Welcome back to the Good Business Podcast. Today, we’re talking about visibility. It’s a big theme for me at the moment, as this week marks the start of “Go for the Know,” my very new, very exciting, totally free program for learning and taking action to gain visibility and finally do all the pitching and outreach that you’ve had on your list forever and aren’t currently doing.

If you haven’t joined “Go For The Know,” you still absolutely can. You can join anytime. I would love to have you.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

– Defining visibility as I see it.
– Why and how most people focus on all the wrong things when it comes to visibility.
– A healthy pep talk on why and how you need to decide on what works for you and then actually do it.

By the end, you’re going to be all jazzed up, I promise!

Defining Visibility

What do I mean when I say visibility? It’s a really broad term that kind of means something different for everyone. For our purposes today, I am regarding increasing visibility as the actions you take to increase the chances that strangers will know who you are and be interested in your work.

Note that I am not quantifying volume. Everyone and every business needs something different. This is part of why so many of us get so deeply discouraged when we contemplate visibility actions, because we focus on how big and how loud and how complicated it all looks and feels. It’s just so loud when we see people who are obviously focusing heavily on visibility over the real content meat depth.

You may need a much smaller reach to accomplish your desires and goals than what you may be comparing yourself to. But we see people who seem like they’re everywhere, and not only does it look hard and exhausting, it can also seem like the meat of their work is being diluted and diminished somehow.

The Overwhelm of Visibility

When you deeply care about the message of your work, we can get so judgy with ourselves and with other people about what it means to put it out there. We decide that it’s all just too much before we even start. We decide that it seems desperate. We decide it seems too salesy, and that’s just yucky.

We decide that we are not good enough. We decide that big companies and algorithms and all the rest of it. We decide that we don’t have the resources or the knowledge or the advantages. We justify and rationalize and make excuses, and it all adds up to just not doing any of it.

I’m sure many of you can relate. I certainly have been just as guilty as anybody else of every single thing I just said. And all because we’re focused on the stretch, the complexity, the overwhelm, and the imbalances of breaking through.

The Opportunity in Visibility

But what about the opportunity? That’s the part that gets lost in the mix. As social media, and media in general, gets louder and louder, and it seems like everybody’s a fucking influencer these days, we miss that. What an incredible opportunity still sits right in front of us.

– Almost anyone with internet access and a phone can break through the noise and find an amazing spotlight with an audience to match for their specific message.
– You can form it, shape it, and make it all your own.

Why isn’t that the leading thought when we think about visibility, social media, and getting ourselves out there?

A very short time ago, we remember a time where that wasn’t true. Getting your message out meant traditional PR and sending press releases. It was really, really difficult. Now, we are making it difficult because there are so many opportunities, we don’t know where to focus. But don’t we owe it to the people who don’t have those opportunities to step up and step forward and use the spotlight that’s available to us?

There are so many gorgeous ideas in the world sitting lonely on shelves behind our justifications and our very good reasons why TikTok’s not for us, or finding press is too hard, or we don’t have the connections. For me, a refreshed commitment to showing up in the world means a promise to myself being kept.

Making a Promise

For me, that promise is sharing what I know with as many people as possible using the tools that are available and sustainable for me. I want to get what I know to as many people as possible for free. It costs my time, basically.

I’ve always made that promise to myself. How do I get what I know out of my head and into the heads of other people without them having to pay a fortune to do so? There are a million ways now. I focus on:

– The tools that are available and sustainable for me to maintain.
– What’s sustainable for you might not be sustainable for me and vice versa.

You don’t have to do everything everywhere, but you do have to push yourself when and where you can in a way that you can see repeating.

Your Promise

Your promise might be different than mine. It might be financial or personal. It might be about legacy. Whatever it is, it needs to be something you can focus on and are passionate about enough that it will outweigh all the rationalizations to the contrary.

It’s important enough for me right now that what I know doesn’t just get lost with me because I refused to do TikTok. That outweighs my resistance, my desire to never put on lipstick, and never leave my house.

If we want a world to be better than it is, more interesting than it is, more beautiful than it is, then the artists, the visionaries, the future thinkers, the do-gooders, the healers, all the people who hate the idea of selling their work because they think it cheapens it—we need them. We need you to speak up, speak out.

Recognize that by doing so, you are not selling out. You are keeping the promise of your work alive. It’s not cheapening anything. It’s not desperate. It’s truly the most selfless thing that we can do: get over our own bullshit, get over our grief for missed opportunities, get over our traumas that rob us of confidence and agency.

We need to learn new things and share. It’s necessary, vital even. The world needs us to show up, to show people what we can do. Otherwise, what are we leaving behind? If we do not fill the world with as much goodness as we can for as long as we can, we lose the right to complain about the darkness that fills the world in our absence.

My god, we all know there’s a lot of it these days. So I’m going to finish with the words of the amazing Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Showing up everywhere we can with our very best work is how we do that.

Alright, everybody. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a wonderful week. And if you haven’t joined “Go for the Know” yet to increase your visibility, please do so. You can do it at thegoodbusiness.co.