Book Review: Entrepreneurial You by Dorie Clark

I finished reading Entrepreneurial You by Dorie Clark at the beginning of 2018 and it changed my entire outlook on how I wanted to run my business and grow my content career. Clark is amazing on a number of fronts, but her carefully crafted and intentional thought process behind the woven content masterpiece she’s created for herself, and so kindly shared with the world in this book, is brilliant.

The main idea behind Entrepreneurial You is the value and necessity of diversifying revenue streams. Now, my love for revenue stream diversification runs deep, so much so that I wrote an entire manifesto expressing my feelings for the side hustle, but it’s so just good business sense. People always talk about the risks in “putting all your eggs in one basket,” why would we do that with our business? It’s way too risky. In today’s blooming digital strategy, content is a key player in marketing, sales, lead generation, you name it — so it makes a lot of sense to diversify the content you create as well.

Clark breaks down her book into three sections: Build Your Brand, Monetize Your Expertise, and Extend Your Reach and Impact Online. Clean and simple.

Step 1: Build Your Brand
She then goes into depth on the importance of building your brand in order to then monetize your expertise and increase your reach and impact. Because the reality is that if you’re a “nobody” to “everybody” then it’s hard to convince anyone that they should pay you for the things you know.

Step 2: Monetize Your Expertise
This is the section that really blew my mind. Clark launches into all of the creative ways you can take what you know and mold it into different deliverables and repurpose it. She’s essentially a master content marketer. She brings up ideas such as consulting/coaching, speaking, podcasting, blogging, vlogging, teaching, guest posting, interviewing, being interviewed and so much more. Really solid content marketing advice here!

Step 3: Extend Your Reach
Here she tosses in one more food for thought: online courses and passive income streams. She also touches on the importance of building communities and fostering relationships, but most importantly, she talks about doing all of this to live the life you want.

And I have to agree with her on pretty much all of these fronts: if you’re going to dive into entrepreneurship, you’d better be doing it to create the life you want to live, otherwise, why are you doing it?