It was never my goal to build an online business empire, get loads of followers, build a big team, manage lots of people or make millions. It was never my goal to be the stereotype of what a CEO is.
As a kid, I actually remember driving past a grassy field peppered with flowers and thinking, "I wish I could just lay in that field forever instead of growing up and getting a real job."
So if anything, I wanted the OPPOSITE of the CEO life.
With my business, the goal was always to make an abundant income online without working full-time so I can live a slow freedom-filled life that prioritizes my wellbeing and happiness.
To be able to wake up and have a slow 4-hour morning drinking coffee, reading books and going for a walk in nature.
To work 3 days a week so I can spend most of my week on other things, like building my tiny home, resting, doing my hobbies, and volunteering.
To provide myself with enough financial security so 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.
That's a big privilege. One I'm grateful for every day.
It's also something I've worked hard for. (Because after all, business can be simple but it still involves hard work.)
That's what I talk about in this week's new podcast episode: doing the hard things you don't want to do...
... like marketing.
If you relate to my brand and my message, you probably relate to my childhood dream of wanting to lay in a field of flowers and do nothing but live in peace. (Aka. live the “soft life.") And if so, you may find it hard to motivate yourself to do the day-to-day tasks required to run a profitable online business, like marketing your services.
You might even say stuff like:
"I hate marketing"
"I'm not good at marketing"
"I wish I didn't have to do the marketing"
I get it. Trust me - I'm not the best at marketing either. It's not my favourite thing in the world.
But it is a necessity if we want to sustain (or for some, create) a freedom-filled life.
Here's how to do the marketing when you don't enjoy it:
Stop forcing yourself to use marketing methods/platforms you don't like and find ones you DO. No one is forcing you to use Instagram or Tiktok, for example, if you don't like them. That's great news - it means you can start phasing them out and replacing them. (I talk a little about how to do this in the longer article & podcast episode that goes with this email.)
Learn how to get on with doing hard things. And trust that you CAN do hard things. Even if you follow step one, that doesn't mean your new marketing strategies will always be fun. They will still be hard sometimes. You will still have times when you don't want to do them. But the more you put off doing something that makes you uncomfortable, the more uncomfortable it gets.
Click “play” on the podcast player below to tune in! (Or scroll down to read the transcript.)
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.
For me, podcasting is something that I enjoy, and it's something that is very easy for me. It's just sticking a microphone on and talking about topics that I have been talking about for 11 years, so I'm confident in it. And so, podcasting has been something that I have been able to be relatively consistent with because it's easy to do.
So, what marketing strategies are you doing right now that you really hate? And it's not just like a seasonal kind of hate like you're just hating it for now. If you've always hated them or you've hated them for quite some time now and the feeling is not going away, then what can you do instead so that you don't become that person who says, "I hate marketing, so I'm just gonna let my business down"? Instead, find something you do enjoy and phase out the thing that you hate. That's one option.
The other thing to consider, which I already kind of mentioned earlier, is the fact that you are not going to love everything that you do in your online business. And that doesn't mean that you can always stop doing it. There are going to be times when you can, as we discussed when you can replace the things that you don't enjoy with other things. So, if you don't like Instagram marketing, you can replace it with something else. But you can't replace marketing as a whole unless you want to outsource it and you have the means for that, then go ahead. But if you hate marketing as a whole thing and you don't have the resources to outsource it, it's going to have to be something that you continue doing unless you're happy to go and find a 9-to-5 job. And that's not a failure. That does suit some people more than running their own online business. And that does not mean that you are a failure as a business owner or that a 9-to-5 job is not as respectable as running a freelance business. It just depends on what is best for you. Either of those things, or both, are fantastic ways to make a living.
So, if you don't like marketing as an entire concept and you can't outsource it, and you don't want to go and get a 9-to-5 job, it stands to reason that you're going to have to do it even though you don't like it. And here's the thing—I can relate.
In my boat build, as many of you know, I'm renovating a narrowboat that I'm going to live on and travel the UK in when it's done. But there has been a whole year's worth of renovations that I've done that I have not enjoyed, mostly because they've been the hard jobs, not the fun ones like installing the kitchen or cladding the walls. This has been the hard work of rust scraping, cleaning the engine, and being in a tiny cramped engine bay stinking of engine oil. All of these things are not fun but have to be done.
There have been many times when I have really doubted my decision to buy the boat and questioned whether I should continue or just do what everyone else does and get a house or a flat. Maybe I should have just bought a van and converted it into a campervan instead. So there have been many times that I've had these doubts about whether I should continue, whether I made the right choice to start this. And business is very similar.
