Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
Enthusiastically Self-Employed is designed for you if you’re self-employed as a coach, consultant, speaker, author, solopreneur, or small business owner. Listen in for business, marketing, and LinkedIn tips, sprinkled in with stories along the way.
Listen to Enthusiastically Self-Employed for education and insights to help you to be successful and support the love you have of your business, while also supporting your bottom line. That means growing your revenue, reducing your expenses, and optimizing your processes.
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Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
Looking to Market Your NEW Consulting Business on LinkedIn? Profile Mini-Audit with Tom Livingston Ep 122
Are you a solopreneur, business professional, or coach / consultant looking to unlock the power of LinkedIn to get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn Pie? Watch this LinkedIn profile mini-audit of Tom Livingston.
TIPS we covered include:
▪️ Shifting from #OpentoWork to Self-Employed to market yourself as a consultant
▪️ Having a refreshed Headshot Photo to ensure you are putting your best (current) face forward in your personal brand development
▪️ Using your Header Image to market your consulting expertise
▪️ Creating a Company Page (free) on LinkedIn. How to: https://www.mellermarketing.com/blog/how-to-create-a-company-page-on-linkedin-free
▪️ And more!
Want a LinkedIn profile mini-audit? If you're a coach / consultant / solopreneur, download these 15 LinkedIn Profile tips, and follow the instructions in the final email: https://www.mellermarketing.com/list
LinkedIn "Power Hours" (Single Session, x4, x12)
Each package includes:
- LinkedIn consulting / coaching, personalized to your needs and focusing on your questions.
- Review of LinkedIn profile / company page to provide guidance / advice / recommendations
https://www.mellermarketing.com/powerhour
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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.
Visit mellermarketing.com
Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)
thing now. Hey, this is Brenda Meller, back again today for another LinkedIn profile mini audit, and I'm joined today with Tom Livingston. Hey, tom, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Good morning Brenda. How are you Good to see you.
Speaker 1:I am doing great. Looking forward to chatting with you and Tom as we get started. Why don't you tell us your name? What do you do and who do you help and who do?
Speaker 2:you help. My name is Tom Livingston. I am a career enterprise salesperson. I'm transitioning into running my own sales consulting business and I'm looking to help startups and budding entrepreneurs develop their sales and marketing approach.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. I'm going to share your LinkedIn profile up on screen here and as we get started in the conversation, tom, I want to ask you do you have any specific questions you're hoping I'll address in the profile mini audit, or are you just open to some general pointers here?
Speaker 2:to you before. I'm sort of at the beginning of this whole process. So this profile, I don't think it's going to fit with what I just talked about, but any ideas you have to transition, this would be helpful.
Speaker 1:Okay, wonderful. And the good thing is, tom and I've been talking for a little bit before we started the recording, so I know a little bit of the backstory here. And, tom, you mentioned that you've been in enterprise sales for your career and you're now starting to look at moving into consulting, so working for yourself. And the good part for you, tom, is that you're at the beginning of this process, so I can help you and give you some items that you can work at on your profile as you start to make some decisions about what the business is and what it looks like. So it's actually perfect timing for you to do this.
Speaker 1:In the pre-call we talked about the fact that you do have the open to work banner on your photo your headshot image on here, and that is because Tom has been looking for a job. So, as you start to shift from being a job seeker to being self-employed, that might be one of the fields, tom, that I suggest for you, and I'm going to address two things in the headshot photo. One is removing the open to work, because my concern here is that if I want to hire you to do sales consulting for my company, I want to make sure that you're going to be there for me and for my company. If I see open to work, I might think well, what if I hire Tom for a six month engagement and a month from now Tom gets a full-time job and says I can't help you anymore.
Speaker 1:So, having that open to work on there is a really strong signal that you're looking to become an employee of a company and if you're starting to change gears and evaluate consulting, it might be helpful to remove that so that people can see that your focus is now on growing your business. Related to that, tom, is the headshot photo, and I always tell people it's really important to keep a current headshot photo on your profile, and I'll even use myself as an example. As I decided during my last career transition that I no longer wanted to be a corporate employee, that I wanted to be self-employed, I went out to a headshot photographer and I got a new headshot photo taken and I would recommend, if you have the budget to do so, to go to a professional photo taken, and I would recommend, if you have the budget to do so, to go to a professional, because, as you know, working in enterprise sales, image is everything and we want to look like the best professional version of ourselves. Today. It's similar to Tom.
