Ep 253: Why Being Invisible Online Is Costing You More Than You Think with Ange Dove

SHOWNOTES

For years, Ange Dove ran a successful copywriting agency in Singapore with no website that had her name on it, her photo on it, or any trace of her online. “I had no visibility whatsoever,” she says. Then a coach gave her one blunt instruction — Google yourself — and what she found (nothing) changed how she thought about her business for good.

Ange has run her own business from Singapore for more than twenty years, first as founder of a copywriting agency serving multinational companies, and now as a coach helping business owners build the visibility she once avoided entirely. She’s also the host of her own podcast and YouTube channel — a full turnaround from someone who once needed a whole afternoon to record a 30-second video.

We Also Talked About

• How a competitor’s decision to close her business after 10 years in the same industry made the shift feel suddenly real for Ange.
• Why “people buy from people, not companies” cost Ange work for years without her realizing it.
• The line from a coach — “it’s not about you, it’s about who you serve” — that changed how Ange thinks about showing up online.
• How a 21-day group challenge got Ange comfortable on camera, and why doing it alongside others made the difference.
• A simple trick for talking to a camera lens without it feeling like talking to nobody.
• Why Ange thinks older generations may be more addicted to social media than the younger ones now pulling away from it.
• How repeated waves of technology — Google, content marketing, and now AI — forced Ange to keep reinventing her business model.

Resources Mentioned

• Ange Dove’s website: angedove.com
• Ange’s 12-week personal branding challenge: coach.angedove.com/aa12
• Scrivener (the writing software Ange used to build her copywriting business): Scrivener

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

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Episode 253: Why Being Invisible Online Is Costing You More Than You Think with Ange Dove

[00:00:00]

Trudy Rankin: A coach once told Ange Dove to do the obvious thing, Google her own name. Now, she’d been running a successful copywriting business for years, and there should have been lots there, but nothing came up. Not one result. And it turns out that that kind of invisible costs you a lot more than you’d think, and fixing it meant confronting the one thing that Ange had spent her whole career avoiding.

In this episode, we get into what invisibility can really be costing a business owner in money and missed connections. We talk about the line from a coach that completely reframed how Ange thinks about showing up online and how she went from dreading the camera to running her own podcast and YouTube channel.

Ange has run her own business from Singapore for more than 20 years, first as a copywriter and now as a coach helping other business owners build the visibility [00:01:00] that she once avoided entirely.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and if you are someone who needs a flexible work from home option, I help you grow the online side of your business so that you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I’ve got Ange Dove with me, and Ange has got something that we’re going to discuss a little bit that I think probably matters to probably 90, 95% of people who run businesses, at least particularly if you are an introvert, and that is that sense of feeling invisible.

And whether you want to be invisible or whether you don’t want to be invisible and you are, [00:02:00] I think that it’s that sense of just not being seen, whether that’s online and actually even offline. So one of the things that sort of made me perk up my ears when Ange and I met on Podmatch and we’re talking about actually, you know, whether or not we would want to just chat on this podcast, was just that whole concept of when you’re invisible, you’re actually losing out quite a lot of money.

And not just money, but the ability to meet people that are interesting and you might actually want to get to know. So this is something that Ange has been, living for the last number of years because she’s experienced it herself. And I’ve asked her if she’ll tell her story and just share some of her expertise today.

So Ange, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Ange Dove: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. So do you want to just share with our listeners a little [00:03:00] bit about your backstory? You know, kind of where you were and how you’ve gotten to the place now where you’re actually one of the people who actually help people create that visibility online.

Ange Dove: So, oh, long story short, hey. I live in Singapore. I’ve lived in Singapore for 30 years, and I came here to teach English originally, so that’s what I was doing. And I did that for about 10 years. And then over time I got really interested in the publishing space. We did some publishing for English as a foreign language books, and I got into the writing part of it.

And I just loved it. I just loved it. And I thought, I just want to be a writer. Eventually I set up a copywriting agency here in Singapore, and I was running that. But I ran it, I did a really good job of creating the brand for the company, but I did not create a brand for myself. So I hid behind the company.

