Six years is a long time to disappear from the stage.
In Céline Dion’s case, “disappear” involved being diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes severe muscle stiffness and spasms. It affected her ability to walk, move, and use the voice that had made her one of the world’s biggest singers.
For years, nobody knew whether she would ever perform a full concert again.
Then, last Saturday, she walked onto a stage outside Paris in front of roughly 30,000 people.
She opened with On ne change pas. She cried. The audience chanted her name. Then she performed for more than two hours, during a sold-out opening night that marked her first full concert in six years. She had originally announced ten shows and grew into a 26-show run after enormous demand.
For days, my social media feeds have been inundated with snippets of her concert and this helped me crystallize an idea I had been toying with for months now.
Céline Dion had stopped performing, but people had not stopped remembering her.
They still knew every word of her songs and they still cared.
She did not return to an empty room and start politely introducing herself — “Hello, I’m Céline. I help emotionally overwrought people process maritime disasters through song.”
Even if her career was paused, the relationship with her audience survived.
Obviously, you and I are unlikely to walk into a 35,000-seat arena after a six-year absence and have people spontaneously scream our names. (If that does happen, please have someone check the building for fire.)
Still, the same principle applies to experts and solopreneurs at a more modest but commercially useful scale.
I’ll tell you all about it in a second after a quick message from today’s partner, one of the experts I look up to. So run, don’t walk, to this free resource that will teach you how to keep your clients and your audience close enough to pay as much as you ask (just like people paid for Céline Dion’s concerts)
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When zero followers stops being a biography
I remember my first time joining a social media platform for professional reasons: zero followers, zero views, zero authority. I was a tiny digital fetus with a profile photo and several opinions that no one cared about.
Back then, it took me months to get something tangible out of a new platform. For instance, I sent this newsletter to fewer than 100 people for months!
All that has changed, though. The most recent channels I joined are YouTube and Threads, and I started from scratch on neither of them. Even without telling people on other platforms, I still got some traction.
I never screamed into the void.
The way the internet (cookies, especially) works helps: social media platforms will show my content to those who follow me elsewhere.
I saw the same thing happen during our Threads Challenge in The Council.
Several people joined Threads or started using it more intentionally. Almost immediately, they were found by people who already knew them elsewhere: clients, newsletter readers, LinkedIn connections, and acquaintances they had nearly forgotten about.
Their follower counts started near zero, but their reputations did not.
I believe that this distinction matters because we have allowed platforms to convince us that their dashboards contain the full history of our work.
They don’t.
A platform can count the followers attached to your account. It cannot count everyone who recognizes your name, remembers something useful you said three years ago, forwarded your article to a colleague, heard you speak, worked with you, bought from you, or has been waiting for the right reason to get back in touch.
That invisible network is easy to underestimate precisely because there is no jaunty little analytics graph for it.
Yet, still exists.
Familiarity accumulates
Repeated exposure makes people more familiar with us, and familiarity can increase liking under the right conditions. Every worthwhile article, conversation, workshop, podcast appearance, email, introduction, and slightly unhinged social post can add another layer of recognition.
One post rarely creates a reputation. Hundreds of coherent signals do.
People gradually learn what you care about, what you know, how you think, and whether you are likely to produce something useful or another carousel explaining that successful people wake up before the sun and hydrate aggressively.
When you move to another platform, launch a new offer, start a newsletter, speak at an event, or reconnect with an old colleague, some people already have a mental file on you. It may be incomplete, and it may be several years old, but it is there.
What matters is that you have less explaining to do, and that is one of the most valuable forms of business leverage available to a solopreneur.
Even your old relationships have been quietly fermenting
Did you know that the same thing happens to networking — even if you don’t nurture those relationships constantly?
In one study, executives were asked to reconnect with people they had lost touch with. Despite common belief, dormant ties were still useful, socially and economically.
This is why a former colleague can become a client seven years later. An old subscriber can recommend you for an opportunity. Someone who followed your work in 2022 can buy from you in 2027, despite contributing absolutely fuck-all to your engagement rate in between.
They did not vanish. They were living their lives, which was inconsiderate of them but statistically predictable.
Weak ties matter too. A massive randomized experiment involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users found that weaker connections increased job mobility, with moderately weak ties producing the strongest effects. Your closest circle often knows many of the same people and opportunities you do. Looser connections can give you access to entirely different parts of the network.
Reputation travels. Distribution usually needs help.
There is a catch, because of course there bloody is.
Accumulated reputation cannot guarantee instant traction everywhere.
People who follow you on LinkedIn will not all obediently march over to YouTube. Newsletter readers may love your emails and have zero interest in watching your face explain the same idea for 14 minutes. Plenty of people will miss your announcement because the algorithm has decided they urgently need to see a stranger’s engagement bait instead.
Recognition gives you a head start, BUT you still have to build distribution on the new platform:
- Tell people where you are.
- Use a recognisable name and photo.
- Carry your strongest ideas with you.
- Give existing readers a reason to follow.
- Participate in the new environment long enough for its native discovery mechanisms to work.
- Become legible to people who have never encountered you before.
Céline could disappear for six years because she had spent decades becoming Céline Dion.
