How can I leverage my 13 years of experience as a television anchor and reporter into a profitable online business that helps people?

Two key concerns are 1. Customer confusion with the 2 offerings: Imagine being in an art gallery that sells photography training and fine art or a book store that tries to sell you fine art. Even if it's the same group of people, they may be in very different mind-sets and hence may not associate both together. 2. SEO challenges with mixed messages you're sending. Which keywords would you optimize for which part of the site? Advantage would be if the customer base is the same group of people, hence offering cross-sell opportunities. For instance, if your MAIN source of leads for the training site is the art site, then this would be more important. In general, I would suggest one site for one customer group. If there is likely to be a very high overlap, then same site, with multiple sub-sites might work. In matter of fact, it'll probably be EASIER to do two sites for this than one site. Your designer will thank you :) Then tastefully add cross-links in the places where someone is likely to use them. For instance the art gallery could have a post 'How I make art' and links to your other business there. And the photog training site would have your art pics with subtle on-image links to your art biz. While I'm not a branding expert, I do find that my engineering lead approach to challenges in Marketing/Sales usually works, and provides clarity and direction.

I face the same challenge! I came up with a separate name that still represents my brand but doesn't force users/partners/clients to try and remember my complicated name.

Whenever I think of skills, the first one I think of is people skills. I think that is the most important type of skill-set to have. Knowing how to treat and talk to people is beyond important in the workplace. When you know how to talk and treat people, it really doesn't matter what kind of product you are selling. When you make it about the person and not the product, walls fall down. Learning how to read people and get a feel for their personality has really helped too. It's a shame more management teams don't take the time to learn and teach this to their staff. I hope that helps!

I do a lot of business with people on Elance (which is now being merged into Upwork and is going away, so stick with Upwork). The real challenge for US-based workers (which you may or may not be) is the price competitive nature of jobs when competing against an international workforce. There are always going to be great workers in every country and sometimes in certain areas you just can't compete on price. For example, I do a lot of business with great people in the Philippines and their work is excellent, they speak perfect English, and they are very affordable. What I usually tell people who are first getting into the space is to be honest about that in your profile and do some jobs for near-free with private pricing so you can build up your profile with good ratings. There are some disadvantages to this approach, but I find it helps to get some jobs under your belt with employers. One of the keys is going to be differentiation. You have your industry listed but skills, language, specific experience, and other niche items are really going to help here. I'm a consumer of a lot of Upwork contractors so I'm happy to do a call and discuss my experience with you. I work with people all over the world on a regular basis and I've built my business around these assets.

Sarah is correct here. Becoming an influencer or authority in any area takes time and dedication, is not something you can typically leverage over night. My suggestions to you is stick to a hyper targeted niche, narrow down your vision and scale back all efforts to the most minimal most targeted effort possible that will yield you to the next effort all with one goal in mind. In growth hacking, we take this approach as having minimal goals but approaching them aggressively to reach highest results at each goal level. No matter how minimal the goal might be feel, if you're moving closer to the bottom line the goal is worth the effort. With that said once you have a niche and only focus on that the social platforms and users will begin to recognize this and turn to you. A quick hack for boost, although it typically doesn't list is writing a piece for publication to local journalists or online blogger. Write about something in your niche, look for relatable blogs or journalists and send it to them. Follow the bloggers, message them, ask for guest articles, or make suggestions on their posts vi their comments with links to your own blog. Dedicate a Facebook page with images (not info) and always include a link to that guest post, or your blog, or article. For example, the first time I came out on television, I managed to get more views of the back stage images than I did on the actual show. I leverage that into more appearances and visitors to my websites and businesses. The authority level can after a lot of work tho. Expertise came to me in my field due to experience and education all I had to do is expose my insight but even that took time and consistency in one area.