In the business world, people talk about leaders endowed with the “vision thing.” These are people who can envision the future for their industry and their company in concrete terms, and explain it in ways that encourage others to buy in to that vision, and focus their efforts around it as well.
Job seekers would do well to follow this example, and spend some time envisioning a clear picture of their career as it will be. With a clear endgame in mind, you can track backwards to those steps you should be taking now, and to recognize the logical next steps when they present themselves.
Do you have a vision for your career? Are you using it to inform your choices now? And will it stand up to the tests of time and experience?
If you don’t, spend some time with your future. Think it through. Let it be real for you, and you’ll see more clearly what you should be doing now, and where it might take you next.
Today’s post is part 2 of a series about the purpose behind HigherEdCareerCoach.Com and the different ways the site and my business are evolving to meet the needs of higher ed job seekers. Consider it a rough draft “blog manifesto” or sorts.
What you need to know about me:
I believe that my purpose in life is to help others along their life and career journeys.
I’ve helped many, many people get jobs and get into grad school, and to figure out where they are going in their lives and careers.
I am mostly interested in helping educators, artists, musicians, and other creators, who keep pushing people, discussions and our culture along.
I believe that knowing your purpose is not enough. You have to find the right way to express it.And for some of my clients, the answer is to not work in higher ed, go to grad school, be an artist or a musician, but something else. If I can help point them away from a wrong turn and be okay with the alternate route, I’ll be happy with that, as well.
I got to a point a couple of years ago where I knew that I enjoyed doing this coaching thing more than the job I was doing, and that it was time to move on. There were other personal motivations, too, including decreasing my stress, spending more time with my partner and kids, and living closer to our aging parents and the rest of my extended family. I want to help people who may be similarly stuck know that it’s okay to change your plans and do something different.
Residence Life is a high burnout field, and I got to a burnout point with it. Then I got over the burnout, and was happy. And people were happy with me. And I felt like I had done what I came to Penn State to do. And I wanted to leave on good terms, because I love that place, and the people there, just like I love my family (dysfunctions and idiosyncracies notwithstanding.)
Once I set a few things in motion, before I knew what had happened, all the sudden, it was time. So I took a leap of faith. And I am happier in my life and career, and get to focus more on what I am meant to do on this Earth, and how I am going to do it. I’m read to help people explore their moments of career serendipity, so that when things come together, they can be ready to take their own leaps.
Which brings me to the whole business thing. Like I said, I have money. It’s not about money. But on principle, I can only justify following my dreams if I maintain the quality of lifestyle my family has, and have a stable enough income to retire one day. I have room to wiggle now, and to figure it out, but I really don’t want to spend my retirement (if there ever is one) living on the street.
So here are the critical points you need to know about me, my sites, and my business.
I’m not motivated by money in the strictest sense, but I do want to have a sustainable business that delivers value and creates regular income, because (like most people), I value stability and want to give that to my family. They deserve it for putting up with me!
The articles and advice you get on the blogs will continue to be free as long as I can manage to keep putting good content out there and justify the costs of hosting the sites. In some cases, I pay my writers, because this is a business, and their writing keeps your eyeballs on the page and gives my business exposure while actually providing you some value, through different perspectives and ideas. In other cases, I trade posts with other education bloggers and coaches, or accept submissions based on a particular topic (for example: Monday Morning Quarterback columns.)
Other services will cost you money. (Resume reviews, coaching sessions, webinars, publications, and eventually one or more members-only sites and coaching programs.)
I’m not outrageously priced, but I am not cheap, either. I do have “friends and family” discounts, package rates, and a variety of products and services, either currently available or in development, and I’m developing more short-term and one-time opportunities to meet the demand for low-cost services.
I will continue to have some sorts of advertising on my site and more often than not, this advertising will be for affiliate programs I am a part of, for products that I use, have used, want badly (like an iPad) or just think are good. If you buy something from a link or an ad on my sites, chances are, I will earn some money from the transaction.
I’m going to stop hinting and start selling, because I want to stay busy with the coaching, help people and support my family. In other words, it’s time to really move from being an aspiring businessman to an actual one.
I’m going to enlist your help. Why? Because I believethe assistance of my readers, professional community, and other people and websites I admire can help me improve the sites and give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t, because I don’t want to annoy you and I do want you to keep coming back.
