Yes, we didn’t mean it with the issue.
Exactly. Now we’re going to end today I want to bring up, I can’t do the tunes anymore because of having this set up.
Oh yeah.
So if you’re been on, I see few people on, we would love some hearts if you guys got something out of this. I would just want to make sure on the Periscope that you guys are getting, you know, valuable content. If you learned something, love the hearts, asking for hearts, please.
It’s kind of a hearts day, this is the full request from the heart for the heart.
Exactly, exactly. So I can’t do the music thing but I do want to bring up the 80s. We were talking about this this weekend we were playing some old tunes. And I’m going to quiz Terry on it just for fun. Okay. What is a Pat Benatar song from the 80s that she was actually in, it was movie. What?
Love is a Battlefield. I should probably let you ask the question.
And what was the movie?
What was the movie? I don’t know. I have different adoration. To all the girls cultivating the path on, what was, what were you going?
I think if I’m not mistaken, Billie Jean.
Billie Jean, okay. Wow, that is old school right there. Old school.
You know when we have this interactivity, oh Gina said, come on Terry.
Billie Jean, if you may recall is a chick flick. While I can get away with watching chick flick
It was good!
I wasn’t watching those. 13 man! If you ask me about Sandlot, I might have known it. But no, you want to talk about baseball.
I’m doing anything to stump you.
Why don’t you ask about Christian Slater.
Oh, I love that movie.
Of course you did coz you’re a girl. That’s what happens.
No excuses Gina says.
Hey listen, I have to give my man card enough, I don’t need the attitude.
I know you probably do. Well great, I’m glad we talked about branding. Be sure to join our group on Facebook, Business Growth Time. And be sure if you are either following us on Periscope, it’s Janet_Johnson, Terry Bean, easy enough. And also we are on iTunes, Stitcher, and those platforms so be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Thank you guys for joining us again.
Thank you guys, we’ll see you real soon. Have a great, great weekend and a wonderful day!