Promotion can be scary.
Not scary like creepy clowns jumping out of the woods at you scary, but scary like…
- What if I ask this big shot to promote me, and they say no…?
- What if I spend all this time and energy promoting and still no one shows up…?
- What if people DO show up, and realize I actually don’t have a clue and I’m just winging this…?
Or maybe you have gotten past the fear, and you want to promote your work, but you just don’t have a clue where to start. It feels overwhelming and super time-consuming — it feels like an additional burden after you get the content written.
Or maybe you’re just not sure where to promote or who to reach out to, or how to do it. You certainly don’t want to sound to salesy or pushy or SPAM people!
…And so you just keep pounding away at your keyboard, creating content, maybe doing the bare minimum, sharing it to your social accounts — because that’s safe, and you know it works (right?), and it’s not scary.
But I know something scarier than promoting your own work — and that’s NOT promoting it.
See, I know that you have a message. You have a gift and you’re using it to solve a problem in the world. You know it’s helping because of the clients who come to you and tell you how grateful they are for what you’ve given them, how they needed your solution so badly.
How you changed their lives.
There are people out there who need you, but what’s scary to me is that if you’re not effectively promoting your content and getting your message out there beyond your existing community, those people may never be able to find you.
You started your business for a reason: to help people. It doesn’t matter what your business is, or what product or service you provide, you solve a problem for people. You make lives better in some way — but only if the people who need you know your product or service exists!
And that’s bloody terrifying to me — that your message, your gifts might never reach the people who so desperately need you.
But I hear from so many people that promoting themselves feels salesy. It feels forced. It feels false. We have been taught from childhood, many of us, that it’s impolite to talk about ourselves, to talk about our achievements, to be prideful.
That’s bragging, isn’t it? And didn’t our parents warn us that no one likes a bragger?!
So, of course promotion is going to feel awkward and uncomfortable. But it doesn’t have to come from an energy of braggadocio.
Instead, what if we approached promotion from an energy of helping?
What if we removed ourselves from the equation and looked at it as marketing our business (instead of promoting ourselves)?
What if we decided that the message, and the people it could help, were more important than our feelings on the matter?
You already have the message! And the people who need it are already out there, looking for you.
You just have to find the right channels to reach them and create a system to make reaching out automatic and achievable.
That’s why my friend Beth Hayden and I decided to put together a workshop on promoting your content, now part of the Content Promotion Bundle — because we’re business owners, too, and we’ve struggled with promoting our own content (and, yes, with the fear and imposter complex that comes along with it!).
But we’ve also realized that those fears do nothing but hold us back. And we’re ready to stop hiding and ready to own that our message is IMPORTANT and worthy of promotion.
Don’t let the fear of putting yourself out there hold you back! Instead, let yourself be motivated by the very real fear that if you don’t put yourself out there, your message may not reach the people who need it the most.
You already have the message; you’re in a unique position to be able to take advantage of these content promotion techniques no matter what kind of time or budget you have available, and finally, finally reach the audience you need to reach to make a bigger impact.
Don’t you owe it to the people who need you the most? Click here to learn more about the Content Promotion Bundle.