Which in a way, in some ways was quite good [00:04:00] because customers were not so invested in me doing the work for them and me being the only person that could do it, so… Although that did happen. But with it being the company, they were quite happy to let other people do it, other members of staff do the work for them, so that was an easier transition that way.

But what I didn’t realize was, I mean, I didn’t know what a personal brand was. I don’t think many people did in those days. But I wasn’t on my website. My name wasn’t on the website. My image wasn’t on the website. It was faceless, right? It was a faceless organization. When I used to go then to meetings to go and see clients, I would turn up at meetings and clients would say to me, “Oh, you know, we’ve heard so much about you and we finally get to put a face to the name.”

And I’m like, “Oh, well, how? Like, how did you find out about me?” Because I’m nowhere, right? I kind of got berated by a coach at one time because he said, “Google your name. Where do you show up?” And I showed up absolutely nowhere. [00:05:00] I had no visibility whatsoever. But, you know, to me at that stage, for me social media was…

I only had Facebook really at that stage, and I had a LinkedIn profile but didn’t do much with it. And I just felt that social media was for connecting with my friends, right? And I was a very private person, and I didn’t really want to use social media to grow my business. And then also with the business we never really put content out either for the business.

We really-

Trudy Rankin: Oh, interesting …

Ange Dove: wouldn’t engage on social media. We got all our clients through Google Ads. I was used to people coming to me. I didn’t have to go and chase them. In that sense there was kind of no need to build so much of a personal brand. But what I realized later was, especially the timing of this in Singapore in the early days, this was over 20 years ago, was there were no copywriters really in Singapore.

There’s a very short supply of [00:06:00] copywriters. No English-speaking copywriters, like native English-speaking copywriters. And multinational companies based here were desperate for copywriters. So when I started calling up and saying, “Do you want the services?” They go, “Oh my God, yes. Please send us something.”

“We’re desperate. We’re desperate.” So it was really easy to get work in those days. But what I didn’t realize was that, um, the… I’ve lost the thread of what I was going to say.

Trudy Rankin: Basically talking about what you didn’t realize in terms of your visibility, why you would need visibility.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

I can’t think what the point I was going to make with that now. But basically yeah, in those days they were desperate for copywriters, but there weren’t really any copywriters. If I’d have put my face out there in those early days, then I would’ve got a lot more work, I’m sure of it.

I would’ve got three times the work that I got. Because my kind of person was exactly what they were [00:07:00] looking for, but they weren’t finding it because it wasn’t visible online. So it’s really, it only spread through word of mouth that I actually got jobs from people, or they just came on through Google and clicked and made an inquiry and didn’t know who they were getting. Yeah, so I lost a lot of money, I would say, through not being visible when I should have, because people buy from people. They don’t buy from companies, really.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. That is so true. And of course, you know, the world’s changed over the last 20 years in so many different ways. And when you got … you know, when things sort of move progressively on as they always do, the competition increases as it always does. What was the trigger that finally made you go, “Hang on, wait a minute, I really do need to be visible online”?

Ange Dove: I knew that I wanted to do coaching, and I wanted to help people to set up their own business as I had done. So when I set up my business 20-plus years ago, I had no idea how to run a business whatsoever, [00:08:00] right? I was just doing it out of, I would say, necessity really out of anything else. I had two small kids at the time.

I wanted to work from home and look after them and spend time with them, and it was just at the dawn of the internet, and we’d just got our first home computer. And I realized then that I could do work from home. I could do writing from home and send it over by email to the customers. But even then, like, I was really green.

It was like the first time I had a job and I had to send the file to a client, I did not know how to attach an attachment. That’s how green I was. I had to phone a friend. So yeah, so that’s how things were in the early days.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so I mean, because I can remember when my children were small, I can remember working for a federal court reporter in the US, and we lived in Australia. And just that liberating understanding and realization that even if I had to post the [00:09:00] physical files through the post and, you know, wait three weeks for them to arrive, I could still at least email and say, “Hey, they’re coming.”

Ange Dove: Okay.

