You’re putting yourself out there, being visible, speaking up and sharing your message, and that’s a great start, but if you want to have an impact, your next step is to build your influence.
If you’ve been following me for a while and / or have taken on my visibility challenge, you’ll know that the first thing I encourage you to do when becoming more visible is to identify your why.
When you structure your visibility campaign around reasons which are meaningful to you, this allows you to focus your effort on the things that really matter. And, when you show up and talk about these things in a way that makes a positive difference to other people, they start to notice and pay attention to you.
Consistently, showing up and speaking out about these things results in you:
- becoming clearer on your message,
- picking up more knowledge
- developing a better understanding of how to explain it to others.
Over time, people start to see you as the person to go to on this particular topic.
Notice that this isn’t necessarily about you being seen as an expert. You don’t need to know everything about a topic to have an influence:
- you may be the person who knows who the experts are and helps others to understand what they are saying
- you might have a unique perspective that changes the way people think about things
- you could be helping create the right environment to discover information that’s completely unknown.
Your influence comes from positioning yourself as someone who adds value on a particular topic or area, and when that area is something you care about, that’s when your authenticity shines through.
It can take time to build influence, and some audiences take more time than others, so you may need to be patient, but there are ways to grow more quickly.
Over the rest of this month, I’ll be sharing how to accelerate your influence, using different platforms and approaches to reach more people and grow your credibility in an authentic way. All of this will build on the core elements of the visibility campaign:
- know your reasons for being visible
- identify your stakeholders/ audience
- align your message to what matters to them
- keep on having conversations
- listen, reflect and review…
If you’d like support with any of these areas, a great starting point is the content from the Visibility Challenge.
If you’d prefer a one-to-one discussion to get personalised support around your own visibility campaign you can book a one-off visibility strategy session with me at any time using this link.
And if you’d like to get these blog posts delivered directly to your inbox on a weekly basis, sign up for my email newsletter here.
