One of the most valuable steps you can take in your business is starting your email list. Your email subscribers are your asset, people who you can contact, sharing knowledge and letting them know about your products. When you publish a post on social media, your followers may miss it. When you send an email to your subscribers, there’s a greater chance of them seeing it because they can open the email at their convenience. Some email marketers go as far as calling the email list your ATM; I’m just going to say that it’s your biggest marketing asset. There are numerous email collecting services that offer campaign templates, email capture forms, etc. I use ConvertKit, but there’s also MailChimp, Infisionsoft etc.
We often find our social media usage innocent. We log on when we wake up, which seems harmless because our brain is not at its sharpest before the morning coffee anyway. We don’t realize that feeding our mind with social media can make us crave it more throughout the day. Starting our days scrolling through the news may expose us to negativity, wake in us feelings of inadequacy, and worse, give our day a pessimistic tint.
Another common presumably justified time of social media usage is when we wait in line or during our breaks. It may seem that mindless browsing relaxes our brain, but it actually harms our overall concentration because our attention becomes fragmented.
We keep hearing about negative effects of social media but there are also firm believers in its benefits. How else can we amplify our brand messages if not with retweets, likes, and shares? How can we communicate with our audience? We may be able to benefit from social media without its negative impact by practicing mindfulness, by using social media consciously instead of reactively. In order to do that, we need to self-impose some rules. Here is what we should consider limiting:
Do try yoga, meditation or any practice that will make our mind focus on the present and improve the quality of our thoughts. Being in nature, spending time offline in quiet, and surrounding yourself with positivity are mindful practices helping focus.
Focusing on projecting a consistent message throughout all channels will shape our image as an expert and strengthen our brand. Having a strong personal brand is being known as a go-to person in a specific niche. People will start reaching out to you for information, ideas, advice, connections, presentations, favors, opportunities, jobs, or partnerships. The stronger someone’s personal brand, the quicker the person comes to mind when we think about a certain topic. We trust entrepreneurs who developed a well-established personal brand. They can expand and move more easily between categories because they have an army of happy devoted clients who value their opinion and buy what they sell.
It’s up to creative entrepreneurs to decide if they should be the center of the business or if there are other stronger components that will make for a better story and company image. What’s most important is adding personal touch to the customers’ experience, providing value for them, and solving their problems. The brand should only focus on the founder if this shows to our clients that they are in good hands. Strong personal brand reassures them that they can expect quality and that their problems will be taken care of.
Developing your personal brand is not about making you shine. If you’re looking for stardom through entrepreneurship, you may want to consider a different path. You will get famous if you and your company can be famously helpful. Successful entrepreneurs become known by uplifting others.
Notice the word that describes your marketing reach—it’s “platform,” not a box or anything limiting. A platform is wide open, offering endless possibilities to elevate you and your brand. There are so many ways to build your platform. It’s for you to test and measure what efforts will advance you on the path of success.
Building your platform demands effort and attention, so steering your focus mindfully toward the most effective marketing ways for you is crucial. You may not know right away where you should be spending your time. It’s important to let go of the pressure of being everywhere.
There’s always going to be the next big thing in social media—Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube.... If you were going to try to be present everywhere, 24 hours a day wouldn’t be enough. There are people and companies that constantly feel the pressure to catch up, be in the loop, and use the newest or most trendy marketing. They’re making a mistake of wasting their marketing dollars developing their presence on platforms not used by their clients. It’s as if they were shouting louder and louder in an empty room.
New social media channels show up constantly, but we don’t have to set up our profiles on them. So often we join a race where we don’t belong; the fear of missing out makes us set up too many accounts we can’t maintain. Consistency and quality content is key, and often we can’t provide it if we commit to being in too many places. We set up a Twitter account where the most recent post is from five years ago. Or we start blogging but seeing no comments after posting for a week, we decide to shift our efforts to our Facebook page.
