an open letter to business owners who don’t “like” marketing
How do I promote myself without sounding self-serving?
Dear business owner who doesn’t like calling attention to herself,
There’s this either/or thing that tends to happen when you are a person who loves other people. (Stella’s one of ‘em, too, and has a decade of non-profit, social service and teaching high school to prove it). You get really clear that you’re on the planet to channel goodness. You’re here to help other people.
And this whole marketing thing feels a little...
Well...
Selfish.
If that’s you, Stella wants to help you make you as much money as you’d like to make. Because you being happy, debt-free, and so rich you want to give your money away for the sheer joy of it is good for everyone.
Starting with, well... you.
And to do that, you've got to debug your brain on this one.
Because in the circles we travel in, you need to be able to talk about your work in a way that gets other people buzzing.
That's just how it works. It's not enough to help them when they are your client.
You also need to help them see why they'd even want that in the first place.
And that, my dear, is marketing.
Now, Stella would like to crawl into her cave as much as the next bear. But she's got all these problems to solve. Ideas to share. Ways to say, teach and explain things that get y'all riled up and happy and making money and feeling on top of the world.
So I stick around.
And keep writing.
Here’s the thing: promoting yourself IS self-serving.
But the real kicker? That’s not ALL it is.
Want the mental patch for getting around the worry that promoting your business is somehow “bad”?
Everyone wins when you promote yourself well.
The more people you get in front of, the more people you can help. The more value you can share on a regular and consistent basis. And the more people you help who come alive—be it in business, health, relationships, self-mastery, finances, what have you—the better off THEIR families and communities and neighborhoods will be, too.
(Can you begin to feel in your bones how important it is for you to know how to share your message with more people? And in a way that they “hear” and get? Now, you see why Stella geeks out so much on this marketing strategy and copywriting stuff! It’s powerful sauce!)
This is why you’ll hear me say: You are a walking invitation. Not only for your business. Which is, of course, true. But for your way of being. For the whole cluster of problems you help people solve. For living in a way that lets people know that there’s a way out of their current pickle… when they decide they are ready for one.
Which means that you’re not only a walking invitation, you are a factory of hope*.
Because at bottom, each one of us is a messenger. And if you really believe in your message, why wouldn’t you want it to reach as many people as possible?
(*A word on hope here, by way of Cornel West:
“I’m a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism… hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn’t generate optimism. It just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended…”
I believe that one of the biggest reasons a lot of marketing comes off as slick and oily is because it pushes false hope. You can smell fake hope a mile away, can't you? Smells like dog poop baking in the sun.
Copy written by lazy people fails to show up & be present with the very real concerns, fears, worries and “stuckness” of its readers. It’s the person who says they are listening while they sit with you at the table, but are texting as they say it.
Instead, you get a lot of emotional short-hand. Which is why you feel like putting a fork in your eye when you read most people’s marketing. But we’re up to something different here, aren’t we? So, here's to hope. And having some when it comes to making marketing that doesn't stink, and sharing some when it comes to talking to people about your business...and the problems you help them solve.)
Many thanks to KSDigital's flickr photostream for the cake.
