Ok, I’m going to have to explain that before I get cries of outrage. With marketing, there are general guidelines, and rules about what good marketing is. But there are no “systems” that can be applied to every business that will work without alteration or adaptation. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant, or not being completely honest with you. And I expect I’ll still hear cries of outrage over having said THAT!

Those who sell systems want you to think that there is some magic formula. There isn’t. Marketing always takes thought, individualization, and a certain degree of experimentation. Experience can greatly reduce the amount of trial and error, but cannot completely eliminate it. A high budget can also reduce the degree of trial and error, but again, cannot eliminate it. Marketing is always an elegant dance that is half skill, half intuitive art.

Marketing is also not simple. It CAN be learned, and it CAN be broken down into understandable bites. But there are always nuances, and flair that can only be learned with practice.

What the systems cannot do, that they imply they can, is to give you a “do this, get this” roadmap. There is no system that always works. The claims that the seller makes are meaningless – because a marketing plan that works for one business will utterly fail for another, and may not even work for an identical business! A successful marketing plan has to consider many factors, each of which is highly individual for the business in question, and which, combined, equal a combination of factors that no other business shares. This means marketing can never be absolutely quantified.

You’ll need to take many things into consideration:

• Your product or service
• Your average target market
• Your own strengths and weaknesses
• Your skills and knowledge
• Your own preferences and business style
• Your branding (existing or not)
• Your long term goals and expectations
• Your overall business plan
• Your profit and price breakpoints
• Your financial budget
• Your available time
• Your existing sphere of influence
• Your existing customer base
• Previous efforts
• Existing performance data
• Your available support and resource personnel (who can you turn to for help)
• Condition of existing marketing assets

You can see, by the time you go over all that, no two businesses will be identical. And the strengths and limitations you will be functioning under will be highly individualized, and sometimes very personal. Marketing counsel which does not take those factors into consideration just won’t be effective – it will fail from the outset because it was not designed to work within the reality of your business.

Can I hand you a system to market your business successfully? No. Can I teach you to market? Yes. IF you are able and willing to learn, and IF you are willing to practice and adapt. Even after you learn the basics, you have to go on learning, because marketing changes some over time, your business and variables change over time, and society around you changes. Even when you are good at it, you still have to constantly adapt and learn.

So instead of looking for a system, look for help in learning the rules so you can develop your own system that works for your business. Our next blog post will cover more about what systems REALLY are, and how you develop one.

I’ve been networking more lately, and as I have moved from strictly business networking venues like Ryze, into mish-mash ones like FaceBook, some aspects of profile photos have become more obvious. There are people who have no concept of what a business promotional photo should be.

It is probably important to point out here that if your profile lacks a photo, you may as well not even bother signing up. People do not like networking with faceless entities, and for business purposes, facelessness in a small business is fatal. People accept facelessness for a corporation, but in a small business, a face is your primary asset – the person behind the business IS the business. So having that profile picture is a critical first step.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and here is what I’ve noticed works, is an advantage, or saves you time:

1. You want one or two standard photos that you can upload in a hurry anywhere online. You will end up using them more than you realize. Make them about 200 X 200 pixels for a good balance between visability and control over image quality. This size seems to work in almost all venues, and if you make it this size, it is more likely to be cropped to show a good view.

2. Make your face visible, even when the photo is scaled down. Some places scale your photo WAY down in preview shots.

3. No bikinis. No bare chests. C’mon folks, let’s be clear about what you are selling here! Skin shots are just NOT professional, and you’ll lose some of your best prospects as they assume you are there for purposes other than business.

4. Please do not hold your cell phone at arm’s length and take a shot of yourself. You are more likely to look like a bull moose in a bad mood than a friendly small business owner, because the camera distorts your appearance. Same problem with web-cams, unless you think your nose is just way too small, a web cam won’t give you a good shot!

5. Casual is FINE! In fact, for small business people in businesses where friendliness is a key selling point may do better if they ditch the suit. Professional photos are good also, but a clear, slightly fun casual shot is equally good, because it looks more “real”. Sincerity is a big deal with small business, so no matter what photo you choose, make sure it looks like the real you, and like are are comfortable and enjoying your life.

6. Make sure the lighting is decent. Again, it does not need to qualify for the cover of TIME. It just needs to be sharp and visible – no dark gloomies, no bright glares that obscure features. Sometimes you can adjust this a bit in a photo editing program, but there is only so far you can push it. There’s just no substitute for a well balanced shot to start with.

Look at photos of other people that make you want to get to know them. And keep in mind, no matter what you look like, friendliness is what counts the most. A shot of a less than glamorous person is far better than no photo at all. Even a candid and friendly looking shot of an overweight, middle aged, gray haired woman can a highly effective promotional tool. I know this from experience. Sure, some people may be turned off by my appearance, but if they are, they are not in my target market anyway, because I love working with people who have depth.

