Ep. 348 Rethinking visibility: Quiet authority without chasing virality

Are you tired of feeling pressured to keep posting more just to stay visible, but not seeing the results you want? In this thought-provoking episode, Anna Lundberg debunks the myth that more content always means more success. Tune in for fresh insights on building genuine authority, crafting a strategic presence, and how to attract opportunities without losing your integrity – or your mind – to the “numbers game”.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction: The myth of “more posting” and who this episode is for

[02:00] Why volume isn’t everything and understanding the “visibility” stats

[04:40] The downside of chasing algorithm validation

[05:30] Real business comes from conversations, clarity, and consistency

[08:15] Positioning: Who do you want to serve, and what do you want to be known for

[10:50] Using content pillars to guide your strategy

[13:40] What your audience really needs (beyond more content)

[15:08] Being known in your space vs. chasing viral fame

[16:21] The importance of intentionality and keeping your integrity intact

[17:07] Working with Anna to build your authentic brand

Resources mentioned:

• Book a call to discuss 1:1 coaching: onestepoutside.com/call
• Anna’s book on Amazon: Outside of the 9 to 5
• The Business Accelerator Programme: OneStepOutside.com/accelerate.
• Connect with Anna Lundberg: Get in touch on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Quiet authority

This one is for you if you’ve ever felt like you should be posting more, which I think is most of us shouting louder or, you know, contorting yourself into a personal brand that you don’t even like. Maybe you’re being consistent ish with your posting, but not quite getting the results that you want and you’re wondering if it’s even worth it. So this is for thoughtful experts, values led leaders, and the strategic business owners who want to be known for something real, not just noticed for a viral moment. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love.

Let’s get started. There’s this myth, I think, that visibility means volume, you know, that the whole online world is set up to tell us, maybe the whole capitalist world is set up to be all around more, right? But it’s telling us to show up more, more, more, more. And there’s an element of truth in it. Let’s just call out that elephant in the room, first of all, because we’ve always known that people need to see us more than once, obviously to buy from us. And, you know, it’s very unlikely these days that they’ll see one incredibly crafted post from you and then go, oh, my goodness, I must give you all my money and work with you. So sorry to bust your bubble there. There are lots of stats and I learned these back in my marketing days in corporate, you know, 20 years ago, Daniel Priestley talks about the 7114 formula. So you need to spend at least seven hours worth of your time with your audience.

So it could be, you know, videos, interviews, podcasts and so on. They need to have 11 interactions, 11 points of contact with you and across four different platforms. Someone else on LinkedIn the other day said it was, I think they said it was 28.8 interaction. I think it was Advita Patel, a colleague who’s been on this podcast as well, who said that we need to have, yeah, almost 30 interactions with someone. Right. So it’s easy to think, think that it’s all about volume and that’s all that matters when it comes to visibility. And so we get caught up in trying to do more and more and more while we’re also trying to deliver our client work, take care of children, take care of our fitness, mental health, maybe relationships with partners, hobbies, who else, who knows what else. And of course, we’re actually running the business.

But the truth is that, you know, actually a lot of the most successful people I work with aren’t actually the ones with massive followings. And I’ve just hit 12,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is great. I am putting attention there, not to get more followers, but I’m obviously trying to position myself, attract certain opportunities that I’m working on. My Instagram, I think is stuck around 2000. I don’t grow my Facebook group anymore. You know, I don’t have a massive following and yet I still have a business. So, you know, having authority, having credibility and selling to clients, especially to corporate clients, I should say, especially B2B doesn’t require you to be viral just to put that out there.

But on the other hand, my approach of, I suppose you could call it a more quiet authority doesn’t mean being completely invisible. What it means is we are intentional with what we do, what the message is, where we put it and so on, right? So I’m in groups in my, my own group and I’m in another group for speakers. Mic drop. We’ve. We talked to Alex on the podcast a while ago. Alex Mary, who runs the programme, and there’s a big piece on building your thought leadership and LinkedIn. And while it’s useful to get all these tips on the hooks and the hacks and the. Another word and you know, how to, to repurpose content and, you know, post things that are going to get more reach and you’ve got to time it there and make sure you get the comments and all these things, you know, that again, there’s a nugget of, I wouldn’t say wisdom, but usefulness to that Advice.

But the LinkedIn spiral, and we’ll deep dive on this next time because I think this is something. I know it’s something I’m seeing more and more, is that we end up chasing likes, tweaking headlines again and again, overthinking the post and of course getting really upset when it’s sort of tumbleweed blowing in the wind. And I had a colleague in the group who said, oh, my goodness, I’ve had no one, you know, comment or see the post even within the first X minutes. And I think, okay, maybe we shouldn’t be sitting at the computer watching, you know, I’ve just posted something on Instagram and oh my gosh, it’s my best work and it’s going to land so much and, and then getting really upset when nobody’s actually seeing it or commenting and so on. Right? We post, we comment, we engage, and then we go on with our lives. Because what actually drives business, yes, we need eyeballs, which a lovely picture to have in your mind. We need eyes on our business. We need people to know that we exist.

