Hi, I’m Jeremy, I’m glad you’re here.
No matter what you create, I’m guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you’re building something that matters, but aren’t quite sure how to take the next step forward, I’d be honoured to have you join us.
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Triage: A Necessary Skill for Progressing in Your Creative Career
Before powering down at the end of every day, I review my task list and bump everything I didn’t complete to a future date, often the next day.
On good days, it’s a small number of non-urgent or unimportant tasks.
On less-than-good days it’s a large number of both urgent and important tasks that got crowded out by even more urgent and important tasks.
Regardless of the day, however, for the past six months there’s been one particular task that’s appeared on my task list every single day… and without fail, been bumped, incomplete, to the next day.
The task?
“Catch up on email”
I know, it’s wildly optimistic to harbour any kind of belief that this task could ever truly be completed. In fact, the mountain of unreplied-to email has only grown since adding the daily reminder.
And yet, I persist in deluding myself.
I created the task after wrapping up the PMA5 launch in the spring.
Launches have a way of crowding out everything but the most essential daily action items—of which there are always more than can possibly get done—and after spending 10 weeks in launch and then cohort delivery mode, I had fallen severely behind on all manner of non-urgent correspondence.
I did what I could to chip away at my inbox following the launch, but it wasn’t enough.
Because before I could catch up, I once again found myself neck deep in planning, executing, and delivering the launch of my next cohort, adding another 2.5 months of email backlog.
Last Friday night, from 9-11 pm I sat down and made the most significant dent in my inbox to date, working through 75 of the 300 or so emails awaiting a response.
It felt good to make a dent in the mountain.
But more interestingly, in going through the emails that had been piling up, I made a realization that instantly reframed my email problems.
The Price of Projects Gaining Traction
In sifting through and responding to the emails, I noticed that the majority of them fall into one of two categories:
- New subscribers to either Creative Wayfinding or Scrappy Podcasting who are responding to the prompt in my welcome emails to tell me a bit about themselves and their work.
- Requests to collaborate, guest on podcasts, contribute to projects, etc.
Based on these categories it’s clear that far from being a problem, the number and type of emails occupying my inbox are a sign that things are working.
The first category is the direct result of people subscribing to my newsletters (my #1 goal in my business). The second, a result of becoming better known and seen as an interesting voice in my industry.
Despite the positive underlying causes of my inbox overwhelm, the situation bothers me.
For one, the lack of responsiveness doesn’t send the message I want myself or my brand to convey, especially to new subscribers reaching out for the first time.
More personally, I have a natural inclination toward, structure and order, which means the lack of control over a task as simple as answering email is deeply uncomfortable.
And yet, one of the things I’ve had to come to terms with over the past two years as more and more of my projects have started to gain traction is that this type of discomfort is an inevitable price of creative progress.
Obligation Overwhelm
At the beginning of a project, our obligations tend to be low.
We likely don’t have an audience expecting anything from us on a consistent schedule. We don’t have paying customers and clients with deadlines and deliverables. And we don’t have partners and other stakeholders to whom we’ve made promises.
On the personal side, the project likely isn’t supporting us financially, so we have little obligation to ourselves to keep the project running.
Pure creative freedom in other words.
What’s more, we’re in experimentation mode, which means we might be playing with half a dozen (or more!) ideas, testing them out to see which has the greatest potential.
As some of those projects inevitably begin to gain traction, however, our obligations to each of them increase.
As traction leads to growth, it doesn’t take long for our obligations to even one such project to begin to crowd out other pursuits.
Which means that if we want to navigate this stage of the creative journey intact, triage becomes an increasingly important skill for us to develop.
Because the more success our projects accrue, the more difficult the choices we’ll face about what gets our best time and attention, what gets the leftovers, and what gets ignored.
Creative Triage
When we first begin to bump up against the limits of our bandwidth, the choices about what to focus on and what to ignore are fairly easy to make.
Other low-traction projects are often the first to be pushed outside the limits of our current bandwidth to focus on the more promising endeavours.
But as the project continues to gain momentum (which of course is our goal), it’s only a matter of time before other aspects of our lives begin to be pushed outside of our ability to stay on top of them.
Relationships with family and friends, our health, hobbies, and yes, correspondence—both business and personal—all have a way of becoming secondary to the demands of a successful—yet not fully self-sufficient creative project.
As with any type of triage, creative triage involves making many painful decisions.
In fact, the more painful a decision, the more potential upside the decision likely offers.
This means turning down promising projects and opportunities you desperately want to take on.
It means letting many of the fires in your business burn unabated—often indefinitely.
It means learning to accept the inevitable discomfort of never being able to get to everything you want to, or perhaps even feel you need to do.
All this, in the service of making progress on the small number of things that matter most—both for the project to be successful, as well as for yourself.
Such is the price of success.
We can try to fight the need to triage our various projects, tasks, and endeavours, attempting to maintain control over everything on our plate even as the demands of our creative platform exceed our bandwidth.
More often than not, this achieves little but undermining the quality and consistency of our work, not to mention our health, sanity, and satisfaction.
The alternative is to choose to embrace making difficult choices about where we focus our time and attention as an essential skill we must develop to reach the next level of success.
Because in the end, we’re most often held back not by the opportunities we fail to grab ahold of, but by those we fail to release.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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How the Right Kind of Scarcity Will Transform Your Marketing
Everyone who’s ever done the slightest bit of copywriting knows that scarcity is an essential element in driving the sale.
As consumers, the idea of missing out, whether it’s on a certain price point, bonus content, or the offer altogether, is often the thing that pushes us over the edge from hemming and hawing about whether now is really the time to invest in the offer to making the leap and buying.
Sometimes this scarcity is real and sometimes it’s fake, and while I’m fully supportive of using scarcity (at least the real kind) in your copywriting, I’d like to suggest that our businesses would actually benefit by reducing scarcity when it comes to some of the truly valuable offerings for our audiences.
But first, let’s take a look at how most businesses are currently operating so we can understand where the current scarcity lies.
What Most Businesses Compete On
Most businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers spend a ton of time worrying about quality.
They agonize over the competitor who they feel has a better offer, content, or marketing (even if only marginally) and spend the vast majority of their effort developing new, higher-quality offers, content and marketing themselves in the hope that by being “the best” they’ll cement their reputation as the undisputed leader of their industry.
But here’s the thing. There is no scarcity when it comes to quality.
These days, almost everything we buy or consume is of at least acceptable quality. Most options available to us are good enough to get the job done, some with a little more friction perhaps, but they’ll work.
Look at YouTube, or Podcasting, or Medium. There is no shortage of high-quality content available to us for free on almost any topic we could ask for.
Sure, you might create something that truly is best in class, but sooner or later, someone is going to come along and create something better.
What’s more, by choosing to compete on quality, you’re entering into a fickle market. Customers who buy the best quality product and looking to buy the best quality product. If something comes out that tops your offer, they’ll move on to it in a blink.
It’s worth mentioning that your quality still needs to be above that minimum acceptable level, and personally, I would put the effort in to fit into the top 10 providers of your content or offer.
But I would argue that the effort required to achieve and maintain the number one spot would be much better spent elsewhere, on areas of your audience experience that are much harder to find, and therefore much more valuable if we can find a way to offer them.
