Years ago, I read the book Monopolize Your Marketplace. Though the title and tone is aggressive, it has some incredible content. The Three Roles of Marketing I teach come from this book. And, as I was working on a new project the other day and rummaging through some old notes, I came across the […]
The purpose of marketing is to make promises. The purpose of your business is to keep them. Most traditional cultures in the world are overflowing with proverbs around the importance of keeping your word and doing what you say you will do. It’s certainly true for my own Scottish and Celtic ancestry. “If I break
This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for years. Fairly often, in workshops, the question (and it’s a very good one) comes up: “What if I can’t guarantee a result?” That question usually emerges from the shiny palace of conversations about creating guarantees, and better than risk free guarantees, doing clever and
This is one of those things that is actually very important to get about marketing that I talk about really seldomly but should probably talk about more. When people are working on their marketing, I think that, often, they don’t really understand the role that their marketing needs to play. Or I should say ‘roles’
Don’t market yourself, market your message. This is the theme I want to explore in what promises to an epic post. I’ve been wanting to write this post for at least half a year and have been slowly collecting ideas and inspirations for it. At this point, I need to put out what I’ve got
There’s an incredible power in being a ‘hub’ in your community. When people get that you’re genuinely committed to the well being of your community, they will trust you more. While everyone is running around trying to get status, you are gaining stature in the community. Paris Hilton has status. Oprah has stature. And, one
Seven Community Building Lessons in Becoming a Hub Read More
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
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
Introduction: myths and assumptions Let’s get started. This is my belief: most practitioners fail not because it’s inevitable, but because they believe certain myths about building their practice. They are like lenses or filters they look through that colour everything. When I say ‘myth’ I mean the assumptions that most practitioners operate under about what
A Common Story: Jane the Practitioner (in seven chapters) Read More