How Asking These Questions Can Help You Become A Better Consultant

This summer, I launched a new channel of communication with my audience – a newsletter. Called ‘The Authority’, it is a bi-weekly newsletter that shares intriguing educational stories to reflect on what really matters in your consulting work.

Every edition of the newsletter features tips, advice, and learnings, split into the following categories:

• The Big Question – this is where I answer the questions that I receive from the consultants submitted to me via email or through one of my social media channels
  
  
• The Disturbing Truth – here I share consulting-related quotes to inspire and educate
  
  
• The Irresistible Content – this section offers an overview of my latest content, allowing my subscribers to quickly bring themselves up to speed
  
  
• The Inspiring Reading – I use this section to share my learnings from the books I’m reading and recommending to the consultants
  
  
• The Inconvenient Number – here I present a piece of evidence from highly respectable research sources on the importance of building yourself up to be seen as an authority
  
  
• The Secret Backstage – I offer my subscribers a sneak peek behind the curtains of my business, sharing what tools and metrics I use for my own consulting business
  
  
• The Inevitable Learning – in this section I outline the programs I’m teaching and what consultants can expect to learn from them.

‘The Big Question’ section has been wildly successful among my subscribers. After the first couple of editions, I started receiving dozens of questions per week.

I do my best to provide in-depth answers. Sometimes I manage to do so within the scope of the newsletters, while other times I write an entire article on my blog to make sure that I address the question in full. 

Since I was able to share much valuable content with my subscribers through the ‘The Big Question’ section of my newsletter, I thought I’d present a summary of it here. I believe the questions I’m asked are relevant to a much larger audience of consultants, and I hope the answers I provide will help them grow their consulting business.

Below is a quick preview of the questions I’ve answered over the last few months.

I recommend going through my answers to all of them as you will find a ton of useful information. However, if you are pressed for time, click on the question you are most interested in and it'll take you directly to that answer.

1. What is the single biggest habit change consultants need to accomplish?
2. How can I use Linkedin in the most effective & efficient way as a consultant?
3. Luk, you teach 'narrow focus' and/or specialization as a consultant. But that would mean more income risk for me (covering fewer expertise domains). How to go about it?
4. What would be the ideal status as a visible authority I could strive for? I mean the kind of 'success measures' of visible authority.
5. Do I need to be on all the social media platforms as a consultant? How to go about social media as a consultant?
6. What mistakes do you see consultants making?
7. How can I best explain (or 'promote') my consulting expertise to my prospects or market?
8. How can I save time as a consultant to re-invest in building my visibility?
9. I work in a large consultancy firm and would like to get more support from marketing to improve my external visibility. How can I best collaborate with marketing?
10. Could you give us a few ‘secrets’ on how you are able to produce such a large volume of content?
11. I’ve always been focusing a lot on expanding and building my relationships and network to grow my consulting business. I’ve read a few articles from you challenging such an approach. Why?
12. What are the common mistakes when developing content as a consultant?

#1 - What is the single biggest habit change consultants need to accomplish? 

I got that question during a webinar. The answer is actually quite easy: Start sharing!

Share your unique stories and experiences in an authentic and passionate way and you will organically create a strong and loyal follower/client base! Here's what I have been sharing all those years:

• What did I learn in the project trenches about the biggest client pains that others could learn from? 
• Which experiences did I acquire that could be valuable for others? 
• What were the unique client stories (with successes and struggles) that could inspire others to pursue better outcomes?

When I talk about this, I always immediately get the following comment: Aren’t you afraid that, by sharing all your ‘secrets’, your clients won’t need you anymore? The answer is a big NO, I am not afraid at all! I wrote an article about this question, here's the link. 

#2 - How can I use Linkedin in the most effective & efficient way as a consultant? 

Leveraging LinkedIn as a consultant is extremely important (from a business growth standpoint)!

