Tag Archives: marketing

How to Ensure Your Company-Based Video Content is Reaching a Broad Audience

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Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly

When you take the time and energy, not to mention investing money in creating video marketing and advertising content for your company, you want to be sure it is reaching as broad an audience as possible. To do that, you need to find the appropriate channels to distribute your video, paying close attention to who the audience is, making sure it fits your key demographics.

So, what happens if you aren’t quite satisfied with your reach, and you’re questioning if you are in fact doing all you can to get your content out there? Here are some tips and advice that will help ensure your video content is reaching the broad audience you hoped for.

Understand It’s Not a One-Size Fits All Approach

One of the biggest mistakes companies can make is to assume video marketing is a one-size-fits-all approach. Continue reading→

Scientist Comedian Finds an Algorithm to Bringing Laughter to the World by Vidushi Somani

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I stood in front of hundreds of people, worrying that the microphone would slip out of my sweaty hands. Suddenly, my throat swelled up, and my chest became heavy. I took a moment to reflect on how I’d ended up on this stage. This was different from anything I had done before.

For years, I had entertained my parents with stories from school and accents I picked up. My parents would hang on every word, laughing hard. Then they would invite me to perform in front of their friends. Embarrassed at first, I became more comfortable the more my audience laughed. Soon, I was making up stories on the spot, coming up with new ways to embellish and exaggerate to get people howling with laughter. Almost every week, I’d find a new family to entertain.Continue reading→

11 Networking Tips to be Connected by Mari-Lyn Harris

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ml_fresh2 copyTo meet new people is sometimes very scary, especially when you don’t like doing it or you are new to town or shy.

Let’s say, you have just moved to a new city what do you do?  This is a great question,  Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank..asks this of people when there are offers on the table. “What are you going to do?”

When I moved to San Francisco CA,  I just knew I wanted to launch an idea/project here. Of course the weather and it’s beauty does help too!

What you need to do, is figure out who you want to meet..when I arrived I knew no one, even though people may say, “hey look me up and…” I think they just said this out courtesy don’t depend on them..some may actually  mean it, some really don’t. I was fortunate that my sister lived here for a long time and hooked me up with a few people..that I could meet or get to know. One of the gals was Liz –  Bette just said “Meet Mari–Lyn for coffee and pretend it’s her (Bette).”  We did, we hit it off, and I always keep in touch or find ways that we can socialize.

I’ve been here for almost 2 years..boy it’s hard to imagine.. I have some great connections in the Food business and still finding ways to meet more people.

My 11 Networking Tips:
1. Pick a focus or vertical of people that you want to meet, this will shorten your time.

2. Go to each city’s Chamber mixers – just to get a feel for the people and the area your are in. Living in Fremont, my roommate would tell me about it, introduce people to me, it will give you time to discover who you would like to get to know better. Each chamber has it’s own focus.

3. Volunteer – I actually volunteered for an organization that I liked what they were doing – Community Gardens.. I was offered a contract for a Project Manager as they received a grant. I said, yes! I was just so happy to have something while finding my way.

4.  Go to Church – Normally it’s not something someone says..find a church that believes in the values as you do.  That will fill your spirit. Why? Because, you’ll depend upon your Spirit or your God within to help you on your new adventure or journey.

5. Check out Meet-Up.com, they have many meetings listed, pick a couple that could help you in your job search, for socializing or just interests. There are lots of business networking groups.

6. Take a class. Learn something new and meet people at the same time.

7. If you are looking for a Tech job, check out this website (www.techjobscafe.com) for jobs. One thing that is funny here, people post jobs on Craigslist.com. Also be active on LinkedIn. Search Indeed.com, you can connect using your LinkedIn account.

8. Be proactive in meeting new people, ask them where they go.  If they are active, they will invite you as a guest. When you find a group you like, reciprocate.

9. Be consistent in networking. I met this gal who was a financial planner I asked her how she keeps up with all the networking she does. Her answer was, she goes to a women group every month and volunteers for committees. The rest of the time, she has five groups that she attends once a month on a consistent basis.

