In this post, we’re talking about how to make your self introduction awesome. By awesome we mean specific, interesting, and memorable to your ideal customers, clients, and students. We’ll focus on your online self introduction and share examples you can try. 

Let’s dive in, shall we?

What is your self introduction?

Your self introduction is normally how you share a quick snapshot of who you are, what your business does, and a tidbit to make yourself memorable. Typically, you’re introducing yourself at an in-person business networking group, Meetup, or industry event.

Yes, it’s usually in person when you can rely on your smile and making eye contact to help you connect with the new person you’re meeting.

Today, we’re talking about how to add zing to the way you introduce yourself online, because growing your online visibility has always been important. Now, with the global stay-at-home crisis—connecting online to grow your audience, customers, and business is more crucial than ever. In other words, the making-connections and doing-business-online genie isn’t ever going back in the bottle.

Bottom line: the online world is going to be the place to grow businesses going forward. The examples we share with you will apply for growing your online business, even after the pandemic subsides.

So let’s redefine your self introduction for the digital world. 

“Your digital self introduction is how you connect with the right customers, students, clients and partners online.”

Where do you use your online self-introduction?

As we’ve said, until recently many entrepreneurs building online businesses would also attend live events. They’d say, “My self-intro is how I connect during live, in-person networking groups, conferences, and Meetups.”

While they gained new popularity because of the pandemic, virtual, online networking events have so many advantages, they’re here to stay. To make sure you can sail smoothly into making connections, growing relationships, and enrolling clients in the online world, you want to polish your “virtual” self-introduction.

You’ll use your virtual, online self introduction in a variety of places, including when: 

• Joining a new Facebook Group
• Participating in online video meetings via Zoom, Skype, or other app 
• Making initial phone calls with potential customers or partners 

And more!

Decide What You Want to Accomplish with Your Online Self Introduction 

Your goal with a self-intro, whether it’s in an online community or during a live video conference, is to make a connection with right-fit people for your business. It’s one that inspires them to ask you for more information. Right-fit people are your dream clients, customers, or students. 

Additionally you may choose to develop two different introductions: 1) for creating relationships with ideal customers or students and 2) for connecting with potential partners. 

Keep in mind, you want to use your online self introduction to start relationships with folks who don’t know you yet, but can benefit from your programs. 

You Want to Connect on a Personal Level with Your Self-intro

As in the real world, when you’re introducing yourself you want to be relatable and make a personal connection. I love a good set of examples, don’t you? So, here are 4 creative options you can make your own, both in online interactions and during initial phone calls with potential customers:

1) Tell a 2-3 sentence story about why you chose to start your business in the first place and why you’re so passionate about it.

Example, “Back in my corporate days, when my husband and I needed a financial advisor who related to our needs raising a young family, I couldn’t find anyone who understood us. I knew there had to be a better way. I left cubicle life and started my own financial advisory firm. Now, I provide the kind of service to families that was missing in the industry.”  

2) Be courageous, skip your title, and share a bit of your business startup story.

Example, If you say, “Hi, my name’s Wonder Woman and I’m a life coach,” you may find people not resonating. ‘Life coach’ is a broad title, because there are tons of different types of life coaches. Are you a weight-loss coach, a dating and relationship coach, a wellness coach, or personal style coach?

Instead, you can say, “Hi, my name’s Wonder Woman and I help women empty nesters navigate the learning stages and find their new life’s meaning after the last child leaves for college. My own journey took me three long years, and my program teaches women how to shorten the search for their next chapter.”

3) Start with a question that highlights how you help clients. Then, emphasize your credibility and expertise with a benefit snippet at the end.

“You know how small business owners really hate tracking expenses for their taxes? I help entrepreneurs overcome tracking-resistance by setting up easy to follow, foolproof, and fun systems to stay on top of collecting receipts. My clients love having time to attend their kids’ soccer games during tax season because of their new systems!”

4) Explore making yourself memorable. One way is to clearly describe how you help customers. Think about your profession and what you hope to accomplish through it, then craft a much deeper and more compelling introduction.

This is an excellent recommendation and example from a journalist Kara Cutruzzula.

“Diabetes can be overwhelming, so I help people figure out real life strategies to get to their best health a step at a time.” 

Excerpted from a July 26, 2018 IDEAS.TED.COM by Kara Cutruzzula

You Make the Rules!

The beauty of your self-intro, is that it’s uniquely yours. You make the rules. You can change it up so it best serves your relationship building and revenue growth goals.

You can gauge how potential clients react to your revised self intro, and adjust. 

The type of response you’re going for is a reply that shows they want to continue the conversation:

“Really, tell me more!”

“How do you do that?”

“What kinds of moms take your courses?”

“What results do your students usually get?”

“Can I private message you?” (inside online groups)

What If Your Self Introduction Gets Crickets?