But most consultants have:

• Poor and foggy LinkedIn profiles (dramatically diluting their professional reputation)
• Expertise-disconnected sharing of all kinds of low-value stuff
• Ineffective social media usage (no TLC-strategy at all: from Traffic to Leads to Clients)

If you want to be serious about growing your consulting business and starting to attract your ideal clients in a more consistent and predictable way, you will have to get comfortable with LinkedIn, the T-L-C-way.

With a (highly automated) smart approach, 60% of my website traffic comes from LinkedIn. On top, LinkedIn is my main source of email list building. 

The drivers of that success:

• I post quality content every day, the weekend included, no exception
• 98% of my LinkedIn activity is the distribution of my own content
• My content always discusses typical consultancy challenges (research-based)
• My target group is 100% clear, I have an 'unreasonably' narrow focus, my LI-profile can't be more clear
• My LinkedIn content is repurposed from my existing evergreen content 
• The sharing/distribution is 100% automated (using Hubspot)
• Every post/article is T-L-C-optimized (the main source of email list building)
• I am obsessed with strong visuals, colors & titles (production is outsourced)
• I only spent 4 (smart) hours/week developing/sharing LI-content, most people are extremely surprised by my HVLI (High Volume, Low Investment)
• My approach is easy to copy, however, 'high-quality evergreen content' is foundational

#3 - Luk, you teach 'narrow focus' and/or specialization as a consultant. But that would mean more income risk for me (covering fewer expertise domains). How to go about it?

I know it's very tempting to cover multiple domains as a consultant, especially in difficult Corona-times. You are trying to keep all the options open, I get that (I've been there, got the T-shirt). Moving to a narrow focus is a scary exercise and requires guts and courage (and a certain financial buffer is helpful). 

However, it's almost impossible these days to be successful if you keep focusing on multiple domains as a consultant.

There’s too much saturation in the very crowded consulting market, too many competitors doing the same thing. It’s a losing battle in both visibility (search engines/online traffic) and trust-building with prospects . Your (focused) competitor is only 1 click away. 

My short advice if you are covering multiple expertise domains: move to a more narrow focus step-by-step.

It's less scary and you don't have to abandon everything at once. You can create special focus (e.g. cases, content, visibility, social proof, website, social profile, etc.) on your strongest expertise domain (your sweet spot) in small doses.

I am helping a few consultants as we speak with their migration to a narrow niche and they are leaving 'the old domains' behind in a (careful, but well outlined) fade-out approach, gradually growing their single-domain visible authority. You can easily copy such a progressive, iterative approach.

I am working with a few other consultants and they are merging some of their key expertise areas in a smart and unique (narrow) 'blend'. 

Every problem has a solution. There are no rules here, just clever approaches. But I am 100% sure: you will never regret having narrowed your consulting focus!

#4 - What would be the ideal status as a visible authority I could strive for? I mean the kind of 'success measures' of visible authority.

Becoming visible is something most consultants really battle with. The truth is that visibility is the only thing that will make you stand out in a crowded and very competitive consulting world. As I always say: your competitor is only 1 click away! 

I've been thinking quite a bit about this question during the past weeks. I wrote down several 'ideal circumstances' I've experienced as a go-to expert in my markets. Here's my list of 'alternative indicators' of consulting performance. 

• Enjoying a reliable (almost predictable), steady flow of new clients (I never had to worry)
• Receiving exclusive expert invitations to RFP’s (instead of begging/applying), I got invited many times to help prepare the RFP...the ultimate go-to expert recognition
• Receiving invitations to speak and teach around the world, achieving incredible market visibility and boosting your go-to reputation in your industry
• Achieving (almost) magnetic retention of existing clients who are more than happy to provide outstanding references
• Succeeding with close to zero marketing costs (organic growth because of the visibility in the market)
• Prequalifying your new clients organically through your content (it took a while, but ultimately new prospects knew what they could expect from me)
• Daring to ask better/higher rates (without getting into persuasion, discussion, or negotiation)
• Doing ‘upstream work’ most of the time (strategic guidance, teaching, and diagnostic-like advice. It will keep you away from low rate implementation 'freelance-type' of work.
• Having the ability to protect 10-15% of your time to re-invest in deepening your expertise, improving your visibility, and growing your business

I hope you can learn from these 'success measures'. I see many 'indicators' in consulting, but these hardly ever appear on lists, which I always find very strange.

