This is Week 45 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week here, on the podcast, and at the Marketing Mix blog.
Once again, I was shown the benefits of doing regular marketing during a week where I didn’t manage to do much marketing at all.
The things that most occupied my time—prepping my presentation for the upcoming Ignite: Portland event, presenting at Pam Slim’s Escape from Cubicle Nation tour, and getting ready for my upcoming sabbatical-ette in the PacNW—are all indirectly related to marketing efforts I’ve made in the months (and sometimes years) before.
Pam and I met by reading each others’ blogs—obsessively, as it turns out, although I beat her to it.
Everyone I know in Portland save one (my former apartment manager, of all things) I’ve met through social networking, for example. One of them—my friend, Jean MacDonald—I met after writing a glowing testimonial for one of her company’s products, TextExpander (I’ve since written a lengthy and equally glowing review on my main blog). It was through Jean that I found out my visit would coincide with the next Ignite.
I’ll also be attending my friend and client Sam Carpenter’s Work the System Boot Camp in Bend, OR the week after next (still a couple of spaces available, if you’re interested). Where did we meet? Via social media, and Pam Slim!
And I picked up another couple of gigs for 2010 over the past couple of weeks: one via the networking I did with my alumni group, and the other via the work I did both with my former marketing coach, Ilise, and the ridonculous number of hours I’ve spent online, futzing around with social media.
My point in all this is only partly to make myself feel better for not getting as much done (and having as many billable hours) as I’d have liked. It’s also to say that the “wins” are the direct result of a long, sometimes slow, occasionally arduous, but always rewarding process. Having a regular marketing system (or “machine,” as Peleg and Ilise like to call it) in place keeps me moving forward, even when my attention is occasionally drawn elsewhere, as it was this week.
The other thing I’d like to offer up—again, to remind myself as much as anything—is that the real benefit of all of this marketing stuff is the building of relationships. It’s relationships that bring opportunity, loyalty, reliability and their attendant rewards. Hopefully, the relationships you build are their own reward, too, of course. But they really are an integral part in getting here from there.
xxx
c
Marketing round-up for this week:
- 8 blog posts (seven at the main blog, one here)
- wrote/designed my presentation for Ignite: Portland
- partnered with Pam Slim to do my “branding” preso dropped into her “Escape from Cubicle Nation” workshop
- attended launch party for my friend Adam and his friend Jesse’s new web show, Put This On! (which you should totally subscribe to!) Bonus? Met Huell Howser! (Sorry about that egregious sentence construction, Mignon.)
- met up with my new friend, Lisa Sonora Beam, to touch base and talk shop one last time before we’re both in different cities
- did some more writing for my upcoming newsletter (which will be one week late—didja notice?)
- email! email! email!
- morning and afternoon checkins with Facebook and Twitter
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