Speaker 1:If you are in enterprise sales and you're sharing sales presentation materials, collateral, people are looking at your website. They're walking into your lobby. Your company does a lot of investing in marketing to create a specific type of brand image and a quality brand image and I'm sure, tom, you've worked with organizations before where the lobby, you know you walk in as kind of dusty They've got really old magazines. No receptionist is at the door to greet you or you, or you go to a website and it says page not found or this website is under construction, and immediately you're getting not a good vibe from them, similar to LinkedIn. Our headshot photo is the first brand impression that people get of our company, so having a good looking headshot photo creates that instant recognition and also having a newer headshot photo as you start to transition to consulting can help to signal to people that you're on the new path. Does that make sense and any thoughts on the headshot photo?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I think that makes a hundred percent sense. I'm open to all that In terms of the actual headshot. I mean, should I be wearing a tie or not? I mean I don't you know.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, great question. So I like to think about who is your ideal target audience for your business and, in your best sales presentation scenario, would you be wearing a tie? Okay, you know, if you're meeting with them in person, would you be wearing a tie? Now I'm going to say for myself when I left corporate marketing which was my previous career, and I started to become a marketing consultant, linkedin, trainer I stopped wearing suits and before that time I had a closet full of gray, black and navy suits and that's pretty much what I wore all the time as a corporate employee.
Speaker 1:As a consultant, I wore more bright colors blouses, sweaters, things like that. I think I have one suit still in my closet, a black suit that I kept for funerals, but I don't wear suits anymore as a consultant. So I would say, now that you're shifting, you have the opportunity to pick attire that's going to match the attire that you would feel comfortable wearing as a consultant, and I will share that. Many of my male executive consulting clients that I work with. They are still wearing maybe you know dressed shirts, but they're not wearing ties, and they may be wearing a sports coat, but not more of a formal attire.
Speaker 2:How does?
Speaker 1:that feel for you.
Speaker 2:It's right on. I agree a hundred percent. Yeah, I'm hoping to talk to startups. They can take your tie off at the door.
Speaker 1:Yes, and startups are the you know gosh. Nowadays a lot of these younger generations, they're hoodies and t-shirts right T-shirts, yeah.
Speaker 2:T-shirts. No shoes yeah. Flip-flops.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the stuffy suit and tie might not be the type of person they want to work with as a consultant. They might want somebody who's a little bit more approachable for you, right?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Good. So let me give you a couple other pointers, and I know you're at the beginning stages of starting your business and kind of defining what that looks like. I've already heard you say you know you'd like to serve people who are startups and entrepreneurs on their journey. So I want you to think about, as you start to decide, what that brand is and what the products and services that you're offering and who you're marketing it to. I want to make sure that all of the important areas of your profile are supporting that audience. And Tom for you, as well as running Wells, who's getting into consulting I want you to think about.
Speaker 1:Your profile is not really about you. It's about you as it relates to connecting with your ideal target audience, and you want to do everything in your profile to help to illustrate how you can solve their problems and how you are serving that audience. So, for example, we've got your header image in the background, which is that rectangular block that sits behind your headshot photo. Right now it looks like it's a scene of maybe something on a beach with a really nice sunset in the background, which to me is kind of like if I'm in the lobby at a building and I walk in and they've got a really pretty piece of artwork in the background. It's something nice to look at, as opposed to sometimes you walk into buildings and they've got like a company logo or awards plaques and things like that that are in the lobby, so they're using it to merchandise the business.
Speaker 1:Similarly, I sometimes use the analogy of your header image on LinkedIn is kind of like a billboard on the side of a highway and no major advertisers are just putting a billboard of beautiful scenery. They're promoting their products, their services, their key messages, and maybe doing so in a way that speaks to the problems that they solve or the expertise that they're offering to their audience. I've seen some people, for example Tom, that will use a rhetorical question. So for you and I'm just making this up, we just started talking this morning but for you maybe it's a question like are you a startup who needs help with sales consulting, or you know entrepreneurs needing a quick fix on sales expertise? I can help Just making those up. You know, top of mind, I want to think about a message in that header that's going to immediately attract me if I'm looking for that expertise and it's going to push me away if that's not what I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Absolutely Thanks, yeah, good. And then, as you start to get more into the places where you're defining your business, your business name, et cetera, I would highly encourage you to set up a company page on LinkedIn Right now. At the top of your profile, I see enterprise sales consultants. If I scroll down to your experience section, that is essentially the current role that you have for your business, and maybe that's just a placeholder for now, but maybe in the future you create your consulting business and you call it I'm just making this up TL Consulting, for example. So maybe the business name is now called TL Consulting. What I would encourage you to do is to create a company page as soon as you define what that company name is To do. So it's free, tom, and I'm going to walk you through how to do so on screen. I will remind you this will be recorded and you can see this again on YouTube later.
