Welcome to Allison Stein Consulting

9-min. read

I am excited to announce the launch of my new business, Allison Stein Consulting, LLC.

If we haven’t met before, I’m Allison, a writer and writing consultant based in the Thumb of Michigan. I have worked primarily on professional promotion projects, editing projects, and usability research projects.

In this post, I explore some of the thinking that drives my design choices in this website and business ecosystem, share my six-month plan to launch an independent consultancy, catalog the strategies I implemented and happy accidents I encountered, and provide a listing of key activities that may serve as a roadmap for other recent college graduates with similar goals.

I divide my discussion into three time periods—July & August, September & October, and November & December—for the sake of prospective consultants interested in how they might structure a launch. My last section, Final Thoughts, frames strategies for establishing a meaningful web presence based around content creation services, especially as a recent graduate.

Let’s get started.

July & August

The Plan: Transforming an Old Portfolio

In the very beginning, I made a list of my skills (read: services) and considered whether and how they might fit together. This was an important step, as it helped me focus the rest of the project and made it easier to communicate with others about the breadth and limits of my skill set, but because I do not have a lengthy proven track record as a recent graduate, I understood that prospective clients would expect me to show, not tell. This meant providing samples of my work through a digital portfolio. In my case, this also meant transforming the classroom portfolio I had on hand from an academic document to a professional document. I didn’t have to create sample work and project narratives from scratch, but I did have to reframe them in significant ways to meet the needs and expectations of a new audience.

Strategies for doing so included listing my education later in my resume, portraying academic accomplishments as secondary to professional ones, and removing unnecessary references to classroom projects. Because my program emphasized problem solving and experiential learning, in many instances, I could reframe those projects as client work.

The next step was getting my portfolio ready for public consumption. I invested in the Squarespace website builder so that I could have more functionality than the free tools I was using for school and bought a custom URL to make it easier for people to find me. I also increased my standards for professionalism by studying what other online content creators were doing. This actually led me to think beyond the portfolio.

The Happy Accident: Thinking Beyond a Portfolio

As I dug deeper with researching others’ strategies, I found a vast number of online business owners, including consultants, who maintained blogs in a niche with demographic and psychographic affinities to the target customer base for their freelance services.

I made a list of blogs I enjoyed, such as Louise Henry, Morgan Timm, and The Creative Penn, and studied how these entrepreneurs used blogging as a tool to build their platforms and create a community of passionate advocates for their consultancies. The posts did not read like a sales pitch or call to hire the blogger in the way a portfolio entry might, but they did serve to sell intangibles, such as experience and ethos.

My goals began to change. I now wanted to design not only an electronic portfolio but a website of a much different scope that would function as a platform for community building at Allison Stein Consulting.

By page(s), I identified the following purposes for this site:

• Home. To orient, welcome, and pique the interest of site visitors.

• Blog. To engage visitors in pertinent topics about writing, editing, and design; to establish and maintain professional identity; to sell myself without selling anything.

• About. To present myself as a qualified professional; to contextualize my personas as a writer and writing consultant (i.e., creative and technical writer).

• Hire Me. To provide examples of my services and manage clients’ expectations.

• Portfolio. To demonstrate my investment in my work and in work processes.

• Contact. To give prospective clients an easily understood “next step.”

• Shop. To sell books; to support the narrative that I am qualified to consult about publishing.

Over time, I compiled the resources I studied in a formal digital archive. I wanted to share the blogs that I found valuable, by category, with others to keep track of the loose ends and overlapping threads in my own professional development, to drive some traffic back to the bloggers who helped me develop a blogging strategy, and last but not least, to earn a reputation for curating quality content with my readers.

Key Activities

• reading about the gig economy

• making a list of my skills, defining the breadth and limits of my services

• deciding on my web pages

• selecting a website-building platform

• choosing projects to feature in my portfolio and how to present those projects

• comparing other blogs; studying up on social media strategy

• choosing the design / aesthetic elements of my website (e.g., font kits, images)

• brainstorming ideas for content of value that I could provide as a student (e.g., resource listings)

• discussing an umbrella business and the potential sub-businesses for my consultancy

September & October

The Plan: Finding My Voice in Articles

As a prospective blogger, I considered internal and external publishing projects. My blog could serve as a platform for both announcements specific to Allison Stein Consulting and links to articles with wider appeal for which I could seek publication in other venues. I identified topics I might be interested in and qualified to write about, venues that published articles about those topics, and patterns and strategies within and among the articles previously featured in each venue.

My greatest challenge was developing an appropriate voice for the articles. Many guest blog posts called for a direct, second-person voice that positioned the writer as a credible source on the topic. Thus, I needed to write in a voice that conveyed more authority and confidence than the voice I was accustomed to writing in. By seeking feedback from people I trusted and studying the tone of published articles, I gradually emulated the voice of other platforms.

The Happy Accident: Writing Project Narratives for the Blog

During this time, I was reading Michael Ventura’s Applied Empathy, which is a great book about empathetic leadership in the Sub Rosa design consultancy run by Ventura. Ventura talks about strategies for practicing empathy in the context of project narratives about the work Sub Rosa has completed for clients. The chapters read like stories rather than the formal narratives I had constructed for my portfolio. I wondered whether and how I could create an alternative version of my portfolio project narratives to distribute in my blog and on social media.

