6 Ways To Captivate with Consistency
If you are new to me and new to what I do, I'm a brand and business coach. I help women in the online space learn how to create a brand that captivates and converts, so it's that branding in that business piece that is so important because if you can't make an income and you can't make an impact, then what's the point of even doing all this work online?
In this post I will be discussing how to captivate with consistency, and specifically six ways you can do that starting today.
#1 Consistency
The first way that you're going to start captivating people to either get on your list or opt into your offers is to commit to being visible consistently.
I know that a lot of us have lives that are already very full and we're thinking about starting a business or starting a blog and maybe converting it to a business down the road, but the first step really is just a mental commitment of, "I'm doing this and making it happen and I'm writing it down. I'm going to be consistent once a month, once a week or every day."
It could even be once a quarter if that's all you can manage for something, that's okay, and instead of waffling and expending a lot of energy saying like, "Oh, it's not enough," or, "I should be doing more, I know I need to be more visible on this platform or that platform."
Giving yourself permission to start where you're at, and then build on that is exactly where you need to start, okay?
Committing and saying, "You know what? I can only write one blog a month." I've got one gal in the community who said, "I've got kids. I can only write one blog a month and that's it, and maybe I'll get visible with that one blog." And I said, "That's perfect."
You know what?
She's got hundreds of people commenting on her blogs. It's amazing.
She's moving slow. She's moving at the right pace and she's totally meeting her clients and her readers right where they're at. It's perfect. It doesn't have to be this overwhelming strategy, guys.
Keep it simple, keep it super simple.
It's the kiss principle. Keep it super simple, like almost stupidly simple. And just start there, okay?
Step one, commit.
#2 Brand Boards
Number two, brand boards.
A lot of things that I see online that I know immediately deteriorates someone's expertise and their authority is changing out their visuals constantly.
I'm not saying if something's not appealing to your audience, not to tweak it, do tweak it, but completely changing out your color scheme, completely changing out your fonts, completely changing out the style of your headshots or your photos, that's really going to throw people for a loop.
What I encourage people with, is if they can't afford to work with someone like me who's a designer or a brand specialist, pick colors and pick clean fonts that you can be consistent with. Google Fonts are free.
Start there and be consistent so that when people recognize that color pink or that color teal or that color orange, they know, "Oh my gosh, stop the scroll. I need to read what this person is saying because I like what they have to say."
It may feel like you're blending in too much by being a little too neutral, but you can always build on colors and fonts that are simple. You can always add a script to that very clean font that you've been using for some time, right? Then you can develop your brand images that go along with that and you can develop even more assets along the way, but being consistent with something as simple as your colors, one or two colors, three tops, and consistent fonts that are free on Google.
Even in the design world, Helvetica is the most used font by brands. Helvetica. And it's free. It comes with Microsoft Word and Pages. You don't have to get super fancy in order to stand out and make money, okay?
#3 Pursue Excellence Not Perfection
One was commit, two was brand boards. Three, pursue excellence and not perfection, right?
I know you guys have heard me say this, I'm not beating a dead horse, but we have to hear this truth multiple times before we start to really buy into it.
You cannot move a parked car, right?
You have to get the car moving before you can turn it.
I want to jump back to the example of brand visuals.
I had a very light blue and kind of a darker blue and I was running Facebook ads for a little bit and they were really blending in. They weren't converting well and it wasn't till I used a pop of color that people started to notice my ads and they started converting better, and I said, "You know what? I've got to add one more color that's going to pop, that's going to be eye catching."
I didn't overhaul my brand. I just started infusing little pops of yellow.
Yellow buttons, yellow lines, yellow shapes that kind of will catch your eye and won't blend into the platform as much. It's little things like this that it's okay to tweak, but I couldn't know that until I just got out there and started getting visible with my brand.
Pursue excellence.
I struggle a little bit personally with the phrase that says, "Done is better than perfect." To me, that's because of this connotation that I'm just haphazardly doing this and just getting it out there.
I think we should always pursue excellence, we should always give our best.
I say pursue excellence, get it done, but don't be a perfectionist about it.
Just start moving.
If you need to pivot and you think, "Hey, I'm hearing crickets."
That's a clue.
That's a good thing.
You know this doesn't work and you can scratch it off your list. Tried that, didn't work, let me pivot, not overhaul, but just turn and let me try something in the similar vein, but just a little to the left, okay?
We're pursuing excellence, not perfection.
#4 Routines
Number four, get into routines.
I know we talked about this a lot in Renew, which is our mindset workshop. If you are just joining us and you didn't hear about it, you can still sign up for it. It's free. We talked about getting into routines so that we can eliminate all the extra stuff going on in our head and we know what to expect for our morning.
I know I'm going to get up, I'm going to do my workout, I'm going to read my affirmations, which are on the wall. I'm going to drink my tea, I'm going to have my quiet time. I'm going to review my notes that I wrote down in my work shutdown routine about what I need to do today.
If anything has changed, if I've gotten any new emails. I'm going to make tweaks and adjustments, but my routine basically sets the pace for my day and I'm not Hairy Scary in the morning.
I'm not freaking out.
I'm not wasting an hour trying to figure out what I need to do.
I have simplified my life by taking a lot of the guesswork and questioning and waffling time out, and now I've just opened my day up even more. That allows me to be consistent, because I don't have to try and figure it out.