The six years were preceded by the songs, concerts, interviews, performances, and memories, so her return drew power from everything that came before it.
For the rest of us, this means the early stage matters more than it appears to. The first months of publishing may feel like shouting into a wheelie bin.
Yet, people are learning your name.
So, how can you speed this up? How can you build a reputation that opens doors and gets your name mentioned in rooms you are not in?
Can you build a reputation FASTER?
Time helps, but time alone can also produce a decade of forgettable beige sludge.
Durable recognition comes from giving people a small number of strong, repeatable reasons to remember you. You want your name to trigger an association before they have to rummage through their mental filing cabinet and mutter, “Wait, what does she do again?”
Here’s how to build that association faster.
1. Decide what you want your name to mean
“Marketing,” “leadership,” “copywriting,” and “business strategy” are categories. Thousands of people occupy them, often while saying the same seven things over a photograph of themselves pointing at a whiteboard.
Recognition becomes commercially useful when people associate you with something more specific:
- A problem you solve
- A type of person you help
- A belief you defend
- A result you create
- A distinctive way of explaining the work
For instance, I want people to associate my name with strategic clarity for solopreneurs, building authority that makes money, and calling bullshit on the marketing advice that keeps experts busy while their revenue remains suspiciously horizontal.
Those associations guide what I publish, what I sell, what I comment on, and which conversations I enter.
2. Repeat your strongest ideas until you are sick of them
You will become bored with your ideas long before your audience remembers them.
You see everything you publish. Your followers see a fraction of it, usually while waiting for coffee, avoiding work, or sitting on the toilet. Subtlety has its charms, but it is a fairly shit recognition strategy.
Pick a handful of ideas that express how you think and return to them regularly. Approach them through different stories, examples, formats, and levels of depth.
I have written repeatedly about trust lag, strategic clarity, profitable authority, rented audiences, content that creates demand, and the difference between visibility and influence. The repetition is deliberate.
Céline Dion did not abandon My Heart Will Go On because some fans had already heard it. Your best ideas deserve more than one LinkedIn post before you drag them behind the shed and shoot them.
3. Name the ideas only you explain this way
A useful idea becomes easier to remember when it has a name.
“People need time before they buy” is an observation. “Trust lag” is an idea someone can remember, repeat, and attribute.
The same applies to frameworks, diagnostic questions, metaphors, processes, and categories. Naming them turns your expertise into portable intellectual property, and people can carry it into conversations where you are absent.
You do not need to trademark everything or invent a seven-step acronym every damn week. You just need to name the ideas that genuinely matter to your work.
4. Build a body of work around those ideas
A good post can earn attention for a day. A body of work can keep introducing you for years.
Turn your strongest thinking into assets people can find, save, share, and return to:
- A newsletter archive
- A research report
- A named framework
- A useful diagnostic
- A workshop
- A podcast or YouTube appearance
- A detailed case study
- A signature talk
- A strong opinion you have supported with actual evidence
Each asset becomes another door into your work.
This also creates depth. Someone may discover you through a Threads post, read three newsletter issues, download a report, watch a video, and then mention you to a potential client. From your side, it may look like one person quietly lurking. From theirs, they have spent two hours forming an opinion about you.
Keep publishing on social media, but make sure some of that attention leads to work with a longer shelf life. Otherwise, you are feeding the content furnace every morning and receiving a small bag of impressions in return.
5. Borrow rooms, then give people somewhere to find you
You can accelerate recognition by entering rooms where trust already exists.
Guest newsletters, podcasts, collaborations, communities, events, interviews, and thoughtful contributions to other people’s conversations allow you to benefit from established attention.
Choose the rooms carefully. A large audience full of people who will never buy, refer, or remember you is merely a stadium-sized waste of time.
When you enter someone else’s room, bring a clear idea because generic advice makes you interchangeable, while a distinctive argument gives people something to attach to your name.
Then give them an obvious next step: your newsletter, a strong cornerstone article, a useful resource, or a platform where you consistently develop the same body of thinking.
Recognition needs somewhere to land.
6. Reactivate the people who already know you
Building recognition does not always require reaching strangers. Sometimes the fastest route runs through people whose mental file on you already exists.
Make a list of former clients, colleagues, collaborators, subscribers, community members, and professional acquaintances you genuinely liked. Reach out to a few every month.
Do not materialize after six years with “Hey, how are you?” followed immediately by a sales pitch.
Reconnect like a normal human being; share something relevant; congratulate them on a recent move; ask about the work you know they care about; tell them what you are doing now if it fits naturally.
Hang in there until you never need to start from scratch again
I know that this journey often feels far too sloooow or unfair. (It often is; you’re not imagining it.)
Think of the people you admire, though, whatever field they may be in. What they do now may look effortless, but you know that it took them years to get there too.
You can accelerate trust and reputation, but only to a certain degree — unless you have unlimited time and money to spend to be everywhere, every day.
In the meantime, I suggest you look back a year or two ago: do doors open easier for you today than they did back then? If so, you’re doing great; keep at it!
And, if you want to be in a room with brilliant experts who are building toward the same thing, join The Council. This is what we in there — by supporting, advising, and occasionally calling each other out.
