Are you holding yourself back when it comes to putting yourself out into the marketplace – the online world specifically – with a view to building your profile and reputation as a genuine authority in your space?
I’ve consulted to and coached hundreds of motivated individuals over the journey – talented and dedicated business owners – and they often come to me because they’ve been held back by one or more excuses they’ve been telling themselves for a period of time.
You may have subjected yourself to these excuses as well. Don’t worry – we all have, and it ain’t doing us any favours!
Here are the ‘Big Three’ I hear the most often:
- “I have multiple audiences and lots of things I want to talk about” (lack of focus)
- “I don’t know what to create content about” (lack of ideas)
- “I haven’t got the time to create content” (lack of time)
Let’s unpack them one by one:
LACK OF FOCUS:
This one’s a great source of frustration for many business owners, and it’s aligned to the marketing advice you hear often, and that is you need to angle your business efforts towards a particular tight niche.
The ‘you-must-niche’ message is so well entrenched in business circles it causes great consternation for a lot of people.
So much so that when it comes to ‘putting a flag in the ground’ in terms of their public voice (and therefore any content-led communications they do), some business owners overthink things and start going around and around in their head in order to try and make a decision.
LACK OF IDEAS
On the flip side, I also come across some business owners who claim they don’t know what to create content about, that they lack the perfect ideas to go to market with in order to build a strong content-led profile.
This is rubbish, of course. These people are credible experts in their space, they know their shit – but for whatever reason they’re stuck on which stories to tell, what issues to comment on, or how they are going to create content for their owned and social media channels. As a rule, I find that these types of business owners tend to be perfectionists, and they won’t publish anything unless it’s 100% ‘professional’ (whatever that means today).
Like the lack of focus crowd above, the people who say they lack ideas end up doing nothing because they’re preoccupied with trying to perfect a handful of story hooks and angles, or content formats (e.g. podcast) rather than just getting on with the job.
LACK OF TIME
This is a hoary ol’ chestnut!
Now, I get this excuse, I really do. We’re all busy people. Hey, we’ve got a business to run: clients to service, admin to take care of … maybe employees to wrangle.
Put simply, people who cite this excuse as to why they don’t actively put in the effort to build their profile and authority is because … 🥁
It’s not a priority for them.
If building your profile and reputation is not important for you or your business, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. But, while lack of time might be an issue (as it is for most business owners), it should not in itself be the catch-all excuse not to take any action.
That’s my view, anyway, and I’m happy to ‘die on a hill’ to defend it 😃
Now, here comes some tough love …
Usually, the above excuses – lack of focus, lack of ideas, lack of time – are just that: they’re excuses.
Sometimes, I reckon they’re trotted out in order to mask some genuine deeper issue a person might have (e.g. insecurity, lack of confidence), but that’s a rabbit hole we don’t want to go down today!
So, what can we do about those excuses, eh? I’ll leave you with some top line thoughts (we can unpack these in future editions of the newsletter if need be):
- “I have multiple audiences and lots of things I want to talk about” – do your homework, hone your priorities (what matters most to you and your business?), and then sit down and write a practical plan that involves paring back your audiences and your idea aspirations, and then slowly work up from there.
- “I don’t know what to create content about” – again, I think having a simple plan in your back pocket will give you some purpose and direction; again, I’d start slowly and build up – bite off micro-chunks in terms of content i.e. comment on other people’s posts on LinkedIn, answer the most frequently asked questions you hear often in your line of work, comment on an industry-relevant issue that’s cropped up in the media, tell a story that involves a lesson learned from your professional past, promote a peer or a colleague and shine a light on their work or latest achievement. In other words: Don’t try and knock it out of the park with ‘The Big Thought Leadership Idea’, but rather, keep things simple and bite-sized (think: social media post vs whitepaper). Oh, and give yourself permission to be a bit scrappy – don’t let perfection get in the way of getting it done!
- “I haven’t got time” – ask yourself: “What am I doing that’s not working? What activities am I wasting time on that are not moving the needle on my business?” – the goal is to find pockets of time so you can focus on your authority-building efforts; develop and work to a plan, start small and grow from there, utilising apps and AI tools to help you become more productive, graduating to some freelance support as you get the ball rolling.
The downside of succumbing to these and other excuses, we run the risk of standing still (i.e. going backwards) in terms of our reputation-building efforts, and let’s face it, no-one wants to be the best kept secret in their industry!
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