#5 - Do I need to be on all the social media platforms as a consultant? How to go about social media as a consultant? 

I could write pages and pages about this, but let me try to keep it crisp and clear.

But before diving into this, I'd like to say that I've learned to be extremely efficient with social media. I see a lot of people struggling and getting overwhelmed. I am sharing content every day (yes!) and never get overwhelmed at all. I am totally relaxed about it. The success drivers: focus, efficiency, automation. Here are my 3 key messages:

1. Where are your clients hanging out? That should be the main criterium to decide in which medium you invest your core effort. Most consultants are working in the B2B space, and most of those clients are active on LinkedIn. That's the basket where I put all my eggs (see previous 'The Authority'). I do share my content on Facebook and Twitter, but that's fully automated (copy from LinkedIn and no extra effort). I will start investing in video in 2021 because video is the fastest growing social medium right now. 
   
   
2. Producing cornerstone content is key to success. I am devoting a considerable amount of time to develop and plan my evergreen, long-format content. It’s my #1 priority. It has always been my #1 priority. It made me stand out in the past. It was a key driver of trust and credibility building and, as a result, of course, of business growth. I am working with a detailed content calendar to plan and organize the next 6 months. All my social media sharing originates from the repurposing of my already existing cornerstone content (no extra work). I only spent max. 3 hours/week on social media. Because it's a well-oiled machine, most people cannot believe this degree of efficiency when they study my social media output. 
   
   
3. Sharing of the repurposed content is fully automated. I have explained it in this article, including a screenshot of automation output via my Hubspot business platform. All my content gets shared in an automated way. There are many (free) possibilities, such as Hootsuite, Buffer (I used a free Buffer version for almost a decade), etc.

I hope I was able to answer the question of the reader. One final comment: please don't get overwhelmed. You don't need to be active everywhere. I would never do that. There are many common misconceptions about how much time it takes to develop and share content, and the bottom line is: it takes FAR less time than you think. Focus, efficient repurposing, automation! 

#6 - What mistakes do you see consultants making?

The 8 main mistakes I see consultants make all the time.

1. No focus, no specialization, no narrow niche, saying yes to everything to protect income/revenue (the generalist consultant, the jack of all trades, at risk to disappear) (see my blog post)
2. Offering-focused positioning (if at all) instead of outcome-positioning (evolve from ‘this is what I/we do’ to ‘this is the transformation, outcome or impact I/we will achieve’)
3. Poor quality thought leadership content with inconsistent sharing/distribution. Poor visibility and trust-building as a result (see my blog post)
4. Poor and foggy social media profile (dramatically diluting your pitch) (see also this Linkedin post)
5. Ineffective social media usage (no TLC-strategy at all: from traffic to leads to clients via social media)
6. Too much belief in references and relationships (important though, but an unreliable, uncertain, and risky long term strategy) and a simultaneously poor approach to gather problem-resolution (or output-driven) social proof (case studies, client testimonials,...) (see this blog post)
7. Accepting lower rates to get contracts (the vicious fear of missing out, the ultimate erosion of authority)
8. No (good) use of (inbound) marketing systems (no systematic new client generation) (see my blog post)

#7 - How can I best explain (or 'promote') my consulting expertise to my prospects or market?

Consulting is a credence business: prospects need to find (Google!), like, and trust us before buying. 

I keep repeating: marketing in consultancy is NOT about sales. Marketing isn’t about pushing a product or service. Instead, marketing is about sharing your knowledge and providing authentic value to your clients (trust-building). 