If we agree that quality isn’t worth the effort of competing on, and we certainly don’t want to compete on price, where does that leave us to focus our attention?
Offering What is Truly Scarce
I’m convinced that businesses that win focus on providing resources that are in fact, often more scarce than their product or service, namely, trust, connection, and attention.
Trust, connection and attention are hard to come by not only in our business and consumer interactions, butnincreasingly so in the rest of our lives as well.
More and more people lack close, meaningful relationships.
Our attention is constantly being pulled a dozen different directions but ubiquitous content, push notifications and advertising.
And with the rise of fake news, algorithms, and selective content curation, not to mention deep fakes, it’s becoming ever harder to trust what we see, hear and experience with our own senses.
If we can find a way to foster meaningful relationships with and between the members of our audience, we’ll win.
If we can focus on giving attention to our audiences instead of capturing and holding it, we’ll win.
If we can focus on showing up generously and consistently and building a real, authentic, trusting relationship with the people we seek to serve, we’ll win.
These resources are scarce because they’re hard to deliver on. They require emotional labour, persistence, and the will to show up and lead when we don’t feel up to the task.
Few people have the commitment to their audience and to their work to follow through.
But that’s exactly why you, if you choose to generously create connection, give attention, and build trust, will win.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
What Does It Mean to Serve Your Audience?
Right up there alongside, “providing value,” on the list of overused and under-applied marketing buzzwords is the idea of “serving your audience.”
Listen to a random selection of online marketing podcasts and you’re likely to hear the phrase pop up at least a handful of times. And then, because I’ve pointed it out to you, you’re going to start noticing it everywhere. #sorrynotsorry
As you start to notice the phrase, you’re also going to notice that its usage often seems to be untethered to any sort of real meaning. Rather, it’s become something of a euphemism for simply “doing business”.
“Serve your audience” has begun to feel like a cliche inspirational poster hung on the wall of every up and coming online entrepreneur, or an easy addition to a list of company values when you don’t actually know what your company values are.
Businesses that truly understand what serving their audience means rarely talk about it. To them, it’s almost too obvious to mention, baked into the center of how they operate and make decisions both internally, and when interacting with their audiences.
Service is an essential part of any business and any marketing that’s going to stand out from the crowd and build an audience. But to find out how you can really apply and live by the principal in your work and your interactions with your audience, you actually need to know what it means.
Service Starts With Empathy
At the foundation of successful marketing is empathy for your audience.
If you want to speak in a way that resonates with them, you first need to see them for who they are, acknowledge their current circumstances, what they’ve done to get there, and where they’re looking to go.
By understanding their story, hopes, dreams and fears, you’ll be able to create products, content, and messaging that resonates with them, and you both win.
To truly serve your audience, you must start here. Get curious and dig deep into getting to know your audience. There’s no way to serve them if you don’t know where they’re looking to go and what’s standing in the way of getting there.
Navigating Zero-Sum + Non-Zero-Sum Games
If you’re serving your audience with empathy, you’ll find that most of the time you’ll both win.
You create an offer based on what would be useful to your them and present it in a way that resonates, they pay for it, and the cycle repeats.
While you both will generally both benefit in this non-zero sum game, however, you may not always benefit equally.
There will almost certainly be times when you have a choice between two offers to present to your audience.
Both will benefit your audience and both will benefit you to promote to your audience. One, however, skews the balance of benefit in your favour and the other in that of your audience’s.
The offer that skews in your favour may be a marginal improvement over an existing offer, maybe it’s a solution that will move your audience closer to their target, but it’s not the best solution for them, or maybe an incomplete solution.
It’s not that these offers are scams, they do benefit your audience in a real way, and sometimes, especially early in your business, these products and services might be essential in allowing you to get some income so you can keep working on the ideal solution to your audience’s problem.
Where it veers away from serving your audience, however, is when you make a deliberate choice between two valid options and choose the option of lesser benefit to your audience because it’s easier to produce, has higher profit margins, or allows you to win bigger in some other way.
Zero-Sum Games
While most of your interactions with your audience will be non-zero sum, allowing you to both win, occasionally, you may be presented with a circumstance in which only one of you can come out ahead. Promoting something you know won’t help your audience to make up for increased expenses elsewhere in your business might be an example.
If you’re truly seeking to serve your audience, you should never be the winner of a zero-sum game.
We all need to take a hit, absorb a loss at some point in our work, and trying to avoid those losses at our audience’s expense hurts us more in the long term than it helps in the short.
Find the Balance
Keep in mind that your audience winning at your expense isn’t the goal here either.
Giving away your time and work for free might benefit your audience immensely in the short term, but if you’re then unable to afford to continue to create new offers that will help them continue to move closer to their goal, you both lose.
Neither is the goal to never release an intermediary offer and spend years working on and perfecting the ultimate solution to your audience’s problem
Serving your audience is about providing them with the best possible solution for their problem that you have the capability of creating and offering with what you have available to you.
This solution takes into account their individual goals and circumstances and is created and presented generously, with the understanding that while you may create better, more complete solutions in the future, right now, this offer will allow you both to take one step closer to your destination, and continue on your journey together.
Where Are You Leading Us?
Good marketing has momentum.
It has forward motion driving it continually toward a destination that your audience has signed up to reach.
And while they might not know exactly where the journey is going to take them, if you’re going to lead them there, you most certainly need to have a vision for where you’re taking them and how you’re going to get there.
Vision and the momentum that comes with clarity around that vision is what separates the marketers and brands that build raving fans and then ones that struggle to gain traction, even when they’re certain they have a winning offer.
Vision is about more than just the destination, however.
The Foundation For Your Vision
In order to craft a compelling vision for your audience, you actually need to know where they’re starting from.
Without an understanding of where they’ve come from, what they’ve already tried, their collections of biases and limiting beliefs, where they are actually looking to go, and what that destination looks like for them, you’re going to have a hard time selling them on enrolling in the journey you’re proposing.
It’s an arduous trip after all, and they want to know they’ll be in good hands with a guide they can trust.
In other words, empathy for your audience is essential to both creating a compelling vision for where you’re proposing to take them, and mapping out the best route to get them there.
Choosing Your Route
There are probably more than a few ways to solve the problem your product or service is attempting to solve, more than one road to the end destination your audience is aiming for.
Your solution to the problem is likely based on your own experience and the route you took to get there. But while your route might be valid and may have been the best one for you, there’s no guarantee that it’s the most direct or helpful for your audience.
Your marketing builds momentum and your tribe grows when you prove consistently that you can get your audience to the next milestone on their journey as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The audience you’re looking to serve might already be further ahead than you were when you started. In that case, you must skip the foundational elements and meet them where they are now.
Or maybe it was you who had a headstart on them. You then need to find out how to get them to the point where you can apply your own personal experience of the journey.
In another instance still, your target audience might be starting from somewhere entirely different than where you started from, meaning you’ll need to commit the time and energy to understanding how to best guide them by the most efficient route.
While this might require extra work on your part, if it means tapping into an underserved and hungry audience, it might just well be worth it.
Parallel Roads
The reason you stepped up to guide these people in the first place, of course, is that you have an offer that you are guiding your audience towards engaging with, while also guiding them to their destination.
It’s important to remember that while these may seem like two separate destinations, one that you’re heading to (profit), and one that your audience is heading to (solving their problem), they are in fact one and the same.