10. Start your own group, whether it’s online or meeting in person.  You never know who you are going to meet. Or join a group like Rotary that would be of interest to you.

11.  Be a hostess/host of the event. Even if it’s not yours. It’s a great way to get comfortable, you are helping other people who are shy and you meet more people. Years ago, I was coaching a gentleman who wanted to meet new people, he was rather shy, I just suggested that he become a host of the event. He reported back to me, saying it worked really well.

Try these 11 tips out see how they work for you. I love to hear which tips that have worked for you.

You can also be a guest blogger by writing a blog about you or your business for this website:  http://www.scrappywomen.biz/blog

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mari–Lyn Harris advises Food Startups – how to energize their Marketing. She blogs, writes about Marketing, Social Justice issues and a few things in-between.  Food 4 Social Change is a Producer Cooperative, provides many services to support food startups. A complete food-eco system. Check out http://food4socialchange.org

How To Sell To Difficult People by Amy Walker

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(First Published at http://amywalkerconsulting.com/blog/ on February 4, 2014)

Selling to the Stinkers

Ahhh, the Hecklers, the Know-It-Alls, and the Doubters.  They are not our favorite people to sell to.  I definitely prefer hearing, “This is exactly what I’ve been searching for!”  But in every event you are going to have a tricky person to sell to.  I know speakers and trainers who just let them go and work with the excited ones.  You can do that.  I also know that I have had some that were stinkers during the sales process and ended up being my most loyal and long running clients.  I’ve also closed stinkers who turned into stinker clients.  The key is to know which ones you need to let go and which ones really need you.

Why are they stinkers?

Most human beings are good and it is in our nature to protect ourselves.  When you come across crusty people, they are usually nursing some type of hurt.  Hecklers have often been through rejection or ridicule and had to laugh their way out of it;  Know-It-Alls often can’t handle being weak and imperfect; and Doubters have often been taken advantage of in the process.  The first step to handling a tough sale is to try to understand them and think of them as a good person.

shutterstock_114407182The Heckler: Makes Jokes, derails the presentation, asks completely irrelevant questions etc.

Remember that hecklers like to see you sweat.  They like pushing buttons.  The easiest way to handle a heckler is to get them on your side.  Laugh with them.  Joke with them.  Understand that they want to be seen and heard, and treat them with kindness.  When they like you, they will also sometimes be the most outspoken proponents of your products.

shutterstock_114974332

The Know-it-All: Everything is great in their life, they don’t need help, every time you get close to finding their pain or problem they will block you

Know-it-alls have a hard time showing weakness.  They are usually strong and are used to doing things on their own.  They do not want to feel incompetent or wrong.  If you keep pushing to figure out their problems, they will put up wall after wall after wall.  When I come across these situations, I pull back and invite them to tell me what they see that isn’t working.  If they come up with nothing, I ask them what they want that they don’t have and then I ask permission to help them come up with solutions to get there.

shutterstock_104220587

Doubters: Second guess you and your product.  Want proof.  Treat you like you are trying to pull one over.

NEVER sell this person into a product or service, you have to let them choose into it.  If you talk them into it, they will inevitable blame you for why their life has gone all wrong!  Ask them if they have had a negative experience before.  Listen to them and ask questions like, “What do you need from me so that this is a different experience?”  Keep asking them, “What else do you need to know before you can decide if this is right for you?”  Give them any type of reassurance they ask for.  If they want references, let them call your clients.  If they want facts, show them where to find it.  Your job in this situation is to inform where ever they need it and continue to invite them to get more answers until they have no more questions.  Then you ask for the sale.

When to RUN! 

Anyone that has worked with a pain in the butt client knows they make your life miserable.  Some of my favorite clients and people have fit into these 3 categories in the beginning.   But if they can’t pass my test, I will not work with them.  My test is simple.  Can they take accountability for themselves, or do they blame others?  If they blame others, they will blame me.  If they can take accountability I know we will be able to work together as soon as they are ready and I will move forward.  If not, I bust out of that sales call as soon as possible!