To promote your business, you don’t have to start a blog right away. Consider writing guest blog posts and being a contributor to online magazines. It’s often more beneficial to take advantage of an already existing platform and post content there than building your own. Social media channel hopping doesn’t build our platform and doesn’t develop our skills. Creatives who post daily YouTube videos, writers who write on Medium daily stretch their creative muscles and perfect their editing and writing skills. I became a faster and more efficient writer thanks to posting daily articles on Medium. Casey Neistat’s video editing skills evolved over the few hundred daily vlogs he posted.
To determine your most effective marketing channels, test a lot to discover where you get most engagement and where you can grow your email subscriber list. Many successful entrepreneurs agree that your email list is your most important asset. With new Facebook formulas making posts from your business page less visible, those likes and recommends are only temporary gains. Once someone subscribes to your email list and you keep providing value, you will create a long-term relationship, offering a possibility of selling your art, information-packed ebook, course, or coaching sessions. Your followers and fans are your asset, your validation. Usually they don’t just show up to give you feedback, share your news, and buy your products. Just like in every relationship, there needs to be an introduction, courtship, and being won over. It takes time, patience, and consistency. The best time to start building your platform is now, before your product launch. Don’t wait to be done creating to focus on audience building or you may find yourself surrounded by your products and no one to buy them. The excuse that you can’t or don’t like doing marketing won’t work anymore, not in today’s content-loaded world. You can start slow, but starting is important. Consider how much time you can devote to it daily and create a social media strategy. Be consistent; follow it religiously.
First, you have to decide whose attention you need to get. It may seem obvious, but when I ask entrepreneurs at conferences who they’d like to meet, they often don’t have a specific idea. Confused, they often mumble something like, “I just want to network and get ideas.”
As a jewelry designer, I’d love to meet magazine editors, their assistants, successful writers, bloggers, and anyone who could help me get exposure for my collection. But I’m also open to meeting and chatting with just about anyone—students, creative people from all the walks of life, world travelers, photographers, writers, coaches, and so on. I’m curious and simply love meaningful conversations.
I once got an email response from a celebrity because of the words “and we talked about you” in the subject line. Celebrities and busy people will pay attention if they hear something about themselves. Whether we want to admit it or not, when we hear our name or read news about ourselves, it’s a piece of information which we want to give our undivided attention to. When I contacted the aforementioned celebrity, my subject line struck home twice. I first mentioned the person who I had just met and who was now our common friend, and then said that we talked about him. This was a very intriguing email subject; the celebrity wanted to know how I met his friend and also what we said about him. I got a response right away, asking how we met. Of course the celebrity couldn’t just ask what we said about him, but rest assured that he was hoping to find this out from our further email exchanges. An email subject to a celebrity must be original. It’s not enough to compliment them. Don’t make it obvious; make it intriguing. Imagine that your email subject is the only space you get to write in. Make it catchy and you’ll increase your chances of the email being opened.
The best and easiest way for you to get in touch with a busy person or a celebrity is, of course, if they contact you. They will reach out to you if they hear about you. This goes back to the point I’d previously made: creating a very successful product.
Reach out, let them know that you have read their book or an article they wrote. The more specific you get, the more valuable your compliment will be. The most valuable gift you can give to any author is a review of their book. Most writers and other creatives will be excited to hear from you. Most of us write to start a conversation. In fact, I’d love to hear from you at Anna@LucidNewYork.com.
I’m a huge fan of coming up with new marketing and PR methods that cost little or no money. One of the easiest and most straightforward ways to start a successful business is to create a product that people really want. If you achieve this, you won’t have to spend much time and energy on marketing. Customers, press, celebrities will be coming to you, asking to buy it. The power of word of mouth will be strong; customers will be talking about your product with their families and friends who will then be contacting you to get it for themselves. This snowball effect will become an avalanche. You may not have enough, you may have to create a wait list, and/or raise prices. Most very successful product launches happen accidentally—usually the product ends up in the hands of the right person at the right time. However, something important must happen: the right person must love it, love it so much that she wants to share. Then the message spreads exponentially. Sales skyrocket. Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
There are ways to increase your chances of getting lucky and creating a successful product. The most important step in achieving it is testing, then testing some more. The more you test, the bigger the sample of people who will give you unbiased feedback and the larger your chances of creating a successful product. In fact, the further along you get in the entrepreneurial path, the more you’ll realize that your small business career will be based on constantly testing and tweaking. It’s all about creating a lot of products to see what becomes popular and making more of those.
