Will Bachman 00:02
Welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’m your host Will Bachman. In Episode 238, I shared 17 ideas on technology tools to set up when you have some downtime between projects, and you’re looking for a way to use the time effectively. In today’s episode, I’m going to discuss ideas for how to invest in marketing when you have some spare capacity. So here are iE 14 ideas. Okay, number one, get a logo designed for your firm, you might consider a crowdsourcing site such as crowdspring.com, or 99 designs, or you can find many talented logo designers on Fiverr. That’s f i v e r r fiverr.com. Number two, get once you have a logo, get business cards, I personally really love mu.com and link is in the show notes. Number three, get correspondence cards for sending a nice handwritten note. I like the note cards sold by mu.com, which are 4.13 inches by 5.82 inches in size. And it’s just a really nice touch. And I personally like the thicker ones just makes a nice touch to send a handwritten note so rarely done these days. Number four, get a professional photo and don’t take it yourself, I recommend getting a photo against the plane background. You know white background is nice with you wearing whatever you’d wear to a job interview in your industry. Really, an iPhone or Android phone can take pretty good pictures these days. If you are going to use a phone, don’t do the widescreen try to do you know zoomed in a bit like the new iPhone, try the 2x screening a little bit of a telephoto gets a slightly better photo portrait. Number five, update your contact info on all of your different alumni sites, which for you may include college grad school and larger consulting firms typically have alumni sites, there’s always a chance someone you once knew maybe looking you up trying to get in contact with you update your confident contact info there, as well as of course on LinkedIn. Number six, get a PowerPoint template designed for your firm. Number seven, update your LinkedIn profile. In Episode 211 of this show, I discuss LinkedIn profile best practices for independent consultants. And you can pair that episode up with Episode 235 where I interviewed Mark Williams, who is goes by Mr. LinkedIn has the podcast LinkedIn formed. Number eight, update your resume, I see a lot of independent consultants who haven’t bothered to update the resume. Sometimes they’ll send it to me and it’s still less than it did last employer. While the resume may seem old school, some clients still are old school. And they just want to see a plain resume in addition to your LinkedIn profile. Number nine, create a bio page in PowerPoint format. If you partner with a boutique consulting firm, or with an expert network or a staffing firm, they may ask you for a bio page to include in a proposal to their client. Most likely, they’ll ask you to update your bio to fit their format. But it certainly helps a lot. If you have one that’s ready and off the shelf that you can just edit number 10 create a one page overview of your practice, or a three page or a five page version. It’s this is tough, it’s not easy to create this kind of marketing collateral. But you often do get asked Oh, just send me one page or send me a quick overview of your firm. And instead of just pointing people to a website, it is nice to have a short overview of what industries your work on what functional areas you work on. Maybe a quick case study, quick bio of you. Just a quick overview of your firm. Number 11. Create a project list. In Episode 140 of this show. I speak with Jay Martin, who maintains a project list that I consider best practice it’s about 20 pages long, he normally doesn’t send the whole thing out, he’ll copy and paste from it. But having that much longer complete exhaustive list is is a really impressive thing and it also allows him to respond very quickly when someone asks for some relevant experience, you can just copy and paste. Number 12 create a proposal template number 13 sanitized some samples of your work. It’s far more powerful to show than tell. In Episode 121. I shared some ideas on how to create a sanitized portfolio of work and why it is such a helpful investment. Number 14. update or create a website. That’s not not an exhaustive list by any means. I hope you heard a few ideas that you found helpful. And I’d love to hear what other investments you are making in marketing. One other thing, if you have some downtime and have been meaning to give this show a five star review on iTunes, now would be a great time to knock that out as well. Thanks for listening.