First, don’t be concerned, this happens to all of us. If the person, or group, you’re introducing yourself to doesn’t make a comment or ask a follow-up question, no worries. It could be one of 4 reasons:

1) You may need to tweak your self-intro to make it more memorable, catchy, or to better reveal your personality.

2) You may want to stand out more by sharing what’s unique about your business and add in exactly how you help customers. 

3) Historically, it takes many people 7 to 10 marketing touches before they reach out to learn more about your products and services.  

4) Lastly, they’re simply not ‘your people’. Think of the time you’re saving by not talking to folks who aren’t a fit for your business, right?

Craft Your Self-Introduction for Facebook Groups

Since the online space is getting more crowded by the minute, be sure to maximize each opportunity to make your business visible to your audience.

Influencer and blogger, Christina Bernard, explains how to standout with your introduction, when joining a new Facebook Group. She infuses a ton of personality into hers!

The tips Christina shares in her blog post on this topic include: 

• Choose a cheery greeting 
• Give yourself a memorable name; Christina nicknames herself, “Crazy Chicken Lady”
• Tell a 3-4 sentence story about your entrepreneurial journey and how you help people 
• End with a big thank you to the Group’s host
• Sprinkle emojis generously to help your introduction pop

Quick Tips for Video Virtual Self Introductions

In addition to polishing your self introduction, here are a few tips for making a great impression during group video calls. 

• If you’re on a live video conference like Zoom, look directly at your computer camera. It’s tempting, but don’t look at yourself on the screen—the person or group can see you’re not looking directly at them. 
• Don’t multi-task by checking your phone while others are speaking. Remember, all participants can see you!
• Crucial tip, for video conferencing, always smile big! The camera will carry through your enthusiasm.
• When you’re live, it’s not as important which style of self-introduction you choose, what matters is that you’re open, enthusiastic, and happy to connect with everyone in the group. 

Final thoughts

Going forward, polishing your self introduction for connecting via social media groups, digital communities, and in live video events, is going to be even more important for growing your online business. 

Set your intentions to refine and test your online self intro and continue to tweak it until you hear your ideal customers say, “Tell me more!”.

Do share your self intros in the comments. We can’t wait to see how you develop your online self introduction so you can start even more customer relationships!

The post How to Make Your Online Self Introduction Awesome appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

I’ve been wrestling with my persona.

In a class on writing Delightful Emails, taught by Matthew Kimberley, one of our tasks was to write a paragraph describing our persona, after answering a series of provocative questions.  The idea is to craft a descriptive profile that is an amalgamation of how others see you + how you see yourself to come up with an amplification of how you would like to be seen by others. Essentially an amplified version of your best self.

Watch the video to hear about my process and a few of the questions to help you get to the end result. If you prefer to read vs. watch, the lightly edit transcript is below. 

Who is Denise?

Since I shot that video (it’s on my IGTV channel), I’ve been tweaking like crazy. It’s still a bit on the long side…here’s Version #7 or 8:

Denise Wakeman’s motto is “Just say yes!” After a life-changing trek in the Andes, she embraced her inner Adventurer, and ditched the black business suits for a knapsack and hiking boots. As long as there’s wifi, Denise is a happy camper.

With map in hand, Denise’s curiosity drives her to explore and challenge herself and others to embrace the new: a marketing strategy or tool, a mountain to conquer, or seeking out new restaurants. She digs deep, is fully engaged, committed and eager to share what she’s learned.

Whether it’s a consult or hanging out with a glass of wine at happy hour, Denise is down to earth and shuns hype. But don’t mistake her laid back demeanor for lack of passion. If you ask her about Peru, social media, or any of her myriad causes, she gets quite animated!  

Fiercely loyal, she is passionate about empowering others to experiment and let go of the little fears that are limiting growth, so they can say “yes” to the bigger adventures and recognize new opportunities, too.

I’m curious, what do you think? If you know me, does this description ring true to you?

Do you think I should add it to my About Page?

If you don’t know me, do I sound like someone you’d like to work with?

I’m thinking that updating all my social profiles with this profile may change the dynamic of the type of people who are attracted to work with me. I’ll keep you posted on that as I roll it out.

Give me a shout out in the comments and let me know.  😎 

“It’s what you do that makes you who you are and how you project that to others that makes you memorable.” ~Dan Schawbel Click to Tweet

Video Transcript

(lightly edited for better readability)

Hello friends, Denise here.  I’ve been contemplating an exercise that I’ve been doing for a class that I’m taking with Matthew Kimberley. It is called Delightful Emails 101, because I  have been feeling that I need to improve my writing skills, especially my email writing skills. Even though I’ve been doing it since the beginning of email, there’s an art to it. So, since I really, really, really love Matthew Kimberley’s writing, his style, his snark, but his heart also, I thought when he offered this program, that it would be a good fit for me. It has been.