Your ultimate profitability is directly tied to your ability to get your audience to their destination. The more efficiently and easily you get them there, the more they will spread the word about you and your offer.
Map out your route with care, empathy, and intention, then figure out how to pitch it in a way that is compelling to the people you’re looking to serve.
These people are looking for a guide, but it’s up to you to prove you’re the right choice to take them where they’re looking to go.
Remember What You’re Getting Paid For
It’s important to remember what people are really paying you for.
While it often looks like they’re paying you for something else, in the end, they’re paying you to do the work for them.
It’s not always a straight-up time for money exchange, and if you’re smart it will almost never be.
Sometimes you’ll be paid for your knowledge or opinion on an issue in which case you may get paid for a few hours of “work” imparting knowledge that took you a year to gather and understand.
For most of us running our own businesses, the work our clients will pay us the most for is our knowledge, insight, opinion, and ability to connect dots in new and interesting ways.
It might be tempting to say “I just got paid a whole bunch of money to deliver a three-hour workshop! If I fill up my calendar with more workshop bookings I’ll be set!”
While you have to share your knowledge at some point in order to capitalize on it, remember that sharing that insight is only a small part of the work you’re getting paid for.
There are dozens of ways of sharing your insight, each with its own price point, reach potential, method of delivery and effort required on both your part and your audiences to implement it. It’s important to think through which method makes the most sense for you, given your audience and goals.
Most important of all, remember that the real work is connecting the dots, solving problems in interesting ways, developing an insightful and defendable opinion.
This work doesn’t have an audience. It takes time, space, and perseverance to complete, and the bigger the idea you’re pursuing, the more of each you’ll need.
Leave space for the real work to happen.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-paid-getting-reps-418c770245dbhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-paid-getting-reps-418c770245db
What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?
“How can I get out of this sticky client situation?” vs “How can I create a system to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t arise again?”
“How can I deliver the work with the least amount of effort?” vs “How can I create a magical client experience that creates raving fans?”
“How can I undercut the other service providers in my niche?” vs “How can I charge 5x what other providers charge and have a full pipeline of clients excited to pay me for it?”
The difference between stagnation and transformation often comes down to the questions we ask ourselves.
The answers aren’t always easy to come by, but we won’t come up with any answers at all if we don’t ask the question in the first place.
There’s enough available information in the world to solve almost any problem we want to solve.
Lack of information is not what’s holding us back.
Lack of bold enough questions might be.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/irrefutable-vs-thought-provoking-83882c919fa6https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/irrefutable-vs-thought-provoking-83882c919fa6
There Are No Shortcuts
How often have you been driving, and, frustrated with the ridiculously roundabout way Google planned out your trip, started looking for shortcuts?
After some quick thinking, you jerk the wheel, pull down a side street and take what you know to be a more direct route, sure that this will cut half an hour off your commute.
Human: 1
Machine: 0
It doesn’t take long for you to realize that you’re chosen route takes you through a residential area, with a stop sign on every other street. Frustrated with the lack of traffic flow you turn off again to find another, slightly less direct route.
You turn down the next, bigger avenue and are cruising along for a few blocks until you hit a school zone which has traffic backed up for a few blocks.
Starting to get more agitated, and unwilling to crawl along at this pace, you again pull off, opting for an even less direct route, this one, at least, on a main artery.
You pull onto your new route and relax as you join the flow of traffic. Things are looking good, you’re not making quite as good time as you originally anticipated when you turned off of Google’s original route, but you’re still slightly ahead of schedule.
You can’t help but smirk at all those suckers who can’t think for themselves and just take whatever Google spoon-feeds them.
Red taillights snap you out of your reverie as you slam on your brakes and narrowly stop short of plowing into the car in front of you.
Traffic slows to a stall around you and as you crane your neck, you can see the flashing orange of road a construction crew ahead in the distance.
Furiously, you swipe open your phone and look at the map. Red lines of standstill traffic for miles.
Again you punch in your destination to assess your options.
As if mocking you, Google directs you to backtrack and join up with its originally suggested, roundabout route.
Reluctant to admit defeat, but without a better option, you switch on your signal and join the line of cars waiting to turn off ahead of the construction.
As you merge back on to your original route, you check the clock and realize that you’re now 25 minutes behind where you would have been if you had just stuck to the original route.
When it comes to our work and businesses, we’re presented with a near-unending stream of products, services, and strategies that purport to shortcut the process of increasing our visibility, growing our audience and making more sales.
Whether it’s buying Instagram followers, automating our lead gen processes, finding a way to game Google’s latest search update, running a viral contest or any number of other hacks, these “shortcuts” get us thinking that it’s possible to quickly leap from where we are now, to where we want to be a year (or five) from now.
Each new tactic’s landing page has raving testimonials of how this product or strategy transformed their business, and life overnight.
More fans, more money, more impact. We’re sure we can be the next success story and have it all just by implementing this new tool in our marketing efforts, shortcutting our way to the top and bypassing our competition in the process.
The thing is, much like with driving, the routes that look like shortcuts rarely are.
We dabble and try a dozen different tools each promising to transform our business overnight, but when the results don’t come as advertised, we start looking for the next quick fix, the next shortcut.
As we fall further and further behind our intended schedule, we search ever more desperately for ever-shorter shortcuts., all the while, neglecting what we’re still sure is the long way around, confident that we can still make up for our wasted time if we can just get one of these shortcuts to work.
We need to remember, however, that real marketing is about nothing more than building an authentic relationship with our audience, and there’s no shortcut to relationship-building.
What appears initially to be the long way around isn’t sexy, and it’s not easy.
It requires us to commit to showing up consistently for our audience with empathy, and curiosity.
It requires us to give generously of our time, our knowledge, and our resources to the benefit of the tribe.
It requires us to commit to the long game, to understand that the route to achieving our goals isn’t about speed or audience size, but about building the deepest connection possible with those who choose to engage with us.
There’s a place for the tools, the tactics, the strategies, but they’re no replacements for putting in the emotional labour of interacting, communicating, and building a connection with the other humans we’re seeking to serve.
That part is mandatory, and it’s the place we need to start.
If we can do this, and do it consistently we realize sooner or later that the long way around only looks like the long way around, until it’s not.
The Creator’s Myth
If you’ve ever identified as a creator of any kind, be that an artist, entrepreneur, freelancer, or something else entirely, you’ve probably told yourself some version of the Creator’s Myth.
The Creator’s Myth revolves around the idea that if you can create something great, be that a product, service, piece of art, we can simply release it and it will find it’s way in front of the right audience.
Faced with offers that don’t suddenly fly off the shelves upon their release, creators often draw the conclusion that their work wasn’t good enough, go back to the lab, create something even better, and release that, hoping that this time it will catch on, go viral and take the world by storm.
In almost every case, that’s not what happens and the cycle repeats with the creator furiously attempting to one-up themselves in the work they do while ignoring the skill and the practice that is essential to getting their work seen — and sold.
Of course, deep down, most creators know what needs to be done, they just don’t want to or believe they’re capable of doing it.
Marketing and sales.
Two words that give creators goosebumps.
They conjure images of sleazy, slimy, slippery used car salesmen, of telemarketers, of all the times they’ve been sold and marketed to in the past when they didn’t want to be.
