Today, I’m guesting on BizologyBuzz with Donna Price.  You can check out her website and tune in for our call here.

If you are tuning in now — or after the show, I’m so excited you’re here!  If this is you first time to my site, you might want to check out my welcome page to help show you around, let you know how you can leverage all the content I’ve been developing to support your business.

If you’ve got questions that we weren’t able to get to on the show, please leave a comment. I will personally respond to any comments from listeners so everyone can benefit as we continue the conversation.

Helpful (Free!) Resources

If you’d like me to come speak to your group, conduct a webinar or teleseminar, or facilitate a workshop or breakout session about marketing, check out my Meeting Planners page or contact Diana: Diana@MyStrategicMarketer.com for more information.  I love, love, LOVE sharing with groups and would be honored to receive your invitation. 

Contemplatively, I just watched the commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005.  It’s very moving and profound, to say the least.  In it, he talks about his brush with death, how he hopes to live another 20 or 30 years, and shares some of the most profound lessons of his life.

Like many, I’m struck by the tragedy we all feel at losing someone so innovative, so extraordinary … so young.  In spite of all his amazing contributions to modern culture, I’m wondering, Did we receive all of his gifts? A heavy thought to ponder, no doubt.  But one thing is certain: he lived to give them.  An intense, driven creator, there’s no question that he lived his life as one committed to giving us all that he had–and he took a lot of heat for it.

My colleague, Lori Collins, pointed out what is sure to be remembered as the most profound part of his speech:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is important.  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You are already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

The chills are relentless as I contemplate the gravity of his observation, the unchanging reality that he is gone forever. I’m thinking of the times I wallow in my own selfish self-pity when contemplating a next move, or weighing the risk-reward of showing up authentically, of risking rejection, of (god-forbid) being a total failure at something I care about succeeding at deeply.

When reflecting on his life, he profoundly reveals:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.  You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever… because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Every week, I talk to amazing professionals who are struggling to figure out their next move, trying to make sense of their path, digging deep in hopes of hitting inspiration or courage to fuel the next leg of their journey.  These people are incredibly creative, loving, giving souls who have been given really special gifts which often are considered “unconventional.” They don’t quite fit into the current molds and models of society, so giving these gifts requires courage and heart, passion and conviction, and FAITH that this journey is the right one, that everything will pay off in the end.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the ttrap of thinking you ahve somethign to lose. You are already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.  And thank you.

My friend, Laura Click (@lauraclick)just posted a great blog about a couple of new buttons you should add to your website or blog to support the sharing of your content via social media:

1)  Twitter – Make it easy for site visitors to follow you on Twitter right from your website. Twitter has updated their API to allow for this functionality.  This is a no-brainer – now, people can follow you on Twitter without leaving your website to do so. Zing!  The snippet of code can be grabbed here: https://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

2)  +1 – Google’s +1 button seems synonymous with the Google Plus social network, but Google is also showing +1 results in its search engine.  This is significant, as the votes your content receives on your site are likely to show up in search results in the future.  Here’s one you can download for WordPress.

Laura explores both of these in greater detail on her blog – definitely take a few minutes to educate yourself, as well as explore other ways of adding this functionality to your site.

I just found my way to a blog post that stopped me dead in my tracks and lit my bottlerocket to the moon.  This guy is bananas – as a bit of a marketing snob and wordsmither myself, I’m mesmerized by Peter Shallard’s (@PeterShallard) poignant way of communicating the honest-to-God truth about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

In his post, “The Truth – Why Solopreneurs are destined to stay that way forever,” Peter cuts right to the soul of what is keeping so many independent professionals stuck.

Here’s a brief intro to what Peter says about the destiny of solopreneurs:

Most solopreneurs have dreams or vague plans to one day make it to the big time. A proper company and staff to boot. Whether it’s an in-house team or outsourced global workforce, every business owner dreams of growing the family, even if only to a single virtual assistant.

Yet such dreams are almost never realized.

Despite the lower-than-ever cost of bringing outsource talent onboard, entrepreneurs still struggle more than ever to actually getting around to doing it.

I have a nose for self-sabotage and something here reeks of internal conflict! This post explains why you still haven’t hired that person you know you should. Hint: It’s all in your head.