Talking about routines, rituals, we talked about four different types. It is a morning ritual, a workday startup ritual, a workday shutdown ritual, and a nighttime routine or ritual, whatever you want to call it.
You don't like the word ritual, call it a routine or system, plan, whatever works for you.
I talked about four specific ones that we can implement immediately into our lives and our schedules that are not more work, but actually simplify our work.
Having routines allows us to be more consistent in what we're doing and that says, "Hey, this person kind of has it together. They know what they're doing, they've done this before."
When we start to build that routine into our business, man, that ups your expertise and appearance.
It's crazy.
People don't tend to trust people who seem to be kind of flying by the seat of their pants.
They trust people who say, "This is our workflow, this is how I'm going to walk you through the branding process. This is how I'm going to walk you through the sales process. This is how I'm going to walk you through how to create a webinar. This is how I'm going to walk you through X, Y, and Z, right? This is how we lose weight."
The systems, routines, formulas. They're stuff that people can grasp and it's really, really beneficial to put these things in your business, and not just in your business, in your personal life so that you can free up creative mental space in your business.
#5 Support
Number one was committed. Number two was brand boards. Number three was pursuing excellence, not perfection. Number four is routines. Number five, invest in support where you need it in order to be consistent.
One of the best things that I did in the very beginning of my business was I invested in a book called Strengths Finders 2.0, and you know what that allowed me to do? It allowed me to consistently lean into my strengths with competence, so I wasn't constantly looking at, "Could this be a good fit? Maybe this is a good fit. Maybe I should pursue this thing over here."
I started to simply be consistent in what I wanted. I figured it out and I was consistent.
I told myself, "I want an online business. I want to make courses. I want to coach people. This is what I'm good at. This is what I want to do."
I started being consistent with that one thing, and then maybe the next step is investing in a course. Maybe you're not ready to invest in coaching or maybe you're not ready to invest and working with a designer. That's okay. You have to make small steps forward in the beginning, and maybe that looks like investing in a course that helps you map out your content.
I have one of those for sale on my website called Map Your Content, and it gives you a system to follow consistently so when you map out your content, you're not talking about things all over the map and then Google SEO starts working in your favor and you always have a plan. You're never feeling lost or feeling like you don't know what to say to people. Investing in something that's going to give you the support you need to get to that next level and give you something that someone's already figured out for you, man, if it's 97 bucks, throw your card down and buy that Bad Larry, because that's gonna save you $97 worth of time spent spinning your wheels, right?
Invest in the support that you need.
If it's a VA and getting some little things off of your plate that are not in your area of strength, go for it. If it's just one hour a week or five hours a week, go for it. It's going to make a difference in your business.
Maybe it looks like hiring a babysitter once every two weeks, so you can have a morning where you're wrapping your head back around your business, making sure that all of your actions for the month are aligned or for the next two weeks are aligned. It makes sense. They're driving towards this goal and not leaving you someplace you don't want to be and leaving you feeling like you're spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere, right?
That four-hour window where you hire a babysitter to just come, so you can lock yourself in a room or maybe you go to a hotel and lock yourself away there for the morning.
That's okay.
You can do those small investments in yourself and in your business and it really is going to have returns on investment both emotionally, physically, mentally. These things will help you and it doesn't have to be a huge investment. That was number five, invest in yourself.
#6 Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Number six, get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Being consistent means you show up even when you don't feel like it, even when you don't feel like you've got it all together.
Part of entrepreneurship is constantly being in a learning curve.
The economy is always changing, your industry might be always changing. Technology for sure is always changing.
Can we talk about Facebook? It's all the algorithm and Instagram's algorithm. Golly, that stuff is changing all the time and we've got to be able to pivot and shift and be like, "Oh my gosh, how am I going to do this now because this was my routine and system that I got really comfortable in and that was a good thing, but now I need to tweak it?"
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, showing up when you don't even feel like it.
Maybe it's, “I wanted to get my workout in this morning. I'm going to do a Facebook live, still sweaty, still in my workout clothes, but I'm going to get visible with this inspiration that I feel like my audience needs to hear today.”
Just commit to being consistent in what you're doing.
If that's committing once a week to showing up on Instagram with a post, do it.
There's all kinds of schedulers too, for free, that will help you with consistency.
There's all kinds of tools, all kinds of apps that will help you to do that, but some of this is mindset stuff like committing and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and some of it is very practical, systematic, strategic, like building a routine for your morning or building in a routine for your evening. Maybe it's you lay out your clothes at night so that in the morning you can get ready quicker and you have more of your morning when you're most productive, right?
There's these little things that you can do to help you captivate people in your business consistently, and the more you can do that, the more trust you're going to build with your audience, the more likely they are to buy from you or even to opt into your free offers and that's going to transform your business.
It's not just going to captivate, it's going to convert.
Also, I'd love to hear from you. Have you invested in some kind of support? Have you invested in a book? Have you invested in a course? What was it? I always want to hear about good things that people have done that have really been beneficial. Share the good stuff, right? The cream of the crop, right? We want what's best to be seen, be heard, to be visible. Let me know what it is that you've used that has been really beneficial. Share it with your community here in the comments, because we want to benefit from that, too, okay?
All right. Six ways to captivate with consistency. Start putting some of these into action today, and I'm super excited. If you have any questions about some of these things, drop ‘em in the comments!
