How to get clients if you hate marketing (or you aren't good at it)
It's never been my goal to build a business empire, you know, get loads of followers, build a huge team, manage those people, make millions, be the stereotype of what a CEO is. The goal for me was always to make an abundant full-time income online without working full-time hours.
To run a business that enables me to live a freedom-filled life. A life that prioritizes my well-being, wake up and have a slow four-hour morning, drinking coffee, reading a book, and going for a walk in nature.
To work three days a week so that I can spend most of my week on other things like building my boat, resting, volunteering, and traveling.
To provide myself with enough financial security that I can save, invest, spend without worrying and not stress about money.
For me, freedom was the goal, and gratefully, what I described has been my reality for 11 years.
I built a six-figure business in my 20s while working three days a week. (I have a podcast episode about my journey here.)
I have rarely ever worked more than three days a week, both at the start of my business and now. When I first started my business, I did a lot of volunteer work, so I couldn't have worked more even if I wanted to. So, that has been the goal for me. Freedom has always been the goal for me. And if you are subscribed to this podcast, there's a high chance that freedom has always been the main goal for you too. Not being a leader of your niche, not being a multi-millionaire, even though none of these things are wrong and I think that's amazing if you do want them, you can absolutely go and get them. I believe that you can. But that wasn't my main goal. It was freedom. Time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom too.
Freedom is such a beautiful thing, but we do have to work for it. And one of the things that you have to do in order to sustain a business and keep this freedom is to market your business, and market your services.
I hear a lot of people saying things like, "I'm not good at marketing," "I suck at marketing," "I don't like marketing," "I don't want to do the marketing," "I wish somebody else would just do it for me." And I get it because I'm not the best person at marketing in the entire world, and I don't need to be the absolute best at it to get clients or teach it. But I (and you) do need to do it.
If you tell yourself things like you don't like marketing, then you're not going to do it. You're going to do less and less of it because who wants to do something that they don't enjoy? It's very, very difficult to. And that's not to say that we need to like everything that we do in our lives in order to do it. There are going to be plenty of times when you have to do something because it's a necessity. And I'm going to talk about that today in this podcast episode. I'm gonna talk about two things.
Number one, how to do hard things that you don't like. And number two, how to also try and look for ways to do more of what you do like. I believe that we have to do hard things sometimes, especially in our businesses, we're not going to be able to do only the things that we like. We do need to make sure that we're doing more of what we like than what we don't like though. Because there are going to be plenty of instances in your business where you're doing something that you don't like that you can actually change to something that you do like very easily and get the same, if not better, result. Let's talk about those two things.
If you don't like doing something, you won't do it very often. That's what most people tend to operate like. They don't like doing it, so they're not going to do it. For example, if you say, "I hate the gym, I hate working out," like my boyfriend hates the gym with a passion, he says it often enough, "I hate the gym." And does he go to the gym? You know he does not. And whenever he starts to go to the gym, does he keep it up? No, he does not because he hates the gym.
But is going to the gym the only way that you can get fit? It's not. You can lose weight, you can get fit in so many different ways. You can go to Zumba classes, dance classes, you can go for a run, you can do more walking, you could go kickboxing, you could go swimming. There are so many ways to get fit that don't involve the gym.
So if you are telling yourself, "I hate marketing," and so you find yourself never actually marketing very much, or you find yourself being one of those people that does a marketing strategy for a couple of weeks and then just gives up for a few months, and then the cycle continues, if that's because you keep saying that you hate marketing, I don't believe that you do. You don't believe that you hate marketing or that you hate selling. I think it's probably more of a case of you hate the kind of marketing that you have been doing or you hate what you believe you have to do to market your services. You hate what you think marketing is.
But what if you open your mind to the possibility that you don't have to market yourself the way that you've been doing it so far? That you can get up tomorrow and try something different? If you hate Instagram, for instance, you don't have to keep forcing yourself to do the marketing on Instagram. You can decide that, actually, over the next six months, I'm gonna continue with Instagram marketing, but I'll do it less. Instead, I'm going to start phasing it out and over six months, I'm going to start building up a different marketing strategy—start podcasting because that's what I've always truly wanted to do, and it's what would be easiest and most fun for me. That is just an example. I'm not saying everyone should ditch Instagram for podcasting. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm sure that you get what I mean.
There is more than one way to market, and if there are marketing strategies that you know you would enjoy or you suspect you would, then try those instead. Because you might find that when you actually start doing marketing that you enjoy, or at the very least, that comes a lot more naturally to your personality, it becomes a lot easier for you to do it consistently and to not give up.