Trudy Rankin: They’re coming. And over time, of course, that’s all changed as well. But the internet has really, really made a big, big, big difference. So you decided you wanted to become a coach and teach people how to set up a business.

You know, because yes, it is an enormous undertaking that people who get started with businesses don’t really realize, I don’t think, how much they’re going to have to grow and change and learn. What made you decide or how did the pivot, if you want to call it that, from doing the copywriting business to the coaching?

Sort of tell us a little bit more about that.

Ange Dove: Okay. So part of it was earlier on, what started it was I was using a writing material, a writing program tool called Scrivener. I don’t know if you know Scrivener, right?

Trudy Rankin: Yes.

Ange Dove: So Scrivener is like when you open it up, it’s like Photoshop.

It’s Photoshop for writers. It’s really complicated. There’s loads of [00:10:00] tools down the side, there’s loads of tools at the top, and there’s nothing on the screen, right? So it’s a huge learning curve to actually learn to use it. So I found online, I just started trying to search YouTube for how to use this thing.

And I came across a guy that was running a course called How to Learn Scrivener Fast. Brilliant title, because that’s exactly what I needed to do. So I signed up for his program at 497, and that was my entry into this world of online learning. When I found that, I thought, “Well, I could do that, too.”

That’s how I started to explore doing that. But the thing that stopped me was I couldn’t be on camera. I could not put myself on camera at all. To show you how bad I was, so this was partly just a lack of belief in myself, and it was, um… Well, it was mainly a lack of belief in myself.

And a coach one time asked me to send him a testimonial, and I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll write something tonight.” “Yeah, no. [00:11:00] No, Ange, I want you to video it for me.” And I’m like, “No, I can’t video.” And I was such a perfectionist at this time, that recording a 30-second video for his testimonial took me the whole afternoon.

And it was just trauma for me, absolute trauma. I just hated every minute of it. And so I thought, “I’m never going to get good on camera. This is terrible.” But eventually I did, just through practice, practice, practice, exposure. Just recording privately for myself, and then looking back and critiquing yourself or whatever.

I got better at it. Then I did a 21-day challenge where I invited people in just to do a challenge to get good on video, to get comfortable on video. So we went through that together for 21 days, and I would give them, I would turn up live every day, um, give them instruction on something to do with how to either set up the camera, how to do the sound or whatever.

They were all technical, plus helpful hints on how to get good on [00:12:00] camera. Then I would do another recording giving them a homework example, and then they would go and do the homework and post it in a private Facebook group. So we did that. At the end of the 21 days, everyone was so comfortable on video, so that, that sort of cracked it for me.

And now I have my own YouTube channel. I do my own podcast. So video’s become now a major, major part of my business. And my podcast is just the highlight of my week. It’s the thing that I enjoy doing the most. So that’s a huge transformation from not being good on camera. So that was part of the journey to going into coaching.

And then, but even though I did that and I was, like, tinkering with it the copywriting business was still my main income at that point. So any jobs that came in, I would just focus on that because that was definite money coming in. So I didn’t really put aside any time to build the coaching business.

But then ChatGPT happened. [00:13:00] And then it was like someone flicked a switch, and overnight the inquiries just dried up. And I would go to networking event and they’d say, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “I’m a copywriter.” “Oh, do they still exist?”

Trudy Rankin: Oh, ouch. Yes.

Ange Dove: So yeah, the inquiries just dried up completely.

And then the realization that this is serious came when a competitor of mine who I’d never met, but I knew she was around, and she put a post on LinkedIn to thank her customers for years of service and she was closing her doors. And I was like, “What?” So then I messaged her, and then we arranged to go for coffee.

So then we… I don’t know, for 10 years we’d never met each other, and then we went for coffee, and we were just discussing, how it had affected the business and then what she was doing. And she completely moved on to something completely different.

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm.

Ange Dove: But my stand was I’m going to be the last copywriter [00:14:00] standing.

Trudy Rankin: So I’m curious, like, I mean, it’s a, it’s a fascinating story. But I know it’s happened to a lot of other people as well.