Get your photos scaled, cropped, and put somewhere on your computer where you can find them quickly, and then USE them every single time you are asked for a photo – Keep a larger copy also just in case someone wants one for print, but if they watn one for web, you are ready to go in seconds.

That photo will serve you well over and over.

I know people who work for years at what they are good at, and love what they do, but when they decide to try to work from home, they start looking for spammy “business systems”. You know, the kind that don’t work, can’t work, and leave you frustrated.

Why the disconnect in logic? If they were going to go get another job, they’d look at their resume, see what they are qualified to do, and go look for that kind of job.

Yet when they go looking for a work at home option, they look for things that are totally unrelated to what they are GOOD at… even if the system COULD work, the person would be ill suited to it because it was not chosen based on their strengths and experience.

Working at home should not be a matter of trying to find the system that promises the easiest road to wealth – you know those are all scams anyway!

It is more about this:

What is your dream job?

I’m not talking about the one where you sit around and everyone pays you just to look good. I’m talking REALISTICALLY, what do you want to work at that makes the world a better place, that you enjoy enough that the good times make the bad times worth it, and what are you going to WANT to get up in the morning to do every day?

That job!

Turn that into a business. Build it around your skills, your strengths, and the things you actually LIKE doing. Sure, you’ll have to do some stuff you don’t like. And you’ll have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. But it will be yours, and it will be something you believe in.

Just don’t disconnect your brain and think that the way you make money online is to buy into someone else’s system. It isn’t. That is the only sure way to fail. Success comes from taking the unique things inside that you have to offer the world, and turning them into the business of your dreams.

Wow…

What, really, is the perfect life? We tend to think of it as being carefree, full of play and relaxation and having whatever we want. We do not tend to think of of boredom, or overindulgence, or the fact that no life is carefree, or that those who have time to relax earned it the hard way in most cases. We just know what we think we don’t have enough of, and want more, without limits.

Much of the perfect life is all in how you tell it. To every perk, there is a price. No one gets everything they want without giving something that most people who want the benefit, do not want to give. Otherwise, more people would be obtaining what they think they want.

• I wouldn’t mind doing something amazing enough to have everyone awed over my brilliance, but I never wanted the privacy invasion that comes with fame.
• I wouldn’t mind driving a nicer car, but I never wanted the poor gas mileage of a sports car.
• I wouldn’t mind having a maid, but I never wanted to miss time with my kids by hiring a nanny.
• I would like to have a larger house, but I don’t think I’d like to have a ton of rooms to clean.
• I wouldn’t mind living a little closer to shopping, but I don’t think I want to give up the quiet slow pace of a small town.

Many times, when people describe the good stuff, they leave off the backlash in the telling. They do this because sometimes the down side is something they don’t mind, or because they know that is just the price they pay for what they got.

I think you can make almost any life sound like the good life, if you tell it right. And maybe sometimes we need to focus on that good stuff more than the down side so that we appreciate what we have. But when HEARING about it from other people, it doesn’t pay to be envious – we may not know what we are really envying.

If I tell you that I live in a small town, with a vegetable garden, fruit trees in the back yard, a shade tree in the front yard, on a quiet street in a town with no pollution, where I homeschool my kids and work alongside my husband, you are starting to think this IS the good life. Add to it that we can leave the house with the doors unlocked and not come back to a stripped house, plus we’ll own the house free and clear in less than a year, and you are thinking this is REALLY good.

But we work long hours to have this, the fruit trees struggle and bear small fruit because this is high altitude, and the garden has to be watered twice a day just to keep the hard clay soil moist enough to not cook the roots of the plants. The lawn has perpetual sagebrush trying to get a foothold, and the streets of this quiet town are unpaved, which sends clouds of dust which permeate closed windows and settle on every surface. We are sixty miles from the nearest shopping area, and from full medical care. And if you saw the house, you might think you would not WANT to own that!

We have good things here. But we have a trade off too, and we pay for each good thing with a deprivation or an inconvenience which many people would feel spoiled the dream. It happens to be a set of inconveniences that we can deal with better than we can deal with crowded streets and day jobs.

Look at your life. What is the perfect life that you are already living?

We are experiencing a proliferation in the Coaching industry. You can have a life coach, a business coach, a spiritual coach, a health coach, parenting coach, and many other niche coaches for whatever part of your life makes you feel inadequate. No disrespect intended to the Coaching industry, just making some observations on the explosion in this arena.

Coaches are sometimes certified, sometimes not, and the origin of the certification varies widely when they do have it. Some have a college degree, others don’t.

I think the coaching industry has grown from two simultaneous happenings:

• First, people want to take their experience to teach others, and they don’t want to have to do that in a corporate environment. The vast majority of coaches are independent business owners, who feel the desire to be an entrepreneur, not an employee. Their desires and actions have driven one half of the explosion.
• Second, individuals are seeking coaches for a number of reasons. They are less grounded with family, and feel widely separated from their parents in their needs, and people now are more likely to listen to a professional than to a friend on many topics. There is so much information out there on virtually any topic, that you can research answers to any problem and find completely conflicting information, telling you to do two completely opposite things. Much of the available information is provided with advertising in mind, so it is hardly objective. Individuals feel that coaches are more objective in recommending possible solutions or helping them sort through the confusion of information.

