Stay in your own lane?

This week, I did two things that pushed me outside of my area of expertise.

• One - I spoke at the inaugural TubeFest conference in Birmingham about how we get leads from our YouTube channel
• Two - I attempted to run a paid ad in my business

One went well, the other has proved a little complicated.

Which one do you think went well?

I love speaking on stages. I am very comfortable speaking about anything to do with LinkedIn. This week though I was asked to talk about our YouTube channel

This is what I call a 'baby channel'. We have around 10k subscribers which is phenomenal on one hand, and actually tiny compared to most of the other people speaking at the conference. Nick Nimmin who I am now watching a LOT to learn from, has 912k subscribers. WOW! #Goals

It's good to push yourself outside of your comfort zone now and again.

• Would you like to speak on a stage?
• What would be your breaking point?
• Speaking at a conference of your peers?
• Speaking about your area of expertise?

What if someone asked you to tell your story of how you got into business?

I love talking about how I started my business (you can tune into the Life-Friendly Business podcast to hear about it here)

However, I have never spoken about the YouTube channel growth before.

It seemed to go down well.

It's good to have a bit of nerves before you go on stage.

I have to say, it was hard to read the audience from the stage. One guy, Michael Wolf was smiling and nodding along - so special shout out to him for that. Thank you to people like Abi Sea and Katy Simpson who sent me encouraging messages after.

Tip - sending someone a message of support means THE WORLD to them - so do it if you can. Also, a great way to get a bit of visibility for yourself and some good karma to boot.

We can talk about the mess that is Aer Lingus cancelling my flight and diverting me home to Belfast via Aberdeen another day.. plus the world's largest ever security queue for an airport at Birmingham (about as long as the queue to get into Springsteen at Croke Park the week before).

TubeFest 2 is now on sale for Dublin, October 25th - see you there!

What about the second thing I did?

I decided, in my infinite wisdom, to test out a paid ad on one of my YouTube videos.

Well that was a disaster.

I woke up this morning to a big red warning message to say my account has been suspended. Words like 'violated' and 'circumventing' and 'cancelled'. YIKES.

I know nothing about running paid ads on Google.

I have done a few paid ads for clients here on LinkedIn and that has worked out fine ( thanks to AJ Wilcox for sharing some tips on that back here)

Should you stay in your own lane?

Or should you test out new things?

The difference between the speaking gig and the paid ads is clear to me.

Speaking on a new topic was nerve-wracking but I was able to prepare for it and I have experience of speaking. I took the skills I have from creating a talk on LinkedIn and used those to create a talk on our YouTube channel.

Creating an ad was different - I have no idea how to run Google Ads. More importantly, I just did it without any help. No wonder it crashed. Now I need to fix it and I am still flying blind.

My core skills are working with clients on LinkedIn, writing and creating videos and podcasts. So that is what I am going to stick to.

If you work in leadership coaching or financial services, marketing your business on LinkedIn might be out of your comfort zone. You have a few options.

• Teach yourself how to 'do' LinkedIn for free using our videos on YouTube.
• Give it a go on your own
• Outsource it to someone who knows what they are doing. Stick to what you do best. And probably earn way more money at.

Don't get me wrong. I want to speak about how you can use LinkedIn for Business. I am not launching a new sideline on how to do YouTube. Although we are starting to include that offer with our video marketing service. But I am definitely not touching Google Ads again anytime soon.

I'd love to hear about you - have you ventured outside of your comfort zone recently and if so, how did it go?