Marketing Your Own Business

Work in Progress

My website project has been underway for several months. We (my in-house geek and I) have tried a few different designs, and I keep writing content. The problem? When I re-read that content, it’s just not right. Frustration ensues—I do this for other companies all the time; why can’t I do my own?—and I “take a break,” which really means I move on to other projects.

After talking to other writers, I realize it’s not just me. For many of us, writing about our OWN company is much harder than writing for clients.

But why? I can’t tell you for sure, but I’ve explored websites and books and come up with a few theories. I’m not sure these apply to men, but they seem to be common themes for creative, talented women.

 

Details, Details, Details

We get bogged down by the details. When you know absolutely everything about your company—all the things you can do, all the things you have done, the different companies you’ve worked for, and your goals and challenges—it’s hard to get out of your own head and look at it from the audience perspective. Why do people want or need to know about your company?

 

It’s Not Real Work

We don’t treat writing for ourselves as being just as important as “paid” writing for a client. We’re wrong. Engaging your audience, who in time can become clients or refer clients, means this work IS paid. It’s not a direct do-the-work-bill-the-client-get-paid income link, but in the end, getting new clients is the biggest payoff of them all.

 

The Big Scary

Oops, sorry to mention that “biggest payoff of them all” thing. Once we start thinking about the desired outcome, our own materials start to take on an exaggerated role. Subconsciously, getting it wrong can be too scary to contemplate. “After all,” our ever-helpful brains say to us, “without a good website or leave-behind, we will never get any clients ever again and then our business will fail, and we won’t be able to pay bills. We are going to end up as bag ladies.”

 

It’s Bragging

When we were growing up, we internalized the message “don’t brag. People don’t like you if you brag.” Women especially got this message. Learning to promote ourselves and feeling comfortable doing it means unlearning or overcoming our early programming, and replace that recording with one that let’s us talk about our work with excitement and enthusiasm.

 

In This Case, It Is All About Me

In my case, these four challenges have one thing in common—me. Those creative voices in my head that help me turn out good copy for my clients are not my friends when it comes to self-promotion.

(Don’t freak out about the voices. When I write, I hear the words in my head, and I’ve also taught myself to hear the questions the audience will have. The key messages for a project float around in there too. It gets kind of noisy sometimes.)


Next week: So what are we going to do about it?

Intentions for the new year

With a new year, many people make resolutions or set goals, both personally and professionally. Instead, I'm setting intentions for the year. Somehow, that seems friendlier and more likely to happen.

Resolutions seem to have become a joke—something you decide to do to make yourself "better." These often get abandoned even before the end of January.

Goals, strategies, objective: those all seem to have mixed meanings and be used somewhat interchangeably by different people. For example, what comes first, the goal or the strategy? Do strategies support goals or goals support strategies? Where do objectives fit in? Is an objective part of a goal or is it the overarching thing that everything else should support? 

When you are on over-thinker, which I am, it just starts a circular session that devolves into internet searches, multiple outlines trying to make objectives support goals and/or goals support objectives, plus evermore granular tactics. The result? No end point where something actually gets done. 

An intention though—that seems workable. We'll find out at the end of the year if that is the case. (To quote my dad, "What's this 'we' jazz? You have a rat in your pocket?") By we, I mean me and any of you who end up coming along for the ride.

Back to intentions. 

According to Meriam-Webster online:

in·ten·tion 

noun\in-ˈten(t)-shən\: the thing that you plan to do or achieve : an aim or purpose

Of course the first entry in the longer definition provides "resolve" as a synonym, but I'm ignoring the reality that I'm using a different word for the same thing. While the two words are related, they have subtle differences.

My intentions are the things I am turning my attention to this year. That means when I'm not doing client work or the accounting and office tasks involved in being a business, I should spend time on those intentions. Client work always comes first, plus I volunteer on my professional board and with a local nonprofit, so having a focus for the times I'm not working billable or volunteer hours will hopefully let me feel I'm accomplishing something.

Case in point: I intend to do more writing this year. Part of that intent is to add a regular schedule of blog posts, of which this is the first. The blog will eventually end up linked to my website. (Intention 2 = get new website launched.)

That's all the time I have right now, and this first post already seems long, so back to the work I get paid to do. 

Happy New Year! Do you make resolutions in January?

T