In the project narrative blog entries, I needed to appeal to a broader base of readers than prospective clients, which is the primary audience for my portfolio. That meant adapting my narratives to the blogging platform. For example, I added a Final Thoughts section with strategies and quick fixes for readers to implement in their own consulting work. I focused less on the results I achieved with client projects than the activities that drove those results, as the main purpose of my blog—unlike, say, my portfolio—is not to sell my freelance design services but to teach people.

Key Activities

• studying how other consultants present themselves on Fiverr and Upwork

• modeling project narratives for the blog after Ventura

• identifying potential venues for guest blog posts

• identifying patterns and strategies among articles published by target venues

• drafting articles for target venues

• seeking feedback from others

• planning pricing, contracts, and services

• filling the gaps in my professional development

November & December

The Plan: Reimagining the Website as an Ecosystem

At this point, I had developed some content for both the portfolio and the blog, but the question was, could I do more or better to market myself to prospective clients?

I liked the way my portfolio was shaping up, but I saw a need to give people an opportunity to skim the surface of my professional development, instead of or in addition to taking a deep dive by reading a portfolio entry. To that end, I worked on crafting a resume. I offered this document as a one-page PDF or as an expanded, interactive version with internal and external links to my projects.

On the blogging side, I constructed project narratives modeled after Ventura. I also refined my digital resource archive, where I contextualized thoughts from a variety of qualified bloggers. My three resource-related entries focused on strategies and best practices for social media managers, editors, and usability researchers.

The Happy Accident: Establishing Categories for Professional Identity

It occurred to me that the way I divided my resource listings among the three topics paralleled the three categories I had chosen for work experience in my interactive resume (Professional Promotion Experience, Editing Experience, and Usability Research Experience).

Although I had been wrestling for months now about what topics and types of content to publish on my blog, suddenly the content calendar filled itself in. Like much of my best usability or market research for clients, the research for my own consulting website was a very bottom-up process. I figured out what I had to say and then mapped those possibilities and constraints to blog categories, not the other way around.

I made a list of areas of professional focus, or topics of content.

• Professional Promotion

• Editing & Publishing

• Usability Research

I made another list of areas of the website, or types of content.

• Services (Hire Me)

• Resource Pages (Blog)

• Experiences on Resume (About)

• Project Narratives (Portfolio)

• Project Narratives (Blog)

• Articles (External Venues)

I decided to set up blog categories that allowed readers to search by either topic or type of content.

Key Activities

• dividing my business into three Professional Development categories

• strategizing about the different types of blog content

• making a content calendar grid

• writing my author bio

• creating the Resources pages

• creating an interactive resume

• building more project narratives for the blog and portfolio

Final Thoughts

This final section is intended for beginners on the career ladder who, like me, are interested in building a website to support a new business venture. Here, I list my best strategies and quick fixes for getting your entrepreneurial project on track in the short and long term.

Read on for my best advice.

1. Close the gap between how people perceive you and how you want to be perceived. For me, this meant transforming my portfolio from an academic to a professional document so that I could feel more comfortable showing samples of my work to individuals and businesses outside of Saginaw Valley State University.

   Strategy: Reframe class projects as client projects with a clear audience, purpose, and context.

   Quick fix: Limit references to course names and curricula, except where and how your audience expects to see these details (e.g., in the Education section of your resume).

2. Consider whether you are defining the scope of your project too broadly or narrowly. I changed my goal from designing a portfolio to designing a web-based community, of which my portfolio was one component.

   Strategy: Study model consultancies, and draw from published strategies and best practices.

   Quick fix: Zoom in and out of your project. If you zoom in, can you more easily define a core purpose for your business without the distraction of peripheral activities? If you zoom out, do you find a core purpose on the periphery?

3. Speak to your readers in a direct, confident tone. People will be much more receptive to your message if they see you as competent and trustworthy. It took some practice before I established patterns for writing in this manner.

   Strategy: Read the work your target venues publish. Ask others how your writing comes across to them.

   Quick fix: Search your Word document for hedge language, such as “I think,” “you should,” and “sort of.” Edit any sentences that appear in your search.

4. Write for multiple audiences, or at least with multiple audiences in mind. I developed formal project narratives for my portfolio, which caters to the needs of prospective clients, and for my blog, which serves a more general audience, including other consultants.

   Strategy: Construct personas for members of different audiences. Consider if and where readers’ needs, expectations, and values are apt to diverge. Identify areas where you might offer two complementary but alternative reading experiences.

   Quick fix: Write an expanded version of a short blog post. Write a summary about a longer post.

5. Make connections between and among your web pages. I used an expanded, interactive resume to link my standard resume (one page, PDF) and the project samples from my portfolio.

   Strategy: Draw a map of your website. Evaluate how and to what extent you lead readers from one page to another. Note untapped opportunities to cross-promote your content, weak or arbitrary connections between posts, and blog entries with fewer than two internal links.

   Quick fix: Add links to posts of the same type or from the same content category at the end of each blog entry.

6. Establish categories for your knowledge, skills, and abilities. I focused on marketing myself as a professional promotion expert, editor, and usability researcher.

   Strategy: Commit your ideas to paper via a content calendar. If you are a visual thinker, try making a grid. List areas of professional focus across the x-axis and areas of your website down the y-axis.

   Quick fix: Visit job boards for freelancers, such as Fiverr and Upwork, to see how other consultants talk about the work they do and jump-start your thinking.

Thanks for reading!

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