“I just can’t let go”

Famous last words of the archetypal solopreneur who endlessly procrastinates hiring the help they need.

I want to just copy the whole freaking post and paste it here for you to read.

My experience hiring my first virtual assistant

I remember when I hired my first VA three years ago.  I was kinda terrified, not gonna lie.  I mean, looking back, it wasn’t a big deal, but it felt like a HUGE commitment to siphon off part of my cashflow every month to another resource, in spite of my being very clear that I needed to get leverage, stat, if I was going to keep growing my business.

I’ve seen my clients grapple with this over-and-over again.  Truthfully, the reason I have a marketing team that executes booking / publicity, marketing administration and social media marketing for our clients is because the thought of trying to find a qualified, solid resource to execute on their strategy (once they’ve defined it through my Marketing Gameplan program) was intimidating and overwhelming to them… and I saw them struggling once they hired someone because they didn’t know how to bring out the best in that resource.

Make the shift from solopreneur to entrepreneur

I love how Peter closes out his post, with a charge to all “solopreneurs” to get about the business of breaking through to greater possibility and fulfillment as an entrepreneur.  Remember our charge: Who must I become to complete this quest?

Getting a team of people to do important work is harder than it looks. It requires a special set of skills that you won’t learn in school or from your parents. It’s tough and your unconscious mind knows this.

That is why your veins are riddled with fear. Your intuitive self is trying to stop you rushing into a situation that it knows you can’t handle. The same thing would happen if you lined up to ride a rodeo horse. Fear. It means there is something coming up which you need to prepare for.

This post isn’t about “how to be a manager” – it’s about how to pay attention to the signals your mind is sending you. It’s about how to overcome a hugely limiting form of self sabotage, that’s stopping you achieving your business goals.

If you’re a solopreneur who has always dreamed of building a team, it’s time to start preparing your mind for the challenge. You’re not procrastinating because of “control” issues, you’re procrastinating because you’re not ready… yet.

So get ready. Read, learn, train. You know how to be an entrepreneur. Now it’s time to learn how to be a manager.

You can check out Peter’s blog here (add him to you RSS Reader – good stuff!).

How are YOU getting leverage in your business by outsourcing and bringing in help?  And how are things going for you? Let’s talk about your experiences in the comments!

“How much does it cost to create a good website?”

It’s a misleading question, in many ways – in truth, the actual cost for designing your website is minimal compared to the costs for making it “good.”  Or even “great.”  Check out another one of my blog posts about the important components of a good website here.

For independent professionals (speakers, authors, executive coaches, consultants, trainers, etc), the actual design of your website could be as inexpensive as “free” if you’re a do-it-yourself-er who knows WordPress and wants to use a free template.  Or, you could have a custom HTML template created with custom programming for integrating things like eCommerce and subscribe forms, styling sidebar widgets via CSS and other such techi-ness.  You’ll likely pay $500-$1000 for a template website, and anywhere for $1500 to $3500 (or more, if you’re REALLY going bananas) for great design and programming (slicing a design into HTML code can be very time consuming, as can styling widgets and customizing the look-and-feel of forms).

Having your site hosted is another expense.  Factors like if you’re using a shared server or dedicated one, and how much traffic you’re getting, and how many backups of your site you’re having created (and where those backups are being kept) can all influence your hosting costs.  The average Joe can expect to spend $10 to $60 monthly on hosting.

The REAL upfront cost of building a great website is in creating great content. Content includes things like:

• Overview of your offerings
• Strong “About” page (bio, etc)
• Blogs and articles
• Podcasts, videos, and other multimedia
• Media Room with useful media resources
• Downloadables like one sheets, white papers, and other tools used to support different aspects of your marketing

Creating powerful, compelling copy is THE most important component of your website. Like, if you don’t have that, you’ve wasted whatever time and money you’ve spent getting your site up.  A mediocre design and powerful copy are WAY more important than a beautiful design with weak copy. (For some strategies on creating compelling copy, check out this blog post for tips.)

But it doesn’t stop there.