So talk to us just a little bit about that transition period from where you’re going, “Oh my goodness, this is not a going to be a going concern for very much longer.”

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: To, “Okay, I do have a viable thing that I can focus on that is going to bring in clients, and I can keep working, keep bringing in the money.”

Ange Dove: Mm.

Trudy Rankin: Talk about that transition and pivot time.

Ange Dove: Okay. So it was a long period of acceptance on several levels, I would say. And it all started with, like throughout the whole business, my business was running for over 20 years, and throughout the whole business, there was always some change, right?

And I think that’s something that business owners have to realize, is that you set up your business, you’re proud of it, it’s going great, and then something happens to throw a spanner in the [00:15:00] works, right? Something will change along the way. And for me, most of the time it’s been technology. Every time technology changed, that forced a change in my business.

So when Google first came, for example, that was a major change for us because that meant people really demanded content. So actually that was a boost for us because people demanded content, so there was a lot of people asking for content services. But then at the same time it caused more competition because more writers came out then to service that demand.

And when we first started the business the main jobs were print newsletters. Because I was serving multinational companies, they were my main customers. And when I served them, they at the beginning, like refused to go online to do marketing. It was all offline marketing.

It took them a long time to actually transition to online marketing. But eventually we had to learn online marketing as well. So changing the services to that. And then there were various things along the way with different [00:16:00] tech that changed things. So we were always having to constantly adapt.

So it’s never the same. You are constantly adapting. So at first, I just saw this ChatGPT as another adaptation I have to make, right? And it’ll work out, and it’ll, you know. And I still think a little bit as well, it’s kind of like the pendulum swung violently one way, and I think it’s coming back down now.

I think people are starting to realize that they still need copywriters, that you’re not going to get everything out of ChatGPT. You need a human in the loop somewhere. So it’s just working out how I serve people that way. It’ll just be a different way of writing.

Trudy Rankin: Yes.

Ange Dove: But at the original, like when it first happened, is I really sort of put my head in the sand and just pretended nothing was happening, right?

I’m not dealing with this. This is not happening. That was my way of dealing with it at the beginning, and then realizing then when I saw how good all these tools were, I [00:17:00] then started teaching people how to use the AI tools to get better writing out of it. So I would go into corporates and actually teach them how to use it, and we do a lot of training with government agencies here because…

This is one thing good about the Singapore government is they’re very proactive when something… They’re very quick to adopt technology. So they recognized very early on that AI wasn’t going away, and they could use it to their advantage. So in all the government agencies, they have a one system that everybody uses, and it has the AI writing tools packed inside it.

So they can use AI to do all their writing. So, there was a big demand then to teach them how to actually get something useful out of it. You know, looking at… You always gotta sort of look at, okay, I can’t do this anymore because there’s no demand. What can I do with my skills that I can still use?

So that became one of the skills, was teaching the AI. So that was person [00:18:00] to person. That was in a physical room we would teach that.

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Ange Dove: So that was that. And then I had the backup of the work that I’d been doing with my preparing for my coaching that I never actually launched.

So that was teaching people how to set up their own business, so that’s this one, Business From Anywhere, and really bringing people in through personal branding and the need to be visible, right? And if you’re telling my story, right, if you’re not visible, you’re leaving money on the table.

So that’s how that transition went. And it’s still a constant ongoing tweaking and, you know, speaking to customers and finding out what they need, what is interesting to them and what they find difficult, how do we simplify things down so that they can really get useful information out of it.

So, that’s where we are. And, it’s kind of like, you know when you’re going through difficult times, you think the world is ending, right? The sky is falling [00:19:00] in, whatever. But you know that there’s always going to be… You’re going to get through it, right? And then when you’ve got through it and you look back, you’ve got all these dots that you can connect that didn’t make sense at the time, and now they make sense.

And now I look at it as, okay, well, thank God for ChatGPT coming along, because otherwise I would still be cruising along in my copywriting business, and I would never have launched my coaching business, I believe, because I would never have had the time. It’s actually a good thing that’s happened, because at this stage of my life, I don’t want to be writing copy for other people.

