Boomers, It's Time To Be Visible

This series of blogs will walk you through increasing your visibility. If you want to know how much visibility you have in the REAL world of online…Google your name. If your name doesn’t show up until the twenty-fifth page, you have a visibility problem. Why should you care? You care because that’s how professionals find the movers and shakers in business. Even if you don’t care about being a mover/shaker, you do care about being relevant and perceived as a professional.

So, let’s look at three ways to let the online world know who you are and what your value is. Consider this activity as your marketing strategy. Remember that being online and having a Facebook or LinkedIn accounts don’t mean anything unless you actively work these channels:

• LinkedIn – join at least five groups and contribute to the discussion boards by asking probing and interesting questions. Something like “What trends are you seeing in business?” or “How can we better engage our clients?”. You may not get any feedback or answers at first so you need to consistently ask questions or provide answers and information to others who pose questions. You want two things to happen with this strategy. First, you want your name to become familiar and you also want to become an information source.

• Join Twitter and contribute to it every day. Again, it’s all about consistency and participation. Start a campaign to educate people about your industry and share articles links that are interesting. Start following people who share info you learn from and enjoy.

• Write an article on LinkedIn every month. Write about a topic that you can speak as an expert. Writing these articles builds your reputation. Make you pieces engaging, crisp and to the point. Read them out loud to yourself before your publish. You’ll appreciate your great writing style when you hear it out loud. Aim to entertain your audience and don’t go into details….you’ll lose’em.

Start thinking of yourself as the product. Your skills, experience, flexibility, common sense and business acumen are your features. The benefits of your features are the ability to save time and money because you can get things done. You know how to move forward and form teams of people to projects completed. You know how to communicate across generations and management level. However no on will ever know about you unless you tell them….nicely.