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Stop Copying Other Business Owners

Stop Copying Other Business Owners

“Whatever you do, be different — that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.”
~ Anita Roddick

As a business coach and more importantly, as a business owner, I’m pretty obsessed with the importance of having a sustainable business model.

I started out as a brand new coach over a decade ago and between then and now I’ve pretty much made all of the business model mistakes a business owner can make.

Copying other people’s models without knowing the full picture, undercharging and overgiving, overcharging and under delivering and many more besides.

From it all, the greatest lesson I’ve learned regarding business model is the importance of sustainability.

A business that not only sustains you financially but that fulfils you personally. A business that gives you energy, rather than drains you of it.

A business that you actually enjoy showing up for, week after week, month after month, year after year.

So what makes a sustainable business model?

Most newer business owners, trying to figure out how to make money, will jump straight to looking at what combination of products and services they will offer, asking themselves “what can I sell in order to start bringing money into my business?”

And with this question comes a tendency to look around at what others in our field (particularly those who are more successful) are offering and try to copy it even when what they are copying might be totally unsuitable for the individual business owner.

My alternative to this is to take time to consider the following elements in order to create a business model or offering that is unique to you.

What stage of business are you at?

If you are brand new in business, the types of offerings you want to be considering will be significantly different to those for a more established business owner. My recommendation to people early on their business journey is to focus on a simple but impactful 1:1 service (like my subscription model).

When you have a small audience, it’s far easier to get 1 person to sign up for coaching with you, than it is to get 5–10 people into a group program, even if the latter is cheaper for the customer. I’ve seen many newer business owners get burned by trying to do group offerings too soon.

Having said that, there are always exceptions to the rule so the important thing is that you consider your unique situation rather than follow blanket advice.

What would you enjoy to create and deliver?

When you seek to create a new offering, rather than copy what “seems” to be working for others in your field, it’s crucial that you take into account your own gifts and strengths, preferences and tendencies. Are you a gifted speaker, for example, who thrives when teaching a room full of people? Or do you come alive when working 1:1 and going deep with individuals? Are you introverted or extroverted? Does lots of contact with people drain you or sustain you? These and so much more are really important things to consider as you design your next product or service.

What your audience wants (and needs) and would be prepared to pay for?

As business owners we often assume we know best when it comes to what our clients “need” but this isn’t necessarily what they want or what they are willing to pay for. What is key here is doing some research with your people before you create something. Most business owners do little audience research before creating and launching a new offering and the effects of this are few if any sales.

What your audience would be able to bear in terms of marketing?

This comes into play when we consider the product or service we want to create and sell. With a small audience, getting a new 1:1 client a month may still be pretty achievable. A small or stagnant audience, won’t however bear a big group launch 2 or 3 times a year. Here you want to be taking into account not only your audience size but it’s rate of growth. How many new people are getting to know you each month?

What marketing the business owner can bear or afford to do?

This is the one that tripped me up in the early days of my business. I got all excited when I came across a business membership for female entrepreneurs. The founder had hundreds (if not thousands) of members all paying less than £40 a month and I thought it was genius.

I figured I could make a membership for ethical and conscious business owners and I wouldn’t need half the members they had and could even charge less. To begin it was great — I had nearly 20 members sign up from my tiny list but pretty soon I was completely burned out from creating content and trying to retain the members I had (most of whom had paid a super low beta rate). Plus I didn’t have the energy or the desire to do the marketing required to enrol new people. A year later I had to close it down as it wasn’t financially sustainable.

All products and services require different levels and types of marketing to be successful. Make sure you take this into consideration before copying someone else’s business model. If they’ve been in business a while, they may have a whole team and advertising budget to support them (like the business I was seeking to emulate!).

The problem with copying

When you are early on in the business journey, it can take a lot of courage to ditch conventional advice and forge your own path.

I remember myself when decided I wanted to move away from the classic 3 and 6 month coaching package and instead offer a coaching subscription, I was actually terrified, it took me a year and lots of testing behind the scenes with existing clients before I changed my business model and made my coaching subscription the only way people could work with me 1:1. My business took off from there.

Creating something unique

It can be hard to create a unique business model or offering when we see nearly everyone doing the same thing. So I wanted to share some examples of unique (and successful) offerings that demonstrate how it can be done.

