There are days when you wake up ready to go, eager to get the word out about your offerings, and then there are other days when, well… you’re just not feeling as eager, or clear, or motivated, or… *sigh*
Is there anything you can you do on those days when it feels harder to do the marketing you really — truly! — want to (and need) to do? Yes, of course there is. Enter…
Fun!
Many self-employed professionals believe they don’t know how to sell. You’re justified if you think that of yourself. You didn’t go into business to be a salesperson. You became self-employed because you wanted to help people with web design or personal training or architecture or resumé writing. In order to get clients, you need to have sales conversations, but they aren’t something you’ve ever trained to do. You may even believe you’re no good at them.
Let’s fix that.
Do you err on the side of not being assertive enough because you’re afraid you’ll come off as sharky when talking to a potential client?
I know I did.
Those early days of business, when I was eager to get clients, yet didn’t really know how to do that, I vacillated between being too assertive, AKA sharky, and not assertive enough. Those were some uncomfortable days to be sure!
Yearend. How does it come so quickly?
It seems like just a few days ago you were looking at the year and thinking, “This year will be different!” This would be the year you actually did make a marketing calendar, try new strategies, and consistently get the word out about the good work you can do.
Or you find yourself at the end of the year, possibly in slight desperation and defiant hope, thinking, “Next year will be different!”
And you really mean it.
It’s the time of year when we self-employed professionals often begin to look back at what we’ve accomplished in our business over the last twelve months, and judge our progress and results against what we intended back in January. What frequently results from a process like this is a catalog of everything you haven’t done, or have done wrong. But I believe it’s even more important to consider what you’ve done right this year.
My new client “Rhoda” had looked over her past year’s results and was feeling discouraged when we had our first coaching session. She’d hoped to get 10 new graphic design clients this year.
“I don’t know how to market,” one of my coaching clients said. “I hate marketing,” declared another. “The marketing thing feels so unnatural to me,” claimed a third.
My response to statements like these from my clients is to reply (gently and compassionately), “I don’t think that’s true. I think you’ve just misunderstood what marketing is, and how it works.”
When You Think You Don’t Know How to Market
Business Building Writer Program starts Oct 8, 2019
Join C.J. Hayden for a six-session live webinar series! Business Building Writer: Learn to Build Your Business by Writing… Learn to Write So It Builds Your Business.
C.J. will teach you how to use quality writing as a business-building tool, how to write your stuff so that your desired audience will want what your business offers, and how to put those elements together into a business-building plan. You’ll take away a new set of tools and skills, an action plan, and an inspired new direction for using your writing for business-building.