Happy Selling!

Amy Walker PicABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amy Walker is an International Executive Business Coach and CEO/Founder of Amy Walker Consulting.  As a Featured Professional Speaker she has shared the stage with some of the top names in the industry including Willie Jolley and Delatorro L. McNeal II.  Amy is a Master of Sales and has written sales scripts for billion dollar companies and organizations.  She has been regularly featured on television, radio, and print.  Amy is passionate about Women in Business, Making Businesses Thrive, and Balancing Business and Family.  She is the happily married mother of 5 boys.
Website: www.amywalkerconsulting.com
Facebook:  Amy Walker Consulting  – https://www.facebook.com/AmyWalkerConsulting
Twitter: @amywalkercoach – https://twitter.com/AmyWalkerCoach
Instagram: amywalkercoach – https://instagram.com/amywalkercoach/
Youtube:  Amy Walker Consulting – https://www.youtube.com/user/awalker2911
Linkedin: Amy Walker – www.linkedin.com/in/amywalkerconsulting

Ten Truths about the New Sales Professionals by Linda Holroyd

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85_Todd_R-_color_284_Linda_Holroyd

You hear us speaking on marketing and leadership and the age of personalization all the time. This newsletter will include our monthly top ten rules of marketing blog, as well as our new top ten rules of leadership blog. To better follow and report on the trends around personalization, we have created a Scoop.It blog, which captures articles and information on the blend of marketing, leadership and personalization.

FountainBlue’s monthly top-ten rules of marketing are designed to guide our client entrepreneurial tech companies and the community in general on marketing practices that clearly communicate and connect, thereby generating momentum for people and organizations. This month’s top-ten-marketing rules topic will be on the ‘Ten Truths about the New Sales Professionals’.

The sales heroes of the 80s and 90s often left me with a sense of oil and grease – to me, they were people who were more slick and connected wheeler-dealers than consultative, customer-oriented providers. No longer are we in an age of buying-what-you-don’t-need, with money-you-don’t-have, to impress people-who-don’t-care.

The economic meltdown precipitated both the aftermath of Y2K (no disaster, reduced IT spending) and 9/11 (which created a global culture of suspicion and caution) coupled with the empowerment of the user (through Google and Yahoo with its search, through Oracle and IBM and its big data solutions, through FaceBook and LinkedIn and Twitter with social media, through consumer-based e-commerce solutions like Amazon and eBay) is driving the age of personalization, and revolutionizing the sales process.

As marketing professionals and leaders, we need to understand and support the next generation of successful sales professionals:

They will be more customer-oriented, so help them profile their customers and prospects, and communicate with the team in delivering what the customers want.

1.   The new breed of sales professionals will truly and genuinely understand the current and anticipated needs of the customer, and great leaders will reward them for doing so.

2.   Indeed, they will consider the needs-of-the-customer above their own immediate needs, even if it means walking away from a sale or even directing them to another, even competitive solution. The old type of successful sales professional will have a difficult time adapting to the concept, and the new sales professionals will not look and feel the same as successful sales professionals of the past.

They will be more tech-savvy, so develop the tools to help them do their job well.

3.   The new generation of sales leaders will increasingly better understand enough about databases and software to know what can be efficiently customized.

4.   Indeed, they will understand the types of solutions which can leverage technology to be personalized, and the types which would be difficult to make efficient, seeking scalable, customizable solutions for their customers. They may be a current sales professional who sees things differently, or someone from another field who gets-the-tech, and wants to apply it to address specific customer problems.

They will astutely leverage social media to spread the word and reputation, and it will take a successful partnership between sales and marketing to make this work!

5.   The new sales professionals will proactively leverage social media and reputation management solutions to credibly spread the word about company offerings.

6.   Indeed, the more experienced and savvy professionals will recruit and incentivize ambassadors to spread the word to identified niche audiences.