My subscription model for 1:1 coaching. When I realised that my clients weren’t able to achieve results in an arbitrary 12 week timeframe, I ditched the traditional 3 month coaching package in favour of a lower priced ongoing subscription and the results have been amazing both for my business (more clients + more income) and for my clients. Because of the lower price point, they’re able to stay with me longer and therefore get better results.

My favourite ethical copywriter Lauren Van Mullem realised that she didn’t only want to do full service copywriting for people and wanted to find something less intensive for her and more affordable for her clients so she created Loom Reviews. Lauren also ditched convention with her freebie. Rather than a “5 ways to make your copy stand out” PDF, she created Craft and Copy hour. A way for her to make time for her love of crafts, a chance to meet Lauren, do some crafting with her and ask her any copy related ideas you have. Talk about unique!

Tad Hargrave found he didn’t want to spend so much time in front of a computer, he wanted a less
cluttered home but resented tidying AND that some of his people couldn’t afford his full 1:1 coaching rate of $300 an hour so he created puttering sessions — a unique solution to all of the above. Lower priced coaching sessions, because Tad will be puttering around his home tidying up while he talks to you! Genius.

All of the above, hopefully demonstrate what’s possible when you create something that is truly unique to you!

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

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Balance Work Life

Balance Work Life

“Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender.”
~ Danielle Orner

 

In this blog, I share with you my thoughts on work/life balance and a few practical strategies to better manage your business when life seemingly gets in the way.

Let me begin by sharing something I heard many years ago from Danielle Laporte.

Balance is a myth.

I remember being struck by those words and whilst I don’t remember everything she said on the topic I remember feeling the truth of those 4 words deep in my bones.

The idea here is that we don’t get to a place where work and life are perfectly balanced, without one taking up more space than the other. Instead the balance tips in favour of one or the other at different points in time. Allow me to explain. If you are sick or need to take care of a sick loved one, then for sure life is going to take priority. It has to.

If all is well on the personal front and we’re in the middle of a big launch in our business, then the scales are going to tip on the side of business for a while. That’s inevitable.

The liberating key here is to acknowledge that. To understand that the balance we often strive for is a myth. That then frees us up to figure out how to better manage things when the scales are tipped one way vs the other. I.e. how do we not drop all the balls on our business when life is feeling full on? And how do we not lose ourselves in our work when business is full on?

I can’t claim to have all the answers here, but for what they are worth, here are my thoughts for how to stay connected with your work when life is fighting for your attention.

Manage your expectations

Whilst on a call with a fellow business owner whose Dad has been seriously ill and who is herself recovering from a second bout of Covid, she shared that she hadn’t been feeling the ability to create content lately, which has never happened before and was asking how she might get her inspiration back. When I reminded her how much she is dealing with on a personal level and how normal it is therefore that she isn’t feeling creative, she broke down in tears.

I see some version of this all the time.

We don’t acknowledge what is going on for us and then on top of everything we might already be dealing with on a personal level, we have unreasonable expectations of ourselves to keep on keeping on. When we can truly acknowledge that our capacity for work may be limited, we’re better able to do the bare minimum than when we try to carry on at full capacity, which just adds more weight to an already unbearably heavy load.

On this same call, I was asked what I wanted to commit to for the next two weeks and without missing a beat I said: maintaining my business until our house renovation is complete. That means nothing extra, no big launches, no working on new things, no bold moves, or big steps. As boring and as safe as it might sound, my only job for the next month is to stick to my content schedule and serve my existing clients.

Even though that is more than enough, there still was a voice that whispered but you should be doing more.

It’s so important to be aware of that voice and to gently and respectively ignore her.

 Plan ahead

This one is a work in progress for me but making the most of the extra time I have in my business when things are quiet on the personal front is key to feeling less stressed when life gets busy or challenging.

That means that when I know I’ll be taking time off for a planned holiday, I can, for example, work a bit harder in advance to prepare content to be scheduled in my absence.

Much like it was in my old corporate life when I knew I had to take leave, there would also be a little bit of intensity ahead of the break, getting things set up for when I wouldn’t be there or handing stuff over to colleagues.

This doesn’t necessarily help when unexpected things happen like sudden sickness, but if you can endeavour to get ahead of yourself in for example your content creation, then you’ll have some leeway to work with when you suddenly find yourself busy with personal things. The trick is to be more productive when the space is there to do it so that you can step back when you need to, without dropping your business essentials.