So I’ve kind of… It’s forced me to move from a done for you service to a, either a done with you or DIY service. So it’s, I’m more of a consulting role than a doing-it-yourself role, which is exactly where I want to be. So it’s been good. It’s been good.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. I mean, it’s always interesting, isn’t it? The things that happen and you look back, as you say, and you connect the dots and go, oh. So that’s [00:20:00] why. So that’s the value that I got from that. I want to talk just a little bit about just that whole concept of visibility, why it’s so important, especially when you’re just getting started. But I want to approach it from the perspective of a lot of the people that I work with who are starting their own businesses or they’re trying to build their businesses, grow their businesses past the point that it is at the moment. And that reticence to show up online, not, like, physically show up, like in guest podcasting or videos on YouTube or even videos on your website or having your picture plastered all over the place, because that can be really confronting. Because every day we change a little bit, we get a little bit older and, you know, people have lots of interesting ideas about how close they fit their current mental model of what they should look like.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: So in your experience, how much does, I guess, [00:21:00] personality, introversion versus extroversion have to do with that reticence to be visible online, and how would somebody who is an introvert get over that?

Ange Dove: Okay. Well, I’m an introvert actually. I’m an extroverted introvert, so I can be extrovert when I need to be really only for my business, but it takes a lot of energy out of me, then I need to go and lie down. So I prefer to have just a few people around me. I don’t like big crowds and, you know, that kind of thing.

And then for me, you know, as I described, it was a case of not wanting my picture anywhere, being private, and I only did it for the business. Didn’t do it for myself at all, I just did it for the business. And it’s the knowledge that if you don’t do it, you’re going to make things much harder for yourself in the long run because people need to understand who you are.

[00:22:00] They need to understand what you do, or else they won’t buy from you because nobody buys from, you know… If they’re confused, they’re not going to buy. So putting yourself out there and just telling people what you do is the easiest way you can move on. But I understand definitely how confronting that is.

But you’ve just gotta bite the bullet and do it. Like, as I said, I would never have been on camera if I hadn’t forced myself to do it, and now I’m here on a podcast talking to you, so it can be done. It can be done. But you’ve got to… Okay, I’ll tell you the light bulb moment for me where this happened was when a coach told me, “Angela, it’s not about you, it’s about who you serve.”

That changed everything for me. Everything. Because I suddenly realized, oh, it’s not how I show up on camera, it’s not what I look like, it’s not if my hair’s okay today, it’s not if I’ve got my makeup on. It’s if I don’t show up, I’m not serving the people that are waiting to hear. And what he said to me was, “There’s [00:23:00] an audience for everyone. You’re not for everyone.” And why should you be? And if you were for everyone, you wouldn’t be able to handle the demand anyway because you’d have the whole world coming at you, right? So but everybody has their own little audience that they can serve, and people that will resonate with who they are.

They’ll see something in you that is, yeah, that’s me, or yeah, I understand where this person’s coming from, and they’ll want to learn from that person. And if you don’t show up and they’re waiting for you, you’re doing them a disservice, and they may go with someone who is no good for them whatsoever and won’t get them very far.

So it’s your responsibility in a way to show up, and that’s how he framed it with me, and that’s when everything changed for me.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s interesting because I think for a number of people that that whole thing about showing up, focusing on other people and the value and the service that you can provide to other people, that also applies to the whole sales thing. A lot of people think sales is yucky. They [00:24:00] don’t want to do that. They don’t like the sales. But if you can flip it into being this is actually an act of service, offering what you have, making it available to people for a fair, you know, exchange of your value, money. I think that does make a big difference to people. So it’s just interesting to me, so you mentioned that you, when you were just getting yourself comfortable with the idea of being on camera, is you just, you practiced privately. And then you specifically ran a challenge that you said, “Join me on this challenge.” So you led, you led the thing. But you weren’t the expert. You were saying, “Do this painful thing with me.”

Ange Dove: With me, yeah.

