Unlocking the Secret to Solopreneur Success: The Sacred Marketing Hour
When you wait until you find time for marketing, it will never happen. Here is the secret how solopreneurs make time for marketing and make their business take off.
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You think you're not a marketer? You prefer to build your product, service or piece of art instead, so that you "forget" marketing?
Yep, I feel you. Been there, done that!
Problem is, if we don't market our stuff, people won't notice how much good things we have to offer and won't buy anything from us.
As a solopreneur, you can't leave it like that – otherwise your business will soon be dead!
Fortunately, there is a secret that you can put to work here, and I'll reveal it to you right now: It's called The Sacred Hour for Marketing.
What is the Sacred Marketing Hour?
A Sacred Hour is a block of time that you reserve for yourself, to work on one single thing. In our case here, it's marketing.
No distractions from social media, email or text messages. No other things to do, just a dedicated block of time that you carve out in your calendar. It can be anything from 60 minutes to a day or two, this depends on what you want to get done.
If you think "yeah okay, I will do my marketing work once I get such a Sacred Hour", you got me wrong.
These hours are called "sacred" because you plan them in advance and remove everything else from your calendar and your desktop. I really mean "everything", including what you love the most: Building your product. Nope, building doesn't happen while it's time for your Sacred Hour for marketing!
How to Make it Happen for You
So, how on earth would you find this block of time? As I learned in the Ship30for30 writing class, your sacred hours need to have two characteristics:
- You must be awake and productive
- You will be unresponsive to the rest of the world
So check your week and think about it: Where are these times for you that meet both criteria?
In my case, some possible slots are:
- Saturday early afternoon until tea time
- Sunday morning and early afternoon
- Monday, the entire day
In the afternoon, I'm not as awake as in the mornings, so Saturday is a good time for me to take a blog post from the previous week, turn it into a script for a YouTube video, cut it into digestible sections and load them into the teleprompter app for Sunday.
On Sunday mornings, after my Swiss Muesli and a cup of coffee, I am fully present so that I can roll up the greenscreen, stand in front of the camera, and record 6-8 takes of 10 minutes each. The rest of the morning and early Sunday afternoon, I can spend for video editing.
On Mondays, I write a blog post and publish it as a newsletter on ConvertKit, Medium, and Substack. I also do some podcasting if a guest has scheduled a slot for an interview. The podcast would then be edited and released on the following Sunday. I share what I produced on Twitter and Mastodon.
This may sound like a lot, right? In your case, I would recommend you start with a 2-hour block and see what your mind and energy will allow you to do. In the beginning, it may be less, but usually, it's more than you think!
The Benefits for Your Business
If you clean up your desktop, close any social networks, pop in your earbuds, switch on some light music (e.g. Streambeats by Harris Heller) you'll quickly get into the zone.
Then...
- Open your content plan and look what it suggests you talk about
- Visit the places where your future customers discuss their problems online
- Get your marketing material nearby (images, stock video, text, audio)
- Fire up your favorite tools for writing and marketing
- Open the "creative tap", let the stale water come out and wait for the fresh water that follows it
When you've got a Sacred Hour for marketing, you will enjoy increased productivity, better focus, and improved marketing results. Ultimately, we all want to see and hear those sweet Stripe payment notifications trickling in, am I right?
Time to get started
Did you find your Sacred Hours? Good! Put them into your calendar, as "appointments with your marketing self". 😄
First, take one entire block to work on the positioning of your product. For whom is it? What does it do, and why is it so good? What transformation can your future customers experience when they get their job done or their problem solved, using your product or service? (I described how to do proper positoning in a previous episode of this series here).
Take another entire block to create a quick content plan so in the future, you will always know what to say and when. (If you want to know how to create a good-enough content plan, watch my short video about it on YouTube).
And then, in the upcoming Sacred Hour blocks: Start creating marketing content. Blog posts, newsletter issues, tweets or toots – whatever your audience enjoys or even craves for.
All the best for your business! May your phone screen be full of sales notifications (ka-ching, ka-ching!) 😄
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