Get help

Even though most of us work solo in our business that doesn’t mean we can’t recruit others to help take up the slack when we need to take a step back. There are several things you can do to find cover for while you are away that doesn’t require too much work up front for you.

You might, for example, invite a colleague to do a content takeover for your newsletter. This is something I’ve done for my dear colleague Eli Trier in the past. When she was busy getting married, she invited two or three of her most trusted colleagues to come in and write a newsletter on a topic relevant to her audience that she could schedule to go out while she was busy with her wedding. It was great for us as we got the opportunity to be exposed to a new group of people and could share links to our business and therefore get new followers and it was great for Eli, who had three weeks of quality newsletters she didn’t have to write or pre-prepare.

You can even do this with services. Years ago when I was on maternity leave with my first son, I was running a women’s circle with weekly calls. I invited 3 of my dearest colleagues to host calls in my absence and it was great, my women really appreciated that the calls continued while I was away bonding with my baby and my colleagues loved the opportunity to host a group call and share their skills.

And inside my mastermind program, I had a week off and had to miss one of the group calls, instead of cancelling it, I invited one of the amazing women inside the program to test out her new workshop on her fellow mastermind participants, meaning that the women benefited from her wisdom and she was able to get some validation and feedback on her new workshop. So it was a win win, with no extra work from me.

Give yourself grace

Always important but specifically relevant for those times when planning and calling in help just isn’t viable, it’s important to give yourself some grace when navigating difficult personal issues like illness, death of a loved one, birth of a child, children home from school, moving house (or house renovations!!) and all other big life events that inevitably mean our work has to take a back seat.

We would never be hard on a friend or valued colleague during times like these and would find it super easy to show empathy, understanding and love to someone else in this situation. Why then is it so hard for us to extend this kindness to ourselves?

Next time you find yourself in a situation where you’re dealing with some big personal life issues and catch yourself being hard on yourself about work, remember to show yourself some compassion. All being hard on ourselves does is make things even harder. In my experience, the more you’re able to lean into self-compassion, the sooner you’ll be ready to get back to doing what you can.

And there you have it, three things you can do to survive in business when your personal life is a struggle. Is there anything you’d add to this list? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

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Celebrating Five Years Since I Launched This Business + 21 Lessons Learned

Celebrating Five Years Since I Launched This Business + 21 Lessons Learned

Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
~ Winston Churchill

On Thursday 19th May 2022, I celebrated 5 years in business as a business coach, around 8 years in business total (I was a Life Coach before that) and around 10 years of working for myself. As such, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share some of what I’ve learned over the past 5–10 years.

The most exciting thing for me to be able to share after 5 years in business, is that it’s working.

I make a good living, working only 6 hours a day. Often working only 4 days a week, as I regularly take Fridays off. I love what I do and I’m having a positive impact on the lives and businesses of others (so I’m told!). What more could I ask for? In many ways, it feels like a dream come true.

Whilst I share this, I’m painfully aware that it hasn’t always been this way that there has been a lot of struggle and fear over the years as well as courage, blind faith and dogged determination. A lot of highs as well as a lot of lows. There have been months where I’ve made more money than I knew what to do with and months where I’ve not known how I was going to pay the rent (more of the latter than the former so far).

In this blog, I’m going to share just a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Your income doesn’t reflect your worth. Period.

2. The number of likes, shares and comments on your content doesn’t determine the value of what you have to say. Most people aren’t even seeing it.

3. There is no shame in getting part-time work to pay the bills while you’re waiting to get your business off the ground. Financial stability is a really good place to operate from.

4. Belief that you’ll succeed is key. I genuinely believe this is one of the most important factors of my own success. I never said “if my business works” I said “when” and I meant it.

5. In many ways your business is just like having a job. You have to show up for it and do the work or you’ll lose it.

6. It takes time for things to work. In my experience, it’s taken at least a year of consistent application of any given strategy before I’ve seen good results. Strategy switching kills your business.

7. Less is more. The more you do, the more exhausted you become and the more confused your audience gets. Pick a few things and do them well.

8. Keep it simple. Don’t try to be too clever in your business, try to be clear. Remember a confused mind says no.

9. Do what you love rather than what the mainstream marketers tell you you should be doing. You’ll be more consistent that way.

10. Support is essential. Over the years, I’ve worked with many coaches, taken a lot of courses and had several amazing mastermind partners. Even now, I wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to a mentor if I’m feeling stuck or unsure about my next steps.

