EDCrocks Events: How to make your work more visible

Being a freelance consultant is both frightening and exciting. I have much more time now to design courses, workshops, write materials, and connect with people. However, it’s always difficult to promote my work without using those digital marketing formulas that, quite frankly, can be very deceiving. If you’re on the same page, wondering how you can make your work more visible and get more people to talk about it, maybe this post can give you some ideas.

My top 5 tips to make your work more visible

When I was a full-time employee, it was harder to work on my professional portfolio because time was always an issue. However, I used my connections to seize some opportunities that involved getting people to know more about the things I was up to. I accepted a lot of invitations to speak for free and many times had to spend hours preparing the slides and studying the topics. As a freelancer, I can’t afford too many free talks anymore, so here’s my first tip:

#1 Accept free talks in exchange for exposure

It might be as simple as promoting your courses, your book, or your consulting services or even as elaborate as getting the person who invited you to deliver a free talk for your channel once. Let’s say someone invites me to talk about something that is very dear to me and I’m very inclined to accept the invitation because I know they have no budget and that it will benefit many teachers. I can ask this person to do a live session with me for my Instagram account or my YouTube channel. If they have a website or a blog, I can ask them to publish one of my texts to get more visibility or simply to share my links on their social media.

#2 Reach out to influencers and offer an interview

Instagram influencers are always on the lookout for new content. Their posting habits are quite systematic and as long as you identify what they’re looking for and how that aligns with what you offer, you might have a chance of being featured in their next interview. I’ve offered to do a webinar or an interview a few times and that led me to great gigs. Make sure you keep trying till you get a break.

#3 Explore different types of media

I first started to talk about things that interested me through this blog in 2017. It grew big, beyond my expectations to be honest, and I decided to explore Instagram. I created my EDCrocks profile there in 2019. I still don’t have as many followers as I’d like but I’m working on it. In 2020, I became more vocal on LinkedIn, and in 2021, I decided to turn my blog posts into a podcast. EDCrocks Podcast was born. Now I finally have an official YouTube channel.

#4 Become a reference in your area

I knew that if I wanted people to take me seriously, I’d have to study and get the right credentials. That takes time and effort. Back in 2014, I realized that I wanted to learn more about neuroscience and psychology. I bought many books about the subject and studied hard. In 2016, I traveled to the USA to learn about teaching methods in language schools there. I took a few short courses in 2017 on neuroanatomy, learning how to learn, the Mind, Brain, and Education science – I even joined BRAZ-TESOL MBE SIG. But my big break came in 2018 when I got the Chevening scholarship. I earned my master’s degree in Psychology of Education, published a few articles, took part in many conferences, and got a job as a lecturer in postgraduate courses on Language and Cognition. It took me a couple of years to build this path and I’m still learning.

#5 Offer your own free events

I love to challenge myself and create thought-provoking webinars that will not only challenge some paradigms but, more importantly, also give the participants actionable tips – practical stuff they can do right away. That helps me stay sharp and innovate. In that spirit, I’ve decided to create a calendar of free events you can join to get to know my work more. They are all part of courses or workshops I already teach and I regard these in particular as my contribution to the teaching/learning community.

A quick note before you check out my events. Make sure you be very picky about when to spend time to create and deliver stuff for free. My rule of thumb is: if you can afford to do it and you think it might bring you more benefits than hard work for nothing, then I take it. I also accept invitations to contribute to social causes and help the teaching community in poor areas. But we must be very careful not to waste our resources when we have bills to pay. You’ll be the judge of how far you can go.

Here are some of my events. If you like my work, help me share this post and hopefully we’ll be together during the webinars or live sessions on Instagram.