No matter where you are in the social media game, it’s worth playing. Whether you are just starting a social media business page or have thousands of followers but need a new plan of action, it’s important to be engaged. By creating a strategy—rather than not having a focused plan of how you interact with and offer to your followers—you will end up devoting less time to implement it. Just like with any long-term, on-going project, it’s important to choose a direction, have a plan, commit to it, and be consistent.
I strongly suggest you set up business accounts on social media. Personal accounts limit the number of friends you can have, they don’t offer any call-to-action options, and you can’t place ads from them. Trying to grow your social media presence with private accounts would be restricting, and you don’t want anything to limit your business. Setting up your accounts properly at the beginning will prevent you from having to make a switch in the future and losing a lot of work and data.
The 7 Day Social Media Action Plan is meant to be a set-up of your successful strategy, and ideally you’d launch your campaigns after these seven days of preparation. You may wonder why I’m suggesting spending seven days on the set-up and not taking action immediately. It seems easy to write a tweet or create an Instagram post, so why would you need a plan for that? There are different ways to use social media and what I’m sharing here is a blueprint, a strong actionable plan to use social media to grow your business. The seven days explain the steps you should take to create the plan, but you will need more time to research and create content before you launch. Those who use social media successfully have a strategy that they had created before they started. Chris Guillebeau started working on his podcast The Side Hustle School five months before its January 1, 2017 launch. He got in touch with John Lee Dumas and watched his Podcasting Lessons series, recorded draft episodes, decided on what type of stories the podcast will feature, and started looking for interesting candidates.1 Delivering content daily, like Chris does, requires having some content created in advance and saved for future days when you won’t be able to create. Unforeseen circumstances do happen, but your audience expects you to be consistent regardless. The strategy I’ll be presenting can, of course, be adjusted depending on your availability and steps you’ve already taken. I invite you to course correct, modify it and get inspired to create your own social media blueprint.
Day 1
Determine where your target market likes hanging out. Are they active pinning on Pinterest? Do they prefer Instagram? Do they join groups on Facebook? Based on their engagement and your own preference, which two social media platforms would you like to be consistently active at?
Browse lots of accounts that are similar to what you have in mind for your brand. Start liking the ones with thousands of followers, study the posts’ frequency and consistency.
Start creating your social media business accounts on any two channels you choose. Decide on your call-to-action buttons, i.e. what would you like the visitors to do and what page to land on when they click. If you don’t have a perfect landing page, don’t let that stop you. You can always start by linking the call-to-action button to a page now and change the link later.
Day 3
Decide what quality content you’d like to post and how often. Being specific about your post publishing days and times will help you be consistent. Once you have a group of devoted fans, they will expect and wait for your content. They may be starting their days having coffee and browsing through their bookmarked accounts or pages, and you may be one of them. If you start being a part of their routines, they’ll expect to see your content regularly. You may probably get away with not being a part of their feeds once or twice, but if it’s more often, some of your fans may decide to replace your page with the one that shares content more consistently. Here’s an example of Facebook business page post schedule:
Monday: 1 post at 9 a.m. (#MondayMotivation)
Tuesday: 1 post at 1 p.m.
Wednesday: 1 post at 3 p.m.
Thursday: 3 posts at 9 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m.
Friday: 3 posts at 9 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m. (Fun posts)
Saturday: 1 post at 1 p.m.
Sunday: 1 post at p.m.
Day 4
Get familiar with Google Trends and Google AdWords. Google Trends will show you what searches are popular and Google AdWords will reveal what keywords people are typing into their browsers to find information related to your message.