Many other aspects of maintaining your online presence could potentially impact your budget, including:

1. Updating software & plugins, and integrating new technology into your website. On a pretty regular basis, your server and likely your software (like WordPress) is going to be issuing updates to hardware and software, respectively, that you will need to install.  It’s not uncommon for these updates to break or conflict with other programs and plugins set up on your site and / or running on your server.  This is not a good place for DIY-ers to be experimenting. You need a pro to help. You can often hire VAs for this kind of support if it’s simple.  More complicated issues will need the support of a programmer.  You really can’t get by without these ongoing expenses if you are actively marketing online and engaged in social media, so plan for it.  I’d recommend putting at least an hour monthly into your budget.
2. Updating graphics. It seems that once or twice a year, both my and my client’s website graphics will need to be updated to accommodate some kind of change we want to implement on the site.  These changes can cost as little as a couple hundred bucks, or as much as $1,000 to execute (or more).  It doesn’t happen frequently, but you should expect to be reviewing things every six months and learning ways you can improve things.
3. Adding additional functionality to integrate with social media.  It goes without saying that social media is evolving and changing at the speed of light.  Sometimes we can anticipate the changes, but more often, we are a bit blindsided by the “new thing” that people want to do in the interest of sharing content.  WordPress is awesome because it allows you to integrate new functionality via a plugin pretty easily.  Most plugins are free, and with a little training, you might be able to add these plugins yourself.  Be wary, though:  it’s not uncommon for new plugins to need some tweaking so they “look good” on your website, or for new plugins to conflict with existing plugins on your website, requiring the assistance of a seasoned programmer to fix.  It seems that several times a year, we need to bring in a programmer to help us manage upgrading our sites’ functionality (typically a couple hundred bucks each time), so plan on it.
4. Optimizing new content, managing Google adwords and Facebook ads campaigns. Obviously, step one is creating the content.  But once the content is created, it needs to be proofed, optimized for search, uploaded to your site, and if you’re committed to getting more traffic for your site, submitted to other sites around the web (like Digg, article submission sites, guest blog posts, etc).  And of course, you want to create tweets for the content, schedule them for facebook and twitter (and Google plus), and more.
5. Adding landing pages, creating new content and reconfiguring conversion paths. After you launched your website, you started getting feedback that your visitors were looking for something you didn’t position well (so they were unable to find it, sometimes leaving the site without doing anything).  You were hoping people would come to the site to buy something, but what you realized after monitoring things for a few months was that people were looking around and leaving without so much as signing up for your newsletter.

Or consider that you started getting feedback from people that inspired you to create a new offering that you want to display front-and-center on your website.  New copy needs to be generated, your menu might need to be changed up, you might want to tweak your home page or add a new page to your website, and update other copy to drive traffic to this new page. Sometimes, these tweaks only require an hour or two of support; other times, you’ve got a full-fledged project on your hands that might take 20 hours and several weeks to execute.

It is really important for you to consider the implications of these variables when you begin thinking about creating a new website. It is very common in my work for me to talk to professionals who’ve spent a huge wad of cash on making their website pretty, with little-to-no funds remaining to actually get results by levaraging social media and engaging in activities that drive traffic.

If you have a limited budget, go the site template route and budget for important money-making activities that directly affect the ROI you are going to experience by creating an ecosystem that attracts customers, builds your credibitility, stokes the fires of raving fans and inspires others to share your work with their friends.  Spending all your budget on a pretty design with nothing left over for taking action predestins you to be one of those frustrated professionals who struggles to make their website work for them.

In part one of this blog series, I talked about how important failure is to success, and ended by saying If you haven’t failed, you haven’t been taking big-enough risks! In this blog, I want to take things a step further and share with you 7 key lessons I’ve learned along my own entrepreneurial journey. From educating yourself constantly to making the commitment to success and accepting how long it might take to see financial rewards, here are  7 key shifts in thinking that are necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur (these tips are especially for the speaker, author, coach, consultant, expert who’s selling their knowledge and expertise):

1. The most crucial investment you make is in educating yourself. I really notice this when interviewing new team members – those who’ve been freelancers for a while expect to invest time and money to keep their skills sharp so they are able to create opportunity for their clients and land great gigs. Those who have been “employed” their whole career want you to pay for them to learn something new.

