This is Week 48 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.
Funny—I got a comment via email this week about my Thanksgiving Day poem (I post a little something in something a little like verse each Thursday).
In it, the reader very kindly thanked me for the poem, and hoped that someday, my days would be full of poetry rather than self-promotion and self-reflection. Which I know he meant in the kindest of ways, but which kind of stung: am I really all self-promo, all the time? And if I am, what of the Yellow Highlighter People? The mind reels.
Anyway, it got me to thinking about thankfulness and poetry and marketing and all the rest of it. What I’ve come to is this: that some people will always think any promotion is too much promotion, that you have to do what feels right for you and your business (and let other people learn where the line is for them), and that I’m pretty happy with my own mix of self-reflection, self-promotion and poetry.
This week, there wasn’t much of any of it, save the poetry. I had an arduous drive back from Portland, followed by some mandatory rest and relaxation, followed by some semi-mandatory family/holiday time. I’m using the rest of the weekend to squeeze in some relaxing puttering, much of it marketing-related.
And what’s made this little break possible? Nothing but the regular-as-clockwork marketing I’ve been doing for years now, especially this past year.
I know it can get tedious at times: I’ve had my own late-night wrasslin’ with my email newsletter, and there have been plenty of times when I questioned my sanity, committing to this networking event or that unpaid speaking gig. But putting aside the weird and utterly unquantifiable sensation that somehow, everything is coming together underneath, there’s the very real truth that because I market all year-’round, taking a week off at the holidays won’t hurt me.
If you haven’t yet committed to your own year-long project for 2010, I’d ask you this: why not? Can you not spare two hours a week to create some room and sanity in your life?
“Marketing” round-up for this week:
- 6 blog posts (five at the main blog, one here)
- email! email! email!
- morning and afternoon checkins with Facebook and Twitter
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