As an entrepreneur, an important question to ask yourself is, ‘Do I have a visibility strategy and does it bring me joy?’ If yes, fantastic – no need to read on! If no, here are three areas you can focus your visibility strategy on:

1. Traffic
2. Connection
3. Authority

First up is deciding which is most important to your business right now.

If you need more people knowing about you (more ‘eyeballs on your work’ is the colloquialism), then traffic is the one to focus on. You may have spent a lot of time building a connection with your community but if your numbers are capped then traffic is the area to focus on.

All of the actions that falls out from this strategy relate to bringing more people to your website or shop front if you run a brick and mortar business. Things like SEO and improving your visibility in search engines and appearing on other people’s platforms as a guest are all actions you might take to increase traffic.

Now apply the Marie Kondo method to deciding which actions you’ll take to increase your traffic:

1. what are you already doing to increase traffic?
2. does it bring you joy?
3. if not, stop
4. if yes, great – keep going
5. what other traffic increasing action might be needed that feels joyful?

Throughout the process you’ll want to be clearing your visibility blocks to ensure you’re not sabotaging yourself or receiving mixed internal messages about what does and doesn’t bring you joy. (Internal blocks will often convince you there’s no joy in something when in fact, it’s merely resistance to taking action. They’ll also stop you from looking for a joyful path in the first place so it’s super important to be aware of that.) Some of the big visibility blocks when it comes to building traffic relate to being seen by strangers, being seen as successful, being vulnerable and feeling unsafe with being seen.

CONNECTION

If you have a good amount of new people finding out about you each day, week, or month, then connection may be something you need to focus on next. Whenever you’re feeling disconnected from your community, it’s time to bring connection to the forefront of your visibility strategy. For me this is about upping the intimacy between you and your community. Perhaps you spend more time chatting with people on socials or in a facebook group you manage. Perhaps you post a survey or encourage people to have a chat with you on skype and let you know where they’re at and what they need from you. Perhaps you host an event. There are so many ways to increase connection within your community. The key thing is, will it bring you joy?

So if you’ve decided increasing your connection is the strategy you’ll be focusing on for this business season, then be sure to work through the Marie Kondo method to decide which community building and connection actions you’re going to take.

1. clear your visibility blocks to intimacy and to being seen as a leader
2. what are you already doing to build a connection with your community and amongst your community members?
3. does it bring you joy?
4. if not, stop
5. if yes, great – keep going
6. what other connection building action might be needed that feels joyful?

AUTHORITY

Finally, the visibility strategy you might need to take right now relates to building authority in your industry. This one becomes important when you feel like there are loads of people out there talking about the topic your business is focused on. If you feel you need to establish that you have something important to add to the conversation then authority building is the key.

The types of actions you might take to build authority include being interviewed on other people’s shows, writing a book, hosting your own show, showing up as a subject area authority on other people’s platforms.

Then remember the Marie Kondo method:

1. clear your visibility blocks to claiming space and being seen as a leader
2. what are you already doing to build authority in your industry?
3. does it bring you joy?
4. if not, stop
5. if yes, great – keep going
6. what other authority building action might be needed that feels joyful?

And that’s it – the Marie Kondo method to creating your visibility strategy.

There are however, just two important notes before we end;

1. Some actions can grow your traffic, build connection, and increase your authority. They’re the golden ticket actions so if you’re having difficulty choosing which actions to prioritise, choose those ones.
2. If you haven’t read the book The One Thing yet, be sure to pick it up. It will help you enormously in narrowing down your options which is precisely what you want because one thing done well will always outweigh 10 things done half heartedly.

P.S. If you don’t know who Marie Kondo is, she has a great book called ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ which I highly recommend and there’s a great Netflix series that shows you the process in action called ‘Tidying Up with Marie Kondo’.

P.P.S. There’s a part 2 to this post which you’ll find right here.