Whatever images these words bring up for you, they’re probably based in your personal experience and entirely justified.
The thing is, those were objectively bad marketers and objectively bad salespeople.
Real marketing is about nothing more than building a relationship and having a protracted conversation with your audience.
Whether you like it or not, if you create things that you want people to use, and buy, you cannot simply do your work, press “publish” and then wait for the sales to roll in.
You need to take the lead on getting it in front of your audience, the people who will benefit from your work.
And this is a good thing.
Why You Should Want To Take The Lead
If we’re working off the assumption that The Creator’s Myth (ie. Build It and They Will Come) is the way to getting our work into the hands of those we wish to serve, we have a couple of problems.
The first is that if we’re leaving it up to others, others who don’t know the work like we do, don’t know its specs, its intended uses, or who it was made for, to do our selling for us.
What ends up happening is a giant game of telephone in which the core purpose of our product, the promise it makes to its potential users is translated and garbled into something entirely unrecognizable.
Sure, some products and offerings are obvious, but if you’ve ever been asked “what exactly is it that you do?” by a friend or relative, you’re probably all too aware that your work requires some explanation.
If you step up and take the lead on marketing and selling your work, you’re able to ensure that you’re crafting your messaging in a way that actually does the work justice, that is clear, concise, and curiosity-piquing.
You’re also able to get that messaging in front of a clearly defined audience, one who you may know or suspect is made up largely of your ideal customers.
What’s more, since you know your work better than anyone else, you can subtly tweak the messaging to customize it to different audiences who may all benefit from what you’re offering them.
There is no such control when you simply do the work and leave it up to the universe to get the word out.
Systems
The second big problem of refusing to promote your work is that you’re relying on pure chance, and pure chance is not repeatable.
Even if you hit it big with a product once, will you be able to repeat that process for your next launch?
If you’re going to make a living as a creator, it’s essential that you create repeatable systems to give your work the best chance of getting in front of the people it was intended for.
Imagine having a template that you could drop various pieces into and be reasonably sure that the result would be your ideal customers and clients taking you up on your offer and engaging in your work.
If you’re one of the creators who has no shortage of ideas and no hold-ups about doing the work — maybe you create compulsively even — a marketing system like this starts to sound an awful lot like a money-printing machine.
Getting Your Reps In
If you can get past the slimy connotations you may have around marketing and sales, you’ll probably still run into the small issue that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing when it comes to these pursuits.
That’s not an excuse to not promote your work.
All that means is that you have work to do when it comes to learning how to market effectively, generously, authentically, in a way that connects and resonates with your audience.
Think about the time you’ve put into developing your craft. It might be years or even decades of your life.
Have you even spent a few hours educating yourself around marketing?
If learning how to market your work meant the difference between creating in obscurity and being known as the authority in your field, what would that be worth to you?
My guess is that committing a few months or even a year to really studying marketing in your downtime would be more than worth the time and expense if it meant a loyal audience that believed in your work and was ready to buy each time you created something new.
This is what effective, generous, relationship-based marketing is really about.
I get it, there are seemingly infinite strategies, techniques, frameworks and tools, each with their own horde of proselytizers. It can be hard to know where to start.
Find out which marketing experts other people you know are consuming and start listening to their podcasts, reading their blogs, their books, watching their YouTube channels.
Test drive a bunch of different marketers until you find someone who’s philosophy you resonate with, not just when it comes to marketing, but in life, relationships and business as well.
For me, that person is Seth Godin, and I highly recommend you check out his blog, books, and amazing podcast, Akimbo.
Once you find that person, dive deep into their frameworks and start applying and experimenting relentlessly.
You won’t get it right the first time. No one does.
No matter, try again, try differently, try better.
Keep what works and ditch what doesn’t until you start to find patterns that you can apply repeatedly to get your work seen.
Real marketing is not slimy, sleezy or slippery.
Real marketing is about knowing who you are creating your work for, seeing them with empathy, and in return being seen by them with trust and engagement.
Your work is already good enough. It’s time to step up and market it generously.
Your audience is out there waiting for you.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/6-reasons-creators-dont-get-credit-sales-d92713db82f6https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/6-reasons-creators-dont-get-credit-sales-d92713db82f6
The Messenger Matters
Your work might be world-changing.
It might be immaculate in its design and execution.
There may be no better way to solve the problem you set out to solve than the solution you came up with.
But for it to catch on, for it to spread, it needs to resonate with just one person first.
Which means you must be able to pitch it, to sell it, to spread the message of your work in a way that piques curiosity, translates its value concisely, and maybe even sparks excitement.
This requires empathy, understanding your audience, knowing how to speak to them.
This is where so many brilliant creators fall short.
Because the messenger matters.
We want to believe it doesn’t. We want to believe our work will speak for itself.
But it does, and it won’t.
So if you’re a creator, best to learn how to speak about your work in a way that resonates, that connects, that sparks excitement, or find someone who can.
Irrefutable vs. Thought Provoking
Trolls suck. It’s true.
But what sucks even more is letting them influence, alter, and detract from your work before you even release it, maybe before you even begin to create it.
Pay enough attention to the trolls and before you even sit down to your keyboard, canvas, or wherever else you create your work, you’re thinking through all the potential criticisms, all the ways in which your work may not deliver.
Pretty soon you find yourself wrapped up not in creating work that matters, that can inspire, that can change people, but in editing work that was previously daring, new, and thought-provoking into something that strives only to be as inoffensive as possible.
It’s not just the irrational trolls you alter your work for either, the ones who will find something to criticize no matter what you (or anyone else) does.
Just as often you’ll end up editing, altering and dumbing down your work any time you find yourself going out on a limb and making a statement that you don’t know for certain is 100% factual.
You couch your statements with “I think”s, “it seems like”s, “probably”s, “maybe”s and any number of other ways to convey your lack of commitment to your ideas in an effort to appease the trolls, or at least lessen their vitriol should it arise.
But here’s the thing.
Your work is not meant to be the irrefutable truth of the universe.
Your work is a statement of your world view, your personal beliefs, your personal truths, and if you believe in them, and your work, you owe it to your work to express them with conviction.
Better than endlessly editing, dumbing down, and homogenizing, what if you decided to create work that steps outside your comfort zone, and while it might not always be 100% “right”, is thought-provoking, fresh, and unique?
You might get called out from time to time, and in those cases, you might learn something new that ultimately improves your future work.
If your goal is to create work that changes people, work that creates an impact, you must create work that causes them to think differently than they have to this point.
This means you have to show up generously, step into the arena with a new, thought-provoking idea and ask, “what about this?”
You’ll definitely get some trolls, you’ll definitely get some haters. But you’ll also get some people who resonate with what you’re saying and lean in to hear more.
In the end, these are the people you’re creating your work for. Do it for them, and forget the ones who don’t get it.
This Shouldn’t Be Easy
We’ve all heard the near-mythic stories about founders who worked 100 hours a week for years while they were starting up their businesses, making incredible sacrifices in every other area of their life before striking gold and rocketing up the Forbes net worth list.
Most of us don’t aspire to be billionaires, or maybe even millionaires. We want to create work we believe in, work that matters and get paid fairly for it.
