*Resources mentioned during the episode*
The Outsiders Business Academy: A self-paced course for you to work through in your own time, to learn – and implement – the foundations of building a profitable business that lets you escape the 9 to 5. onestepoutside.com/course
How to be more visible
Welcome back to the podcast as we continue to look at your personal brand, your content strategy. Last week, we talked about the three P’s of content marketing plan, produce and promote. This week, we’re leading into how to be more visible. This is a hard lesson learned. For me, it’s something I’m still working on. And they always say that you teach what you need to know yourself. So here I am doing just that. We tend to, I tend to focus on creating amazing content, right, doing my best, putting all my thinking in refining, both in terms of the thinking and the strategy, and so on, but also in terms of making it look good.
Last week, I met in a graphic designer to kind of uplevel the brand itself, but also to develop my three so called lead magnets, my escape roadmap, my five pillars scorecard, and my five l’s and life assessment. So we can spend all this time making the perfect PDF and video stressing about lighting and so on. And, you know, to some extent, that’s important needs to look professional, certainly, we need to be thinking about the content, improving learning and so on. But look, it’s pointless if nobody sees it. Right. So, the truth is, if I’m just sitting making posts on my Instagram channel, where I’ve got a few 100 people, 200, a few 100 people, we shouldn’t poopoo that right, because if you imagine a few 100 people in a room, that would be pretty amazing. You know, if I’m writing my website, where there aren’t that many visitors and so on, even if I’m talking on my podcast, when I’m first starting out, there are no listeners, really, it’s, it’s great, because we’re beginning to create that momentum. Over years, you know, I have SEO now working on past posts, and so on content, the podcast and everything. And that’s definitely worthwhile for the long term. But you need to also be really proactive about putting it out there.
Now, it’s actually really valuable as well, for you to put things out before you’re ready.
The big insight I got in the way, I was finally able to publish my book in 2018, leaving the corporate nine to five, which you can now get in paperback, Kindle and hardback on your local Amazon, leaving a corporate nine to five was, first of all, I collected 50 stories of people who did that transition. So it meant I was presenting other people’s stories, rather than having to write a whole book myself. So of course, there’s an intro and outro my additional perspective on each chapter, and so on. But that really helped me But secondly, the most important insight was somebody said, Hey, nobody’s going to get anything out of this. If it’s sitting on your computer in your draft folder. That’s pretty true. Your first book is never going to be your magnum opus, it shouldn’t be, it can’t be very unlikely you’re going to write that kind of Harry Potter, start with why straight off the bat, right. And it’s more important to get it out there, get yourself out there, see what resonates, evolve. And then you can refine and make better and write another book or, you know, develop your framework. So I thought this was the thing that everyone wants to know. But actually, it’s this thing over them.
So again, your goal is to get out there, as it were, to have conversations to learn to develop. And as I said, last week, as well, there are new people coming into your note, there aren’t new people, there needs to be new people coming into your ecosystem every day. If you don’t have new people coming in, you’re not running a business, you’re not growing your business. So if you find that hang on, I haven’t had any consults in a while I haven’t had anyone book a call, I haven’t had anyone coming onto my email list or emailing me or calling me whatever the call to action is for you hang on a second, even if you’re super busy right now. And this is in particular danger for if you’re a freelancer, if you’re working with a handful of clients, you’re not actually growing the business. So visibility is so cool in the sense of amplifying your message getting in front of new people so that those new people are coming into your ecosystem every day. And so I did a framework and new framework actually in my course.
So the outside is Business Academy new program is a self directed course you can find out more at one step outside.com. Forward slash course wants to get started calm for that course, it goes through the five pillars of building a life and business outside your nine to five and pillar four is building an effective personal brand. And I share this framework of you know who you are, both as an individual and as a business person, right in the sense of the personal brand, which by the way, is already a curated selective for kind of filtered version of who you are as a real human being is the biggest circle, right? Imagine who you are is sort of everything, your mission, your definition of success, your values, your strengths, your skills, everything right.
