What is your favourite dish?
Let’s take, for example… paella.
Paella is very good.
There is seafood paella, chicken paella, vegetable paella, mixed paella, blind paella, lobster paella for a special day and almost anything you fancy.
You can use a lot of imagination.
More than once with what you find in the fridge.
And when you expect that there will be paella to eat, you lick your fingers from the day before.
What happens is that paella is very good once a week. Maybe twice.
But if you have paella for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, you will soon end up hating paella.
And paella is not to blame.
It’s a question of knowing how to use it sparingly.
Something similar happens with the secret formulas for creating your professional profile.
Here, I have to admit, salaried people have an advantage.
The company gives them a job title and all they have to do is post it on the networks:
“CEO of PinguinoVerde.com“
“Full-stack programmer at Marte2050.com“
“Electrical installer at Chispas.com“
And that makes you envious when you’re an entrepreneur or a consultant or self-employed.
Because “CEO and founder of MyMinusculaOffice.com” doesn’t inspire much confidence.
So, to solve this great need, secret formulas have emerged.
Those secret formulas that allow you not to think too much and that, according to their creators, are going to bring you customers by the bucketload.
For example, the much-used, “I help real estate agencies to increase their turnover” or “I help businesses and companies to increase their turnover”.
or “I help companies and non-professionals to create strategic content to attract clients through Inbound Marketing” or even “I help companies and non-professionals to create strategic content to attract clients through Inbound Marketing”.
or even “I help business leaders transform their organisations through people development, process improvement and continuous problem solving”.
Wow!
No, I didn’t make those up. You can find plenty of those on LinkedIn.
And if you want Masterclasses on this, search a little bit on YouTube and they will explain and develop it for a whole hour.
I will abbreviate a little bit.
The truth is that the formula is good. “I help (my niche) to (get what they want)” makes two things very clear:
- Who should/could talk to you
- What problem you solve for them
The problem arises when this very correct formula becomes paella every day.
And you get sick of seeing it everywhere.
And your subconscious becomes blind to this kind of messages.
By applying these formulas you get the first part of what the creators promise you (not to think too much) but probably very little of the second part (bringing you customers by the bucketload).
So the question is, what then?
I can’t set charges. I can’t set formulas.
No, you can’t. You can set formulas. But you do have to do a little bit of work and a little bit of imagination to be original and to stand out from the average, from what everybody else uses, from the well-known formulas.