This is Week 46 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.
This is not so much a week at it as a week off.
And yet, here on my Big Couple of Weeks Off I’m feeling On in a few places. Most of the people I’m meeting up with here on my two-week stay in the PacNW, for example, are people I’ve met via online networking sites—Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. At a rehearsal for Ignite: Portland, I met a bunch of other new friends (contacts, whatever) whom I’d never have met were it not for finding out about the event through my friend, Jean MacDonald, of SmileOnMyMac. That’s right—a random happy comment I wrote about a fantastic product I happened to really and truly like led to me speaking on stage in front of (gulp) 800 people, not to mention a fun evening at a ladies-only party in the Pearl District and who knows what else from here.
Plus there was a lovely dinner and meetup with my friend, Chris Guillebeau, whom I also met via social media, and his lovely wife, Jolie (who cooks a mean black bean soup and cornbread, boy howdy). And a great collaborative-planning call with another new friend, Brooks Palmer, declutter to the stars, as well. And three or four meetups over the next week.
This is my point: for so long, when I was in the Big Boy Business World, I looked at things in a very rigid fashion. You had your fun, and you had your business. Now, they bleed over into one another, and instead of it making life weird, it makes it great. And it makes doing business infinitely better. This is one of the great joys of thinking like a self-employed person, whether or not you actually are. (Although, as someone who has basically been fending for herself since 1992, I think I have to say I am one by now.)
Just as my favorite kind of selling is Not-Selling, my favorite kind of marketing is Not-Marketing. More and more, I’m becoming an adherent of the “marketing is the truth of you, translated into the language of them” school of marketing. And that’s just talking to people—about what they do, and need, and where you might be able to help them with that.
Marketing round-up for this week:
- 6 blog posts (five at the main blog, one here)
- rehearsed my presentation for Ignite: Portland
- went to after-party for rehearsal
- went to fab lady-party in downtown Portland
- chatted up various local merchants about their businesses (in person! so friendly!)
- wrote/sent my latest newsletter
- email! email! email!
- morning and afternoon checkins with Facebook and Twitter
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