   My most successful colleagues all spend a great deal of money on conferences, certifications, mastermind groups, and courses they believe will give them any kind of an edge as they’re growing their business.  They don’t “throw money around” at every opportunity–they are intentional and deliberate, and they aren’t afraid to risk some dough if it will give them an edge. And it pays off.

   As an entrepreneur, it is a must for you to constantly be investing time and money in your own learning (taking a course, hiring a coach, attending a conference, buying a book, enrolling in a training program, etc).  If you’re of the mindset that spending money on your education and / or support is frivolous, or you “don’t have the money,” you’re pushing your success further into the future and potentially creating a more challenging path.

2. The only person to blame when things don’t work out is “you”–own it, and go easy on yourself. When things don’t go well, it’s easy to slip into the blame game: it’s because of that vendor, or that bad hire, or that jerk of a client, or the market crashing.  As an entrepreneur, it’s your job to manage all the conditions that affect your success. You can’t blame your boss, or your co-worker, or the processes and procedures; huffing “because-they-won’t-listen-to-me” or “so-and-so-didn’t-do-x-so-this-is-what-happens” doesn’t make you successful.  The accountability is radical when you’re a business owner.
3. Blaming someone else only keeps you stuck. If something isn’t working, at the end of the day, it comes down to something you did or didn’t do.  I find myself constantly solving “puzzles” around creating more success: I need a better system, more education, better resources, a new team member, a different client, a new relationship … I need to find out what condition is missing, or what nuance we need to address.  Communicate better.  Change something.  It’s never, ever, ever anyone else’s fault.  It’s always mine.  I own everything.  That doesn’t mean I don’t hold people accountable–I do.  And you should.  But your success ultimately depends on your ability to bring together the right team and create the right conditions for alchemy.
4. Business owners need a tremendous amount of courage, and feeling “afraid” is just part of your job. Corporate environments have many nooks, crannies, and “layers” of bureaucracy that give your ego lots of places to hide when the going gets tough – it’s easy to find someone to blame, or to ignore what you’re not ready to face, or to remain oblivious to a shortcoming, or to overlook your need for someone else’s cooperation.  As an entrepreneur, there is nowhere to hide.  Every day, every hour, every minute some days, you must face things that are challenging to reconcile–your vulnerability to failure floats just beneath the surface of your experience.  If it gets too hot in the kitchen, sure you can quit or find another path, but if you are committed to success, you get really good at finding the courage to set your jaw and plow through.
5. You must value your time differently and learn the art of LEVERAGE. As an employee, you trade your time for dollars in a pretty linear way to make money.  As an entrepreneur or independent professional, you soon learn that there are a LOT of hours that you could potentially work for which no one is writing you a check.  Getting leverage is really the key to success in building a sustainable business — you need others to come alongside you as partners to keep things running smoothly.  A major area for “getting leverage” in your business is in farming out the administrative and accounting responsibilities… it’s easy to want to hang on to these responsibilities so you don’t have to pay someone else, but you’ll soon learn that this isn’t sustainable.  Your time as a business owner is likely worth at least $100 / hour; every hour you spend doing $15 / hour work costs you money and slows your growth.  By hanging onto “menial” responsibilities, you clog up your mental bandwidth with sludge that keeps you from igniting your creativity to serve your clients, find new ones, and to channel the divine into something new and special.

   Another huge shift comes as business owners realize that they aren’t selling 40 hours/week. Most independent professionals have 15-25 hours per week to feasibly sell–the rest of their time is spent on marketing, networking, and creative work to sustain growth in their businesses.  Misunderstand this, and you’re setting yourself up to ride the roller coaster of feast-or-famine: after you finish what you’ve been pouring yourself into for weeks or months, you’re staring an empty pipeline square in the eye.  Rats.