That's why content-driven visibility is the only thing that is going to make you stand out in a crowded and very competitive consulting world. The more you open up, the more your clients and prospects can relate to you as a consultant. 

Related content: Doing 'Sales' in consulting is not always easy (my LinkedIn post)

2. Focus, focus, focus

I could write pages about the topic of focus but here's the essence: to better connect with your clients (both off- and online), you have to niche down and demonstrate that you’re an expert in a single, narrow area. 

Consulting clients are searching for subject matter experts and trusted advisors to help solve their problems. Clients have more options today than ever before - there are more consultants and experts and advisors than ever in the past and buyers can find anything in seconds. Your competitor is only 1 click away!

The world's biggest authorities relentlessly say ‘No’ to protect and maintain their narrow positioning. 

Related content: Why you should learn to say NO to grow your consulting business

3. Your unique story is your starting point

Your consulting expertise is probably not truly exceptional but YOU certainly are. Keep your audience at the forefront of your mind and your goals, and use your unique story to show them how they can implement what YOU have learned to achieve similar results. That's what I did all those years.

Related content: Consultants, unlock the teacher in you (my LinkedIn post)

Imagine you are at a conference and a prospect asks you what you do. I bet that 98% of all consultants would give a poor and foggy answer. In 30 seconds, you should be able to provide a crystal clear pitch about who you are, who your clients are, what your problem-solving expertise is, and how you solve those client problems. If you can't, you will dramatically dilute your reputation. 

Here's my own EP: How good is your public profile as a consultant?

It's not enough to have an elevator pitch, prospects also want to understand how you perceive current trends and how they might be causing the challenges clients will be facing tomorrow.

Here's my current POV (on my home page): "As consultants, we need to stand out! We need to consistently win profitable clients that value our expertise. Referrals work, but the pipeline doesn’t feel as reliable as it once did. The market has shifted.

In a world where professional services buyers act like consumers and can find anything in seconds, whether searching for a new pair of shoes or for an expert to solve their business problem, how the heck will we stand out in a very competitive, crowded consulting market? Your competitor is only 1 click away!"

6. Explain your 'Driver of Transformation' (DOT)

The DOT approach is an important way of thinking about your consulting offering as a catalyst for change or transformation. The DOT approach focuses on moving the client from point A (problem state) to point B (problem solved) and explains your specific Driver/Vehicle (your 'secret sauce') of transformation. In your DOT, you need to explain the future state of your client, not your product or service. With your DOT, you provoke or inspire 'The Promised Land' in a credible way.

7. Your social proof

Last but not least you present evidence that you can make the story come true. I always did this with a double approach:

1) writing case studies (success stories) about how I've helped other clients (similar to the prospect) achieving 'The Promised Land', and/or...

2) pain resolution recommendations from clients, explaining how I had helped them to achieve 'The Promised Land' (and not just commenting: he/she is a nice person to work with). 

Conclusion

Many consultants struggle to translate their expertise into an easy-to-understand, credible message. Unfortunately, without a clear message, a consultant can never get the right connection with their target clients, leading to poor relevance and visibility in Google on top. 

Clients are searching for subject matter experts and trusted advisors to help solve their problems. And those clients have more options today than ever before - there are more consultants and experts and advisors than there ever have been in the past and buyers can find anything in seconds.

David C. Baker: "If you don't know what to say, you aren't an expert. If you don't know how to say it, you haven't practiced enough. If you find too many audiences when directing your writing, you haven't focused enough".

#8 - How can I save time as a consultant to re-invest in building my visibility?

For those who know me a little bit, I am obsessed with organizing my work to free up time for business development, and I am on a ruthless search for productivity gains, systems, and processes. People are always surprised when I tell them about ‘having a time strategy’.

Here are my 3 biggest time-saving approaches, time tested a decade long:

I already talked about focus earlier in this post, but more from a marketing perspective.