Now, what you’re sharing is a smaller circle, a smaller section of that, because of course, you’re not sharing every single thing about everything you know, and everything that you are and so on. And then an even smaller circle is what they actually see. And that’s the circle we kind of want to make bigger because I’m creating all this amazing stuff and you’re creating all this amazing stuff and you won’t be able to see it you’ve started this business because you believe in this message. You want to make an impact. You want to help people say go out and help people I know that people find that the idea of having a personal brand little icky, this visibility, oh, I don’t like Facebook, I don’t want to be on video.
It’s kind of hiding behind the business.
You know, it’s not about me, it’s about the clients or it’s about the business. But the truth is that people do business with you, because of you. It’s, you know, very individual, it’s personal, even. In fact, if you’re working with businesses, b2b business to business, we’re still working with human beings, we’re still liaising with HR, or the leadership team or whatever. It’s all about those relationships. You know, I still do one to one coaching with people who aren’t necessarily starting a business, they’re looking to navigate, I don’t do traditional career coaching as such, in terms of this is how you apply to a job. And these are the jobs you should do and so on. But, you know, the moving into a new role, especially if you’re going in a new direction, you industry wanting a different dimension, a higher level, whatever, you can’t just send off your CV to 20 companies anonymously, pretty much upload them into the system, you know, I always share that when I was in one of my consulting roles, we had 200 people apply for a role, I ultimately recommended somebody and then we took nobody because they took someone internally for political organizational reasons. In fact, that happened in another company, too, I’d sort of groomed somebody for, for the role, I’d get handed over, everything went off traveling. And as it turned out, they gave it to someone else who hadn’t had any of my handover who had no expertise, just because they were coming back from some time off, you know. So it’s the personal brand piece, having that visibility, networking, I know another key word, you know, showing up in people’s LinkedIn sharing interesting articles, commenting, you know, having conversations that are so critical to being top of mind, whether you’re selling a service, you’re applying for a job, you’re wanting to do something, you know, be a speaker, this is so critical.
So try to Rephaim frame how you’re thinking about that visibility. And of course, it’s important to be visible with the right people.
So the good news is, this is hopefully reassuring and a bit of a relief. We don’t have to have the millions of followers, even 1000s of followers, I have a small number of followers, I have the most on LinkedIn, like 10,000 or so now. Instagram is still not that many, you know, Facebook group, it’s relatively small. And yet I still have my business working right. So you need to have the right people. Yes, it’s a bit of a vanity metric to have 10,000 followers 500,000. And of course, if you land on someone’s profile, and they have that many it sounds impressive, it looks impressive, but not to take away from some of those people. Some of them have purchased those followers. And so it’s empty, the algorithm won’t be sharing the content, the right people, if you’re tempted to do that, by the way, don’t do it much better to have a small number of clients of prospects who are really engaged, who are the right people, and so on. So how can you be more visible? I’m assuming that you get the importance of being more visible? Well, there are a few different ways, right? The first is to guest on other people’s podcasts. Now, please don’t pitch me to be on my podcast unless you as a listener, which you are, really understand what I do I get all these especially agencies, but people saying, Hey, I’ve got an amazing guest for you, I would be amazing guests. I’ve listened to your podcast, here’s the expertise I can give you. If you had listened to our podcasts, you’d know that as a solo podcast number one. And I’ve recently started doing interviews, but the interviews are with people who have quit their nine to five. So if that’s your your client, I’m happy to entertain it. But if you’re just pitching me, I want to talk about my book, and I want to talk about how you can get more clients. No, thank you. Right. So in the reverse sense, if you want to pitch yourself, you need to be first of all getting clear on what those podcasts are. So understanding complementary businesses as similar audiences to yours, who aren’t competitors. But but complementary, where you can actually add value, you want to be listening to podcast episodes, you want to see where you could fit in, you want to send them a really clear message. And by the way, I need to be open to guests, of course. So be aware of that. And