Marketing Roadblocks - Which of these is Stalling Your Success?

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If you’ve been in business for more than a week, you probably know the basics of how to market your business. As a solopreneur, you know you should be writing articles, maintaining a blog, networking like crazy on the forums and social sites, creating a magnetic website, and giving away free enticements so your prospects will get to know, like, and trust you, and then spend money with you. Oh, I forgot the newsletter and probably a few other "musts".

So - why aren’t you doing it? From conversations with my clients I’ve identified 3 primary reasons solopreneurs avoid the marketing activities they know will bring clients and profits.

Misunderstanding "Unique Selling Proposition"

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people on the internet marketing what seems to be exactly what you are marketing. Search Google for "life coach" and you are bombarded with over 6 million results. Who can compete with 6 million other people?

Your first task in a marketing plan is to develop your "unique selling proposition". If you think that means totally unique, it can be pretty daunting.

On the other hand, you ARE unique. No one else on the planet has your exact set of skills, talents, and abilities combined with your exact history and experience and filtered through your particular beliefs and attitudes. Nobody!

If you are selling your personal services, the way to differentiate is by being yourself! And you’ve had how many years experience doing that? So, get to it!

Need for Change and Excitement

It is part of your entrepreneurial fiber to want to create and innovate! Celebrate that! Just recognize that in marketing, too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing.

Your prospect needs to hear your message between 7 and 10 times before it may even get her attention and begin to sink in. By that time, if you are like most entrepreneurs, you’ve moved past boredom with it and may have even gone on to something else.

Indulge your need for change and excitement - for sure - just find another place in your life to get those jollies. Your marketing needs to be consistent and persistent to be effective. That means you need to repeat the same message over and over to the same people until they either buy something from you or get off your list.

It also means you need to use that same channels to communicate to those people consistently - you need more than one channel, but most solopreneurs don’t have time to do ALL the major channels justice. Choose just a couple and focus your efforts on them until they succeed.

Not Understanding the Game

Robert Middleton, of Action Plan Marketing, explains marketing in terms of baseball. You don’t go from home plate to 2nd base in a straight line. Robert describes the journey from home plate to 2nd base as marketing, and the journey from 2nd base back to home as sales. If you are like may new entrepreneurs, you may be tempted to skip the whole marketing process and go straight for the sale. It can be easy to confuse the two if you are just getting started.

Here is the easy way to know the difference. Marketing is what you do to let people know your services exist and get them to express interest. Sales is what you do once someone has expressed interest to get them to buy.

Developing the Marketing Success Mindset

Take any good internet marketing (or offline marketing, for that matter) class and your guru will tell you that your marketing mindset will determine your success or failure. Developing this mindset takes awareness, flexibility, and commitment to constant improvement. It can be done, though, and you owe it to yourself and your business to acknowledge any roadblocks you’ve got and find a way to get through them.