They will be more collaborative, at least the successful ones will be, and it’s a great opportunity for marketing and sales to bury the hatchet and find a path forward, together.

7.   The new sales professionals will work with product marketing, development and marketing to ensure that the company understands and delivers precisely what the customer needs in the short term, and even anticipates what the customer will need in the longer term.

8.   In fact, they would willingly mentor others sales people to better deliver solutions to customers, and understand the value of doing just that. This is a new-world-order way of looking at sales, and goes against the grain of sales-professionals-of-the-past, who covet and protect their leads, their territory, their knowledge and skills so that they can reap rewards beyond their peers.

They will be more proactive, and let’s hope partnering with marketing leaders to deliver all of the above.

9.   The new sales professionals will follow the trends and manage and even anticipate the evolving needs of the customer, and proactive approach customers about how trends would impact their business and offerings and what they can do to address these shifts.

10.  Indeed, they will learn from the needs and deliverables for one customer/company/industry, and be able to generalize offerings to others while optimizing customization and while conducting business at the most ethical levels.

The bottom line is that the new successful sales person is someone who is intelligent, articulate, genuine, collaborative, informed, proactive and tech-savvy, and they may or may not be in sales now. They are someone you would trust implicitly to put your company first. Where do you think we should find them? How can we groom them? Your thoughts are welcome. E-mail us at info@FountainBlue.biz. See previous ‘Ten Rules of Marketing’ posts:

Visit and follow us at http://www.scoop.it/ageofpersonalization. Your comments are welcome.

ABOUT the AUTHOR:

Linda Holroyd is the CEO of FountainBlue, a Marketing and Strategy Adviser Company for many Tech Companies.

The FountainBlue’s monthly top-ten rules of leadership article is designed to guide Linda’s clients, entrepreneurial tech companies and the community in general on leadership best practices for themselves, and for their teams and organizations. Launched in December 2012, the questions and stories raised and the advice given has been mentioned before to individual members, and compiled and gathered to benefit the larger community. This month’s top-ten-leadership rules are on ‘The Top Ten Tips for Sharing Your Stores’.

She invites your questions about your marketing and leadership successes and challenges.  Please E-mail her at info@FountainBlue.biz if you have your suggestions on her marketing and leadership topics.  You might want to ask for her help with your own marketing or leadership opportunities or questions.

You can follow on her Scoops: http://www.scoop.it/ageofpersonalization.

Tweets: http://www.twitter.com/@lindaholroyd

Facebook posts: http://www.facebook.com/linda.holroyd,

FountainBlue group on LinkedIn: http://www.tinyurl.com/fountainblue.

 

 

My Motivation for Starting My Own Business and Why I Would Never Do Anything Else! by Trinity Nicole Miller

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DSC_8209-fb Tinity Nicole Miller

I recently got a divorce and have been reflecting on the last 15 years of my life.  I wanted to make the next 15 years better, more productive and I wanted to be smarter in my personal as well as business life!  I started to think about how I got into the industry I am in and why I fell in love with my work.  I think it is because the foundation of it all was helping people, something that is so much a part of my life especially today.  I am an avid community servant, have raised millions of dollars for women with breast cancer and severely abused children, have held a national beauty title and currently hold the title of Ms Texas 2013 to help raise more money for my organizations and finally I am an overachieving workaholic.  How did I get this way???

In January of 1996, I bought a small advertising business called ‘Colonial AD” where I designed and put coupons in video boxes at the local video stores. This was when they were still VHS, there were no DVD’s yet.  I had all 5 of the video stores signed up with me and it was going pretty well.  I had Burger King, Sonic, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Shakey’s Pizza and several other major chains as well as a few nice local businesses that provided some good offers.  It was pretty cool to get your movies and also great deals on food.  All of my coupons were a buy one get one free deal on food. I was doing this in my spare time and I really decided I liked it. I started to think a lot about how to market different types of businesses and I fell in love with advertising.