Last week one of the things that we talked about and which became our homework, was to create a paragraph, a persona paragraph that we can use [as a guide] for how we convey ourselves through our email. Now, this is not creating a persona that’s a fake or who’s not you, but just how do we convey that person who we want to be known as for our audience. Matthew asked some good questions. We went through a long exercise that got us to the point to answer three questions and then put together the persona or that paragraph.

The questions are:

How would others describe me? That would be like your personality and also your physicality, who you are as a physical person out in the world. I have one friend who would say that I talk too much with my hands, although I didn’t write that down. She always is backing off when we’re talking in person.

The second question is how would you describe yourself? That’s a much more internal description. Who do you think you are? Use lots of adjectives to describe who you think you are.

Then the final question, and this is the question that you use to actually write this paragraph about your persona, describing your persona, and this is the person you want to be known as publicly. You know, online, in your emails, in your social media, on your blog posts. Again, it’s not a fake person. It’s who you really are and it’s been an incredible exercise to figure out how to describe that person without describing what you do specifically, but just who you are. Who do you bring to your interactions and to your work? Not what your work is specifically.

'Who, who, who, who are you?' 3 questions to develop your public persona. Click to Tweet

The question is, how would you like to be described?

So, we got this exercise last week and I’m the kind of person who has to mull everything. So, our next class was this morning and last night I finally was able to craft something because I just felt so unsure of how to express this. One thing that really helped me was an exercise that I did a few months ago when I took a visual branding course from Irina Leoni. She had us do an exercise where we asked our friends and family, colleagues, whoever we wanted to, clients, to tell us what they think our superpowers are.  I remembered that I did that and I decided to find that content or find those descriptions …  I think I sent out about 15 and I got back about 10. They were all from close friends, close colleagues, and my family.

I found those replies, so I put them all together in a document and then I highlighted the keywords that jumped out at me. There was so much consistency, using different words but meaning the same thing. That was really helpful to me because once I had that input from others, it was easier for me to write about who I think I am and then who I want to be seen as. I think I’m pretty much there already, but it was still a really good exercise to go through.

So, I invite you to do this as well. I’ll review the three questions here.

1. How would others describe me?
2. How would I describe myself?
3. How would I like to be described?

So, out in the world how would I like to be known? How would I like people to describe me out in the world?

So, I am curious to know if you’ve done an exercise like this and what you learned from it. If you have not, would you be willing to try and share those results with me? I will share my result with you in another video as I’m still in the draft stage. I did one draft and it definitely needed to be edited. Then I did a second draft and it was closer. I did the third draft and it’s almost there.

As soon as I’ve got mine where I say, “Yes! This is the way I want it to be” I’ll share that with you. So, in the meantime, let me know. Answer these questions and see what you come up with, and let me know what it is. Okay? You can connect with me on Instagram, you can send me a private message on Facebook. Those are the two best ways to get to me. I would love to hear from you. In the meantime, have an adventurous day.

*The Who’s “Who Are You?” (1978) kept going through my head as I thought about persona and what it means to create one for yourself. 

And now, for your listening pleasure… one of my all-time favorite bands with the drummer, Keith Moon, who left us way too soon.

The post Who, who, who, who are you? [Video] appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

Mia Voss is an entrepreneur juggling several great ventures that all have one thing in common: building a stronger community. Best known for her online Google Hangout program, The Mia Connect Power Chat, Mia’s main focus is on providing great programming and connecting her audience to the people & businesses they need to know.

On the Hangout we discuss:

• Introverts in business
• Meeting IRL (in real life)
• Mia’s various business ventures
• How Mia got started on Google+ 
• The secret sauce to her success as a Hangout Host and how it’s created her personal brand
• Mia’s tips for building community and connection (pay attention to how she does shout outs to her #batpack at the end)

Check out all the action, questions, comments and photos on the Event page!

For your convenience, the mp3 and transcript are posted below, from the live Hangout with Mia. 

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Links to shows mentioned in the Hangout:

• 4:59 The introvert sweater! 
• 7:25 The Mia Connect Power Chat from #SMMW14 
• 34:49 HOA Street Team Sponsor Shoutout to Cyd Rust
• Full list of clickable time codes listed on YouTube

 Mia’s social links:

• http://TheMiaConnect.com
• https://plus.google.com/+MiaVoss
• https://twitter.com/TheMiaConnect
• https://www.facebook.com/TheMiaConnect
• http://www.pinterest.com/themiaconnect/

• Watch past Adventures
• Subscribe on YouTube 

Be sure to visit Mia Voss’ website for more information, and follow her on Google+!

Do you know someone doing an outstanding job with their online presence? Someone who has created massive visibility? Let me know in the comments and I’ll reach and invite them to be a guest on Adventures in Visibility!

To get reminders about when Adventures are scheduled and when replays are posted, you can get on the list and follow me on Google+. Be sure to let me know you want to be added to my Adventures in Visibility Notification Circle so you get the invitation directly through Google+.

The post Building Your Personal Brand on Google+ – Adventure in Visibility with Mia Voss appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.