And here’s the focus rationale from a time-saving perspective. Earlier, I’ve explained the development of the critical components of an expert positioning:

• Your unique expert story (combining specific expertise, experience, and credentials) to build trust with your prospects
• Your positioning statement, explaining exactly who you serve (your audience), what outcomes you deliver, and your ‘DOT’, driver of transformation: the way you bring your clients from point A (problem state) to point B (problem solved). See also my LinkedIn post.
• Your POV (point of view): explaining the current and future trends in your market or expertise domain that will impact your clients (and you should know everything!)
• Your social proof: hard evidence that you can make the client transformation come true, e.g. by publishing and sharing case studies on an ongoing basis, research data, or problem resolution recommendations from your clients

Can you imagine doing all that work for multiple expertise domains and still finding the time to deliver your client work (and remain credible)? Impossible! If you keep saying ‘Yes’ to everything because you’re either scared of losing opportunities or you just want to be nice to your existing clients, you’ll never have time to structurally grow your business.

As a consultant, you need to fully grasp the details, the background, the context, the relationships, the trend(s), the characteristics, the frequency, the volume, the typical stakeholders involved, etc. of the critical pains of your target clients (in your narrow market). If you cover multiple expertise areas, that’s totally impossible to accomplish.

The world's biggest authorities relentlessly say ‘No’ to protect their time and maintain their narrow positioning. Focus!

In their striving for visible authority, I teach consultants to remain productive (and save lots of time) 'by staying upstream' as much as possible: packaging their expertise into 'a strategic system' and to price it as a premium diagnostic service (upstream being strategic versus downstream being operational/implementation support).

As authority you'd stay (far) away from implementation work, that’s how I ‘survived’ the past decade. Strategy, roadmapping, diagnosing. That’s your new mindset to save time as a consultant (and authority).

Many consultants are still providing highly customized services rather than standardized packages (and are afraid to move to highly standardized approaches).

Even if they focus on a single expertise domain, they may still have a hard time packaging that expertise into an easy-to-sell system.

As a result of not having a packaged system, they risk moving 'downstream' quickly (highly customized, difficult to scale operational/implementation work) in their consulting activity rather than “staying upstream” (standardized, strategic, diagnostic higher paid work – process and value-driven, much easier to scale).

Offering highly customized services is the biggest draw on your time I could think of and it is also immensely difficult to reverse that downward spiral. It will burn you out one day, watch out!

Here are a few more time-saving benefits of packaging a service that I learned over the years:

• It reduced the time it took me to develop a plan of action;
• It reduced the time I spent explaining the service and the pricing;
• It reduced the time clients spent on decision making;
• It reduced the time lost due to implementation scope erosion, typical for customized approaches (spending far more hours than planned and extremely difficult to give client pushback);
• It solved problems in a time-saving repeatable way (which also led to better pattern recognition, thus deepening the expertise);
• It reduced the time to train and align team members, freelancers, or colleagues who were supporting me in my work;
• It reduced the overall amount of time I spent working on client accounts, freeing up time for business development.

CONCLUSION: Not having (making) enough time is a mindset! 

I’ve always set myself the target of creating actions that will lead to at least a 20-30% in available time to devote to my content marketing and business development. I am damned serious when I say that 50% of my past success as a consultant was my state of mind to be able to free-up 20-30% of my time to grow my consulting business.

If you really want to develop your consulting business, you will have to get rid of the vicious mindset that tells you ‘I don’t have time to win more clients’ or ‘I don’t have time to nurture my existing clients’.

#9 - I work in a large consultancy firm and would like to get more support from marketing to improve my external visibility. How can I best collaborate with marketing? 

Contrary to popular belief, marketing is not merely about selling stuff. Marketing in consulting is all about building long-term visibility and trust.

As I’ve seen time and time again, consultants don’t like marketing and sales. Many of the consultants I’ve met in the past believe that marketing is somehow ‘beneath them’.

