Growing your business with marketing, week 52: Year in review

This is Week 52 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.

At long last, we come to the end of this little (LITTLE!?!) project. So what did I learn from it?

1. (Regular) blogging is awesome!

I learned this lesson on two fronts this year, blogging 5x/weekly on my main site and weekly here. Regular blogging done reasonably well brings more readers, and more readers helps keep writers motivated. Or it keeps this writer motivated. It brings in more readers (see my post on communicatrix for detailed stats), which can translate to more clients and evangalizers. It brings in comments and emails (or not) that tell you when what you’re writing is landing and when it’s not. And it

2. (Regular) blogging is awful!

I won’t lie: I’m relieved that it’s over. Not the marketing-regularly part: doing anything with focused attention helps move it along, and this was no exception. The weekly posting became burdensome about four months in, right around when my interest in what I was pursuing shifted. On the other hand, it forced me to reinvent things about halfway through: in case you hadn’t noticed, the posts became much more about sharing my journey, and that’s something that I always enjoy doing, even when it’s not easy.

3. Podcasting is super-awesome

If you had told me back in January that the best thing about this project would be my podcasts, I’d have said, “What podcasts?” Because it was only at the urging of Peleg that I decided to give them a whirl. I couldn’t believe that people would rather listen to me yammer about the week than read about it. People did, bless their crazy hearts, and I loved doing it. I’m kicking around an idea for a podcast to start up next year. It may not be marketing-related, but it will be fun-related.

4. Writing goals down works as well as they say it does, whoever “they” are

This is the scary-amazing part.

I know that there really isn’t some study of Harvard Business School grads who made x more dollars because they wrote down their goals. And by no means did I hit all of mine: I abandoned ship completely on several, and several others I morphed into more reasonable, attainable and—most important—interesting-to-me goals as the year progressed. (This is the hardest part of goal-setting for me: getting honest not only about what really excites me, but how many hours I have available in the day to work on the stuff.)

One goal I abandoned early on, with Ilise’s approval: that of 50 consulting clients. Given the health setbacks I had and all the plates I had spinning, it just wasn’t feasible. Plus my offering was still not completely formed and needed work (heck, I still haven’t moved it off the Super-Secret Page it currently lives on.) So I just dumped it as an action item and forgot it, although I didn’t stop taking on clients.

So tallying up the year’s results was kind of a shock: a cursory count showed 27 individual consulting clients, and I ended up getting talked into doing some ongoing coaching with three of them. An over 50% success rate just for writing something down? I’ll take it!

I also exceeded my goal of 12 speaking or teaching gigs (I’m including webinars), racking up a whopping 16! Again, I didn’t do anything specific to go after these, like targeting, researching and calling. (The one bit of calling I did in the beginning of the year, reaching out to colleges with theater departments, netted me nothing. Bad timing, with endowments gutted because of the market crash.)

5. Accountability is critical

Blogging-out-loud helps with accountability, but it wasn’t enough. (It’s not you; it’s me.) Having people to report to, on the other hand, made a huge difference. Mid-year, I added something called Success Team, a group of four creative folk who meet in person once weekly to hash out what happened, offer and get guidance and generally provide support. (It’s mastermind-like, if you’ve heard of those.) I tried out a few phone partners: for the past couple of months, I’ve had bi-weekly phone dates with a fellow coach/consultant-type that’s been working well. And a couple of weeks ago, I added a daily check-in with a Twitter pal who’s a designer-consultant; we’re using Google Wave, and it’s really interesting and fun.

I loved my time with Ilise, too; paying for a coach is a great investment in your business, and there’s no way I’d have come this far without her. Right now, I’m investing my self-improvement allowance in a rare form of martial arts training (I know, but it’s cool) and in monthly shrink appointments, but I’m sure I’ll have another coach eventually. Meanwhile, I can’t recommend Ilise Benun highly enough if you’re a creative solopreneur looking to build your business. And Deidre swears by the Marketing Mentor groups.

What’s most important? Clarity, focus, flexibility, and…

Accomplishing big things requires regular energy and attention, and there’s just no way you’re going to sustain that over the long haul without passion.

So my advice going in is to be honest, and get clear. If  you don’t have the focus you need yet, don’t fake it: commit however you can to discovering your passion.

Then, once you’re clear on that, go after it like a white-hot laser of focused energy.

Thanks for making this journey with me. And thanks to the intrepid Deidre Rienzo who hunkered down and did the work week by week, and also blogged out loud about it. (And speaking of Deidre, you should immediately go to the Marketing Mix blog and read about her astounding, measurable success. Puts me to shame, she does, and good on ‘er!)

Here’s to an amazing 2010. And if you want some help, do check out the new 2010 Calendar. It’s got a number of really cool additions, like helpful articles and several recurring sheets to help you track your progress (I wish I’d had numbers handy as I sat down to do this).

“Marketing” round-up for this week:

• 6 blog posts (five at the main blog, one here)
• Two holiday parties (sorry, but I accidentally did business at one; reflex action, I guess)
• Wrote marketing column for actors
• email! email! email!
• morning and afternoon checkins with Facebook and Twitter