In August of 1996, I bought my first PC and I decided to put coupons on the internet.  At the time I was proficient on an Apple as I was a paralegal for a large criminal defense firm and had not been on a PC yet.  I had also worked for American Airlines and was very proficient with the SABRE system, the 2nd largest computer system in the world, next to our military system.  I was completely excited with getting to discover a completely new computer system and jumped in.  I contacted a new company that had just opened and was providing internet in our area for the 1st time.  I partnered with them and they gave me internet service in exchange for putting their logo and link to their website on the front of my website.  I had no idea how to build a website at the time and I really didn’t know what the ‘world wide web’ was or how it worked.. I scheduled another meeting with the internet company and I arranged for the owner of the company, to give me private lessons on web page design every morning at 7am. I learned to program html in a matter of weeks.  It was funny, because I understood how everything worked very easily. I simply had to learn functions.  Computers and programming have always made perfect sense to me.  I never used a web page editing program such as Front Page.  I started with MS Note Pad on a blank page and hand coded everything from the very beginning.  I still do  however, I now use Edit Pad..

The first week of my lessons, I got a very simple and clean coded web site up.  I kept the name Colonial AD and my company was the first company worldwide to offer coupons on the internet. I also started the concept of ‘local search placement’ with these coupons.  I saw that localized marketing was the only way to help logically and relevantly categorize a company to place them on the search engines.  I put companies on ALL of the major search engines and directories according to industry and location.  At that time the ‘major search engines were: AOL, InfoSeek (which evolved into GO.com), Excite, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, Dog Pile, Alta Vista. ASK, Lycos, Metacrawler, and All the Web.  Google officially arrived in 1998, bought out GO.com and it’s very large database and has changed searching online dramatically for the better. My company was grandfathered in with Google due to the fact that I had a lot of pages in the database, had properly categorized companies for inclusion, operated with ‘white hat’ techniques and helped keep their search engine relevant.  I have been a Google partner since they first arrived.

At this time, Yahoo was still only a very large directory and did not yet have a search engine until 2000.  They used the Google search engine until they launched their own in 2004. I used to sit up all night in the late 90’s and email back and forth with the creator of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and I learned SO MUCH about the industry, where it was going and how to properly program to make my pages load and function at top efficiency.  I credit Jerry with giving me the foundational information that I needed to become a power in the industry later in my career.

During this time our economy was crashing in the Texas Panhandle due to the fact that we got our first Wal-Mart.  In the first quarter of Wal-Mart being open, over 250 local businesses that were family owned and had been in business for 30-100 years went out of business.  My friend owned  the local newspaper and was so excited when Wal-Mart bought $150,000 per month in advertising for 3 months in his newspaper.  Once the 1st quarter was over, Wal-Mart pulled ALL of their advertising out of the paper and Brad had lost the majority of the local business due to the closings. He had to sell the newspaper his family had owned for over 50 years. Needless to say, our area was devastated by the arrival of Wal-Mart.

I decided to use my coupon program to try to help the companies that were left to stay in business.  I named my website “The Business Showcase of the Texas Panhandle” and hired 3 very intelligent sales guys and sent them to the 13 towns surrounding Amarillo. I told them to offer this for $15/mo and if they couldn’t afford it, to give it to them.  They immediately signed up 400 clients and I would estimate ½ of them I gave the advertising to for free.  I told them that it would help them and when they started seeing results, they could contact me and start paying.  Within 6 weeks, I had 400 paying clients.  Over 80% of my clients did not have a computer or the internet, but when I explained what I wanted to do for them, they knew that they needed something radical or they would be next to go under.  My sales people took a printout of the website and examples of coupons so they could see what they were getting. This is still funny to me.

I was also building websites for clients and that was so fun!  It was like playing a video game to me and I spent 18 hours a day, 7 days a week working on my business.  I took out ads in the Thrifty Nickel and put pages of these online coupons in it and advertised that shoppers could go online to my website and download and print these and many more coupons.  I also partnered with the billboard/bus bench company and put these coupons on billboards and bus benches all over the panhandle.  I was the only marketing company that was advertising websites and it was interesting that people were making fun of me, saying that the internet would never make it.  But I knew in my heart it would, and my heart is never wrong about business.