Trudy Rankin: So, in terms of that progression from, hey, I’m practicing by myself to actually I’m going to practice with a bunch of other people, to being able to do it whenever you need to on your own, what would be one of the… Not just one, maybe two or three things that would help people in that progression. So it’s kind of clear what they need to do. They need to practice by themselves in the [00:25:00] privacy of their own home. And then they need to do it, and then for you it was helpful to do it with people.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: But what helped you get from practicing by yourself to, “Hey, I’m going to do this challenge with a bunch of people”?

Ange Dove: It was really just reading somewhere at that point that to break a habit you need 21 days. And I thought, okay, 21 days, I’m going to run a… It just came into my mind, I’m going to run a challenge for 21 days.

And I was in a community of people that were willing to learn, and I just put the message out there and I just said to them, “Hey, If you’re, you know, you don’t like being on camera, it’s not comfortable for you, I’m running a challenge for 21 days to get you used to being comfortable on camera.

Who’s interested?” And I got about seven people interested in doing it, so that’s how I ran that. You know, you can throw yourself in at the deep end as well if you want. I did go on a video course with somebody that I know, and one… And this was terrifying for [00:26:00] me. One of the things they, he got us to do was go live.

Go live and talk about whatever you want to talk about, but do it live, stream live, and I just felt like a complete idiot. So I would probably not recommend that. Just take it slowly and just get used to seeing yourself. Because I think that’s one of the things is we don’t… Do you remember the first time you heard your voice?

Trudy Rankin: Yes.

Ange Dove: Yeah. And you never think you sound like that. The first time I heard my voice, I’d just moved from England to Singapore, and I’d lived… I grew up in London but I lived in Sheffield, which is further north of England and I lived there for six years. And I didn’t realize at the time that I’d developed a Sheffield accent.

I had no idea. And then when I heard my voice recorded, I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve gotta get rid of this.”

And it’s the same with being on video as well, it’s just, it’s something you don’t… You don’t see yourself every day because you can’t see yourself. You’re looking outward, you’re [00:27:00] not looking towards you. It’s uncomfortable when you first see yourself, I would say. And it’s just getting used to the exposure to that.

So just keep practicing looking at it, getting used to what it is, and then eventually it’ll be, once you’ve done it a few times, it’ll be like, “Okay, this is nothing. I’ll just turn the camera on and do this.” So yeah, it’s just, with everything in life really, I think it’s going through the fear and doing it anyway.

And practice, practice, practice until it’s no longer fearful.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah.

Ange Dove: The hardest thing I found about being on video is looking at the screen and talking to a pin prick hole that means nothing, right? And, like, trying to imagine someone at the other side of that, which is really difficult.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. One of the people that I’ve chatted with, talked to, one of the little tips that they gave was to just draw yourself a little smiley face or put a picture of somebody. Just a little tiny miniature picture, and just put it right up there by your camera so that you’re looking at the picture and not the camera. And pretend you’re talking to them. And [00:28:00] they said it makes it a lot easier. Little things like that which can make it easier for you to just get over the barrier of going, “Ugh, I just don’t like how I look. I don’t like how I sound. I think people will think I’m stupid.” Those sorts of things, just getting past those. It’s almost like a desensitization strategy.

Ange Dove: And I would say as well, what I’ve noticed is sometimes when I’ve been on camera and I think I’ve stumbled, right? And it’s like, okay, that must’ve been a really long gap, or that’s going to be really obvious.

When I’ve watched it back, it’s not there. So a lot of it is in your head as well.

Trudy Rankin: Yes. Yes. That is true. That is very true. Before we wrap up, and we will need to wrap up soon because I’ve realized the time zap past. But you mentioned, obviously you’ve been in your business, in the business world for a long time.

Ange Dove: Mm.

Trudy Rankin: You’ve started this relatively new business of coaching. You’ve gotten comfortable being on camera. And I was just wondering, you know, because I look around me and, my niece [00:29:00] is… she’s not fussed about being on camera. She’s had pictures taken of her, images taken, photos taken of her from the time she was little.

You know, my, my grandkids are the same. They’re used to being on camera. Do you think that the world basically has changed in terms of people’s comfort with being online, or do you think that there are still people, young people around these days who actually aren’t comfortable being on camera?

