Can Marketing Yourself Be Fun?
Depending on what career path you want to take, it’s no longer enough to be the best for the job or have the best product. You often have to have some kind of platform. And if you’re anything like I am, you’re not into that.
When I started ‘marketing myself’ as a product, I was acting in Chicago. The industry morphed alongside social media while I was in it. There came a point when you pretty much had to have an actor website. I remember painstakingly creating mine.
Having kittens around made marketing yoga somewhat more fun for a while. It’s easy to get fun pictures of you doing yoga when you have two kittens crawling all over you. Take advantage of these kinds of situations when it feels right.
While I was acting in Chicago, I switched day jobs and became a full time fitness instructor. This also grew to require a platform. It was no longer good enough to teach an awesome class, you had to connect with your students on social media so they become invested in you and want to see you in class. Find your audience. Find your brand. Otherwise your attendance might drop and your class might get pulled from the schedule.
What a lot of people don’t know is that I also spent some time taking online courses in pursuit of an Associates Degree in Marketing. I was in a rough spot, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and my husband’s job offered free classes. I didn’t finish the degree because we moved and he had to leave that job, but I did get a good way into it.
When I started to seriously pursue writing, this was one area that I felt I at least had a handle on as I’d done it so many times. But do you ever really have a handle on it? I’m not sure. It changes constantly. But here are a few things that I do know and will pass along.
If you’re in a career that does require some kind of platform, like writing, to get noticed, it may be tempting to try a little of everything. It’s fine to be active on several platforms, but unless you’re hiring someone to manage them all for you, you’re not going to be effective on every single one. Some of the best advice I got was in a marketing seminar for fitness instructors. Someone in the audience had said they just weren’t comfortable doing the gym selfie. (Taking pictures of themselves looking great and having perfect form while working out.) The advice was not to do it then. Find out what you do like doing. If you like to take pictures, do Instagram. If you like to write a lot, do a blog.
Offer something back. I did a thing for a while where I took pictures of my students (with their permission) doing cool things and post about it. Then I would tag them. This went over really well because everyone likes a picture of themselves boxing like a badass or doing a headstand in yoga. A lot of people added it to their stories. You can also do ‘how to’ posts. Book reviews are popular. Etc. Whatever you put out there, if it’s for the purpose of building your platform (not everything is) then make sure you have something to say and that it’s useful to someone.
Make it consistent. If you’re doing a newsletter every month, do it on the same day every month. If you’re posting a blog, the same day every week. The people who look for your things are going to start looking for it at the same time. You don’t want them to be disappointed and forget about you.
Make it sustainable. This works with number 1. You’re not going to be able to do something in the long term if it’s not something that you enjoy. If you try book reviews and you hate doing them? Stop. Now, a caveat to this is that there is always going to be that day where you say, “Ugh! It’s Thursday, I have to write a blog today!” (What? No, I’ve never said that. Hush.) But that’s true of anything. If you start out disliking it though and give it a few tries, it’s not likely to start lighting a fire under you. You’ll be more genuine doing what you enjoy and more likely to stay the course and get better at it.
It’s okay to try things and it’s okay to make mistakes. I have tried three different blogs. The other two are more specific, one is for health and one is for book reviews, and I still throw something up on them every once in a while, but I’ve found I don’t like to be forced to write about a certain thing. This blog has been going consistently every Friday for three years. And the practice of making myself write something when I sometimes don’t know what I’m going to say whether I’m in the mood or not, has been very beneficial to my writing overall. I’m also glad I tried the other blogs out. And this one has changed over time as well. If you stick with something for a while, it probably will change. We’re not static, the world isn’t static and social media is certainly not static.
It’s never too early to start building up your platform. Are you a writer that hasn’t published yet? Well, to put a different twist on a common phrase, this is the ‘fuck around’ time of your ‘fuck around and find out.’ Once you’ve got your product, you want your platform solid and ready to go. This is a great time for you to be finding out what you enjoy doing and what you can offer up. If you publish your book and then try to start a platform by talking about nothing but your book… people are going to get bored quick.
You can’t sell people what they don’t want/need to buy. (Or you shouldn’t, if you’re a reputable salesperson.) Consider this when trying things out. Not everyone is going to enjoy your blow by blow of your latest speedrun of MegaManV. But if your goal is to get the attention of retro video gamers, then you do you, my friend. Bonus if they can learn something about you along the way. People like to know a little bit about the personality that they’re investing time in. You’ll find the balance between too much and not enough as you go.
They’re not all gonna be winners. In fact, at first you may get slow to no responses. It’s okay. Are you still having fun? Keep it up. Every now and then you’ll get something that hits big and you may want to try and replicate that. “Oh, I posted a picture of me lifting weights with my cat and everyone loved it!” Well maybe, but maybe they’re just people who like cats and aren’t people who are going to come to your fitness classes. But you never know. They might be both! My point is, don’t sweat the low results too much, especially at first. You eventually should see a steady growth. I personally have rarely been able to predict a ‘hot’ post.
This is not an exhaustive list and I believe I’ve made it clear that I’m not a marketing professional. I’m just someone who’s experimented a lot. I will leave you with the words of a guy I used to take martial arts classes with that has since become a core part of my personal philosophy, “If you’re not getting paid or having fun, what are you doing it for?” Sometimes there’s still a reason, but it’s always good to ask the question.