By 2000 I had changed my business name and expanded to the entire US with 2800 cities set up in my program that I could advertise a business in.  I started doing local, regional and national targeted marketing online.  I also started building a coupon and website creator program for my clients to be able to build and update their websites and coupons themselves.  I hired ‘programmers’ to help me build this program but I kept getting ripped off and lied to, so I got a Perl/CGI book, and I started learning on my own.  It took me 3 years to finish the program.

In Thanksgiving of 2003, I won the ‘2003-2004 Webmaster of the Year’ award for the entire world with this program.  When I got the phone call that I had won, I was out in my detached garage office working and started screaming hysterically.  My family thought that I was hurt or being attacked and came running out to help me. I was so freaked out I couldn’t tell them that I had won for about 3 minutes.  I can still see the looks on their faces and it still makes me laugh.  This was a huge accomplishment in my industry and I had I won using a very slow internet connection with 36.6 dialup modem.  This was pretty amazing in itself.  The next year we finally got DSL service in our area.

Since then I have used my online marketing techniques to advertise and grow thousands of local businesses.  I am very proud of the work I have done because not only did I do it successfully, but I helped lots of companies reach their goals and dreams, even in a down economy.  In Sept 2011 I divorced and turned my company over to my ex due to the fact that was the only way I was ever going to get him to show up in court and give me my freedom. It was devastating to me at first, and while I thought this would be the end of me, I am definitely a scrappy business woman!! One great thing about me is my tenacity and hardheadedness.  I have since started a new company and it is growing faster and better than I had anticipated.  My new company will definitely be the crown jewel in my career for the next phase of my life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Trinity Nicole Miller, President of Nicole Miller Marketing & Ms Texas American Renaissance 2013. I am an over achieving workaholic business woman and motivated beauty queen that has a intense passion for helping people.  I use everything I have in skills and talents to plant something good in the world around me.

Quote: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do…..Eleanor Roosevelt

Wanted: The Job That Doesn’t Feel Like a Job by Irene Waltz

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Irene Waltz

Ever since I started in the working world, I’ve had this notion of finding my “dream job”. Even before there was any talk of work-life-balance, I was dreaming of a job that I would love so much that I would never care if it was work or free time.

Most people back then called me crazy and said that job didn’t exist if I weren’t an artist, which I am most definitely not.

Some are lucky enough to know early on what they want to do. Not me. There was so much I wanted to try, I never thought I could focus on just one thing. When I went to college, I studied languages, business & cultural studies. There was no clear career path to follow, so I had to find my own way.

Over the years, I have tried lots of things, employed on my own: managed a language school, built the Berlin office of a Swedish internet startup, taught Russian immigrants computer skills, worked as a business and financial translator, built websites with WordPress, did sales cold-calling and managed large marketing projects.

In the end, I found that I’d have to invent the job that would fit me.

Over the years, I have picked up a lot of sales and marketing skills, and that is what I’m selling today. I’m a hand-on marketer and marketing coach helping entrepreneurs win clients in new markets, especially in Germany, of course. My aim is to get things up and running and to help my clients become better marketers themselves.

I also speak about marketing, and managing workshops and seminars.

To be honest, I don’t care too much about the latest fads in marketing techniques (although I do want to know how they work). Rather, I’m interested in helping cool people who love what they do enjoy their business even more by working for clients that really get them.

To be taken with care: Advice from others

When my second son was born five years ago, my last employment had just ended. Frustrated up with the restrictions of the corporate world. I set out on my own again, this time in the marketing field. I’d been a freelance translator for a few years before that last corporate gig. This time I wanted to do it right. Build a “real” business.