This type of thinking is just plain wrong. Marketing is not separate from you, as a consultant. Whether you like it or not, you are marketing yourself all the time. A good consultant is a good marketer of his/her expertise.

While there are a number of reasons behind this fact, the important thing is that you move past these beliefs and embrace marketing as a critical trust-building, visibility-improving activity.

Unfortunately, many of the marketing departments in larger consulting firms are not really focused a lot on supporting the senior people with structurally developing and maintaining their external visibility and to help them with building trust in their markets/industry.

I am doing quite a bit of workshops with consultancy firms and in this article, I’ve summarized how senior consultants and marketing can best collaborate to improve the consultant’s visible authority in the market. Make sure to check it out in full, but here’s the gist:

• define a crystal clear positioning of your expertise in the market,
• become obsessed with content-driven inbound marketing,
• build writing capacity within your existing consulting team to support the development of new content and execute the content calendar,
• take co-ownership (with marketing) of the localization of global content (most large consultancy firms have top-notch global content),
• grow your external visibility and exposure via a well-thought BBC approach: Book (or eBooks, white papers,...), Blogging (writing) on important external platforms (such as industry associations) and your very own social media (LinkedIn most likely), and speaking at important Conferences,
• organize the social proof of your client work.

• be the experts in facilitating client persona ideation workshops together with your authorities (and his/her consulting teams),
• take ownership of the overall content strategy and content calendar management for each of your authorities,
• become obsessed with the system of repurposing of existing content,
• leverage global content by localizing it together with the expert-consultant,
• become the experts (or get external support) in Google keyword analysis and SEO,
• support your authorities with building a high quality ‘authority page’ of their profile,
• become the gurus of marketing technology and automation, email list building (to nurture new/existing clients with new findings, learnings, trends), and social media (become inbound content-driven instead of outbound event-driven).

#10 - Could you give us a few ‘secrets’ on how you are able to produce such a large volume of content?

Consistency is one of the key elements of getting measurable results from your content. Your content machine should be well-oiled and diligently maintained. I see fellow consultants post a LinkedIn article every few months and then fail to get any meaningful traction and leads. That’s because one-off pieces that are published outside of a larger strategy will never deliver the type of returns that a robust content machine can.

That’s where a content machine comes in, so let’s dive into it. 

I have set up a process that allows me to generate a large volume of content and distribute it with a high level of efficiency. This question prompted me to write a blog post, so do check out my detailed response here.

Here's a quick recap.

Step 1: Identify your content inspiration sources. As a consultant, you have plenty. These are my content sources:

• The market research I commissioned before launching my services to identify the typical pains and gains of my prospects (and I keep researching on an ongoing basis)
• My communication with the consultants via my newsletter (readers send me questions about their problems/challenges)
• My daily interaction with clients (calls, emails,...)

Step 2: Create a content hub that will centralize all your content efforts

There are many ways to create a system that will allow you to publish your content, send out newsletters, schedule social media posts, and track all of the efforts. Hubspot is the system of my choice.

Step 3: Set up a system for promoting your content – the machine.

Almost 100% of my content – blog articles, social media posts, newsletter – is published and promoted according to a schedule. While I, of course, engage with my network on social media often spontaneously, my own content goes through my content machine.

Read the full article with all the details

#11 - I’ve always been focusing a lot on expanding and building my relationships and network to grow my consulting business. I’ve read a few articles from you challenging such an approach. Why?

This is not the first time I come across a question like this. “Network until you drop” is how we, as consultants, are basically taught to go about business development. While building relationships and expanding your network certainly can help, my argument has always been that such reliance is dangerous.

I was never reliant on my network to grow my consulting business. Building relationships was never my ultimate goal but rather the result of my subject expertise, my visibility, and my reputation on the market.

I’ve been making an effort to provide in-depth answers to the questions coming from you, my subscribers. That’s why I once again put together an entire blog article dedicated to this subject.