Day 5
Know your hashtags. Hashtags make your social media posts more visible. They’re free to use; you just have to know how to use them effectively.
Day 6
Decide what type of content you’ll be sharing. Is it going to be original or mindfully curated from other sites? Bookmark 10–15 sites that you’ll use for daily inspiration to create your content. Write a 500-word article on a topic that your audience may find interesting.
Day 7
How are you going to engage with your audience? The more likes, shares, and comments your posts receive, the more visible your page will be. Some of the examples of engaging posts include quizzes, contests, polls, and questions inviting followers to participate. Research pages which successfully use these forms of engagement and decide what you’ll be implementing for your brand.
After the 7 Day Social Media Action Plan, you’ll have the first version of your social media strategy ready. Treat it as a plan that you can adjust according to what works for you.
Most people who want to connect in business don’t do it mindfully. Being presented with business opportunities, they don’t express what would help their business assuming that others know what they need. Through the years of being a jewelry designer, those who I would newly meet would try to be helpful and enthusiastically offer to introduce me to other jewelry designers. I would be also referred to those who were looking for diamond rings and jewelry repairs. Of course I’m always open to connecting with everyone, but in terms of making introductions from a business perspective, those who wanted to help me simply didn’t know how. For me, the most crucial need has always been getting press exposure for my jewelry brand, and eventually at networking events, I would start expressing this. I’d ask to be introduced to magazine writers and fashion bloggers. Thanks to giving this explicit suggestion, I was now on my connectors’ minds when they were meeting someone working in the media.
The world is full of Gladwellian connectors, who get satisfaction by referring and introducing others. However, if you don’t communicate clearly who you’d like to be introduced to, they’ll attempt to connect you but the referral may not be a business prospect. This is how my friend who has a successful professional cleaning business informs others about how he can be helped: “My name is Mike and I own a professional cleaning business. Feel free to connect me with real estate agency owners. My team specializes in professional deep cleanings for new rentals and sales.” I bet that without this introduction, most people would try to connect him with tenants looking to have their houses cleaned, though this is not what his company does. Even if they knew real estate agency owners, it would not occur to them to introduce them to Mike if he hadn’t been specific.
Depending on what stage of your creative career you are at, you may benefit from being introduced to different people. At the discovery stage, you may want to get connected to those who are living your dream. As you move forward, you’ll get a clear idea of who your ideal customer is. Just as you have a rehearsed speech about what you do and what your business is, do have an elevator speech of who you’d like to be connected to. Don’t be shy asking for introductions. Many of us find true pleasure in business matchmaking and connecting. Also, do remain open to all connections and interactions. You never know who will be a link in your career and life chains.
If you work in PR and marketing, you may not like what you are about to read. I’m going to share a non-conventional, proven method of how I efficiently hired a PR agency guaranteeing exposure results, which in my case were placements of my jewelry brand in People StyleWatch, Cosmopolitan, the New York Times blog The Moment, Entrepreneur magazine, etc.
Like many business owners, I get pitched by PR companies often. Surprisingly however, all the agencies which had been approaching me were giving the same “no-results guaranteed” pitch where the client pays a hefty recurring monthly sum without knowing the outcome of the campaign. They also say not to expect any results for three months. This basically means that clients are asked to invest around $10,000 and wait for months for the exposure that may or may not happen. This agreement would probably never work in other industries, but for some reason PR companies continue getting away with making clients pay without guaranteeing results. I needed press exposure, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this “no-results guaranteed” way of working. I started thinking of creative ways of hiring a PR agency, wondering how compensation could be directly related to the outcome. I knew that this was not a usual way of hiring a marketing firm but since the supply—the number of PR agencies out there—was higher than the demand—companies needing and willing to pay for exposure—potential clients had an opportunity to disrupt the current ways of working and start collaborating in a more client-friendly, results-focused way.