Here are some upcoming things you will see on the sites, as a result of the “course corrections” to get my sites and my business moving forward:
I will be placing more prominent links and buttons on the sidebar to encourage people to consider working with me as a coach. No more hinting. If you are a job seeker in higher ed, I want your business. But if you only come to read, that’s cool too. But if and when you are ready, I want to be at the top of your mind. If you know me and trust me already, then that’s a good start, and I’ll take it.
You’ll continue to see e-mail list sign-up forms in the sidebar and I do use pop-up forms as well. I’ll try to give you incentives to join the list. For the e-mail list, I am linking them to some auto-responders that will deliver free e-mail mini-courses over a set period, as well as regular newsletters, and the opportunity to get “blog broadcast” summary newsletters. New subscribers who sign up at Higher Ed Career Coach are currently getting a mini-course on “Planning Your Career in Higher Education” in exchange for signing up. This autoresponder mini-course has weekly topics and exercises to help you flesh out some of the steps as you plan your career journey. It isn’t really a “self-coaching” program, but it should help you get started. This mini-course will be available for the next month or so, but will be taken down and replaced by another topic-related mini-course, probably in early October. Afterwards, it will be offered (probably with some modifications and feedback) as a paid product.
This month, I will begin offering some low-cost webinars on career topics and you will see registration widgets on the site, as well as articles about upcoming opportunities. Some of these will have set per-seat prices, and others will be offered as “Tip Jar Webinars.” This means that you pay according to the value you receive. There will be a suggested donation but if you think the seminar was useless you won’t pay anything. If you get something out of it, you’ll be encouraged to support the development of the series by “tipping” based on the length and format, number of presenters and value of the information. (Probably between $5-$20 would be an appropriate tip for most seminars)
In the next few months, you will see offerings for e-books and for a book I am contributing a chapter to, called “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career.”The book is a cooperative book project from SelfGrowth.Com and that means I bought into the project to get published alongside 100 other career authors and to have books to use for giveaways and promotions, as well as selling them. There is a screening process, so hopefully my article won’t get rejected, now that I am telling you about it. So let me make it clear. I do realize this is a glorified ad in some ways.
I’m going to revise my affiliate advertising strategy, and the first step will be to get feedback from you about what you would prefer to see, and what you might buy. I will only continue to participate in affiliate programs for products I use, would use, want or believe in. And if you have a bad experience with one of these programs or think I should stop my affiliation with a group or company, I want to know that, because I only want to advertise products and services that readers would actually use.
Thanks for reading. I’d love your feedback about what I can do to improve the sites, focus my business strategy, and better meet the needs of higher ed job seekers. I’ll be starting later this week with a brief survey about the site features and advertising/affiliate programs.
Let’s just jump right in and get to the point. Today, I learned that I am a failure.
Well, at least as an affiliate marketer. I’m trying to decide if I really care one way or the other about this, but let me rewind a bit and give you some of the backstory that brought me to this conclusion, so you’ll have context.
You may not have even realized that I am a marketer. After all, the site is called Higher Ed Career Coach, and most of the articles you find here are about job searching in higher education, and issues related to the changing landscape of higher ed. The ads you see are pretty much relegated to the sidebar and I took off some of my more sales-ey content a while back, including my Amazon.Com widget, my “book an appointment” Tungle calendar link, and the easy links to my shopping cart and Paypal payment buttons. You might even think the site is only about free career advice.
It’s not. The whole thing is an ad. And not a very good ad, at that. Sure, the articles can create discussion, and the podcast on BlogTalkRadio can offer different insights from guests, and you’ll certainly get the occasional articles that are really about me and the business. But the real goal of this site and my other site (Higher Ed Life Coach) are really the front gates for my business, and I’m not doing the best job with the selling part of things. It’s not why I went into business. I had more idealistic goals. I went into business to help people get jobs and find balance in their lives and careers (another thing I’d failed at plenty, myself, but learned a lot from.)
But I realized a few months back that I needed to get more comfortable with selling, because a business can’t just be about ideas and motivation. It has to be about action.
So I did a couple of things. First, I joined Third Tribe Marketing (affiliate link), a site founded by Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Darren Rowse and Sonia Simone, to try and learn how to do this without being annoying. Second, I redesigned my sites to be cleaner and to get away from Adsense ads, because their strange algorithms pull in all sorts of advertising content, and there is little you can do to truly control what ads end up on your site. It’s annoying, and I hate it. So I took a new approach, and joined affiliate networks and chose companies I have used or feel that readers can actually get some value from. But I never figured out the right way to draw attention to them, and to let people know why they are there, without being sales-ey. So people haven’t been buying.