For many of us, part of the draw is that a life in which we work our own gig appears to be full of more ease, more flexibility, more control over our routines and circumstances.
While we may not aspire to build startups or businesses with massive teams, we understand that setting up our own little business for ourselves will still take work, commitment and sacrifices.
So we take the familiar founder stories and scale them back to suite a smaller-scale operation.
Setting Expectations
We’re not really sure how someone could humanly work 100 hours a week, but 50 or 60 seems manageable, at least while we’re starting up.
We feel like by putting in the long hours, by prioritizing our work over the rest of our lives, we’re following in the footsteps of a long line of entrepreneurs before us.
This is exciting for a year, and our business grows, validating the time, effort and focus we put in. So we continue on as before, feeling that this must be the only way to build a business, that maybe after another year things will start getting easier.
We commit to building up systems to allow us to work smarter, instead of harder. We might even bring on a contractor or employee or two to help free up our time more.
This helps, at least a bit, shrinking our to-do list from four pages more than we can do today down to two and a half.
There’s fewer minutiae, less client work on the list, more big picture decisions, but we start to feel the pressure of those decisions now that they will affect more than just us.
Again, we wonder, “When is this going to get easier? Will this get easier?”
Reassessing Your Dream Job
It’s easy to fantasize about a life in which we work for ourselves and are in complete control of everything in our orbit.
Clients show up precisely when we need them, they give us complete creative control over the work, and we get paid more than adequately for it.
From the outside, it appears that we’re the only ones for which this entrepreneurial life is hard. Everyone we can see around us is experiencing massive growth, landing dream clients, creating incredible work, and posting a steady stream of photos on Instagram of them traveling the world, working from exotic locales.
The reality of our day to day is so much harder than the life we left behind when we started down this road.
We realize that the hard life we traded in, one filled with work we didn’t believe in, being told what to do by others who created a plan we had no say in, passing our weeks waiting for the weekend was replaced by a new, and much harder kind of hard.
In this new hard, we are responsible for everything in our work, we often don’t know what to do and have no one to tell us what plan to follow, and the boundaries between our personal lives, our evenings, our weekends have all but disappeared.
Not to mention we have to maintain the time, energy and inspiration to create work we’re proud of while juggling the business side of things.
For some of us, we realize that this isn’t the easy life we thought it would be, and that easy is more important to us than doing the hard work of creating work that matters. And that’s fine.
But for those of us who are committed to creating our best work, work that changes people, that has an impact, maybe we need to realize that this life shouldn’t be easy.
We should realize that being a creator is a privilege, that if it were easy, everyone would do it, and that what we might lack in ease, we make up for with pride in the fact that our work is making a difference in the world.
Sure, we can create systems and structure our lives to create more ease in our lives, but this work will never be easy.
Creating work that matters requires us to continually wrestle with the unknown, to show up with vulnerability and generosity again and again and again, asking, “What about this?”, to continually be learning, connecting dots, thinking outside the box.
And then once we land on something that shows promise, we have to summon all our courage, all our resources, and face The Hard Stuff and expose our work, and ourselves, to the world, risking rejection and failure.
Whether or not it succeeds, we must then to do it all again, because it’s what we are called to do.
Making work that matters is not an easy life. It might be the furthest thing from an easy life.
But if you feel the calling to channel that spark inside you to create something meaningful, know that it’s worth it.
For you, and for all of us.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/never-work-day-life-752912302ca0https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/never-work-day-life-752912302ca0
Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
How We Do Things Around Here
Inspired by a recent blog post by Seth Godin, How we do things around here, I wanted to brainstorm and define the principals that guide how we at Counterweight Creative work, and interact with both clients and among our team.
Big thanks to Seth as always for his generosity and inspiration, I’d highly recommend checking out his original post.
We build everything we do on the foundation of kindness.
We believe treating people with empathy, dignity, and respect is essential to creating exceptional work over the long run. If the two ever conflict, we will side with treating people like humans.
If we had to choose between being known for doing the best work in our field and being the best people in our field, we’d choose the second. Luckily, being better people creates better work.
We communicate with openness and vulnerability.
We believe in radical ownership and will take personal accountability when things don’t go as planned.
We are generous with our praise.
We share our knowledge freely.
We will ask for help if we’re unclear, overwhelmed, or incapable for any reason.
If we don’t know, we’ll say so.
We don’t cast blame when something fails. Instead, we ask “why did this happen?” and “what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”
We give the benefit of the doubt.
We always answer emails to each other within a day, even if it’s just to say ‘got it’.
We pay invoices before they’re due.
We don’t miss deadlines.
We agree that all of our interactions are off the record, unless we agree otherwise.
We don’t use legalese, jargon, tricks or loopholes in our agreements. Instead, we’ll be as clear as we can and honour what we said, and expect that you’ll do the same.
We are intentional and specific about our work, and don’t do for the sake of doing. “Who is it for”, “what is it for?”, and “why are we doing it?” are the questions that guide our work.
If it’s not working, we’ll say so, and do it with specificity and kindness.
We are constantly learning and improving ourselves and the work we do.
We recognize that the work is important, but understand that the people involved in it are more important.
We expect a lot from our clients and our team, but expect more from ourselves.
We charge a lot but expect to deliver more than we are paid for.
We expect to fall short of these principals at times but we will always maintain them as our guide.
This is the first draft of what I’m sure will be an ever-evolving list. I’d love to see what principals are guiding the work you do, so please reach out and share!
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/the-long-view-be7caefb98a7https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/the-long-view-be7caefb98a7
How the Right Kind of Scarcity Will Transform Your Marketing
Everyone who’s ever done the slightest bit of copywriting knows that scarcity is an essential element in driving the sale.
As consumers, the idea of missing out, whether it’s on a certain price point, bonus content, or the offer altogether, is often the thing that pushes us over the edge from hemming and hawing about whether now is really the time to invest in the offer to making the leap and buying.
Sometimes this scarcity is real and sometimes it’s fake, and while I’m fully supportive of using scarcity (at least the real kind) in your copywriting, I’d like to suggest that our businesses would actually benefit by reducing scarcity when it comes to some of the truly valuable offerings for our audiences.
But first, let’s take a look at how most businesses are currently operating so we can understand where the current scarcity lies.
What Most Businesses Compete On
Most businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers spend a ton of time worrying about quality.
They agonize over the competitor who they feel has a better offer, content, or marketing (even if only marginally) and spend the vast majority of their effort developing new, higher-quality offers, content and marketing themselves in the hope that by being “the best” they’ll cement their reputation as the undisputed leader of their industry.
But here’s the thing. There is no scarcity when it comes to quality.
These days, almost everything we buy or consume is of at least acceptable quality. Most options available to us are good enough to get the job done, some with a little more friction perhaps, but they’ll work.
Look at YouTube, or Podcasting, or Medium. There is no shortage of high-quality content available to us for free on almost any topic we could ask for.
Sure, you might create something that truly is best in class, but sooner or later, someone is going to come along and create something better.
What’s more, by choosing to compete on quality, you’re entering into a fickle market. Customers who buy the best quality product and looking to buy the best quality product. If something comes out that tops your offer, they’ll move on to it in a blink.
It’s worth mentioning that your quality still needs to be above that minimum acceptable level, and personally, I would put the effort in to fit into the top 10 providers of your content or offer.