When two young women approached me at one of the trade shows pitching their PR services, I suggested an “a la carte” agreement. When they asked me for clarification, I shared with them my idea, which I was still forming as I was explaining it to them. I suggested providing them with a list of blogs and magazines, which I aspired to have my brand featured in. Every editorial exposure had to include a picture of a jewelry piece and a mention of the website. If they managed to secure a feature, they’d be compensated according to our agreed upon “price list.” As an example, if the jewelry was in People StyleWatch or Elle, the compensation was $3,000—the payment was tied to the circulation of the magazine and potential jewelry sales. Exposure on blogs, depending on readership, was $250.
This tactic, however, did backfire once. The People StyleWatch feature happened to be right by the fold of the magazine, which made the mention very hard to notice. The placement converted to few sales, and I had to pay the agency fee as it wasn’t specified where the editorial mention should be. Besides this, the PR agreement was beneficial for both parties—as a client I felt comfortable, and both the agency and I knew what to expect. Lucid New York was featured in a number of publications, and the agency was compensated accordingly. There was no initial investment for me and usually a magazine mention caused a significant spike in sales, which funded the agency fee. Thanks to our collaboration, my sales and brand awareness increased.
You don’t have to send multiple ships per day, but if you commit to sending two to three ships daily, it will set you up for success. I’m sorry, are you waiting for me to explain what “sending ships” means? Okay, here is my definition: sending ships means reaching out to the unknown without having any expectations about what comes back to you.
I send about two to three ships daily by reaching out without expecting anything in return. One day, I may contact an author of an article I read, complimenting her on it, or I may reach out to an editor of a magazine to ask about the rules of submission. Another day I will contact someone who I admire, either requesting an interview or asking a question, which may provide a great insight for the next book I’ll be writing. If you have a product business, your sending ships may be reaching out to a blogger to ask for a review or opening a masthead of a magazine that your audience reads and reaching out to an assistant editor for a possible editorial feature. You can also answer a question on Quora, write an eloquent comment on a blog post, or respond to a press inquiry from Help a Reporter Out. There are so many ways to send ships, you just have to creatively find them.
Here is my advice on sending ships:
I have been sending ships daily for a few months now, and I’m already noticing unexpected results. Thanks to this method, I secured a few book endorsements and a couple of interviews, offered and received some valuable advice, connected professionals providing value to both parties, and got an offer to review my book.
The key to sending ships is to keep on sending ships without waiting on any to get back.
When most entrepreneurs start, they are ready to do anything. They boastfully claim that they are open to whatever comes their way. They pitch clients from different industries without realizing that we are attracted to specialists and experts. The narrower the specialty, the more we tend to value the business. So being open and ready to do it all may sound like an accommodating strategy, but not the one your future clients will trust. They shape their opinion about your business cataloguing you and your skills in one category, respecting your expertise. If they find out you’re branching out to an unrelated field, they may get confused or, worse, loose trust.
It’s wise to offer various types of products and services when you’re starting out. This is what the testing stage is for. There is not a better way to measure what’s going to be successful than seeing what our customers are willing to pay for. After testing, you should decide and choose the expertise you’ll be developing and become known for. With time, you may consider branching out mindfully; your clients will appreciate the newness and may be tempted to buy more. It’s the drastic pivots from what’s working well that may get frowned upon by your loyal fans. Entrepreneurs who achieved their success at first try may become very confident and think that they can expand into anything and succeed like the first time. I made that mistake and failed, as you’ll read about it in the next section.
By staying true to and extending your brand wisely, you’re also strengthening its story, which has a potential to reach more people. I know it’s tempting to follow all the new and exciting possibilities out there, but by diluting your brand, you are also making it less memorable.
This rule does not apply to celebrities. The ones with a devoted fanbase can start just about anything and it will be successful. For example, in 2015, actress Sarah Michelle Gellar decided to partner with Galit Laibow and Greg Fleishman to start Foodstirs, healthy baking powders based on organic ingredients. Her fans trusted her, believed in the products, and started proudly wearing Foodstirs signature totes announcing that baking was their superpower.2 But if you’re not a celebrity, you’ll want to be more mindful about your new ventures.