11. There’s no quick fix or magic bullet when it comes to building a successful and sustainable business. Those people on the internet who say that there is, are profiting off your desire to succeed. Be in it for the long haul and know that these things take time.

12. It takes about 4 years of consistently working on the right things to reach a level of sustainability in business. That’s been my experience and it’s the number I’ve heard shared by other experienced business coaches I respect.

14. The two most important strategies to implement to grow your business are: consistent content creation and practising authentic outreach (aka, talking to people!).

14. Strategy trumps tactics. It doesn’t matter if you are on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, writing long-form, making videos or doing reels. What matters is that you are showing up consistently and being of value. That’s strategy. The former is tactics.

15. It’s more important to challenge your clients than it is to please them. In my line of work anyway!

16. Generosity is a wonderful way to do business. But don’t over give as it doesn’t serve you or others.

17. Be mindful of what you consume. Unsubscribe from or unlike anyone whose advice feels toxic or makes you feel less than. Choose your mentors wisely, based on shared values.

18. You don’t need to worry about bothering people, if you are a business owner, then you must accept that people are in your audience and on your list because they expect to be sold to.

19. Ask for feedback as much as possible, but focus on what your ideal clients are telling you more than anyone else.

20. If you really want to master something in business, taking action trumps all the thinking, studying, reading and listening you can do.

21. Give more than you ask. Genuinely put people before the sale and interestingly you’ll make more sales.

There’s so much more I could say but for now, I’ll leave it there. I hope that in some small way, my lessons learned over the last 5–10 years, are useful to you on your journey. Now over to you, what’s your greatest lesson learned in business? I would so love to know.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

10 Practical Ways To Minimise Business Overwhelm

10 Practical Ways To Minimise Business Overwhelm

dded”Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.”
~ Dr. Stephen R. Covey

In this blog, I’m sharing 10 practical things you can do to better understand overwhelm and to minimise its impact on your day-to-day business activities.

For me overwhelm is nearly always an indicator of fear. When I feel overwhelmed I know that, in that moment, my mind has lost sight of the here and now, that I’ve become attached to some desired outcome in the future and the overwhelm has crept into the space between the two.

For me overwhelm is the fear that I won’t realise my desired outcome and a sign that I’ve become focused on how things should be versus how they are and then from that place taking the single most simple next step.

If overwhelm is affecting your ability to get things done in your business (or just making you feel low), take a look through this list and choose the actions that speak to you.

1. Get it out of your head.

The first thing I do when I recognise that I am feeling overwhelmed is to make a list of everything on my plate. It sounds super simple because it is. Making a list gets all of the various things you are juggling out of your head and onto a piece of paper, the key is to include everything no matter how small or silly they may seem.

I’ll never forget the most powerful coaching session I ever had (and I’ve had many!). I got on the call with my coach and I was feeling terrible, really low and totally overwhelmed. He told me to open up my notebook and write down the number one thing that was bothering me. After that, he asked me what else? And what else? And what else? Until I had filled four pages of my notebook. At the end of it, we reviewed the list and he said to me “no wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed, who wouldn’t with all of this to deal with?” I instantly felt better. Just getting those things off my chest and out of my head eased the feeling of overwhelm significantly.

The overwhelm was coming from feeling like I should have had it more together, the overwhelm dissipated when I found a place of acceptance with what was.

2. Prioritise.

Once you’ve made your list, you’ll want to organise it. Often when we are feeling overwhelmed, we’re ruminating on the million different things that we believe we could or should be doing, instead of focusing on the next most important step. Here’s where we need to prioritise. Personally, I like to organise my tasks using Stephen Covey’s 4 quadrants (see image below) so that I can quickly eliminate anything that is not important (Quadrants 3+4) and spend my valuable time on what is important (quadrants 1+2). I no longer need to use the 4 quadrants diagram to do this, these days, I instinctively know what is important and/or urgent and can disregard the rest.

To deal with my most important tasks for the day, I like to identify them and then schedule them in my diary, so that I can take into account any pre-existing appointments and how long things get done. If that means I can only do 1–3 of the urgent and important tasks on my list then that is what I schedule, nothing more.

I also recommend never committing to more than 3 tasks a day regardless of the time and space you have. Any more than 3 and our minds inevitably veer towards overwhelm. Besides, there’s nothing to stop you from doing more if you get your 3 things done early.