I read tons of books, every scrap of advice out there on building a business. You know what: I ended up more confused than before. One book said I needed to build systems, and I spent weeks with long lists of things that I never used. Another said I had to decide if I just wanted to build a job for myself or be a “real” entrepreneur. It took me half a year to get passed this.

I always thought: If I can only define my vision and my mission, then everything will be fine, kind of build itself.

But you know what? All this heady stuff just kept me spinning my wheels, looking for answers. For years, I felt bad because I couldn’t come up with a grand, dent-in-the-universe vision like curing malaria or something like that. Yes, I have an idea about my values and what I’d like to do for people and for my family, but a huge vision? Sorry, I don’t have one.

Sometimes, the answer is right in front of you.

I was so focused on this whole passion-doing-what-you-love thing that I completely overlooked one thing: There had been someone right in front of me all this time, doing what he loved, and being very content with it.

He was a college professor for English, a man who grew up in postwar Germany. Coming from a humble family of butchers, he put himself through college with little money and lots of willpower. A very quiet man, not one of those big-shot professors with great acclaim in the academic world. He was not a rich man, but there was enough for his family, his wife and four kids, enough to support his old mother.

Sometimes you’d hear him talking in his study, proclaiming Chaucer’s Canterbury tales aloud with a funny accent. When he passed away, the little church was packed, and there were piles of cards from former students expressing their gratitude. He wasn’t famous, but for the people who knew him, he made a big difference.

That man, of course, was my father.

So I am blessed to have lived with someone who encouraged me to do what I enjoyed, to follow what made me happy; and who led by example. Only now do I realize, it’s not always the grand and loud things that are important or meaningful, but passion can be quiet as well, focused on the little details.

Doing what makes you happy

About a year ago, I found a kind of diary I must have written when I was 17 or so. It said: “I’ll just write. Writing is what makes me happy.” I had completely forgotten about this. Here I was, over 20 years later, and all the writing I did was marketing texts for other people. And a marketing blog that bored me because I filled it with stuff I thought people wanted to hear.

So I set up a fresh blog and started writing. In English, a language I had missed. (I’m German, and my business had been mostly in German lately.) It was much easier than my marketing blog. The texts just started to flow. I don’t think about pleasing anyone with it. I just write. Little observations on life and happiness. I don’t even know if anyone reads it, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s called Irene’s Notes, if you want to take a look.

And there’s another project: Last summer, I discovered the sport of triathlon. I was so enthused that I contacted a small brand of triathlon clothing just for women. And ended up writing their German blog, which is extremely fun.

The thing is, I’m not earning any money to speak of with these activities, but just doing it makes me so happy that my business life is also affected. And from the triathlon blog, I’ve attracted people to my marketing pages, as well.

As for my marketing blog, I started one in English, too at www.irenesmarketing.com. And I started writing about things I care about. I don’t follow all the “how-to-write-great-blogposts” advice, rather, I’m finding my own style. It’s much more fun than ever before!

Trusting myself

When I turned forty last summer, I decided I would not pretend any more to be someone I was not. My company is called “Die Marketinghelfer” or “The Marketinghelpers”. Only, it’s always been just me, and it felt like I was hiding behind the name. So I’m in the process of changing it, putting myself more on the line.

Also, I made a vow never again go against my instincts or do things just because I thought someone wanted me to do them that way. Sometimes, I have to take a closer look and see if it’s just fear holding me back. Often enough, though, my gut is right, even if I can’t explain it rationally.

There is some advice I really did learn from all the business courses: Just think in little projects. Try different things. See what works. See where it gets you and go from there. Without thinking this has to be THE ONE THING.

So really, I’m back to doing what I used to do: Enjoying the adventures of life and business day by day and being open to the opportunities that arise. Who knows where this journey may lead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Irene Waltz is a hand-on marketing & sales woman, writer, speaker, business translator, a mother of two boys, and probably Germany’s slowest triathlete. Based in Berlin, Germany, Irene helps knowledge-based businesses get clients in new markets, especially in Germany. Follow Irene on Twitter or check out her blog at http://www.irenesmarketing.com