We can find ourselves thinking, "I don't like doing this marketing. Did I make the right choice in starting this online business? Is running a business really for me, or should I go and find a job?" Again, as I said, there's no right or wrong. Both of those things are perfectly wonderful ways to make an income. But if you are someone who knows you don't want to go to the 9-to-5, and that is great for you, then you have to make your peace with marketing.
I would encourage you that whenever you're doing the hard things, remember why you're doing them. What's the end goal here? What's the lifestyle that this is going to give you? The freedom when you do this marketing and make this income and get the clients, what kind of lifestyle does that enable you to have? Because you did the hard thing. Sometimes, when we remember why we're doing something and we take the time to really dwell in our blessings and feel grateful for what we have and the freedom that our businesses give us, it can often make it a lot easier to do the things that you don't like doing or do the hard things because you know why you're doing them, and why you're doing them is worth it to you.
If you brainstorm why and it doesn't feel worth it to you, then I would encourage you to dig deeper and find a deeper purpose for your freelance business. It can be just making money and paying your bills. That's a purpose, and that's a very noble purpose. But sometimes, digging deeper into why you want to pay these bills, why do you need this income, you'll find other reasons. Like you want freedom, you want to sustain your time freedom. You want to be able to, in the future, have a family and not be away from them in a 9-to-5 job five days a week. But be able to work from home and be around your kids. Or you want to have the freedom to travel the world. Finding your why is going to really make it easier.
Here's another simple yet important reminder about doing the hard things. Even when you find a marketing strategy that you enjoy (which I truly believe we all can, by the way), there are plenty of them and something for every personality, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or email marketing. When you find something that you really enjoy, you're not going to enjoy it all the time, and you're not going to feel motivated to do it all the time.
Excuse my voice, by the way. I've been recording podcasts all day, and my voice gets very croaky. Even when you're doing hard things that you don't enjoy
Even when you're doing hard things that you don't enjoy, what I have found is that when you just do them, when you just start, the motivation comes. The motivation comes after you do it, not usually before. This applies to the gym, going back to that example. So many of us don't feel motivated to go to the gym. We lie there, thinking, "Just five more minutes," and then we think, "I don't want to go." We look at our workout clothes and think, "Oh, it's so much effort. It's too early. I don't even want to put those clothes on and go. I don't want to sweat." Yet, we put the clothes on, we go to the gym, or we do whatever exercise activity we want to do. And as we're doing it, we feel it, and we think, "You know what? I actually enjoy this. This is actually not as bad as I was making it out to be this morning. It's hard, but it isn't that bad."
How many times does that happen? The motivation comes after you start doing the activity. It's the same in marketing and online business. You might find that even when you choose marketing strategies that you enjoy, you don't always feel motivated. But once you start doing them, the enjoyment comes and the motivation increases. The more you do the things that are hard, the more you show your brain that you can do hard things. This is a very important thing to teach yourself, in my opinion. You can do hard things, and you might actually enjoy them more than you think.
Don't let your brain lie to you and trick you into believing that marketing isn't for you, that you don't like it, and that you suck at it. Because I promise you, if you take nothing else from this episode, remember that there is a strategy for everyone. There is something that everyone can find to enjoy in marketing, whether it's certain strategies or platforms. And even when you don't want to do it, if you just push yourself to do it and remind yourself that you can do hard things, you will most likely enjoy it once you start.
Okay, so that's it for this episode. I hope that it was what you needed to hear today. I know that so many people start their online businesses for freedom, not because they want to be marketing all the time or selling all the time. And you don't have to do it all the time, but we do need to do it. So I hope that these mindset hacks have been encouraging for you today. If you want to learn more about marketing and sales from me and learn how to attract clients consistently and start scaling your online service business to consistent 5K months, then go and check out my course, Simple Sales School. It might have a different name soon. I'm in the process of debating whether or not to rename it, so I will let you know. But I will drop the link to that in the show notes below.
About Nesha
Hey there! I’m Nesha, 10-year traveling entrepreneur and host of The Simple Business Show. I teach freedom seekers how to make a full-time income online without working full-time hours, so they have the time, location and financial freedom to live the lifestyle they dream of.
Looking for more ways I can help you? Here they are:
1:1 Coaching: Work with me on an intimate level to take your business from where it is to where you want it to go. Availability: April 2023.
Organize & Automate - Join 1200+ students and learn how to organize your entire online service-based business in just two weeks (on the side of your regular routine!) so you can stop stressing and fall back in love with your business.
Simple Sales School - Learn how to get a consistent flow of clients so you can build the income & financial freedom you desire.
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