In it, I outline not only the dangers and the limitations posed by a relationship-first approach, but also offer an alternative – and, in my view, a significantly more reliable and scalable – model for growing your consulting business.

The dangers of relying on your network to grow your business include:

• very low control over your network,
• inherent churn risk,
• network’s demographics can get out of sync,
• too much noise in your network,
• wasting too much time trying to impress contacts,
  and others.

The strategy I propose – a far more reliable one – allows you to create a four-pillar foundation for your business growth:

• Positioning should come first 
• Becoming a Visible Authority comes second
• Social proof comes third
• Relationships- and networking-building comes last

Read my answer in full here

#12 - What are the common mistakes when developing content as a consultant?

Here are some of the most common mistakes I’ve witnessed (and many of them, I’ve committed myself when I was starting out).

Big mistake #1: your content doesn’t serve these 4 core principles

Developing content as a consultant serves these 4 main objectives (I’ll keep it short) and if you cannot tick these boxes without hesitation, you are undermining your consulting business!

• Getting visible: If you are reluctant to embrace content-driven marketing (writing, presenting, teaching,...) as a consultant, nobody will ever find you on the internet! Content-driven visibility is the only thing that is going to make you stand out in a crowded and very competitive consulting world. Now even more than before! The more you open up, the more your clients and prospects can relate to you as a consultant. Your competitor is only one click away!
  
  
• Building trust: Sharing content is the best possible way to build a strong and credible reputation as a consultant. Without trust in your expertise, nobody will ever call you to meet!
  
  
• Grow traffic: If over time your content is not driving organic traffic to your website (and your services as an expert), you won’t have a business! Of course, this is not a sprint but a marathon.
  
  
• Generate leads: If you’re able to grow the traffic to your content, it’s an absolute must to convert that traffic to subscribers. If your content is of high value, readers will be happy to subscribe to receive more and you will have more opportunity to get visible and to build more trust in your expertise.

Big mistake #2: your content doesn't answer the problems your target audience is struggling with 

When I develop my content, I always keep the pain points and challenges of my audience at the forefront of my mind and my goals, and I use all my learnings to show them how they can implement what I’ve learned to achieve similar results. That's what I did all those years.

Your main objective? Educating your buyers/clients, share best practices with them, tell them what to look out for, give them valuable tips on how to achieve success, demonstrate how you’ve helped others in their shoes. Value, value, value! And share that value. Share. And share again.

And here’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of sharing your expertise: Why You Should Share Your Expertise To Grow Your Consulting Business

Big mistake #3: your content development and distribution process is suboptimal

• Lacking consistency: allocating time on a regular basis to create content is a must. You can’t post one article today, another one in two months, and a third one six months later. This will do nothing for your visibility. Make sure to post on a consistent basis.
  
  
• Not recycling (repurposing) your content: splitting a longer article into shorter posts, turning articles into visuals, expanding an existing article into a longer one – there are so many ways to recycle content! Failing to do that is just adding more work to your schedule. I’m quite fanatic about this and recently wrote this article: My 1-Day-Per-Week Content Machine That Consultants Can Replicate
  
  
• Failing to identify a set of keywords to support your content strategy: Google is our new boss. You must be mindful of that when putting together a schedule of content. You have to spend time researching relevant keywords and do your best to organically integrate them into your content. I use the Ubersuggest keyword tool for my content research. I will explain how I use this tool in my next newsletter. 

These were the 12 'Big Questions' from my 'The Authority' newsletter in 2020

I hope you found these answers useful. At the bare minimum, I want you to use these questions to take a step back and evaluate how you market your consulting business. I will continue answering the questions that come from my readers – both solo consultants and those working for larger firms – and will periodically update this article with the answers. 

Make sure to sign up and you’ll get access to the knowledge I’m sharing with my subscribers. No BS. Pure learning.