In a recent post in the Third Tribe forum, Chris Brogan put it simply. He asked members if they were hinting or selling. And I realized I have only been hinting. And that’s pretty damn annoying, too. So it’s time I “man up” and let you know more about what I am going for with this site, with my business, and about why I participate in affiliate programs. The more you know about me and what I stand for, the better you will be able to decide how my sites and I can serve you better. And, if you can’t get past the idea that I am also looking to make money, as well as assist, enlighten, and occasionally entertain, then I guess you’ll probably be looking elsewhere for this sort of information.
It’s my sincere hope that you’ll stay on as a reader, and help me get where I am going with this. And not just for my sake, or the sake of my bank account. (Let’s just say that I’m fine in that area, for the most part, and that money is not my primary motivation for doing this. I actually believe that coaching helps people, and that I am good at helping people.There is a legitimate need for coaching in the higher ed space, and I feel that coaches need to come out of the ranks of our institutions and help others find the way. I’m uniquely qualified to do this, because I have known both great success and major failure in my career (and my life) and I love sharing what I have learned. Especially what I learned from failures.
If some parts of my life and career only happened to serve as a warning to others, then I am honestly okay with that.What value would they have as distant memories and trivia, when they could be signposts in the road, steering others in the right direction?
Monday: More on me, my business model, and where I see affiliate marketing and pa
As regular readers will recall, I have been writing a lot about the idea of “gurus” out there who promote themselves as the be-all, end-all authorities for this-that-and-the-other-thing, and contrasting them with “who-dos,” which are people who are out there putting their passion and purpose to work, to change the way we do things in higher education, with social media, in helping people in their careers, and other ways that have positive impacts on society and the world.
Last month, I was glad to applaud our friends over at BreakDrink for their efforts to create free and low-cost-of-entry professional development programs for student affairs professionals, and for their groundbreaking attempt to put together a podcast network of sorts serving the field.
As I said in the introduction to this concept, I would like to take nominations each month and announce a “Who-Do” of the Month.
The Process
Here’s how I would like to do this:
I’ll put up a post, like this one, once a month, asking people to submit nominations. Ideally, I’d like to take them in the comment section, so people can read all the good things about those nominated.
I’ll post a poll on the blog about a week later with persons nominated
People will vote.
I will review nominations and votes and have a discussion with an advisory committee (which I am currently putting together-more on the makeup of that, once I have people lined up.)
The last week of each month, I will announce the “Who-Do” of the month.
In the latter part of Spring semester, I will have a process announced for selecting the “Who-Do” Highsman (get it?) award for the year.
Nominate Someone Now!
Please take a few minutes between now and next Tuesday at noon to nominate someone who deserves recognition, and to tell the world why you see this person as defining the spirit of the “Who-Do.” If you want to send the nomination directly to me, e-mail it to sean@higheredcareercoach.com and I will post some of the essential pieces here, so people can at least know who was nominated and why.
Have an Idea for How I Should Structure the “Highsman” selection?
Send me your ideas. I’d love to hear them, and I want to make this process engaging and fun. I’m looking forward to reading the nominations!
Using RSS feeds to keep up with vacancy postings during your job search with Eric Stoller, an academic advisor at Oregon State University, who also shares his thoughts on higher education, technology, and social justice issues at EricStoller.com and consults with institutions in higher education about technology issues.
From my Google Reader: Higher Ed News and Views, plus other interesting articles on social media, education, etc.
Cook Coaching Programs and Services: Information on my 8 weeks to August Career Coaching Program for student affairs professionals finding themselves “stuck” in their job search; Accidentally on Purpose sideshow, with Sean Cook and Monica Moody; upcoming workshops for high school students transitioning to college, parents hoping to avoid the “helicopter parent phenomenon,” and more.
Call-Ins: Please listen in to the show and call in your questions and comments to (347) 989-0055 or send them via twitter to @hiedcareercoach. I’ll be asking for comments at various points, especially between 3:15 pm and 3:45 pm when talking with Eric Stoller, but callers are welcome to comment on or ask questions about anything we cover, or other issues in higher education.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
