The Desert of Arizona
Clear, Heading to 79 Degrees
When I started dabbling in bidness on the interwebz back in like 2001, I spent a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to sell things.
In my head, the equation was: build list, sell something.
No one in the market I chose (oboe reeds, since my wife played the oboe and made reeds) was very sophisticated on the marketing end of things. So we had a bit of an advantage as I got my bearings.
We started a simple weekly email newsletter. How quaint right? How… 2001 of us. The newsletter was called the Oboe Reed Report. And it worked.
That’s the first time I experienced the platform model in action. Of course back then, I wasn’t paying attention. And I certainly wasn’t thinking too deeply about things. So a lot of clues flew right by me.
It’s funny that the same approach works well today.
But it’s hard to get that done on a consistent basis. An email every week? One every day? A podcast every week? What! Everyone’s too busy to get anything done these days.
The simple recipe is to make your marketing valuable.
Now some people recommend you should be “so good, they can’t ignore you.” How about being “so valuable they can’t ignore you?” Which means it’s not about you, it’s about them. (Sorry!)
Selling isn’t bad. Selling hard isn’t even bad.
Selling absent the context created by becoming valuable FIRST is the problem. I wouldn’t recommend that. That’s a dead end for a trusted advisor.
So two questions to ask yourself about the “marketing activities” you engage in to build your business. I didn’t make these questions up, but they are very applicable to what we’re doing:
- Are you being valuable or not?
- Would “they” miss you if you were gone?
That’s the foundation from which you build trust and credibility. That’s the foundation from which you distribute solutions to problems.
Oh, and there’s one more thing required for success if you adopt the platform model of client attraction: you have to learn not to eat the marshmallow. That’s a deal breaker for some folks. Get the details here about what that means.