then maybe get to know them a little bit, follow their content, start engaging. And that’s an amazing opportunity you’ll have I do have, you know, a handful of people always coming into my ecosystem, as I call it, because they’ve listened to me on someone else’s podcast, right? So that’s really powerful. You can start by getting in touch with people who are only just starting out, you can find smaller podcasts, maybe in a podcasting group. That’s how I started in the sheep podcast, Facebook group. In fact, there are a few other similar ones like that, but she podcast they used to do at least a podcast pitch day every week. And that was how I got most of my first appearances. First of all, they’ll be really keen to have you on because they’re just starting out. And secondly, you never know who’s gonna grow into the next you know, Steven Bartlett, Lewis, Howes, whatever, right? So first of all, the smaller ones will add up, there’ll be super keen to share, whereas the bigger guys won’t. And secondly, you know, having a mix anyway, of these smaller podcasts, bigger ones, and so on is always good, right? So you’ll get the ones that perhaps don’t have a huge following, but they have engaged followers who will come in and be super interest in what you do. And then possibly can have the ego boosting Big Bang ones on your wish list as well. So guesting on other people’s podcasts, collaborations, collaboration, this is something I’d love to do. So if you’d like to do something with me, if it works with your business, by all means reach out podcast at one seven photo comm or you can message me on your favorite social channel. But the kind of collaborations I’m talking about include, if you’re running a virtual summit, I can come in and talk about reimagining success, or the five pillars, or your personal brand or designing flexible work life integration. If you are doing a Facebook group live, if you have a coaching program, maybe where you bring in external experts, I can come in and speak there, right and vice versa, we can do kind of a bit of an exchange, if that’s relevant. Maybe you can partner with someone who has a newsletter and you can add value to them. And they can do the same for you. Right. So actually collaborating with other people going live on their Instagram, doing an Instagram takeover, whatever coming back on your platform. That’s pretty powerful. Media. So I talked about podcast media. For me, I’ve talked about this, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I talk about this a lot. But I have finally got off my bum and done this. So I had an article published in our local sort of county magazine Dorset living in December, January, I’ve had a paid article now in psychologies magazine. So this is happening, right, I’m actually going out there pitching and I’m getting really good response. Online, blog posts and guest blogging and articles can actually be even more powerful, because that’s then bringing online traffic as well. And something I don’t do, but in person events, I listened to a podcast the other day where they said, that’s really the best way to network with people and then potentially get guests onto your podcast, get onto other people’s podcasts, get those big names. So obviously now things are opening up now Spring, Summer 2022. Hopefully we’re we’re out of the worst. And you might be able to go to more physical face to face conferences and events, and so on. Right. So we’re thinking here, we’re not talking about you know, last week, we talked about the content on our own channel, before we talked about social profiles and so on, we can, you know, fine tune and massage all of our own content and our own platforms. But unless we go out and go on other people’s podcasts, collaborate with other experts, pitch the media, go to events, people won’t see us, we won’t be getting those new people coming into our ecosystem.
So my call to action for you is how can you be more visible? Who can you collaborate with? What’s your wish list of podcasts? What media outlets would be relevant for you? What events could you go to?
Ideally, you’d be on stage at those events, you know, but but perhaps you can run a workshop if you can’t be a keynote speaker. And certainly, if you can start by attending, you can start developing those relationships. And I do have people I know who go to these kinds of networking groups, I’ve not really done that. And it’s not my thing. I don’t know so much about it. But you know, there are other things you can do as well to get in front of people. So that’s my call to action for you. Now, how can you be more visible choose one thing one channel, one thing you’re going to do give yourself a really specific target in terms of I’m going to pitch myself to three podcasts every week, whatever that number is for you. Even one a week would be great. And then take it from there. Okay, I’ll see you next week. And next week is an ask Anna episodes I’ll be answering a question from the community. I’ll see you then.
Transcript:
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