Here are step-by-step pro tips to get featured on popular podcasts so you can share your expertise while building your brand awareness and reputation.

My colleague and a founding member of my Coaches Mastermind, Brendan Mahan, hosts one of the top podcasts in his category (more info and link below). And he recently shared with our Mastermind his expertise on how to get featured on podcasts.

So I thought you might appreciate his perspective – that of a successful podcaster – along with my own two cents as someone who’s been interviewed a gazillion times.

I’ve lined up the info so as to create a step-by-step guide to getting featured on podcasts…

Identify Your Topic Areas and Ideal Target

They say any publicity is good publicity. But getting exposure to audiences other than your ideal target isn’t the best use of your time and energy. So be clear on whom you want to attract into your following (and email list), and then outline a few topic areas...

You don’t have to spend money to significantly build your brand awareness. Here are seven free ways, plus a few bonus tactics.

Question: In the coming week, how many new people will have been made aware of your coaching or solopreneur brand, or given a stronger belief in your reputation and thus more likely to work with you?

I don’t expect you to actually know the answer, but I hope it triggers the thought, “Ya, even with my website, blog (or podcast), and social media channels, I wonder just how many new sets of eyeballs I’m hitting each week.”

Indeed, if we want to have or maintain a vibrant business, we need to keep front-loading that eyeball pipeline and giving folks who already know of us new reasons to like, trust, and do business with us.

Even If Business Is Good, We Need to Build Brand Awareness

Even if our business is doing just fine, there’s nothing quite like a (longer) waitlist. Or to be able to bump up your rates. Or to have a...

Boost your content creation output by exposing these invisible productivity killers all coaches/solopreneurs face. 

I recently wrote about a handful of faulty beliefs that hold us back from sticking our necks out and writing content for our audience. Well, in addition to those psychological barriers to writing there are also productivity barriers to writing, many of which we may not even realize are hobbling our content creation efforts.

The big, and overarching hidden barrier is what I call our Outlaw Brain, which is responsible in large part for the other three hidden forces hobbling our writing productivity: pseudo-productivity, a destructive mindset of impatience, and finally, a lack of boundaries – not just personal boundaries, but boundaries around our technology and within our own Outlaw Brains.

So, let's first get into…

Our Outlaw Brain Makes Writing Content Harder

Whether you’re an ADHDer like me or a buttoned-up, Type A mental machine –...

Writing content – blogs, social media posts, etc. – is hard. These beliefs make it even harder and keep us from sharing our knowledge and helping our peeps.

I’ve written many times about the importance of consistent content creation for us coaches and solopreneurs. The content we put out into the world in the form of blogs, social posts, videos, etc., constitutes a “ladder” that takes a prospect from not knowing we exist, to knowing us, to trusting us, to joining our email list, and then to working with or buying from us.

But content creation – not to mention consistent content creation – is freakin’ hard. And it’s made unnecessarily harder by some faulty beliefs we tend to hold.

This came up recently in my Mastermind and Productivity Collaborative for Coaches when one of our coaches, who’s fired up to scale his business with Group Coaching, expressed hesitation due to the belief that in order to generate the content...

Follow these step-by-step best practices to growing the single most important marketing asset in your business: your email list.

A while back I posted about the importance of assigning more importance to list-building vs. growing your social media following. Not saying the latter isn’t important. In fact, social media is indispensable for…growing your email list! 

But your social media efforts should not be first and foremost about growing your audience, but about leveraging your audience to grow that list. And why’s that so important? 

The Importance of Building Your Email List 

In the aforementioned post, a couple of the reasons cited were the fact that an email reader is much more receptive to your message than an Instagram- or Facebook-scroller; and that an email will reach an exponentially higher percentage of its intended audience than will any (unboosted) social media post). 

Furthermore… 

Most people who visit your home page...

Every year-end I set aside time to just think…about the past year and the year to come, both in terms of my business and my personal life.

And over the years I’ve developed a pretty powerful questions-based methodology that I share with my clients. I’d like to share six of my business-related questions, which could deliver a breakthrough for you and your business in the year to come.

How can six questions do that?

First, we’re all moving so fast, working on so many things, that we forget to pause and just look around – and find breakthrough business insights and solutions hiding in plain sight!

Second, we coaches are all familiar with the concept of intentionality – yet we forget its potential power in our own businesses: Powerful questions beget intention, which helps us stay focused on what is essential, and in turn begets directed action on those essentials (and helping steer us clear of NON-essential stuff that’s self-defeating!).

This...

I recently wrote about how a “virtual mentor” helped me double my business in the space of just two years. Readers were astonished by how easy it can be to “hire” one. Some had already been “employing” one without realizing it!

If you haven’t yet read that post, let me explain…

What Is a Virtual Mentor?

An ideal mentor, as online marketing guru Amy Porterfield puts it, is…

 “…someone who has been in the trenches before you…who has succeeded in similar ways and accomplished things that you want to accomplish.”

We coaches could all use a good mentor to guide us on marketing, admin best practices, business strategy, etc. Maybe you’ve hired a mentor coach or a business coach, or participated in a mastermind.

If you’ve got someone like that in your corner, Yay!

A virtual mentor is all the above who you can learn from without ever speaking to or corresponding with them. Or paying...

Feeling stuck in your business? Consider a mentor. Want quick results? For free? Get a virtual mentor. Here’s how it helped me double my business in just two years.

Working in our business day in and day out, we often get stuck. We’re not sure where or how to grow. Or we know we need to up our game in social media, our website design or marketing generally, but there’s so much advice out there that it seems there’s too much for any of it to be useful.

Oh – and we’re crazy-busy. So, in the chaos, we don’t move forward with anything dramatically new.

This is why an absolute key for focus and growth in our coaching business is to have a mentor.

And here’s the good news: We can have a mentor we’ve never met, spoken to or even corresponded with. A virtual mentor.

Whether a leader in your coaching niche or a marketing or business-building influencer, a virtual mentor is someone you’ll follow online, whose free tools you’ll...

Been a while since you posted a new blog? Social media pipeline all dried up?

As a result, maybe not getting as many fresh eyeballs to your website lately as you’d like?

You’re not alone. I recently surveyed a bunch of random coaches’ blogs and Facebook pages and found that:

• 70% hadn’t posted a new blog in nearly a year.
• Their most recent Facebook post was, on average, six months ago.

And it’s quite understandable...

Writing is hard – especially longer-form writing (blogs, video scripts, podcast outlines). For most people, it’s among the most effortful work there is. Plus, as solopreneurs, we have a gazillion other, more pressing things to do, so writing often stays on the back burner.

And as someone who writes not one but three blogs and maintains content across 13 different social media channels…Hey – I feel your pain!

But I’ve figured out some ways to make writing easier and faster.

And what follows are a handful of...

I’ll start with a horror story...

A fellow coach recently told me over dinner that her Instagram account, with 7,000 hard-earned followers, had been suddenly and without warning…shut…down.

No reason was given other than, “The account has been removed for violating our terms of use.” And trust me, this coach is NOT someone who’d violate anybody’s terms of use. She couldn’t even guess as to what she might have done wrong. And good luck trying to talk with anyone at Facebook/Instagram – not even a freakin’ bot.

Through a miracle, and only because she knew someone at the company, she was able to get her account and 7,000 followers restored. But she vowed, “Never again! I will never be dependent on a platform that has that kind of control over access to my audience.”

(She then informed all her followers that she’s leaving Instagram, inviting them to join her on an emerging text-based platform, where she has...