You spend years getting good at something. You learn, practice, repeat, and once you achieve a certain level of mastery, instead of staying in the flow, you’re looking for another challenge, a new business to start. What’s new seems easier and more exciting. You quit, restart, and keep repeating the cycle, claiming every time that this time this is it. It’s common to get bored once the business matures, but it’s smart to extend instead of pivot. By expanding into something related to our specific field, we can use the multi-year expertise developed in our core business.
Those who make it and who are successful know how not to get bored with their business. They reinvent and restructure, instead of starting something new and not relatable just because of the excitement of the moment.
I made a very costly mistake at Lucid New York in year three of running the business. Searching for an additional challenge and excitement, I decided to start a handbag line. Mind you, I was running my business solo, so I didn’t have any advisors, designers, or anyone to help. I had been bootstrapping Lucid New York since day one, so all the profit was getting reinvested in the business with no money left to hire anyone full-time. I was contracting out every aspect of the business.
So I decided to create a handbag line in addition to running the already consuming jewelry brand. I didn’t know much about handbag design besides being aware of what I liked and what was popular. However, the success of my jewelry line, which I started from scratch without any training in design, reassured me that I could start and make successful anything I’d put my heart into. I co-designed an entire handbag collection with an artist in Hong Kong, and we got it produced there using an eco-friendly leather-like material. After a few months, the 1,000 pieces of handbags were ready to ship. Right away, I encountered the first roadblock. The shipment got stuck at the border, which is apparently very typical for handbags because they’re more prone to a thorough check to see if they’re counterfeit. All the pieces arrived right after the busy holiday season when I was going to launch the collection. Another thing I realized was that I needed another storage unit to keep them; 1,000 handbags is a massive amount to store.
I started gradually promoting and selling them throughout the year, but we officially launched the line before the next holiday season, placing them in both of our pop-up retail locations in New York City. After only a few days of having the handbags on display, I noticed this decision was one of the worst business decisions I’ve made. Here are the reasons for my failed expansion:
The handbags were selling but not as well as my jewelry line was. To cover high New York City retail rent and other business expenses, I couldn’t afford to sell products that were not selling well. I realized that if I used the wall where the handbags were displayed to show more jewelry pieces, I would be able to increase the revenue. There was no time to waste. In the middle of the busy holiday season, I made a drastic decision to remove all the handbags from both retail locations. My sales team and I did that after hours, displaying more jewelry designs in that space. The next day, my morale skyrocketed. It was as if a burden was lifted from me. I didn’t need to prove or perform. I was able to continue thriving in what I was an expert in: jewelry. I felt I was true to my brand, and my customers reassured me about it by buying more. It was a great season, and the additional space to display the jewelry contributed to increased sales.
In The Dip by Seth Godin, he says the best thing an entrepreneur can do after having realized that he made a mistake is to cut those losses immediately.3 That’s often hard to do because it’s tough to admit to a mistake and accept the loss. Very often we are tempted to wait, hoping to recuperate what we’ve invested. I did too: I figured out the total cost of all the handbags, counted how many sold and at what price, and was trying to figure out how many I’d have to still sell to cover my initial expense. Then I changed my mind. I decided to give up on the handbags completely; I didn’t even consider figuring out a fast way to sell them. All I wanted was to get rid of them to fully focus on my jewelry designs and having another successful season. A friend of mine offered taking all the handbags from my storage. I didn’t care what he would do with them, whether he would sell them and where. All I wanted was not to waste any more time on them. We went to the storage and loaded my friend’s van with close to a thousand handbags. Closing the doors of the storage space, I sighed with relief and realized I didn’t even leave myself one. The handbag chapter was completely closed. My costly lesson taught me to be very careful when adding other categories to an already successful brand. Your brand and the products you sell are like a story; their elements should go together, complement one another, adding to the experience.
What three ships you can send this week?
What one or two social media channels can you post consistent content to?
What value can you provide to your email subscribers?