Ange Dove: Yeah. There’s two ways of looking at that I’ve seen. I was talking to someone about this yesterday. One is, same with my kids as well, they grew up that way, and they would think nothing of just putting the mobile phone up and recording a video. And they don’t care what they look like.

They’re not going to go and put any makeup on or brush their hair or anything. They just turn up as they are, right? So that’s one thing. But then I was speaking to someone yesterday, and I think there is a movement of the younger generation away from social media. They’re saying, “We don’t want this. We don’t want to bother with this.” And they’re going back to nature. They’re [00:30:00] going to a much simpler way of living, and they’re just rejecting this social media thing because it’s just, it’s caused so much trauma, I think, with, you know, you’ve got cyberbullying and that kind of thing as well. And then this whole having to live up to expectations online, which are just so unrealistic, right?

It’s that it’s just knocked people’s confidence, I think, and we don’t communicate the way we used to anymore, that kind of thing. So I think they’re kind of rejecting it a bit. They’re not as… You know, I notice also, like with my daughter would be another one, where I’ll look at her WhatsApp and realize that she hasn’t been online for 12 hours, right?

And there’s me, like every few seconds checking my phone. So I think us older people are more addicted than the younger.

Trudy Rankin: You could very well be right. We’ve sort of lived through that revolution.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: Which is pretty, you know, it’s pretty intense change. And we got to the place where we’re maybe a little bit too [00:31:00] deep into it, potentially.

But at the same time you know, I think that it is a reality, that it’s there. People are online. People are looking for you online. And being able to be there and to show up when people are looking for the services you, services that you provide, it’s actually really, really important.

Ange Dove: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: So, you know, I think it’s a really, really… it’s valuable being able to hear about other people who have managed to break out of that terror-filled thought of having to be online and figured out how to do it in a way that’s doable for other people.

So it’s been really good talking with you, Ange, and just hearing your story. If people were interested in finding out more about you or connecting with you, where would they go? Where’s the best place for them to find you?

Ange Dove: They can go to my website, angedove.com. And, so that’s my name, angedove.com.

And then I’m also running a challenge, which is a 12-week challenge that helps people to actually build their personal brand from scratch, and we do that over 12 weeks. [00:32:00] And it’s learn one week, implement the next. So we’re actually making sure people implement, because that’s one of the things that doesn’t happen on a lot of courses, is they don’t actually end up implementing.

So we don’t want to leave people behind, so it’s learn, implement, learn, implement. So we have live implementation sessions where they have to turn up and actually do the work and not just learn. So that’s available at coach.angedove.com/aa12, if you can remember that.

Trudy Rankin: No, thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, I’ll put that in the show notes-

Ange Dove: Yeah. Thank you.

Trudy Rankin: So that people can check it out and do it, because I think challenges are always great. They’re time-bound. You usually go through them with other people, and they can be really, really helpful. So yeah. Thank you so much. Ange, thank you.

It’s been, it has been fantastic talking with you. And yeah, all the best as you move forward with this.

Ange Dove: Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. It’s been lovely speaking with you as well.

Trudy Rankin: You too.

There you have it. [00:33:00] If Ange’s story has you thinking about your own visibility online, here’s an easy way to get started. Next time you need to send someone an update, a testimonial, or an introduction, record it instead of writing it, just on your phone, just for yourself the first few times, because nobody else needs to see it while you’re still practicing.

And then watch it back before you decide that it was bad. It might not have been bad. And you’ll probably notice it wasn’t nearly as rough as it felt in the moment. Ange’s website and her personal branding challenge are in the show notes, so have a look there. And if this episode was useful, hit follow so the next episode just turns up without you having to remember about logging in.

And if you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick review really does help the right people stumble across this show. And if you’d like to have practical help building the online side of your business, you can have some of my tips landing in your inbox each week. And it’s not just tips, it’s stories and practical advice [00:34:00] that will help you in your growth as a business owner and in building your business.

So come grab my newsletter at OnlineBusinessLiftoff.com/newsletter. That’s OnlineBusinessLiftoff.com/newsletter and I’ll see you next time