One word changed my career: ghostwriter. Until coming up with it, I was restless in my career and my self-promotion efforts often confused potential clients. Selling was hard work, and my results were inconsistent, to say the least.
So I put "ghostwriter" in the headline of my LinkedIn profile, and removed all the other words. For the next six years, I woke up almost every morning to find potential clients emailing me.
Let's see if we can produce the same results for you...
To do this, let's focus on brevity, context, and focus.
Brevity: Most of what you are tempted to tell people is unnecessary. The first thing you share shouldn't be how you got your start in your profession, when you moved to this area, what you've always liked to do, yadda yadda yadda.
Be interesting and concise. On his LinkedIn profile, Richard Branson writes, "tie-loathing adventurer and thrill seeker". Jim Collins, the bestselling author of Good to Great, is an expert in "what makes great companies tick".
Context: There are seven billion people on this planet. Your six words have to describe you in the absence of any other context. For example, if you say "marketing expert" that still leaves an incredibly broad range of possibilities:
- marketing manager
- marketing director
- marketing VP
- marketing CMO
- direct marketer
- interactive marketer
- branding expert
- copywriter
- small business promoter
- integrated marketing expert
- promotional marketing manager
- agency account exec
- and hundreds more...
This is where it gets tough. You're going to have to use your brain, maybe for five or six days in a row. What combination of six—or maybe even ten—words is enough to tell someone what you want to do? Imagine that these are the only six (or ten) words they have to make a judgment about you.
Here are some examples that work:
- Award-winning SEO expert for fitness gyms
- Certified Portuguese and Spanish interpreter
- Helping women negotiate, influence, and lead with purpose
They work because they tell you more than one thing. SEO + award-winning + expert + gyms = very specific.
Focus: Don't use this valuable space telling me your job title or what you've done the past nine years. Tell me how you want to help me NOW.
Before I was a ghostwriter, I was a professional speaker, a customer experience expert, and an entrepreneur. To get "ghostwriter" to jump out at you, I removed every single word about these other roles from my past. (I mean in my headline; I still described them in my experience section on LinkedIn.)
Ken Block, who also lives here in Park City, is the co-founder of a sneaker company... but once he decided to be a race car driver, that's pretty much all he talks about now. Don't forget your past, but don't focus on it either.
Direct attention to your dreams and your destiny. Be extremely clear about what you want. That's how you make your dreams come true.
