I am learning that promoting one’s consulting business is not a laid-back and stress-free undertaking. Apparently writing a blog to place before your audience is a broadly accepted means of such marketing, but what if you have little or no experience in self-bloviating? Most of my experience consists of posting cat and dog videos on Facebook. So, I decided to bone up a little. I read and carefully dissected numerous other blogs and have determined that a few rules seem to hold sway and give the reader a reasonable incentive to follow along.
Rule #1) Announce at the top of each article the number of bullet points or rules that you espouse to be really important (Please note here that I have failed to state there would be six, hence the neophyte status). These could be like five ways to turbo charge your SEO, or three imperatives for effective leadership, and so on. This rule is used to manage your audience’s expectations so that they know you don’t plan to drone on and on about thirty-five ways to manage Millennials or as I like to call it “Training Your Dragons”.
Rule #2) You are expected to offer at least a few pithy words of wisdom, and more than “Never turn on your blender while holding your cat or fry bacon naked”. While those are certainly sound bits of advice, they won’t increase your client’s profits or curb their high employee turnover. So, given the endless availability of new marketing and management tools and tactics you might think it’s easy to identify a topic of interest, and it would be, but differentiating yourself from the nearly 500,000 other professionals (per the Institute of Management Consultants) is the real challenge. I had to ask myself, how does one make the subject of properly onboarding new employees sexy or even interesting? Is there any real interest in four new ways to apply a SWOT analysis to your business? Why are Core Values really necessary? And these were a few of my best subjects? My head began to spin.
Rule #3) Work-in oblique references to your many years of experience and superhero skill sets. This can be a little tricky. If you don’t claim enough years your wisdom is in question. If you count your work history in decades, you may be viewed as a soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur. You may want to use dog years as an alternative in this case. Mine would be about five dog years from my first spin in the CEO’s chair through my last dozen years as executive coach and business consultant. I like to think that I am a pretty wise old pterodactyl.
Rule #4) Drop in a (read more) prompt to see how many folks you have managed to take hostage for the first minute or so. This will give you the all-important “click through”. You managed to follow me through, so thank you.
Rule #5) Let your reader know that you actually have a fairly impressive list of satisfied clients from a variety of business sectors that can confirm you are a Global Marketing Ninja and/or fifth level Management Wizard. Mine are all still talking to me, so I count them each as advocates of some merit. They range from national retailers to local tugboat services, non-profit organizations to iron working companies and even successful restaurants.
Rule #6) Give the reader a few nuggets about managing a business from day-to-day on your website. I have cleverly labeled mine as Hot BizKits which you can find on SkidBiz.com). There are only a few as yet, but I hope you find them useful.
Now, once you have covered the few points that seem to be critical and before you have bored them to tears, invite them to “like” you on Facebook, connect with you on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/skidmorebiz) or phone (562) 413-1061 to receive a free thirty (30) minute consultation and say thank you for reading.
Thank you for reading,
Robert Skidmore