Reputation Strategy: To Succeed in This Next Digital Era, You Need Clarity On What You Want to Be Known For

As you drive your car around town, it's bombarded with countless radio waves and signals, some of which it can receive and many it cannot.

This onslaught of noise is filtered by your car radio. As you turn it on, you tune it to a certain channel to listen to the type of music you like, the sports you care about, or the conversations for which you want to listen. Or you can skip them altogether and plug in your podcast player.

In the digital era we now live in, with more people and companies actively participating online, along with the rise of generative AI, there are more signals and noise around us than ever before.

It's only going to increase. So, how do we stand out? How do we connect with the right people and organizations?

Getting Focused on The Reputation We Want To Build

While it can feel overwhelming, there is a way to navigate this shifting landscape effectively.

It requires us to get focused on what we want to be known for, consistently communicate that message to our network, and expand our network to receive that message.

Many call this brand building. But more simply put, it's establishing and maintaining a reputation. 

As you grow your business and seek out new clients to help solve their problems, you also want those who have those problems to seek you out. This is one of the action items in my book, Path of the Freelancer.

Clarity On Reputation

This initiative requires that we have clarity. We need to focus on the thing we want to be known for, and then craft a strategy to create and maintain that reputation.

Let's give some helpful and simple examples.

When your car breaks down, who do you think about contacting to fix it? Where do you take it? That person or business that comes to mind has built a reputation with you as the reliable source for fixing your car.

When you don't have someone, you likely ask someone you know who they recommend. And people usually love sharing those they recommend. If you don't have someone to ask, you'll search Google, ask ChatGPT, or use some other website to help you find a reliable option.

Once you have a reliable option, that expert maintains their reputation by doing good work. Good work maintains their reputation.

Other factors like cost also play a role, but as long as they repeatedly deliver upon your expectations (or rectify when things go wrong), that relationship will continue.

So, if you want to build your reputation as a reliable car mechanic, you need to decide on that focus and work on building that reputation. Become known as the guy or business that fixes cars. With car repair, location also matters, so you become known as the car fixer in an area.

People new to the area and those already living there who want to switch their car repair service to an alternative will seek out a solution. A network of referrers and an online presence will help drive them to you.

This is why what you and I must do is figure out exactly what we want to be known for, write it down, and build that reputation.

Let me give another example.

One thing I am known for is working on Joomla websites. I build them, update them, and maintain them.

If a person or company wants to build a Joomla website, and they know about me, I'm the guy they approach.

If someone has a Joomla website and needs some help from a specialist, they search for different things on Google, and they find me. Just the other day, I had a call with someone who needed a Joomla specialist, and Google delivered my website to them. They had been looking for someone for months who wouldn't simply tell them to go to WordPress, and they finally found me.

I'm known as the Joomla guy. That's a reputation I want and that I've built. It's one I'll continue to maintain as long as I do that type of work. 

That leads us to our next point. Reputation decays. If I want to continue working on Joomla projects, I've got to maintain that reputation at a level that brings the number of clients I'm seeking to work with. The better the reputation, the more work we'll get and the more we can charge for the value we provide.

Establish an Intentional Reputation With Your Network

With clarity about being the Joomla website guy, I now need to do the work to let everyone in my network know I am the Joomla guy.

There are a few facets here to consider.

First, a lot of people and organizations build websites without a preference for their CMS system. Think of them like a person who wants a car but doesn't care what brand, make, or model. They just need a vehicle to get around.

As the Joomla guy, I need to communicate to people that I build fast websites, search engine optimized, and they're built on a CMS system that gives them complete control over their website. And for certain technical contacts and companies, I can communicate that Joomla helps me do this.

I can accomplish this reputation building by networking, one-to-one communication, blogging, social media posting, email marketing, and paid advertising. 

I need enough organizations that need or know someone who needs a website to contact me. Depending on my network, I may get more than enough website projects to sustain a flourishing freelancing business, which has been my experience so far. But if I hit the limit of the number of projects my network can provide and I want more clients, I've got to expand my network to reach a larger audience that will sustain my business.

For companies bigger than a single freelancer, this scale will be an essential requirement.