6. Becoming successful as an entrepreneur is a 5-7 year commitment. As much as I’d love to paint things rosy, the truth is that for virtually all of us, we don’t really start hitting our strides as entrepreneurs until 5-7 years in.  That doesn’t mean we don’t make money starting out–I’ve been fortunate to have “made it” financially since I started my business over seven years ago. However, I didn’t start hitting my stride until around the six-year mark, and frankly, I’m growing and learning every day.  There is so much to absorb and understand, so many nuances with which to become familiar.  The marketplace needs time to really embrace you and trust you and you need time to really trust yourself. This isn’t what people typically want to hear, but time flies and the journey is life-transforming!
7. A strong entrepreneurial ROI requires a 15-year commitment. Every successful (translate: very wealthy) business person I know has stuck with their craft and honed their skills over years, and their tenacity has paid off exponentially when the commitment turns to double-digits.  Most people I know choose an entrepreneurial path in part because they want their opportunity at a 7-figure income (or more!).  And most of them realize that dream when the tenure of their business crosses into the double digits.

Question:  What important lessons have YOU learned on your entrepreneurial path?

Be prepared to learn from failure and setbacks

I talked to a long-time friend and colleague today about his experiences as a first-time entrepreneur; like many of our experiences, it’s been full of highs and lows.  The thrill of starting a new venture often leaves in its wake a tattered battlefield of failed experiments, expended-effort-to-no-avail, frustration and disappointment. Then, we’re thrilled by the wins again.

It’s easy to drop into dark periods of second-guessing oneself when the going gets tough.  We wish we would have done certain things differently, “if only” and “why didn’t I” thoughts racing through our minds as we tried to figure out what we should have done, and should do now, spinning ruthlessly around the why-didn’t-I.

All normal.

I still marvel at the vast “shift” one must undergo to really be successful as a business owner.  It’s not something you can prepare people for, frankly.  There are many entrepreneurial paths with unique challenges, yet all of them have one thing in common:  they require you to be mentally tough and have a high threshold for uncertainty to survive.

Don’t get trapped by your own thoughts

I remember listening to Tony Robbins’ Personal Power program and reading Robert Kyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad, and marveling at the idea of being stuck in disempowering thoughts. Marshall Goldstein says, “The thinking that got you here won’t get you there,” and I think that pretty much sums up the greatest challenge we must face as entrepreneurs: changing our thinking, a herculean task–talk about embarking on the Hero’s Journey!  Who must I become to complete this quest? has never rang more true than within the context of shifting from employee to entrepreneur.

There are a few key lessons that entrepreneurship has taught me, which I’ll share in my next post.  If you’ve spent any time on this path, you’ll see your own experiences in them and resonate with their truth, I’m sure!  Sharing these lessons won’t keep you from having to journey through them (sometimes over and over again), but perhaps they can pique your attention to maybe look at things a little differently on the next go-around. And don’t judge yourself too harshly for not knowing it all.  When a baby is learning to walk, do the missteps count as failures?  Hardly.  You don’t learn to walk without tripping, falling, sliding, crashing, bumping and tumbling a whole heck of a lot.  There’s no way for a baby to “prepare” for what’s to come.

If there was one piece of advice I could give you to help you on this journey, I’d tell you to be conscious about what you’re making things mean–commit to finding an empowering meaning for your experiences.  Every successful entrepreneur I know has traveled the road of get-back-up.  If you haven’t failed, you haven’t been taking big-enough risks!

Next week: 7 Key Shifts in Thinking from the Entrepreneurial Trenches

Question: What’s your view of the connection between failure and success? Did you overcome a pivotal moment on your path to success?

“If the muse exists, she does not whisper to the untalented.” (from the forward to The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Stephen Pressfield)

I’m afraid they’ll find out I’m a fraud.

I feel guilty charging people to do something I find so easy.

This is really hard. . .is this really what I’m supposed to be doing? Why does it feel so natural and easy on the inside, yet so damn hard and gut-wrenching to try to “get it out”?

What keeps you from breaking through?

If you find yourself second-guessing your calling, or frustrated by the dig-deep work you have to do to “keep going” down this path toward actualizing your full potential, boy are you ever in good company. I’ve never met an independent professional who didn’t feel the frustration and the fear that evolving as a business owner inevitably brings. Every client I’ve ever had has privately confided in me fears and frustrations and nagging doubts about the path they’ve chosen. Dare I say, nearly every strategy call I’ve ever done (hundreds) has included a confession of sorts that revealed the frustration, the angst, the private pain of the beautiful soul on the other end of the line.