But I would argue that the effort required to achieve and maintain the number one spot would be much better spent elsewhere, on areas of your audience experience that are much harder to find, and therefore much more valuable if we can find a way to offer them.
If we agree that quality isn’t worth the effort of competing on, and we certainly don’t want to compete on price, where does that leave us to focus our attention?
Offering What is Truly Scarce
I’m convinced that businesses that win focus on providing resources that are in fact, often more scarce than their product or service, namely, trust, connection, and attention.
Trust, connection and attention are hard to come by not only in our business and consumer interactions, butnincreasingly so in the rest of our lives as well.
More and more people lack close, meaningful relationships.
Our attention is constantly being pulled a dozen different directions but ubiquitous content, push notifications and advertising.
And with the rise of fake news, algorithms, and selective content curation, not to mention deep fakes, it’s becoming ever harder to trust what we see, hear and experience with our own senses.
If we can find a way to foster meaningful relationships with and between the members of our audience, we’ll win.
If we can focus on giving attention to our audiences instead of capturing and holding it, we’ll win.
If we can focus on showing up generously and consistently and building a real, authentic, trusting relationship with the people we seek to serve, we’ll win.
These resources are scarce because they’re hard to deliver on. They require emotional labour, persistence, and the will to show up and lead when we don’t feel up to the task.
Few people have the commitment to their audience and to their work to follow through.
But that’s exactly why you, if you choose to generously create connection, give attention, and build trust, will win.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
What Does It Mean to Serve Your Audience?
Right up there alongside, “providing value,” on the list of overused and under-applied marketing buzzwords is the idea of “serving your audience.”
Listen to a random selection of online marketing podcasts and you’re likely to hear the phrase pop up at least a handful of times. And then, because I’ve pointed it out to you, you’re going to start noticing it everywhere. #sorrynotsorry
As you start to notice the phrase, you’re also going to notice that its usage often seems to be untethered to any sort of real meaning. Rather, it’s become something of a euphemism for simply “doing business”.
“Serve your audience” has begun to feel like a cliche inspirational poster hung on the wall of every up and coming online entrepreneur, or an easy addition to a list of company values when you don’t actually know what your company values are.
Businesses that truly understand what serving their audience means rarely talk about it. To them, it’s almost too obvious to mention, baked into the center of how they operate and make decisions both internally, and when interacting with their audiences.
Service is an essential part of any business and any marketing that’s going to stand out from the crowd and build an audience. But to find out how you can really apply and live by the principal in your work and your interactions with your audience, you actually need to know what it means.
Service Starts With Empathy
At the foundation of successful marketing is empathy for your audience.
If you want to speak in a way that resonates with them, you first need to see them for who they are, acknowledge their current circumstances, what they’ve done to get there, and where they’re looking to go.
By understanding their story, hopes, dreams and fears, you’ll be able to create products, content, and messaging that resonates with them, and you both win.
To truly serve your audience, you must start here. Get curious and dig deep into getting to know your audience. There’s no way to serve them if you don’t know where they’re looking to go and what’s standing in the way of getting there.
Navigating Zero-Sum + Non-Zero-Sum Games
If you’re serving your audience with empathy, you’ll find that most of the time you’ll both win.
You create an offer based on what would be useful to your them and present it in a way that resonates, they pay for it, and the cycle repeats.
While you both will generally both benefit in this non-zero sum game, however, you may not always benefit equally.
There will almost certainly be times when you have a choice between two offers to present to your audience.
Both will benefit your audience and both will benefit you to promote to your audience. One, however, skews the balance of benefit in your favour and the other in that of your audience’s.
The offer that skews in your favour may be a marginal improvement over an existing offer, maybe it’s a solution that will move your audience closer to their target, but it’s not the best solution for them, or maybe an incomplete solution.
It’s not that these offers are scams, they do benefit your audience in a real way, and sometimes, especially early in your business, these products and services might be essential in allowing you to get some income so you can keep working on the ideal solution to your audience’s problem.
Where it veers away from serving your audience, however, is when you make a deliberate choice between two valid options and choose the option of lesser benefit to your audience because it’s easier to produce, has higher profit margins, or allows you to win bigger in some other way.
Zero-Sum Games
While most of your interactions with your audience will be non-zero sum, allowing you to both win, occasionally, you may be presented with a circumstance in which only one of you can come out ahead. Promoting something you know won’t help your audience to make up for increased expenses elsewhere in your business might be an example.
If you’re truly seeking to serve your audience, you should never be the winner of a zero-sum game.
We all need to take a hit, absorb a loss at some point in our work, and trying to avoid those losses at our audience’s expense hurts us more in the long term than it helps in the short.
Find the Balance
Keep in mind that your audience winning at your expense isn’t the goal here either.
Giving away your time and work for free might benefit your audience immensely in the short term, but if you’re then unable to afford to continue to create new offers that will help them continue to move closer to their goal, you both lose.
Neither is the goal to never release an intermediary offer and spend years working on and perfecting the ultimate solution to your audience’s problem
Serving your audience is about providing them with the best possible solution for their problem that you have the capability of creating and offering with what you have available to you.
This solution takes into account their individual goals and circumstances and is created and presented generously, with the understanding that while you may create better, more complete solutions in the future, right now, this offer will allow you both to take one step closer to your destination, and continue on your journey together.
Where Are You Leading Us?
Good marketing has momentum.
It has forward motion driving it continually toward a destination that your audience has signed up to reach.
And while they might not know exactly where the journey is going to take them, if you’re going to lead them there, you most certainly need to have a vision for where you’re taking them and how you’re going to get there.
Vision and the momentum that comes with clarity around that vision is what separates the marketers and brands that build raving fans and then ones that struggle to gain traction, even when they’re certain they have a winning offer.
Vision is about more than just the destination, however.
The Foundation For Your Vision
In order to craft a compelling vision for your audience, you actually need to know where they’re starting from.
Without an understanding of where they’ve come from, what they’ve already tried, their collections of biases and limiting beliefs, where they are actually looking to go, and what that destination looks like for them, you’re going to have a hard time selling them on enrolling in the journey you’re proposing.
It’s an arduous trip after all, and they want to know they’ll be in good hands with a guide they can trust.
In other words, empathy for your audience is essential to both creating a compelling vision for where you’re proposing to take them, and mapping out the best route to get them there.
Choosing Your Route
There are probably more than a few ways to solve the problem your product or service is attempting to solve, more than one road to the end destination your audience is aiming for.
Your solution to the problem is likely based on your own experience and the route you took to get there. But while your route might be valid and may have been the best one for you, there’s no guarantee that it’s the most direct or helpful for your audience.
Your marketing builds momentum and your tribe grows when you prove consistently that you can get your audience to the next milestone on their journey as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The audience you’re looking to serve might already be further ahead than you were when you started. In that case, you must skip the foundational elements and meet them where they are now.
Or maybe it was you who had a headstart on them. You then need to find out how to get them to the point where you can apply your own personal experience of the journey.
In another instance still, your target audience might be starting from somewhere entirely different than where you started from, meaning you’ll need to commit the time and energy to understanding how to best guide them by the most efficient route.
While this might require extra work on your part, if it means tapping into an underserved and hungry audience, it might just well be worth it.