And one of my bigger focuses now is on growing to some extent because I’m at a point where I would like to push the boundaries a little bit of what’s possible for me. But what really drives the business then is having conversations, is people trusting you, is understanding, having clarity on what it is that you do and how you can help. And of course, that dreaded word consistency and consistency again, unfortunately can lead us to think that, oh my gosh, we have to post all day, every day and that’s not the case. Let us celebrate the lurkers. And maybe I should have a whole episode, a post around celebrating the lurkers, because they really matter. Most of your ideal clients won’t engage. They’re going to be silently following you and then reaching out. I have a client in the accelerator who said, you know, because of the sensitive topic that she’s coaching people on, her clients, her ideal clients are not the ones who are going to be going, oh, amazing post.

Oh my gosh, fantastic. You’re so right. And even worse now, of course, the AI comments that we get and hold my hand up, I did that for a brief moment. It’s just not adding any value. It’s. It’s just not worth the couple of seconds you save. So these days I put a very, well, a thoughtful, very human post on, on people’s posts if I do want to support or ask or, or add my value. So.

So if it’s a sensitive topic, people might not comment and they’ll just reach out when they need you. If it’s, you know, hr, L and D or someone in corporate leaders, they’re busy. They’re also not sitting there watching every post and go, oh my gosh, this is such a resonant post. I must comment on Anna’s post and then buy from her. No. So they’re not going to be posting. And actually, possibly we could say that our most ideal clients are not ever going to be the ones who post because for most of us, the ideal client who can afford us and is already thriving and doing well, we’re just going to take them to the next level. In whatever area are the ones that are busy working, earning money, hopefully living their lives and not sitting there chasing the algorithm.

So it’s a bit of a, sorry, rude awakening, but often the ones who are commenting on our posts are experts like us, who are equally just trying to get some visibility. And that’s fine, there’s a place for that. But again, it’s not going to be sort of the biggest driver. It’s certainly not the only driver of your business. So, yes, visibility is an important strategy, but we shouldn’t just perform it. You know, I could have just posted every day for months and ticked that box and commented and whatever else, but if no one’s bought from me, you know, not so helpful. Yes, there are people who only want to grow their awareness. Maybe they don’t care about having a business and so on, but that’s not us.

We’re trying to earn money with this. Okay, so if visibility is your strategy, we need to start with positioning. We need to understand, okay, who is our ideal client, what do we want to be known for and who needs to hear it. Right, you can start with either thing. So we can start with the client. Who do we really want to work with? And then elevate up to thinking, okay, where do they need help? More likely, I would suggest you start with, actually, what do you want to be known for? Probably it’s from your own experience, a pivot, a transformation you’ve gone through, and then you have this message and then you can turn outwards and think, okay, who needs to hear that message? Okay, so we’ll talk about that soon again. But having what I call a signal sentence. I know the elevator pitch kind of concept is one that turns people off, but having a sentence that signals to your ideal client, to the person you’re talking to, it goes beep, beep, beep, beep in a lovely tone.

And whether it’s something to, Aha. Lots of sounds today. This is something I want to listen to. Oh, I know exactly who you should talk to. Or oh, my gosh, I need this. I want to talk to you. And so having that signal really confidently owning, this is what I do, this is who I help. You know, do you know someone….

Is super, super key. Because, if you can’t articulate that, then no amount of content is going to convert. And if I’m posting one day about, well, being and the next day about leadership. I mean, yes, those two things are connected, but there needs to be a red thread, a through line through all of that. If I’m doing well, being then leadership, then I’m trying to think of other topics. I’m so in my own world that I can’t think of anything. I don’t know, weight loss and then AI and then of oceans. You know, it’s not going to really build that consistent message.

People are just going to ignore. Basically a confused mind says no, as the saying goes. Okay. So having that clear positioning and being able to articulate that in a signal sentence. And then the second thing, which I’ve talked about for years, since my corporate days, I was in digital content marketing and I worked with the team to develop their content strategy because at the time it was very much just kind of channel based. It was just, hey, here’s the website and we’ll put our advertising on there. So we took a step back again, understanding, okay, who are you trying to reach? So we have that in one bubble and then what’s the overlap between what they want and in the other bubble what you and your business want? Right. So that’s really going to be your compass for the kind of content you, you want to put out there that ladders up to your message.

And within that, without going into too much detail, we’d have three, four, usually five. I like content pillars to really anchor your presence, anchor your message. So in the past, and I’ve strayed a bit from that as my business has expanded, but I’ve been really focused on my five pillars of a profitable and enjoyable business, as the book calls it. So my book, outside the 9 to 5, my course, the business academy, was all based on my five pillars. And it’s still very much the foundation of, of the work I do and with entrepreneurs, with solopreneurs, independent experts and so on. And the first one is your definition of success. The second one is cultivating confidence and resilience. The third one is building or choosing actually the right business model.

