Setting Up Your Consulting Practice

As you set out to raise your visibility and the path that you decided on is creating content, then you want to think about what are the channels through which you’re going to share that content. 

So channels to think about are podcasts. That’s obviously one of my favorites. I’ve been running Unleashed now for over 200 episodes. Podcasts are great because it’s a very warm medium. People can listen to it when they’re driving or exercising or just walking around. And if people feel a nice connection with you, because they’re hearing your voice. It’s also relatively easy to set up. The other nice thing about podcasts is, if you’re doing a guest format interview, then you’re developing a relationship with that guest as well.

Blogs are fine if you love to write — a little bit more work perhaps than a podcast. But it’s a great place to put out your writing in a form that’s shorter than a longer white paper. If you have a blog, you also don’t have to make everything your own content. You can also put in links to other articles or books that you’ve read that you think are worth sharing. 

You might think about speeches. Now, speeches take the form of in-person speeches … to let’s say a local business group or at a conference. Or, you might even start by reaching out to the management consulting association at a local business school and offering giving a talk to some business school students.

You could also think about LinkedIn posts as a forum. There are LinkedIn articles as well. LinkedIn articles are longer form than posts. In a LinkedIn article, you have the opportunity to have more rich text and more multimedia. But fewer people look at LinkedIn articles. 

You could also think about posting your content on medium.com, as well as your own blog.

White papers, obviously, you can include on your website and they provide real credibility when a client asks what your experience is on a topic if you’ve actually written a white paper on it and you can share that. 

You can also think about a multi-channel strategy of creating content for one medium and then using it in multiple places. So, for example, if you do a podcast, you could have a transcript made of that podcast … either yourself, or you could hire someone to help you turn pieces of that transcript into blog posts. 

You could also turn that transcript into some LinkedIn posts. You could also have some tweets based on that podcast, so you can use it in multiple ways. You could also make some short videos out of that podcast using some of the audio, overlaying that onto some imagery and use those on YouTube or on LinkedIn. All of these are a way to just remind people that you exist, number one, and also, demonstrate credibility that you have knowledge on a topic. 

Now, when we talk about content creation, it’s also worth talking about, referenced it earlier, is if you involve your potential clients in content creation, that’s very powerful; because, your potential clients then, if let’s say you invite them as a guest on your podcast or if you interview 10 potential clients, and then write a white paper based on that; number one, they feel more engaged in the work that you’re doing and they may actually share that with their followers. Like, “Hey, I was a guest on this podcast.” Your guest may actually share that. 

So, think about what your channel strategy is going to be and pick one or two channels and commit to it. I suggest that you think about committing to publishing on some regular basis. Weekly is probably pretty good. If you’re publishing monthly or less frequently than that … it may not have enough density to actually capture people’s attention. So, my recommendation is, if you can manage it, to do your blog post or podcast at least weekly.