Wanna be a successful solopreneur? Build your own marketing habit even if you hate marketing! – The Reluctant Marketer Podcast #2

Mindset isn't everything. Marketing needs to become a habit. But how do you build such a habit when you don't want to?

Published: February 5, 2023

In a previous post, Why a regular, introverted Solopreneur needs a new Mindset before they can market their product, I wrote about what was standing in my way to market my products successfully. In essence, it was about two things: one big misconception and one limiting belief.

Here's what I got wrong:

The misconception was: Marketing = "pound the drum" + "toot the horn". You have to make a lot of noise to be heard. Sending a lot of "buy my stuff" messages into the world. Turns out: Nothing can be farther from the truth!

The limiting belief? "I can't write engaging copy". This one was a biggie. As an engineer, I was trained to write with a boring, factual style. In marketing you have to write in an engaging (often fun) style, so that people love to hear the story in which they and your product simply appear awesome.

Read this previous issue of The Reluctant Marketer to find out how I let go of my misconception and how I overcame the limiting belief.

Good! Mindset changed, limiting beliefs erased! Time to move forward, integrate what I learned, and go "up and to the right" with it, right?

Well, well… it turned out that mindset wasn't the only thing.

I had more problems to solve:

1. No structure in my marketing material and process
2. No marketing rhythm, just "do it when you feel like it"
3. No regular marketing habit, so people forgot about what I had to offer

Next step: Establish structure

If you want to succeed in marketing as a solopreneur, you can't allow yourself to be disorganized or chaotic.

When you've built stuff for a week, you can't switch to marketing, saying: "Okay, uhm… what the heck did I want to write about? Which message? On which channel: email, Twitter, or blog? To which audience?"

Nope. This is not going to work.

So here are two things that you can do:

1. Find rhythms for your marketing, i.e. when and how often will you market your product? What is sustainable for you and doesn't drain your energy, so that it can even be fun?
2. Form a marketing habit, i.e. a repeatable behaviour with a trigger and some well-designed steps that are easy to execute on and will bring you rewarding results: More attention, customers, and revenue.

Let's talk about marketing rhythms (plural!), first.

Find your marketing rhythms

There is a website, made by Jon Yongfook, it's called Coding week Marketing week. Jon made it so that in one week it says "coding week", the next week it says "marketing week".

That's exactly the rhythm that I chose for my building and marketing activities: I build for one week, and I market for another week.

Additionally, every Sunday I alternate between writing a newsletter issue and recording a podcast episode. The episode is an interview with a well-known marketer we all can learn from, or it's with a solopreneur who wants to improve their marketing.

And I tweet daily, 30 minutes in the morning (and sometimes 30 minutes in the evening again).

• First I reply to all people who mentioned me,
• then I reply to my peers,
• then I reply to big accounts who have many more followers than me.

That makes 3x10 minutes in a row, then I get off Twitter again for some hours of deep work.

You might say: "Wow, this seems like a lot!"

Indeed, it is a lot, but I can execute on this because it has a defined structure. Without that, it would simply overwhelm me.

Good, you found your rhythms, now what?

Time to form the habit itself

A habit needs a trigger, a repeatable behaviour, and a goal or desired result.

What triggers marketing? For me, it's Sunday for the newsletter, or Monday morning of the marketing week for the more meaty stuff that will take more than one day.

The repeatable behaviour? Run the next marketing experiment you planned.

What if there is no such planned experiment? In that case, you should plan a few: Each experiment tells a story on a channel that can reach your audience (this can be your blog, email, social media, etc.). After that, you measure the impact of the messages you sent out: Do people engage with your content, do they take the action you wanted them to take?

What if there is no such story you could tell in that experiment because you don't have one? Okay, so sit down and write one.

What if you don't know what to write, or whom to write to? Then, you need to run a positioning exercise, first, to figure all that out.

Here's a shopping list for the first positioning exercise. You need to collect:

• your target persona (a.k.a. "ideal customer" or "audience")
• the transformation this persona is trying to bring into their life
• the benefits they are trying to achieve
• the features of your product that could help them reap those benefits
• and your product itself and the kind of "limelight" you want to shine on it.

Here's some help for you

Feel like taking action to boost your marketing now? There are 3 ways I can help you:

• Read my step-by-step breakdown of SPME, a marketing habit for solopreneurs who have other things to do besides marketing
• Download The Reluctant Marketer's Setup Workbook, a FREE PDF that helps you design your own marketing structure
• Use my habit building software, 2Quiet2Market. It makes you position your product, write copy, design and plan experiments, convert them to tasks, it even integrates with Todoist, the task manager, to make you simply "do" those tasks.

Wow, problem solved, huh? 😄

I hope so! This did the trick for me, and it will at least build a basecamp for your marketing adventure.

Good luck, and – good results!

Matthias

🙏 Cover Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash.