How to Keep Your Marketing Going Even When You Hear Stop

How to Keep Your Marketing Going Even When You Hear Stop

Every self-employed professional has at some point found his or her marketing stopped in its tracks. Maybe you hear an internal voice, telling you things like, “This is too hard,” or “I don’t like selling,” or “I don’t want to bug people.”

Or perhaps you’ve gotten a rejection from a prospective client. A prospect has told you, “Not now,” “I need to think about it,” or “I don’t have the budget.” Instead of moving on to your next prospect, you find yourself questioning whether there is anyone at all who is ready to hire you and able to pay.

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What It Really Takes to Get Clients

What It Really Takes to Get Clients

The longer I do this work, the more I come to realize that we self-employed professionals can be our own worst enemies when it comes to getting clients. We know what we should be doing to market ourselves better, and then we don’t do it. Or we don’t know what’s the right thing to do, so we throw a dart and pick something randomly, or respond to the latest email we got, instead of considering our options and making a well-reasoned choice.

Or we make a valid choice, then second-guess ourselves, dropping one marketing strategy and picking up another, without putting enough effort into any one approach to produce results. Or we spend too much time talking to ourselves and not enough talking to prospective clients, worrying about why the last prospect never got back to us, whether the blog post we just wrote is good enough to publish, or if the latest version of our tag line finally gets across our message.

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How to Be Successful in Business if You’re Not a Nuts & Bolts Person

How to Be Successful in Business if You’re Not a Nuts & Bolts Person

Congratulations, you’re a business owner! You know your craft and are filling your days doing what you love, giving value to your customers, and putting well-earned cash in the bank as a result. Everything is as it should be.

Except.

There’s a voice you keep hearing that says something like:
You aren’t nuts & boltsy enough, how can you be successful in business? You can’t even understand a profit and loss statement – how do you expect to make it?

*sigh*

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How to Keep the Most Important Person Interested in Your Marketing – You!

How to Keep the Most Important Person Interested in Your Marketing – You!

If you’ve read my book Get Clients Now!, you’ve seen my personal definition of marketing: telling people what you do, over and over. The book also spills the beans about the secret to successful marketing: choosing a set of simple, effective things to do, and doing them consistently. Following these two pieces of advice will make your marketing both simpler and easier. You design a marketing plan, refine it, and then repeat it. Voila – clients! But there’s a problem.

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Your Marketing Year in Review

Your Marketing Year in Review

As a business owner, it’s important to stop periodically and review how things are going. As you near the end of the year, take advantage of the slower business demands many of us experience to ask yourself how this year was for you, marketing-wise.

Set aside a dedicated time — anywhere from an hour to an afternoon — and consider these questions.

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Why You Don’t Market the Way You Should… and How You Can

Why You Don’t Market the Way You Should… and How You Can

Are the results you’re getting from your marketing not what you hoped for? Perhaps there is something else you should be doing. I don’t mean something more. You are probably working hard at marketing already. I’m suggesting something else.

It’s been my experience that many independent professionals just don’t market the way they should. Here are the five most common reasons, and how you can overcome them:

1. Missing information.

There’s a lot of misleading information out there about marketing.

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Is It Time to Reset Your Marketing Plan?

Is It Time to Reset Your Marketing Plan?

Is your marketing plan producing the results you need? When was the last time you evaluated your plan to see if it is leading you toward success? Are you even using a marketing plan at all? Here are four questions to help you determine whether it’s time to reset your plan.

1. Are you getting in touch every month with at least three times as many new clients as you need? Not every prospective client will say yes. You need to have a marketing pipeline filled with prospects, contacts, leads, and referrals that you can draw from.

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Don’t Let Commitment Phobia Wreck Your Marketing

Don’t Let Commitment Phobia Wreck Your Marketing

Effective marketing of your business requires commitment. No matter what marketing approach you choose, you must be consistent and persistent with it, if you want to see results. You’ve probably heard that advice. But this sort of commitment doesn’t always happen in practice.

Do any of these phrases sound like something you may have said about marketing at some point?
“I tried that a couple of times, but I didn’t see results right away, so I stopped.”
“I was using X to market my business, but then a friend suggested Y, so I started doing that instead.”
“I don’t know if this is the best way to market myself, so I don’t want to risk doing it.”

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Are You in the Mood to Market Your Business?

Are You in the Mood to Market Your Business?

There you sit: you know you need to do something to get the word out about your business and get the clients flowing in, yet you’re not in the mood. In fact, you’re mostly never in the mood to do marketing. The problem is, no marketing = no clients = no money = no impact with the work you’re here to bring to the world, which is a sad state to be in.

“Even if you don’t feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.”
– Ayana Mathis

Getting in the mood to market is a mind shift, one you can bring on yourself. Consider these tactics when you’re just not feelin’ it:

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You Already Know How to Market… So Why Don’t You Have All the Clients You Need?

You Already Know How to Market… So Why Don’t You Have All the Clients You Need?

For the past twenty-plus years, I’ve been asking self-employed professionals to tell me the most effective ways they know to get clients. No matter where and when I ask this question, their answers are always the same: “networking,” “referrals,” “word of mouth.” These are the right answers. The professionals I ask know this to be true.

But then I ask a follow-up question: “What are you doing right now to market yourself?” And what I hear back is surprising, given the answers to my first question. More than half the people I ask tell me their primary focus is on something other than those answers. They’ll tell me they are building a new website, or mailing out postcards, or running pay-per-click ads, or cold calling strangers, or launching a Facebook page, or exhibiting at an expo, or posting promos on Twitter.

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