Our world is changing radically, and it is having a profound influence on the kinds of services people will pay for, and the kinds of services people want to offer.

The explosion in the coaching industry is just one of the areas where changes are visible.

I dumped them. Just let them go completely. They are still out there lurking in blogland, but they no longer make me feel guilty when I don’t update them.

One I started to promote classes. Seemed like a good idea at the time, and given the name of one of the classes, it was suitable. Didn’t get used much though, and I quickly ran out of topics – I think I’ll eventually open this one to other instructors.

One was for SEO. A friend said she wanted to do an SEO Blog. So I set it up. She posted once, and left me holding the bag. I kept it up, posting every other day for several months. It is a compendium of SEO commentary that has value. But I’ve run dry on the topic, having tackled it from almost every angle that applies to small business. So I walked away. Eventually, if I think of something that needs to go in it, I may update it occasionally, but I no longer feel obligated to do it.

The third was for a blogging community. It will eventually sustain itself, so I let it go also. I’ll post if I feel the desire, but otherwise, it can just fend for itself.

This blog is me. I jokingly say of Frumpy Haus Frau, that it is the one place I can completely be myself online. That the header is really ME, and in fact it is, because my son drew that. I usually have more kids lurking in the background than that, but even that is declining all the time (sniff!). This one deals with the topics that I most like to write about though, and I can pretty much go off in any direction and it still fits.

The weight really lifted. Now I just have two major sites to keep rolling forward with, and six more in various stages of development. Much more manageable!

Really!

I can mostly keep up with just one. Sometimes fall behind though.

Periodically, I realize I’ve taken on too much. Then I go through a phase of decluttering where I reassess my priorities and reorganize the demands on my time. It usually takes about six months before I’m back where I started because the natural result of decluttering is to see lots of empty space just waiting to be filled – and work just seems to fill it easier than timewasters do.

Is that a bad thing? Some would think so. I’m not so sure it is. Yeah, it isn’t nice to feel harried. But when I’m juggling a lot of things, I get more done. Really. I am at my best when sprinting. And those extra things I take on temporarily sure teach me a lot. They broaden my experience in ways that give value back to my clients.

We listened to a presentation by a bootstrap expert a few months ago. He said that to be successful, a bootstrap business pretty much had to run understaffed. Everybody had to meet their potential and then some, and there was no room for overstaffing, for anybody to have to fill time. We find that this is true. We have to juggle work, and we all have to stay busy. If we don’t, then we run into a deficit really fast, because payroll ends up being the largest single expense for a small startup.

It is often very hard to balance all the business needs – marketing and networking, client work, product prep for the future, presentations and teaching, development of our own sites, development of client resources, etc. Client work of course is the most important, but those other things have to be done also, or the business runs into a wall later.

I’ve come to understand that for me, I’ll probably always wash in and out like the tide between too busy, and not busy enough. And I’ve come to understand that it isn’t bad – it allows me to experience many things I’d not experience otherwise, and it helps me to learn how to prioritize when necessary.

There are two kinds of people in this world:

• Those who look at the past, and understand that if a road has always lead to a specific destination in the past, that it is likely to lead there again, and again, and again.
• Those who look at the past, and assume that because of their personal charm, unrealistic desires, or ignorance of the facts, that the road will lead somewhere else for them than it did for someone else.

Now, I’m not talking about creativity, doing it different, or taking a failed idea and changing something to make it different.

I’m talking about historic, social, moral, political, familial, and business patterns that form rules within which we must work. And if we step outside those rules, there WILL be consequences just as there have been for every other person, society, or group, which tried it.

It is like looking at a Map of the US, and heading North to get to Mexico. You won’t get to Mexico, you will get to Canada. To assume that just by “believing”, or sheer bull headedness that you can get to Mexico by heading North, is purely illogical unless you want to circle the globe. And that, my friend, is taking the long way, and is more likely to end in failure, and CERTAIN to involve unnecessary pain and hardship.

There is all kinds of flexibility for individuality within the rules, but if you want to reach a certain destination, you do not head off blindly or contrarily in the opposite direction. If a certain road has always lead to a certain destination, the wise study it out, and follow the road that goes there. The foolish wander off in other directions, scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.

The real problem is figuring out what the rules really are – where the map really is pointing. There is a lot of conflicting information on all subjects in this day and age. Which is the real map? Which guide is telling the truth about their experience? Because it takes a lot more than believing to get somewhere. You have to believe in something that is actually true, and you have to act in a way that carries out the required steps to achieve what you want to achieve, whether it is a monetary goal, a spiritual goal, or a personal goal.