It’s been a while since I wrote my first book.
It was always my intention to write books. After all, how could I possibly continue to introduce myself as “Speaker, Author and Marketing Expert” if I wasn’t authoring? How long could I continue to ride the wave of the one book I had written?
Plus, isn’t that what every other successful entrepreneur did?
The big guns and gurus all had more than one book published … didn’t they?
Or that’s the story I had been telling myself over the past couple of years. As this story got told again and again in my head, it became more and more real. More and more true.
And this is exactly the topic I want to explore in this book; the stories, thoughts and expectations we bring along on our journeys to becoming “successful”. We all have them and they affect the experiences we have and, ultimately, the results we get from our marketing.
We need to be marketing our businesses; without marketing, you reduce your opportunities of clients finding you. Without clients there’s no income. And with no income … well, there’s no business. So to find out how to market your business, it makes sense to start with information out there already. Instead of sitting at your desk, twiddling your thumbs whilst asking the Universe for clients to ring you on your phone, you do what most people do – you look to experts.
Why invent the wheel when we can get information about the best, latest, cheapest, quickest ways of winning new business from other people who have done that (and got the T-Shirt).
And where do most of you start? Well, yes … the internet.
The internet is a blessing and a devil. It gives us the opportunity to create a global business from our kitchen tables and spare bedrooms. But it also gives us the opportunity to fall into Alice’s rabbit hole when seeking for ways to get new clients.
Just hang out on Facebook for 10 minutes and your newsfeed fills with ads offering live training events to learn this and free checklists to learn that.
Google “how to get clients” and you get 730,000,000 results with pages and pages full of listings offering “33 ways to get more clients”, “21 ways to bring in the business” and “the quickest and easiest way to get booked solid”.
There so much free stuff out there, you sign up for this, that and the other and before you know it … BAM you now believe you simply HAVE to be creating an online business, BAM you NEED a way of bringing in passive income because there’s no way you’d be able to work with enough clients to have the income you need to live the promised beach life and, to be any way successful, BAM you’ve GOT TO start running webinars, group mentoring programmes and sell places for a VIP retreat weekend.
The next 12 months has you continually spinning further and further down the rabbit hole until you wake up one day and ask yourself, “What business am I trying to build here? I hate what I am doing. I’m exhausted at trying to get these marketing strategies to work. Why am I not bringing in enough clients? Why am I not more successful?”
If this has happened to you, you are not alone.
Most of us who have started up a business have experienced this at some time and at some level or other. It doesn’t matter how successful you perceive yourself to be (or how unsuccessful for that matter), everyone I know has fallen into Alice’s rabbit hole at some point. Everyone I know has sought information, advice or consultative help on how to get better results from their marketing from outside sources; from other experts who done that (and got that T-Shirt).
It’s what I do, after all. I have spent the past 10 years teaching and sharing marketing strategies and tactics. And I have also spent a fair amount of my own money learning the best, latest, cheapest, quickest ways of winning new business so that I can apply to my own business, as well as then adapt and share with my own clients.
For the most part, these outside sources are credible. What they teach works for them and for some of their clients.
And yes, I know there are plenty of charlatans out there and some who may even have a good heart but just don’t have the ability to deliver or meet their clients’ expectations. This book is not about starting a slanging match or starting a witch hunt! But, on the whole, when you go out and seek information and advice on how to get new, different or better clients, you will get tried and tested strategies and tactics.
So if most of the information and advice out there is sound, why don’t most of these strategies and tactics work for you?
Why is that the information and advice you sometimes (and perhaps almost always) get from these outside influences NOT get you the results that you after?
These are the questions I want to answer in this book.
Over the past couple of years, I have begun to understand why learning more can actually mean you end up knowing less; why the “7 Steps to Success Programme” you invested in doesn’t work for you the way that it worked for the expert who claims it does.