And it seems that the most volatile, frustrating moments appear when it’s time for the client to sit down and write or create products, content, or offerings intended to serve the masses.

In The War of Art , Pressfield reveals, “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers (or painters, or musicians, or creatives of any kind) don’t, and that secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance (emphasis added).“

Your biggest block: Your own resistance

Ah, resistance–that internal “block” that keeps us from moving forward or taking action. The whispers of fear, the lies that tell us we won’t succeed or that we’re frauds or that today-isn’t-the-day or this isn’t our time.  For those among us who are called to share their gifts with the world, to blaze this unique trail to uncovering their bliss, resistance is an ever-present force that must be confronted with courage as we trust in the call of the Universe for us to give, to expand, to grow.

So what does resistance look like? From The War of Art:

“First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless. We can’t get no satisfaction. There’s guilt but we can’t put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We’re disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves. . . . If you find yourself criticizing other people, you’re probably doing it out of resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.

“. . . If you find yourself asking, Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist? Chances are, you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death… The more scared we are of our work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.“

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work.  The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

I’ve often said that for independent professionals (people who are packaging their knowledge and expertise as authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, etc), growing our businesses can be some of the most intense spiritual work we’ll ever do. So how do we “overcome resistance?”

My friend, Scott Jeffrey, reminds us of a beautiful metaphor for understanding the nature of our true selves (that includes the giving of our sacred selves). In his blog post “Approaching Spiritual Work,” he explains, “Numerous spiritual teachers. . .say that the sun is always shining; we need only remove the clouds. The clouds represent our psychological and spiritual work. The sun is the Light that we are (the Self, with a capital “S”), only realizable when the clouds are removed. Our clouds are many: negative emotions, poor habits and tendencies, false identifications, addiction to our minds and thinking, and so on.

“Examining, understanding, and dissolving these clouds represent the core of serious psycho-spiritual work. That’s why it’s work. Once this is accepted as given, we can approach our darker side with courage, forbearance, and patience. Then, situations that trigger our negative emotions, for example, become opportunities to develop instead of reasons to feel bad about ourselves, getting discouraged about our ‘lack of progress’.”

The battleground for overcoming resistance is in our minds, in undoing our crappy programming and embracing our responsibility to give the world our best and make a difference. Go easy on yourself. This journey isn’t for the faint of heart. Your destiny is assured; the sun is shining bright. May courage take you all the way!

Need a how-to guide for working through your resistance? I’ve created a three-part blog series on creating solid content that includes some great strategies for finding your break-thoughs.  If you’re looking for some good reading, I love Byron Katie’s Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life and Patricia Carrington’s The Power Of Letting Go: A Practical Approach to Releasing the Pressures in Your Life.

I’ve been downloading my processes and insights to my blog for a couple years now, and in an effort to better-organize my content and help you more easily find content that will be helpful to you as you’re creating and executing your Marketing Gameplan, I’ve changed up how I’ve categorized my posts. I’ve aligned everything with my Marketing Gameplan process and the Marketing Triad, which are the cornerstone of my marketing development philosophy.  You can learn more about said philosophy in my program, How Should I Market Myself?

In order to benefit from the content on my blog, I think it might be helpful to share a bit how I’m “wired” as a marketer and how I’ve organized this content to support you.  At my core, I am a strategist and a process person.  I take the “big picture” and develop the road map for getting there.  I know a lot about marketing (eat it, breathe it, love it), but I’m a different kind of marketer.  It seems that a lot of marketers have an “area of focus” (social media, search, publicity, “a plan,” website, etc).  They will advise you based on their expertise and help  you with a “piece” of your overall gameplan.

My great passion is in bringing the pieces together and creating a system to execute all the administrative tasks related to marketing and growing your business. I want this blog to illuminate processes and patterns for you, to challenge your thinking at times, to clarify the decision-making process, to support you in building a platform that will rocket you to the next level.

I often find myself in conversations with both my marketing colleagues, clients and the marketplace in general that go something like this:

• I tried [this strategy], and we made progress, but it created a backlog of responsibilities over here that just sunk the ship. Or I didn’t have time to manage it well, plus take care of my clients and meet my other deadlines.
• It’s stressful trying to do all these marketing things! (Typically, their business model doesn’t include any leverage for managing and sustaining their momentum.)

