Dorie Clark’s latest book Entrepreneurial You provides a blueprint for those seeking professional independence, with insights and advice on building your own brand, monetizing your expertise, and extending your reach and impact online.
If you are a wannabe ‘solopreneur’, interested in setting up a small online business or defining and creating your own brand, then this book is for you. In Entrepreneurial You, Dorie shares stories from consultants, coaches, podcasters, bloggers and online marketers who have generated six and seven figure incomes online.
It is more important than ever to define your unique role in the world, and sell what you can offer to a global audience. From 1948 to 2000, jobs grew 1.7 times faster than the population in the US. But from 2000 to 2014, the population grew 2.4 times faster than jobs. Competition for jobs is now global, and you need to start thinking about and selling to a global audience.
51% of US workers currently describe themselves as “not engaged” at work, and 17.5% say they are “actively disengaged”. Many of these workers feel stifled by traditional jobs and would like more autonomy, flexibility and freedom in their work. As a result, it is estimated that the number of freelancers in the US will rise from 34% to 40% by 2020.
If you are planning to launch yourself as a brand, Entrepreneurial You has some fantastic tips. Here are 8 of them:
1. Don’t keep your blog to yourself
If you are decide to start building an audience by blogging, don’t just publish your articles in one place. Dorie recommends approaching well established sites such as Huffpost or the Harvard Business Review and offering your articles to them to publish. If successful you will get access to a huge new audience of potential customers, as well as boosting your reputation and credentials by being associated with such prestigious publications.
2. How to find a publishing agent
Dorie recommends a useful hack if you are interested in publishing your own book. Find a book similar to yours, read the ‘acknowledgements’ section and find where the author has thanked their agent. You can then approach this agent with your book proposal. Alternatively, Publishizer specialises in crowdfunding for would-be authors looking to publish a book.
3. Be nice to influencers
One of the best ways of getting exposure to potential new followers is by collaborating with people who already have large audiences. The best way to do this when you are starting out is by offering something of value to influential people in your niche. They are more likely to recommend you to their audience if you have helped them out in some way (e.g. by promoting their site, making them something they need or offering them free consulting). You could write a review of their book, for example, or share their posts on social media to capture their attention. Influencers may include niche websites as well as people. Clay Hebert advised a client launching a cat toy to partner with niche cat-lover sites to win the toy, generating two thousand email sign ups in one weekend.
4. Use your blogs to actively build an audience
Dorie recommends including links to newsletter sign ups in your blog posts so that you can directly reach readers when you have a new product to sell or article to promote. Visitors are unlikely to leave their email address unless they get something in return, so you may offer a free product or valuable content that readers will want to download. She outlines how Chris Winfield grew his email list by 15,000 from one post on medium. His article included a ‘lead magnet’ at the end that encouraged readers to download an e-book by providing their email address.
5. Have faith in your skills
It is sometimes difficult to believe that anyone is interested in what you have to say let alone follow your advice or even pay you for your work. Dorie reminds us that when something is simple for us, we often assume it must be easy for everyone else. In fact, you likely possess skills and knowledge that will save other people months of frustration trying to figure it out. What is common knowledge to you will be expertise to someone else, and they are a potential customer.
6. Start offline
When setting up an online business, it is tempting to jump straight in and start selling to the world. Dories reminds us not to overlook the contacts that we already have. Start out by asking friends and colleagues if they or anyone they know may need your services. It is always easier to to do business with people you know, or have a mutual contact with. Starting this way can get you experience, confidence, and potentially affiliations with prestigious organisations before you start selling to an audience of strangers.
7. Start premium
You may expect that when you are starting out with a new online business, you should price your products at the lower end of the market, but Dorie suggests otherwise. If your product sells at the higher end of the scale, you need fewer customers to succeed. Only ten customers would need to buy a $5000 course, for example, to create a basic annual salary. You may need to work harder to build an audience and a trusted reputation to start with, but the payoff will be worth it.
8. Focus
Dorie personally identifies just TWO primary professional goals every six months to focus on. This forces her to make progress by concentrating her efforts on high value tasks. She deliberately says no to lots of other things that she would love to do, and it pains her to do so, but is vital to her progress. You can read more about focus here.
I have highlighted just ten points that were useful to me. There is plenty more advice in the book, which I highly recommend.