Parallel Roads
The reason you stepped up to guide these people in the first place, of course, is that you have an offer that you are guiding your audience towards engaging with, while also guiding them to their destination.
It’s important to remember that while these may seem like two separate destinations, one that you’re heading to (profit), and one that your audience is heading to (solving their problem), they are in fact one and the same.
Your ultimate profitability is directly tied to your ability to get your audience to their destination. The more efficiently and easily you get them there, the more they will spread the word about you and your offer.
Map out your route with care, empathy, and intention, then figure out how to pitch it in a way that is compelling to the people you’re looking to serve.
These people are looking for a guide, but it’s up to you to prove you’re the right choice to take them where they’re looking to go.
Remember What You’re Getting Paid For
It’s important to remember what people are really paying you for.
While it often looks like they’re paying you for something else, in the end, they’re paying you to do the work for them.
It’s not always a straight-up time for money exchange, and if you’re smart it will almost never be.
Sometimes you’ll be paid for your knowledge or opinion on an issue in which case you may get paid for a few hours of “work” imparting knowledge that took you a year to gather and understand.
For most of us running our own businesses, the work our clients will pay us the most for is our knowledge, insight, opinion, and ability to connect dots in new and interesting ways.
It might be tempting to say “I just got paid a whole bunch of money to deliver a three-hour workshop! If I fill up my calendar with more workshop bookings I’ll be set!”
While you have to share your knowledge at some point in order to capitalize on it, remember that sharing that insight is only a small part of the work you’re getting paid for.
There are dozens of ways of sharing your insight, each with its own price point, reach potential, method of delivery and effort required on both your part and your audiences to implement it. It’s important to think through which method makes the most sense for you, given your audience and goals.
Most important of all, remember that the real work is connecting the dots, solving problems in interesting ways, developing an insightful and defendable opinion.
This work doesn’t have an audience. It takes time, space, and perseverance to complete, and the bigger the idea you’re pursuing, the more of each you’ll need.
Leave space for the real work to happen.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-paid-getting-reps-418c770245dbhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/getting-paid-getting-reps-418c770245db
What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?
“How can I get out of this sticky client situation?” vs “How can I create a system to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t arise again?”
“How can I deliver the work with the least amount of effort?” vs “How can I create a magical client experience that creates raving fans?”
“How can I undercut the other service providers in my niche?” vs “How can I charge 5x what other providers charge and have a full pipeline of clients excited to pay me for it?”
The difference between stagnation and transformation often comes down to the questions we ask ourselves.
The answers aren’t always easy to come by, but we won’t come up with any answers at all if we don’t ask the question in the first place.
There’s enough available information in the world to solve almost any problem we want to solve.
Lack of information is not what’s holding us back.
Lack of bold enough questions might be.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/irrefutable-vs-thought-provoking-83882c919fa6https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/irrefutable-vs-thought-provoking-83882c919fa6
There Are No Shortcuts
How often have you been driving, and, frustrated with the ridiculously roundabout way Google planned out your trip, started looking for shortcuts?
After some quick thinking, you jerk the wheel, pull down a side street and take what you know to be a more direct route, sure that this will cut half an hour off your commute.
Human: 1
Machine: 0
It doesn’t take long for you to realize that you’re chosen route takes you through a residential area, with a stop sign on every other street. Frustrated with the lack of traffic flow you turn off again to find another, slightly less direct route.
You turn down the next, bigger avenue and are cruising along for a few blocks until you hit a school zone which has traffic backed up for a few blocks.
Starting to get more agitated, and unwilling to crawl along at this pace, you again pull off, opting for an even less direct route, this one, at least, on a main artery.
You pull onto your new route and relax as you join the flow of traffic. Things are looking good, you’re not making quite as good time as you originally anticipated when you turned off of Google’s original route, but you’re still slightly ahead of schedule.
You can’t help but smirk at all those suckers who can’t think for themselves and just take whatever Google spoon-feeds them.
Red taillights snap you out of your reverie as you slam on your brakes and narrowly stop short of plowing into the car in front of you.
Traffic slows to a stall around you and as you crane your neck, you can see the flashing orange of road a construction crew ahead in the distance.
Furiously, you swipe open your phone and look at the map. Red lines of standstill traffic for miles.
Again you punch in your destination to assess your options.
As if mocking you, Google directs you to backtrack and join up with its originally suggested, roundabout route.
Reluctant to admit defeat, but without a better option, you switch on your signal and join the line of cars waiting to turn off ahead of the construction.
As you merge back on to your original route, you check the clock and realize that you’re now 25 minutes behind where you would have been if you had just stuck to the original route.
When it comes to our work and businesses, we’re presented with a near-unending stream of products, services, and strategies that purport to shortcut the process of increasing our visibility, growing our audience and making more sales.
Whether it’s buying Instagram followers, automating our lead gen processes, finding a way to game Google’s latest search update, running a viral contest or any number of other hacks, these “shortcuts” get us thinking that it’s possible to quickly leap from where we are now, to where we want to be a year (or five) from now.
Each new tactic’s landing page has raving testimonials of how this product or strategy transformed their business, and life overnight.
More fans, more money, more impact. We’re sure we can be the next success story and have it all just by implementing this new tool in our marketing efforts, shortcutting our way to the top and bypassing our competition in the process.
The thing is, much like with driving, the routes that look like shortcuts rarely are.
We dabble and try a dozen different tools each promising to transform our business overnight, but when the results don’t come as advertised, we start looking for the next quick fix, the next shortcut.
As we fall further and further behind our intended schedule, we search ever more desperately for ever-shorter shortcuts., all the while, neglecting what we’re still sure is the long way around, confident that we can still make up for our wasted time if we can just get one of these shortcuts to work.
We need to remember, however, that real marketing is about nothing more than building an authentic relationship with our audience, and there’s no shortcut to relationship-building.
What appears initially to be the long way around isn’t sexy, and it’s not easy.
It requires us to commit to showing up consistently for our audience with empathy, and curiosity.
It requires us to give generously of our time, our knowledge, and our resources to the benefit of the tribe.
It requires us to commit to the long game, to understand that the route to achieving our goals isn’t about speed or audience size, but about building the deepest connection possible with those who choose to engage with us.
There’s a place for the tools, the tactics, the strategies, but they’re no replacements for putting in the emotional labour of interacting, communicating, and building a connection with the other humans we’re seeking to serve.
That part is mandatory, and it’s the place we need to start.
If we can do this, and do it consistently we realize sooner or later that the long way around only looks like the long way around, until it’s not.
The Creator’s Myth
If you’ve ever identified as a creator of any kind, be that an artist, entrepreneur, freelancer, or something else entirely, you’ve probably told yourself some version of the Creator’s Myth.
The Creator’s Myth revolves around the idea that if you can create something great, be that a product, service, piece of art, we can simply release it and it will find it’s way in front of the right audience.
Faced with offers that don’t suddenly fly off the shelves upon their release, creators often draw the conclusion that their work wasn’t good enough, go back to the lab, create something even better, and release that, hoping that this time it will catch on, go viral and take the world by storm.
In almost every case, that’s not what happens and the cycle repeats with the creator furiously attempting to one-up themselves in the work they do while ignoring the skill and the practice that is essential to getting their work seen — and sold.
