Day 7: Raising your hand to get noticed

Objec­tive: Learn how to make your self vis­i­ble, iden­tify your best poten­tial buy­ers, and con­nect with them and be the nice per­son you are in the process.

Today we wrap things up but before I do that let’s remind our­selves of the pur­pose of all this.

Every one of the baby steps we cov­ered these past seven days has built on the pre­vi­ous one, to help you under­stand, where you want your busi­ness to go and who would want that stuff you make. Finally, we use all that to be seen by the peo­ple who have the prob­lem to our solution.

Hope­fully, you’ve seen how this gives you clar­ity,which ulti­mately saves you on blood, sweat and tears and gives you an edge over those skep­tics who are still run­ning around in cir­cles scream­ing “I don’t have time”.

Once you get all of this down, you’ll have a good foun­da­tion that and only need to come around to this process once a year or so. The time you need to spend on mar­ket­ing will not feel over­whelm­ing, con­fus­ing or bur­den­some, in most cases it will become easy.

Now that we have that out of the way let’s move on to the final baby step…getting seen.

The idea here is to be seen as human, one who cre­ates exquis­ite work for a select group of peo­ple, one who is an expert and will­ing with poten­tial buy­ers is the key to break­ing out of the cage of ran­dom sales.

Every­thing about this final step and in fact mar­ket­ing your work is about net­work­ing, and net­work­ing in an alto­gether dif­fer­ent way than has been done. That is why you built that list of where your ideal buy­ers hang out.

Here’s what you do with that list…

Select a few of the hang outs you are  com­fort­able start­ing with,  start fol­low­ing them,  join­ing a  forum, sub­scribe to a blog etc. Then fol­low the “good” instruc­tions below.

If they are blogs and/or on-line forums:

The Bad

Announce your pres­ence and talk about some­thing totally not rel­e­vant to the post you are com­ment­ing on.

If it is a forum sign-up and imme­di­ately start break­ing into con­ver­sa­tions to let peo­ple know you are here to save them.

Start forum threads that pump up your busi­ness and lit­tle more.

Make a lame com­ment like ” cool post” or “great idea”…you may as well save band width and not do anything.

Why Bad?

Pretty obvi­ous that you haven’t con­tributed any­thing and only made your­self look like an evil com­ment spammer…a real good way to build a bad rep if that’s what you want.

The Good

Start com­ment­ing on posts it will help the blog­ger, her read­ers and you. Make your com­ments worth read­ing add some­thing to the blogger’s post, or addi­tional infor­ma­tion her read­ers might like.

See if the blog­ger will let you guest post.

Sign-up and watch the post­ing trends for top­ics you can con­tribute to, then start contributing.

Start your own threads about some­thing your ideal buyer would be inter­ested in

Why Good?

Com­ment­ing with infor­ma­tion of value not only to the blog­ger but also for her read­ers helps everyone.

You become part of the con­ver­sa­tion around the information,

You become rec­og­nized as some­one worth pay­ing atten­tion to and

you become gain author­ity in your field

All of these rein­force your authen­tic­ity and sin­cer­ity instead of mak­ing you look slimy. By being part of the con­ver­sa­tion, you become vis­i­ble within your medium, adding  evi­dence as some­one worth lis­ten­ing to. That evi­dence increases your stand­ing in your medium’s com­mu­nity and finally as your author­ity in your field increases so to does your vis­i­bil­ity and place in the minds of poten­tial buyers.

Social Net­works Face­book, Twit­ter, etc.

The Bad

Send out Face­book sta­tus updates or Tweets every 15 min always talk­ing about  youself.

Always use updates and Tweets to talk about how great you are and brag about the num­ber of followers/friends you have.

Have a bil­lion followers/friends but hardly show up and when you do you don’t have much to say.

Why Bad?

Social net­works are all about being social they are the net­work­ing event of yes­ter­year except they now cover the entire world instead of on tiny lit­tle piece. Word trav­els fast espe­cially where slim­i­ness is con­cerned so always talk­ing about your­self will not get you ignored real fast.

The Good

Be selec­tive about who you friend/follow or accept as a friend/follower vet them to make sure they aren’t  high in the slimy scale.

Make your pro­file page have value and make your updates/tweets about some­thing of value to your friends/followers, and don’t for­get the human side. Include infor­ma­tion that helps folks know you can be trusted. Just don’t always talk about brush­ing your teeth.

Why Good?

The whole point of social net­work­ing is to have a net­work of folks you can con­nect with and vice-a-versa. As a sin­gle per­son small busi­ness you are its face to the world. Hav­ing a net­work of mutual sup­port can build your author­ity and stand­ing as an hon­est and sin­cere per­son to do busi­ness with and refer busi­ness to.

Your final task now is to find those places and start mak­ing your­self visible.