I almost died a month ago. And it showed me something important. When we are in crisis, the crisis becomes everything we see. It looms over us like a giant, blocking out the sun. And this makes dealing with the problem very hard. We become overwhelmed with not only the problem but our emotional reactions […]
Rebecca Tracey has something very important to share with you. So many people come to me for marketing help who are not ready for it. Before you can market a thing, you need a thing to market. It sounds so simple. But, if you want it to be really successful and
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Clarity is everything in marketing. A while ago I wrote a blog post about the importance of developing a clear platform. Your platform is what you’re known for. It’s another way of talking about ‘brand‘. It’s the heart of slow marketing (but also the basis of fast marketing). The challenge that I lay out in
Bryan Welsh is likely not someone you’ve heard of. But if you’ve ever read Mother Earth News, Utne, Natural Home & Garden, The Herb Companion, Grit or The Farm Collector – then you’ve read one of the magazines his company Ogden Publications owns. And, last night, I had the pleasure of seeing him speak at
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At some point last year, it became clear to me that there are three main things most entrepreneurs need to have handled in order to thrive. They overlap each other like circles in a Venn Diagram. And I realize now that I’d never written about them explicitly. So, here we are. First, there’s a seven
I invite you to give up trying to change people’s minds. People can be a lot like this child – stubborn. They don’t like being pushed around. Or told they’re wrong. This is the core challenge of marketing I think. Or a core blunder. Or something. Trying to convince people that we are right and
So, over the past week or so you’ve read about why it’s important to have a bigger cause that your business is about, you’ve seen some examples of people who have or are exploring this but now it’s time to look at how you can begin to sort this out for yourself. The first thing
It’s easy to feel alone in the world. But it’s not pleasant. And, the way we market our businesses can actually help heal that. In his book Start With Why, which you should really go and buy from a locally owned bookstore, Simon Sinek shares a familar old story, “Consider the story of two stonemasons,
As we continue the conversation about having a clear ‘why’ for what we do, I think it’s good to have some real life examples . . . Gandhi’s work is a clear example. He wanted to see India move from being colonized to being independent once more. It was so clear it became symbolized by
The other day, I wrote a blog post about the four key elements you need to create your platform. Today, I want to zone in on the last of the four – the deeper why and bigger cause of your business. It’s a simple question: ‘why do you do what you do?’ But it’s one