Are you invisible?!
A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to view an almost total eclipse of the sun here in Scotland – well, I say view, I hadn’t been organised enough to get hold of those special filter glasses and by the time I realised the eclipse was taking place, everywhere had sold out. Fortunately, despite a bright and sunny start to the day, the clouds came over enough to act as a filter, and I was able to see what was, I think, about 95% totality.
The whole idea of the sun hiding behind the moon (nearly!) got me thinking about where we hide ourselves in our businesses, especially if we don’t feel particularly comfortable shouting about what we’re good at. I know when I was in the workplace before my children came along, I trundled along in the background in my support role, getting things done, working away on the day to day tasks and providing an essential service to the people I worked for. However, I felt pretty much invisible in terms of the business as a whole, and I never really felt that important, despite the fact that if I hadn’t been there, the whole team wouldn’t have worked!
Becoming a business owner
Being a business owner is a different kettle of fish, mind you. If you don’t make yourself visible, you won’t get business, it’s as simple as that!
That was a difficult concept for me to grasp at first. I wasn’t remotely comfortable promoting myself and telling people what I was good at, and in the very early days even starting my Facebook page made me feel extremely anxious – what if people actually wanted to buy my services?? What a scary thought!
I’ve been in business for over four years, but I’ve only had a blog for just over a year, and the posts were only once a month at first, but I’ve managed to increase them to once a fortnight (more or less) for the moment. I do love the writing process, so once a week is my goal, sooner rather than later, I hope!
So what do you do if you’re feeling a bit invisible?
My advice to you first of all would be to start a blog. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and even if you aren’t able to have it there on your website, you could do what I did in the early days and set something up on wordpress.com. If I can work out the technical bits and bobs, anyone can. If you want to start off by doing a post a month, you only need to think of 12 topics to write about, and I bet you can come up with more than that if you set your mind to it. What questions do your clients and potential clients ask you? What advice can you give? What can you teach people?
You can even do what I’ve done recently and try out video as a way of making yourself really visible. My videos aren’t polished at all, and they’ve all been done either on my phone or with my webcam, but it’s a great way for people to see YOU, and after all, people buy from people they like and trust, don’t they?
As a little addendum, if you’re struggling to write, you could try dictating your thoughts and ideas and get somebody like me to transcribe and edit them into a usable form, and the same goes for videos, which can be transcribed and turned into written blog posts or articles.
How would you like to make yourself more visible in your business? Please do comment below, I’d love to hear some other ideas!