There’s still very much a place for “how-to” learning in my opinion. After all, you wouldn’t want to have heart surgery from someone who is simply trusting their instinct and confident about their own abilities to “give it a go”. But it’s time for me to start sharing my path of understanding with you on how to reverse the outside-in process so that your marketing can become inside-out. I want to share how your marketing can feel more authentic, more you … without the need for following a 7 Step Success Formula.
Your marketing strategies and tactics can be somethings that you love to do. You know what you could be doing to grow your business and find new clients right now; it’s just that you can’t access this information because you are too busy pulling your hair out trying to implement stuff that you feel you “should-be” doing.
So stop feeling guilty that you haven’t posted for the past seven days in your 30 Day Blogging Challenge. Stop beating yourself up because you still haven’t got a decent lead magnet on your website. And stop getting frustrated because you haven’t run that webinar you promised to do because the technology is scaring the pants off you.
It’s time to throw everything you think you want to know about out of the window and start working on your marketing from the inside-out.
The above is an excerpt from the introduction of my new, upcoming book “Inside-Out Marketing: How to put a stop to your “should-be” marketing and attract client with simplicity, grace and ease.” (or the alternative title “Sod the 7 Step Success Formula – let me do what I bloody well want to do to market my own business!”)
If you are interested in getting sent further excerpts of this book and perhaps even be involved in it’s creation, then click here to add your name and email address to the notification list.
In the meanwhile, leave a comment below and tell me what you think of what you read so far. Do you want to read more? Are you experiencing Alice’s rabbit hole? Or do you love working on your marketing strategy? Tell me your ideas and views below.
I could feel a wave of relief as I read through this! A bit like the right diet – we and our businesses are all different and we need to be happy with how WE operate – it feels more authentic … I look forward to reading more 🙂
Nice intro Karen. I remember when someone told us we absolutely had to have video content. What a waste of time that was (for us). So many people who just have to give you their advice and tell you what you’ve got to do or, perhaps worse, what you’re doing is totally wrong. You own your business – it’s your head on the line. It was the moment that we started extracting valuable relevant advice from experts, but not applying the 7 steps to Utopia AND doing what we believed in, for the industry we passionately knew, that we started getting decent traction. Look forward to reading the book and getting the T-shirt.
You’re right Karen, there are so many how-tos out there in various forms, formats and platforms, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start. And as the first commenter said, it’s also all to easy to be given bad advice by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.
There’s another side to this as well – sometimes the right advice is given but the recipient is either not ready for it, doesn’t understand it properly or has their head filled with other nonsense so they actually don’t hear it! Sometimes it can take several goes before the penny drops, as we all know that information needs to be presented up to 21 times before a client may decide to take action.
Good luck with this book, Karen, I await with anticipation.
Fabulous advice Karen and your clarity of thought shines through – as well as your lack of BS. Perfect timing for it I would think. Can’t wait to read the rest of it.
Hi Karen, I echo Tracy’s words. I think you have a fantastic delivery style that talks my language and keeps it simple for me.
Totally agree about the ‘shiny new toy’ syndrome and I’m very guilty of trying everything and getting nothing (except a headache)
As one of my old uni lecturers put it: “the trouble with data diarrhoea is that it leads to paralysis by analysis.”
Let me know when your book is available please.
Mike (from a very windy and wet Edinburgh).
Love it Karen ! It really made me feel I wanted to go out and buy the book.
I also agree with you that cookie cutter programmes don’t always bring results as everyone and their circumstances are so different.
Oh yes. C’mon Karen get it written. I think it’s totally what we all need.
Hi Karen – this feels like a great book to write, we all need Moms, teachers, role-models, and mentors who says “hey you don’t need to do it the way others do it if it doesn’t fit” trusting from the inside out is a big challenge in life but very powerful. I love your writing style – fresh and to the point 🙂 Looking forward to learning more.
Spot on! A great read so far, I want more!! Love the concept of this inside out as I have just realized that these last couple of months. X