Roger Hamilton calls people who are wired like me “Mechanics.”  We learn the business side of things, and put the systems in place that create efficiency and growth.  This is the “space” I come from as I discuss growing your business.  ”Mechanics are great at systems and perfecting the details,” he explains.  I’m often told I’m a balanced amalgum of creative and business, right-brain and left-brain, whereas most people are predominently one or the other.

Enough about me, the point is YOU, and how I want to help you. Each link below represents a blog category and will help you explore the content on my blog.

Marketing Gameplan process

I’m a big believer in sequencing: doing the right things in the right order.  Strategic decisions must be made within the framework of context, and determining the context that provides the backdrop for decisions takes time, intention and effort.  When I begin working with a new client, the first thing we do is explore the full context of their business and the marketplace (as much as we can discern, anyway) so that we hedge our bets in decision-making and ideally, set the conditions for sustainable success.  It’s very frustrating to spend time and money on marketing efforts, only to realize through lack of success that we executed prematurely, or in the wrong sector, or we were missing key components.

If you take the time to build things right, you will save yourself a lot of time and money. More importantly, you’ll get traction to begin contributing and making a difference in meaningful ways–which is the goal, right?

• Step 1:  Know What You Offer
• Step 2:  Know Your Customer
• Step 3:  Package Your Solutions to Solve Your Customer’s Problems
• Step 4:  Determine Your Marketing Strategies
• Step 5:  Create Your Tools
• Step 6:  Execute Your Plan

Marketing Triad

I developed the Marketing Triad to help my clients understand how the different marketing strategies related to each other, and to emphasize the strategies that were important for independent professionals to execute first. The core triad (showcasing, networking, and grassroots marketing) represents the most important strategies for you to execute as an independent professional (speaker, author, coach, consultant, trainer – someone packaging your knowledge and expertise).

Stacking Strategies are secondary strategies (like publicity, advertising, trade show marketing, sponsorships, etc) you should execute after you’ve got the infrastructure and support for executing your core strategies in place, and you’ve been consistently hitting your benchmarks.  AFTER you’ve tested and solidified your Triad’s strategy, you might begin focusing time, money and intention on the Stacking Strategies.  This is important – it’s a very common mistake for people to spend a lot of time and money on executing Stacking Strategies, only to realize later on that while they may have kicked up some dust, they’re not growing their business.

Showcasing

Networking

Grassroots Marketing

Stacking Strategies

Beyond this, there are a few other areas that I’ve been blogging about lots that deserve their own separate categories:

Working with Virtual Assistants

SEM | SEO | Website | Social Media

Marketing Minutes Podcasts (featuring Misty Williams & Toni Birdsong)

* If you find the content on my blog helpful and you’d like to explore working together, I’d love that, too! Request a Strategy Session and we’ll get something on the calendar right away.

* If you’re the self-study type, my program, How Should I Market Myself? walks you through the Marketing Gameplan process, the Marketing Triad and more.  Check it out!

* If you’d like me to come speak to your group, conduct a webinar or teleseminar, or facilitate a workshop or breakout session about marketing, check out my Meeting Planners page or contact Shannon: Shannon@MyStrategicMarketer.com for more information.  I love, love, LOVE sharing with groups and would be honored to receive your invitation.

Looking for something in particular?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll help you out however I can.

In this podcast, Toni and I wrap up our six-step Marketing Gameplan process and discuss the importance of consistency when you Execute Your Marketing Gameplan. We’ve finally arrived at the lest step in your marketing strategy : Execute Your Marketing Gameplan.  This is where all the work you’ve done starts to pay off and it’s also one of the scariest and most fun moments for your business.

Without consistency, your Marketing Gameplan will not work. Now is the time to determine the benchmarks and goals for your social media and networking efforts, and to figure out how you’re going to measure your progress.  You want to make sure that you’re creating synergy between the content you create and the marketing strategies you put in place. Learn more about the importance of consistency in your marketing gameplan in this week’s podcast: