How do you learn ways you can grow in your career and your business?
Personally, I’ve found the best way to grow in your career and/or business is to create new services or products.
Why?
Because creating new services or products forces you to…
- Listen deeply to what your customers want
- Think strategically about how you can help them get that
- Build iterations of your service or product, improving it each time based on customer feedback
- Market your product so that your customers know you, like you, and trust you
- Sell your product so that people use your product or service— and so that you can generate revenue and continue to improve your product
- Deliver results and keep your customers happy
It’s very difficult to create, market, and sell something new.
But if you can do it successfully, you’ll learn and practice all of the invaluable career/entrepreneurship skills.
I think that everyone should create their own unique product or service — and then, try to sell it. It will be the best education you ever receive.
Will SEO work for my business or startup?
It depends on how specialized your business or startup is.
Let’s say you want to start a logo design business.
Wouldn’t it be nice to rank on the first page of Google for “logo design”?
That would send you a lot of organic traffic.
So, you do some research to find out what that would take.
Uh oh.
It has a nice search volume — 781K per month…
…but it would be super hard to rank on the first page.
It might take years of consistent, high-quality content and backlink-building to rank in the top 10 for “logo design.”
Instead of trying to rank for “logo design”, you start looking for other options.
You really like designing logos for professional services firms — specifically, logos for accounting businesses.
What if you could rank on the first page for “accounting logo design”?
Now that’s much more achievable.
Sure, the global search volume is much lower at 350…
…but it would be “easy” to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.
Within a few months, you could rank in the top 10 for “accounting logo design” — and start sending targeted traffic to your website.
This is how you make SEO work for your new business or startup.
Generally, the higher the search volume, the more competition you’ll face.
So go for keywords with a smaller search volume. Less competition = easier to rank.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is my personal favorite method for generating traffic.
Doing SEO means ranking a page or post on your website in the top 3 spots of Google so that more people click and visit your website.
Here are the advantages of SEO:
- It’s free. You don’t have to pay a cent to generate thousands of people to your website.
- It’s evergreen. I wrote an article in 2016 that still generates thousands of prospects to my website every month.
- It generates higher quality leads. Ranking at the top of Google makes your website look more trusted (as opposed to just paying to be at the top).
That said, it does have it’s disadvantages:
- It’s slow. For competitive keywords, it can take many weeks or months to rank on the first page.
- Building backlinks is difficult. Get ready to send a lot of emails to ask for links— and to get rejected most of the time.
- It requires good writing skills (or genuine interest in a topic). Writing is the most important SEO skill — and if you can’t write good content, you’ll have a tough time ranking your content.
SEO is a long-term play. You won’t get instant results.
But if you stick with it, it can be the best marketing tactic for your business.
What are your top 5 tips for establishing a personal professional brand?
1- Be known for something specific. SKILL for INDUSTRY. SEO for dentists. Social media for museums. Be a specialist. Be the big fish in the small pond. There’s less competition.
2 – Make a personal website. A personal website makes your brand work for you 24/7. It’s your digital clone. It does your networking for you. It’s your own digital real estate. And it’s your legacy.
3 – Write. Writing is the best thing you can do to improve your thinking. It helps you demonstrate your expertise. It will separate you from everyone else who isn’t writing. Writing makes you better.
4 – Provide value. Make your personal brand more about others than about yourself. Create to help people solve problems. Help people get results.
5 – Promote yourself. There’s no point in having a personal brand if you don’t promote it. And if you provide value, you owe it to people to promote yourself. Don’t be selfish — promote yourself.
If you practice these 5 tips, your personal professional brand will be leaps and bounds above the average.