3. Limit your inputs.

Given the world we now live in, it’s no wonder that overwhelm is a common occurrence. We are bombarded by information on a second by second basis. With the internet, social media and the accompanying barrage of pings, notifications and reminders, not being in a state of overwhelm can often feel like an insurmountable task.

This is where it becomes really important to limit your inputs. There are plenty of things you can do to minimise this assault on your senses. Turn off notifications, remove apps from your phone if you have to, delay checking email until later in the day and avoid mainstream media at all costs (if you want to protect your mental health!).

I was talking to someone once who always seemed to be overwhelmed and depressed by the state of the world yet continued to digest the very mainstream media that perpetuated that state. I make a conscious choice not to watch or read mainstream media, precisely because I know that is designed to play on our fears in order to maximise profits.

If there are inputs in your life that don’t serve you, my best advice is to limit or eliminate them. This can take time, but it’s often easier to do than you think. Next time you’re on the receiving end of something that leaves you feeling overwhelmed ask yourself, can I eliminate this somehow? (unsubscribe, block, remove notifications or stop participating in).

4. Watch your mindset.

Sometimes when we have found something overwhelming in the past (like schedules, social media, finances or planning), we develop a fixed mindset around it, i.e. we get very black and white about it. We start to believe that we just don’t do well with that thing and immediately start to feel overwhelmed when faced with it.

I’d like to gently challenge you here to cultivate a growth mindset and create space for something new to emerge. I’ll give you a personal example. For years, I told myself that I was terrible at focus and found it very hard to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. After living for several years with someone who is incredibly focused (sometimes to the extreme), I started to notice my own capacity for focused work increase.

When I allowed myself to question the assumption that I was a person who was very easily distracted and therefore unable to focus, change became possible. These days I wouldn’t dream of describing myself as unfocused — quite the opposite. I’m perfectly capable of sitting down to a piece of work and getting into a focused state for several hours if I have to. By allowing myself to believe that I could become a focused person and working on the skillset to achieve that, I became one.

Consider when in your business life you always revert to a state of overwhelm, is there a possible mindset shift here?

6. Shine a light.

Fear lives in the dark — when we shine a light on something, it can become less scary and overwhelming, If we’re scared of numbers, then working on our financials will feel overwhelming and uncomfortable. That’s because there is a barely audible script running in the background telling us we don’t know what we’re doing.

If you become conscious of that script and seek to change it by empowering yourself with knowledge, then change is possible. Why not take some to learn more about something you find overwhelming and watch the overwhelm dissipate.

When we know how to do something, we feel good about doing it.

So consider now what things in your business are causing overwhelm because of a lack of knowledge or skill and then take some steps to rectify that.

7. Focus on the present.

As I’ve already mentioned I’m a firm believer that overwhelm occurs when we’ve become disconnected from the present moment. So it follows that one way to ease feelings of overwhelm is to do something to connect with the present moment.

One way to do this is to bring our attention to the breath. Another might be to get out of our heads and into our bodies. If you don’t have a regular mindfulness practice like meditation, yoga, movement or dance, consider starting one. I truly believe you’ll notice the impact it has on your feelings of overwhelm.

8. Simplify the task/offering.

Often we feel overwhelmed because we simply have too much to do. I know that there are times in my working week when there are more things that need to be completed than I have time in the day to complete them.

Here is where I recommend scaling back what you do to make your tasks/offerings simpler. Let me give you some examples.

If you offer 1:1 and started out by always writing up post-session notes to send to clients, but as you’ve got more and more clients, now struggle to find the time, stop doing it.

If when you send your weekly newsletter you always like to share at least 5 links to other useful resources but you’re finding it takes too long to pull these together, give yourself permission to stop doing it.

A lot of the people I work with (and I include myself in this camp) are chronic over givers/perfectionists. Meaning there is often scope to scale back how much we do in any given task or client offering. It can feel challenging to pare things down but believe me, the extra space it will give you will be worth it.

9. Adjust your expectations.

Closely related to #8 but more focused on how we think about what we offer. It’s important to acknowledge when our expectations are too high.

I was talking to a client a while ago who has these amazing templates she uses in her business, they are gold. In a beta collaboration, she was working on, she had agreed to turn her (already amazing) templates into workbooks, but doing so was kicking her butt, she was facing a launch deadline and on top of her heavy client load, she was struggling to get the work done.