Speaker 1:In the top menu bar, I want you to click on the for business icon and then scroll down to the very bottom and there's a link that will say create a company page. From here you'll choose company showcases like a sub product page, educational, institution, self-explanatory. So we choose company and then you just fill in the field. So in the name field you'll put the name of your company. Linkedin will create the URL based on that name website. If you don't have one yet, I would encourage you to put your profile URL to redirect people back there. Until the website's up, you will have to designate the industry, organization, ties and type. You can always change those later if you need to.
Speaker 1:A really important element here is your logo, because when you upload the logo to this space and then we link it to your profile, that will appear in your experience section as well as at the top of your profile, and the dimensions there are 300 by 300. Tagline is optional, but it's good to have a high-level description in there to start, and then you click on I verify that I'm an authorized representative and that is it. I mean the whole process could easily take, you know, five to 10 minutes, maybe a little longer if you don't have a logo develop. But then once you have that company page set up, tom, then you would link that company into your experience section and, similar to some of your past roles, where we can see the logo next to the company name, now you look like a real baked business, not hypothetical, like this grayish avatar reminds me of, when I visit a website and it says this page is under construction. It's not a real thing yet.
Speaker 1:So the logo helps to create that warm, fuzzy feeling that you might be further along in your business than you already are right, but it does help to create a sense of you know well-established for the business Does that make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what about the name? Do I have to change the name? Can I just stick with that name?
Speaker 1:You can stick with the name. I want you to think about you know when you have your business name defined. I want you to make sure that you're thinking about who is the audience that you are serving.
Speaker 2:Right and does that resonate with them.
Speaker 1:So if you're saying enterprise sales consultants, it sounds like you're doing sales consulting for large organizations.
Speaker 1:Now I heard you say you're looking at maybe doing sales consultings for entrepreneurs and startups. So enterprise sales consultants I don't think would connect with that group, think would connect with that group. So sometimes I recommend, if you're just getting started with your company and you're not quite sure what direction you're going to go, maybe keep the company name broader and that's why I often use like TL consulting, like your initials consulting. Now for me, I did Mellor Marketing in the beginning, even though I knew I was going to do social media and LinkedIn. I didn't want to have LinkedIn as a part of my company name in case I decided not to specialize just in LinkedIn. So think five years ahead where your business might be. Because if you say enterprise sales consultants and you end up really serving entrepreneurs and startups, then you'd have to do a name change and identity package change and all that other stuff, Whereas if you keep more of a broader company name, you won't have to go through that identity repackaging process. Does that?
Speaker 2:make sense. Oh yeah, great, thank you.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to use an example my friend Michelle Lang. I'll give her a shout out. She's in a different company now, but back in the day she had created a company called Silver Tree Marketing and she was doing a variety of things marketing strategy, research, branding, advertising and I asked her at one point I said what is silver tree marketing Like? What does silver tree mean? And she said you know, brenda, silver is my favorite color and the day I was designing my company name, I looked outside my window and there was a tree there and I just put silver tree together and it means nothing. But it's almost like naming a child. As soon as you give it the name, that is the name. It doesn't need to necessarily mean anything Gotcha, great. All right, tom, I will stop there for today. I don't want to do too much here because you're still kind of in that beginning phases of your business. But was this helpful for you?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely yeah, it was extraordinarily helpful. Thank you, good.
Speaker 1:Well, I am looking forward to watching you and your journey and supporting you by the sidelines, and I want to thank our audience, whether you're watching this live on YouTube or whether the playback on YouTube, or if you're listening to this on the podcast later. If you are a coach, consultant or solopreneur and you'd like to get a LinkedIn profile mini audit from me for free, I want to encourage you to go to mellormarketingcom slash list where you can download my free checklist of 15 LinkedIn profile tips for coaches and consultants. Watch your emails for me, because the last email in that series will be a link that you can book your profile mini audit with me. With that said, looking forward to watching your progress on LinkedIn and have a wonderful day, thanks.
