What is the most effective way to market your skills as a self-employed Peer Support professional?

When I left a major social service organization to be my own boss and do private consulting, I compiled emails of everyone I had helped in the past and let them know I would still be providing the high quality service they had come to know from me and did an email blast describing my services as a private consultant. I booked up quickly and that never stopped. I did a huge amount of outreach via LinkedIn, Facebook and internet searches. I was like a bulldog with outreach but bottomline, you must have developed a following (hopefully) of those who admire your work. If you don't have a following, you must convince folks why it would be to their advantage to utilize your services. You must convince others why you are unique!

Pro tip: Networking is not just meeting amazing people. It is rooted in connection. The email after meeting, the coffee meet-up, and the continued interest and communication. Prioritize that to leverage value from your efforts!

Generating meaningful blog posts of quality is time consuming. By meaningful & quality I mean well written and presented, not click bait, not regurgitating content that adds little that hasn't been written a thousand times before. My experience is that to sustain an impactful blog site you need to be able to publish content at least once a month. This is a much bigger commitment than it sounds, especially if you are doing everything else that a self employed person has to do to look after their business. If your quality is high then getting published on a reputable industry site gives you greater reach and both contributes to and borrows from the reputation of the site for your benefit

Listening to clients, general public and the market provides important information about pain points. Feedback not only contributes to skills enhancement, it provides insight into what our peers are experiencing. I've used that insight to redesign training sessions. After every client interaction, I reflect on the process and what I did well and what I could improve. Feedback received rarely matches with my reflection. Sometimes what I think worked well, did not matter to the client or they have raved about something I thought needed improvement. As a marketing tool, I can create blogs about lessons learned and use the responses for testimonials in my next email or website marketing campaign. Always remember: feedback is data. Track it.