Grow Your Network

If you're trying to make orange juice and you need four oranges and you only have three, you've got to get another orange.

So, if your network is fully "squeezed" and is only producing three clients when you want four, you'll have to expand your network. This expansion will involve growing your audience. It could be meeting more people in person and reaching out to more people online in public and private digital spaces. With the online shifting landscape, there are countless opportunities to make this happen.

So many of my friends, clients, and guests on my podcasts are people I've never met in real life, but somehow, we connected online.

When you have a really good system for maintaining your network (like a newsletter), scaling it up is often easy. You simply amplify what you're doing, that is working.

If you are known for one thing, that becomes much easier to scale up. And often, it can be more efficient or effective to scale up a focused, singular reputation than a multi-faceted one. So, let's talk about that distinction.

Maintaining a Multi-Faceted Reputation With Key Triggers

As you and your organization increase the number of things you want to be known for, things get more complicated.

When it comes to my freelancer offering, I am the Joomla guy, but I'm also the SEO guy. And I'm also the guy who gets stuff done and coaches business leaders through their challenges. Outside of my consulting services, I'm also known for my podcast, YouTube channel, blog, and writing books. My first book is for freelancers. My second book is for stuck small business owners, and my third book is for Christians.

For different audiences, I'm known for different things and some combination of the different facets of my larger collective reputation. 

Building a multi-faceted reputation is more complicated and difficult. But it also provides cross-promotional opportunities.

For example, if someone could potentially hire me to build their Joomla website and I'm trying to get them to buy my book for freelancers, I've missed out on an opportunity with the wrong message to the wrong audience.

On the flipside, if someone sees me speak on the topic of my second book for small businesses and then hires me (I've channeled one thing into another).

That's the opportunity.

Redirecting Our Reputation Towards a Different Aim

Let's say we have a reputation based on a speciality demonstrated repeatedly over time, in a particular area, but we want to redirect that reputational energy differently.

How does that play out?

I'm the Joomla guy. But, as a freelancer, I have more work right now than I have the capacity to deliver. So, I'm not actively pursuing more projects. But with the demand, I have something to work with if I want to redirect that energy.

Because projects end and I may want another project in the future, keeping some of that energy directed at potential new projects is useful for maintaining a flow of leads.

But, where should I direct the rest of that energy?

Historically, I've leveraged this extra energy with clients and prospects towards helping my freelancing and entrepreneurial friends.

I've got a friend I've recently brought onto a client project because there is a lot of work to do, and he specializes in some of the areas we need to work on. I've had many clients where I've built freelance teams, managed them, and directed them. So that's one option for channeling the reputational flow, of which I'll continue.

Another is to channel that energy into some scalable option. As the Joomla guy, I recently built my first plugin (preview unpublished articles) for Joomla using generative AI. I've now made that plugin available to purchase here. That's a digital product that is done, and as many times as I can sell it, the better, because there is no bottleneck to deliver. They buy it, download it, install it, and set it up.

If I wanted to grow my Joomla reputation further, while also channeling that into other productive outlets, I have some options.

For my SEO work, clients pay me thousands of dollars to audit their websites, provide optimization recommendations, and oversee the work being done. But when I've hit that capacity, I can now direct them to my online course, The Most Effective SEO Task. This shows them how I efficiently do the most important SEO task that has the most impact for optimizing content for the search engines.

And there are more. I can channel my...

• Freelance expertise reputation towards my book, Path of the Freelancer, and the related course.
• Small business experience towards my book, The Jump.
• reputation to make recommendations on software systems and digital products, of which I am an affiliate partner.

And that is the mode I'm now operating.

I've got more work than I need as a freelancer, but I've built a large enough reputation across categories that I can channel that in different ways to earn income that is not dependent on time. That allows me to scale in ways that were limited in my freelancing business, particularly my time.

As you reflect on this topic, get clear on what you want to be known for, how to integrate the different things you want to be known for in a cohesive strategy, and do the work of telling your network while also growing it. The more helpful you are, the more successful you'll become at this endeavor.

Action-Item Recap

To recap, into specific next-step actions, here are the actions to take in your journey down this road.

If you want to join me on this reputation-building journey, sign up for my email newsletter using the form below.