Of course, deep down, most creators know what needs to be done, they just don’t want to or believe they’re capable of doing it.
Marketing and sales.
Two words that give creators goosebumps.
They conjure images of sleazy, slimy, slippery used car salesmen, of telemarketers, of all the times they’ve been sold and marketed to in the past when they didn’t want to be.
Whatever images these words bring up for you, they’re probably based in your personal experience and entirely justified.
The thing is, those were objectively bad marketers and objectively bad salespeople.
Real marketing is about nothing more than building a relationship and having a protracted conversation with your audience.
Whether you like it or not, if you create things that you want people to use, and buy, you cannot simply do your work, press “publish” and then wait for the sales to roll in.
You need to take the lead on getting it in front of your audience, the people who will benefit from your work.
And this is a good thing.
Why You Should Want To Take The Lead
If we’re working off the assumption that The Creator’s Myth (ie. Build It and They Will Come) is the way to getting our work into the hands of those we wish to serve, we have a couple of problems.
The first is that if we’re leaving it up to others, others who don’t know the work like we do, don’t know its specs, its intended uses, or who it was made for, to do our selling for us.
What ends up happening is a giant game of telephone in which the core purpose of our product, the promise it makes to its potential users is translated and garbled into something entirely unrecognizable.
Sure, some products and offerings are obvious, but if you’ve ever been asked “what exactly is it that you do?” by a friend or relative, you’re probably all too aware that your work requires some explanation.
If you step up and take the lead on marketing and selling your work, you’re able to ensure that you’re crafting your messaging in a way that actually does the work justice, that is clear, concise, and curiosity-piquing.
You’re also able to get that messaging in front of a clearly defined audience, one who you may know or suspect is made up largely of your ideal customers.
What’s more, since you know your work better than anyone else, you can subtly tweak the messaging to customize it to different audiences who may all benefit from what you’re offering them.
There is no such control when you simply do the work and leave it up to the universe to get the word out.
Systems
The second big problem of refusing to promote your work is that you’re relying on pure chance, and pure chance is not repeatable.
Even if you hit it big with a product once, will you be able to repeat that process for your next launch?
If you’re going to make a living as a creator, it’s essential that you create repeatable systems to give your work the best chance of getting in front of the people it was intended for.
Imagine having a template that you could drop various pieces into and be reasonably sure that the result would be your ideal customers and clients taking you up on your offer and engaging in your work.
If you’re one of the creators who has no shortage of ideas and no hold-ups about doing the work — maybe you create compulsively even — a marketing system like this starts to sound an awful lot like a money-printing machine.
Getting Your Reps In
If you can get past the slimy connotations you may have around marketing and sales, you’ll probably still run into the small issue that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing when it comes to these pursuits.
That’s not an excuse to not promote your work.
All that means is that you have work to do when it comes to learning how to market effectively, generously, authentically, in a way that connects and resonates with your audience.
Think about the time you’ve put into developing your craft. It might be years or even decades of your life.
Have you even spent a few hours educating yourself around marketing?
If learning how to market your work meant the difference between creating in obscurity and being known as the authority in your field, what would that be worth to you?
My guess is that committing a few months or even a year to really studying marketing in your downtime would be more than worth the time and expense if it meant a loyal audience that believed in your work and was ready to buy each time you created something new.
This is what effective, generous, relationship-based marketing is really about.
I get it, there are seemingly infinite strategies, techniques, frameworks and tools, each with their own horde of proselytizers. It can be hard to know where to start.
Find out which marketing experts other people you know are consuming and start listening to their podcasts, reading their blogs, their books, watching their YouTube channels.
Test drive a bunch of different marketers until you find someone who’s philosophy you resonate with, not just when it comes to marketing, but in life, relationships and business as well.
For me, that person is Seth Godin, and I highly recommend you check out his blog, books, and amazing podcast, Akimbo.
Once you find that person, dive deep into their frameworks and start applying and experimenting relentlessly.
You won’t get it right the first time. No one does.
No matter, try again, try differently, try better.
Keep what works and ditch what doesn’t until you start to find patterns that you can apply repeatedly to get your work seen.
Real marketing is not slimy, sleezy or slippery.
Real marketing is about knowing who you are creating your work for, seeing them with empathy, and in return being seen by them with trust and engagement.
Your work is already good enough. It’s time to step up and market it generously.
Your audience is out there waiting for you.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/6-reasons-creators-dont-get-credit-sales-d92713db82f6https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/6-reasons-creators-dont-get-credit-sales-d92713db82f6
The Messenger Matters
Your work might be world-changing.
It might be immaculate in its design and execution.
There may be no better way to solve the problem you set out to solve than the solution you came up with.
But for it to catch on, for it to spread, it needs to resonate with just one person first.
Which means you must be able to pitch it, to sell it, to spread the message of your work in a way that piques curiosity, translates its value concisely, and maybe even sparks excitement.
This requires empathy, understanding your audience, knowing how to speak to them.
This is where so many brilliant creators fall short.
Because the messenger matters.
We want to believe it doesn’t. We want to believe our work will speak for itself.
But it does, and it won’t.
So if you’re a creator, best to learn how to speak about your work in a way that resonates, that connects, that sparks excitement, or find someone who can.
Irrefutable vs. Thought Provoking
Trolls suck. It’s true.
But what sucks even more is letting them influence, alter, and detract from your work before you even release it, maybe before you even begin to create it.
Pay enough attention to the trolls and before you even sit down to your keyboard, canvas, or wherever else you create your work, you’re thinking through all the potential criticisms, all the ways in which your work may not deliver.
Pretty soon you find yourself wrapped up not in creating work that matters, that can inspire, that can change people, but in editing work that was previously daring, new, and thought-provoking into something that strives only to be as inoffensive as possible.
It’s not just the irrational trolls you alter your work for either, the ones who will find something to criticize no matter what you (or anyone else) does.
Just as often you’ll end up editing, altering and dumbing down your work any time you find yourself going out on a limb and making a statement that you don’t know for certain is 100% factual.
You couch your statements with “I think”s, “it seems like”s, “probably”s, “maybe”s and any number of other ways to convey your lack of commitment to your ideas in an effort to appease the trolls, or at least lessen their vitriol should it arise.
But here’s the thing.
Your work is not meant to be the irrefutable truth of the universe.
Your work is a statement of your world view, your personal beliefs, your personal truths, and if you believe in them, and your work, you owe it to your work to express them with conviction.
Better than endlessly editing, dumbing down, and homogenizing, what if you decided to create work that steps outside your comfort zone, and while it might not always be 100% “right”, is thought-provoking, fresh, and unique?
You might get called out from time to time, and in those cases, you might learn something new that ultimately improves your future work.
If your goal is to create work that changes people, work that creates an impact, you must create work that causes them to think differently than they have to this point.
This means you have to show up generously, step into the arena with a new, thought-provoking idea and ask, “what about this?”
You’ll definitely get some trolls, you’ll definitely get some haters. But you’ll also get some people who resonate with what you’re saying and lean in to hear more.
In the end, these are the people you’re creating your work for. Do it for them, and forget the ones who don’t get it.
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Hi, I'm Jeremy, I'm glad you're here.
No matter what you create, I'm guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you're building something that matters, but aren't quite sure how to take the next step forward, I'd be honoured to have you join us.