Self Investment: your # 1 intention in a down economy

Self invest­ment from here on out should be focused on find­ing and using the best tools and tech­niques to build a net­work of enthu­si­as­tic fol­low­ers. A cru­cial part of self invest­ment dur­ing a down econ­omy is to start rec­og­niz­ing that you have to change the way you think about your busi­ness. You will need to expand what you do best…thinking cre­atively about not only your art but also your direction.

Think about how many neg­a­tive mes­sages you are get­ting about the cur­rent econ­omy and think about, and notice the effect they have on you by using the tech­niques I described late last year regard­ing ANTS. When we are pum­meled con­stantly with neg­a­tive mes­sages, those mes­sages take an emo­tional toll on us. Notice your feel­ings (not your sto­ries) when you think of the future rel­a­tive to a down econ­omy. Some of those feel­ings may be:  feel­ing scat­tered or ran­domly mov­ing from one thing to another and not get­ting any­thing done ‚anx­i­ety, inse­cu­rity about the future and what to do, self doubt about your abil­i­ties or feel­ing unsuc­cess­ful, or fear of mov­ing in any direc­tion, of fail­ure. All of these feel­ings breed and trig­ger scarcity and scarcity leads us to being stuck. Now the funny thing about wor­ry­ing about the future is unless you are psy­chic you never really know what is going to show up next.

The first thing to real­ize is that what is going on out­side of you has very lit­tle to do with your suc­cess and you can con­trol how it affects you by chang­ing your beliefs. It is our nature to become iden­ti­fied with exter­nal fac­tors, accept­ing as given the effects those fac­tors have on us, in essences, we become vic­tims and we start feel­ing stuck and wor­ried. In a down econ­omy we very often revert to what we think is safe, we become risk averse return­ing to old ways of liv­ing. We choose to cling to the sink­ing ship blinded by our ANTS because we know it, it feels safer than the cold unknown waters. Instead we should be look­ing for lifeboats that will help us get away from the mael­strom of the sink­ing ship and find­ing a route to safety by using our innate  inge­nu­ity, and intuition.

Your # 1 inten­tion should be to self invest by own­ing your future, break­ing away from your fear and anx­i­ety and start using your cre­ative resources to find the best lifeboat with the best pas­sen­gers. These pas­sen­gers should not be sur­vivors they should be adven­tur­ers will­ing to nav­i­gate what­ever bar­rier sur­faces in order to find the best route to land. They will also be moti­vated by a par­tic­u­lar twist … their suc­cess will help keep other ships from sinking.

Lifeboats in a tur­bu­lent sea

Your lifeboat in the com­ing year should be equipped with the right gear to help you not only sur­vive but also sus­tain you after you make land­fall.That gear should also help you sup­port those in your boat because they depend on your skill and knowl­edge. And the tools should also rein­force com­mu­ni­ca­tions of all in the boat by ampli­fy­ing your skills. The tools in the gear bag should help you feed and inspire your com­pan­ions by uni­fy­ing them into work­ing toward a com­mon goal ensur­ing that the lifeboat and all its pas­sen­gers make land­fall. In addi­tion your tools should help you find and con­nect with other lifeboats so that you can have greater strength in num­bers along with their rel­e­vant  knowledge .

The pri­mary form your lifeboat will take will be in the form of a blog because it will be your base of oper­a­tions and pri­mary bea­con. You can use it to help those afloat on the sink­ing ship’s debris find you. In addi­tion, you will need lis­ten­ing posts or buoys set up to send you infor­ma­tion about the state of the sea ahead.

Now leav­ing the Titanic metaphor behind and remem­ber­ing that the hub of your activ­i­ties is your blog let’s look at two very impor­tant tools to have in your gear bag. One impor­tant thing about choos­ing tools is to choose only those that will help you and at the same time reduce the amount of time you need to use them… Remem­ber the 80/20 rule.

Here are some that will help you right away.

Twit­ter

• By using a vari­ety of tools you can now seg­ment your fol­low­ers into geo­graphic groups or what­ever way you want.
• You can also send pri­vate tweets to only that group using Tweetgroup.
• Use twit­ter in con­nec­tion with your blog to send your fol­low­ers to spe­cial blog posts like dis­cus­sion of what you will be bring­ing to a show or a spe­cial event at a show.
• Con­nect your blog to twit­ter so your posts will be sent out automatically.

Face­book

• Face­book is the eas­i­est and best way to start build­ing com­mu­ni­ties, it is easy to set up and can be an excel­lent way of find­ing net­works spread out geo­graph­i­cally. And no you don’t need to have 5k friends, in fact it is best to be very selec­tive using the tools built into Facebook.

E-mail list

• An e-mail list is impor­tant because not every­body is up to speed with using the inter­net. You should also have a way of seg­ment­ing your list geo­graph­i­cally so you can send mes­sages to key members.
• When your list starts get­ting large you will need an auto-responder that will auto­mat­i­cally send mes­sages to your members.

Skype

• For those who don’t do e-mail you may want to call and let them know you will be in their area. Skype is web based tele­phony which you can use for pen­nies, you can also have con­fer­ence calls with sev­eral of your members.

You can start build­ing your net­work eas­ily by using the tools above, we will talk about strate­gies and tac­tics for using each one as well as other tools we will talk about later.

Related arti­cles by Zemanta

• Take­Aways from Mar­ket­ing­Profs’ Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Mixer Event (b2bemailmarketing.com)