I suggested that she simply use the templates as they were. Nobody would know the difference having seen neither format and given the templates, as is, are already brilliant and worth more than the whole beta program would cost, it wouldn’t devalue the offering one bit. Such a simple shift, but one that took a whole lot of pressure off and created a truckload of new space in her calendar.

10. Choose differently.

In another piece of writing, I talk about how my own personal epiphany about overwhelm came after reading an article by a coach who argued that overwhelm is a choice. This idea can be triggering for some people, but for me it was life-changing. Knowing that there are things I do that contribute to my feeling of overwhelm and things I can do to minimise them means that I have some control over whether I am in a state of overwhelm or not.

I’m not saying that it’s always as simple as choosing not to be overwhelmed but acknowledging that there is a choice really helps me. To understand more what I mean by this final point head here to read an article I wrote on this very idea.

And there you have it, 10 things you can do to minimise business related overwhelm. I hope you find them useful.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

Is Your Business Visible Enough?

Is Your Business Visible Enough?

“The power of visibility can never be underestimated.”
~ Margaret Cho

Visibility is a topic, much like marketing, that can feel quite anxiety inducing, especially for the more introverted amongst us but it needn’t be so. In this blog, I want to share with you two strategies for greater visibility as well as some simple tasks you can do to have your business be more visible.

Before I get to those though, I just want to say a few words about why visibility is so important. In a nutshell, if people don’t know that your business exists, you won’t be able to generate an income. Not only that but if you don’t continue to grow your audience, i.e. be visible to new people on an ongoing basis, you won’t be able to generate a sustainable income.

Making an effort with visibility is not a one-time thing. You can’t do a couple of podcasts, make a handful of sales and be done with it. If you want a business that continues to generate an income month after month, year after year, you need to be getting in front of people on the regular.

But fear not, being more visible does not mean that you have to shout about yourself or sell your soul. As with everything I teach, being more visible can be done in genuine and authentic ways. In this blog, I share with you the two main strategies for getting more visibility for your business as well as a couple of tactics under each strategy that you can go ahead and start implementing, this week if you want to! Some of these will require you to step out of your comfort zone but in my experience, the further outside our comfort zones we dare to travel, the greater the rewards we receive.

The two main strategies for making your business more visible are:

1. Growing and nurturing your own audience.

And,

2. Getting in front of other people’s audiences.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Growing your own audience

Under #1 we have tactics like:

  • Creating and sharing social media posts (reels, slide decks, stories etc).
  • Regularly publishing live videos.
  • Starting your own podcast.
  • Blogging on the regular.
  • Setting up a newsletter and writing to your people regularly with useful to them content.
  • Conducting audience research.
  • Advertising your content to warm and cool audiences.
  • Practicing authentic outreach.
  • Offering generous freebies.

The purpose here is to grow your own audience of engaged followers who resonate with you and the work you do.

Growing your own audience means getting comfortable creating and sharing content consistently and doing what is required to get that content seen by as many people as possible. Head here to read an article I wrote on my own strategy for audience growth.

Getting in front of other people’s audiences

Under #2 we have tactics like:

  • Guest posting on blogs and publications.
  • Interviewing or highlighting influencers (influencer marketing)
  • Collaborations with colleagues in your field.
  • Pitching to podcasts relevant to your subject area.
  • Offering to be a guest expert or teacher for other people’s group programs.
  • Networking/outreach with potential peers and colleagues.

The purpose here is to find people who have an existing audience that consists of your ideal client.

The ideal is when you find a fellow business owner who is already serving your target audience but with a different product or service than the one you are offering.

Getting in front of other people’s audiences means getting comfortable making new connections with likely collaborators and pitching your message and point of view to other business owners. To read more on the importance of having a strong point of view head here.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to focus on growing your own audience in the earlier stages of business, while you are still figuring things out and finding your voice and later when you are more certain of your ideal client and the value you offer, begin looking for opportunities to share your message with other more established audiences. Not only will they be more inclined to collaborate with you, if you have an audience they can also access but you’ll also by then have more confidence to articulate clearly what it is you do and the value you provide.

So there you have it in a nutshell, my take on how to get your business out of the shadows and more visible to your ideal clients. Is there a tactic I’ve mentioned above that you’d love more information on? I’ve tried to link where possible to other articles so you can go deeper with these, but if there is an approach you’d love to hear my take on, simply drop it in the comments below and I might just write a future blog on the subject.

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