The fourth is building an effective personal brand. And the fifth is designing flexible work life integration that works for you. So you can see how even if other people, you don’t know that I have those pillars and it guides me. I can, you know, in the past, again I did two months on your big picture version of success. That might be December, January, because people are kind of thinking of, okay, what are my career goals right now? How am I going to change next year? And then it’s maybe Mindset for two months, then it’s business model for two months, it’s personal brand for two months, it’s work life integration. You can also weave them together. And for me, it’s really worked to keep them a little bit separate like that. It means that someone, let’s say, catches the podcast.

Hello. If you find this one interesting about visibility, the good news is there’ll be, you know, three more podcast episodes in the coming weeks on visibility too. So you can sort of binge that and then potentially reach out to work with me or go on your merry way and implement what you’ve learned. So having those content pillars really helps to anchor your presence and helps you not to stray too far into other areas. And I was talking to someone in the Recalibration Sprint programme that I ran recently and she loved that. We said, you know what, this is not forever. This is just for now. So for this month, or even better, for this quarter, for the next 90 days, this is my client I’m targeting.

This is the offer and this is the message. And that just makes it so much easier. Then of course, you can get into more detail of, okay, Monday is, I do a poll, Tuesday is a story, Wednesday is a carousel, whatever it is, again, coming too far down the LinkedIn rapid rabbit hole. But that gives you a guide so you don’t have to wake up in the morning, go, oh, what am I going to post and get stressed and. And spend far too much time on it. So, yeah, visibility as a strategy, not performing visibility, not getting caught up in just more in volume. It is important, but it needs to be intentional. I think you’ll agree with me when I say that what people don’t need these days is more content, especially with AI, we can just ask any old question and get all the knowledge and information we could possibly need.

More so than ever before, even before, when we had Google. Right. What they need is a reason to trust you. You know, they need to be able to get you, and that’s the personal piece of the personal brand, right? They need to be similar enough and empathise and see that you empathise with them. They need to be able to find you. So the visibility is important. You need to be in the places where they are or they’re there, they’re looking for you. Yes, you do need to be consistent.

You need to be clear. That’s what builds authority. But don’t trade your integrity for impressions. And I cannot emphasise that enough because the people I work with, I are so smart, competent, ethical, deep in their work. And yes, there’s an element of playing a bit of the game in order to get the visibility, but we don’t want to lose ourselves in that and start playing the game which we don’t even want to play, which probably won’t even get us the results and just distract us from making the impact that we actually want to make. Okay? So I know it’s hard, but if we take a breath, remind ourselves it’s not just about visibility in terms of volume and noise, it’s actually about becoming known. In fact, someone said it to me the other day very well, he said, look, I don’t want to be a thought leader, I just want to be respected within my space and I want to run a business as an expert, right? So that’s what most of us in my world at least want to do. I keep saying I don’t want to be a Simon Sinek or a Brene Brown.

They’re amazing. I mean, Brene Brown, my goodness, what an iconic. I love her work, but the true visibility that comes with that, the huge focus and so on, that’s just not, at least for now, what I’m looking for. What I do want is to be really known and be a kind of go to expert in my particular area, right? Whether it’s a particular audience of solopreneurs who are building differently, it’s about recalibrating how we work in lead. So leaders who want to lead differently, there’s this space of redefining success, work, life integration, putting life and family first and so on. If I can have my name be raised and mentioned in those circles, if I can maybe go to some conferences and speak, if I can be brought into organisations to talk about it, and if I can work through my accelerator and one to one and so on with people like that, then happy days for me. And again, if we’re not looking to earn, you know, 10 million and build an empire and get VC funding, whatever, we’re going to be able to build that business without going viral. We’re going to be able to build it with real conversations, real quality engagement.

So again, deep breath reassuring you, you don’t need those huge numbers to have a thriving business, but we do need to be intentional to make sure that the stuff we are doing is, is landing and it won’t be perfect all the time. And that’s why there is an element of volume. Because of course, as we post more by now, I don’t worry too much about an individual post because I know it’s just one sort of piece of the tapestry, one piece of the puzzle. So again, just don’t trade your integrity for impressions. You won’t do it intentionally, but it can happen accidentally, unfortunately. So look, if, if this resonates and if you want to grow your visibility without sort of faking it, without burning out, we do do this work in the accelerator. The doors have just closed for this intake, so we won’t be opening for a few months. I also work one to one in my authority accelerator, so it’s one to one container where we can really work on your personal brand, getting clear on what you want to be known for, formulating all these things I’ve talked about your signal sentence, your content compass, your messaging matrix and so on. And really coming with that intentionality to what your definition of success looks like within this space and to building that one piece of the puzzle, one part of the tapestry at a time, without getting caught up in the all the noise and algorithm madness that’s out there. Okay, so you can book a call with me to talk about that at onestepoutside.com/call. And I will be back next week again to talk a little bit more about LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Spiral, and how we can show up when we’re overwhelmed by the algorithm and the pressure to be on there. Okay, I’ll see you then.

Building a strong personal brand is important, whether you’re a freelancer, an entrepreneur, or an employee. If you’d like help getting clear on what you want to stand for, mapping out how you can amplify that message, and stepping up as a true leader in your industry, get in touch. You can book a call at onestepoutside.com/call.

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