...and some you might not have thought to ask

Will going through this process make me feel stupid?

Creative, idealistic people tend not to know or read much about marketing, and many have a fear of it.  And it doesn’t help that lots of people, especially teachers, feed their egos on the pain of others’ lack of knowledge.  It’s an everyday phenomenon.  You too have probably done it!  I try my best not to; also, I am very clear about the fact that you are not “less than” just because you haven’t figured out this information on your own.  You probably haven’t thought about it, because it’s not your field.  I didn’t know this stuff before I encountered it, and the process of learning it has never been humiliating. My clients have almost always found it exhilirating and fun. And finally, we are co-creators, each playing his/her part, to make your business thrive and bring your gift into the world.

Will it take a lot of time?

It will take 10 hours maximum, and a bit longer if you choose to make use of my proprietary tool.  We can do optional extra work for extra benefits, but the %60-%85 reduction in inefficiency will only take 10 hours of my time and only three or four of yours.  Then you can save 3 or 4 hours in the first month you don’t have to exert yourself marketing yourself.

Won’t I still have to spend hours putting up flyers, typing on chat boards, blogging, writing articles, and hauling myself to networking events?

If you marketing is 3-7 times as efficient you can do that stuff %66 to %85 less.  If you’ve been marketing yourself just a little, that may be enough to go from one client a week to a sustaining practice in just six months.

    You’re using Ron Richards as an example of someone who gets the kind of results you can get, and he claims to get you 2-5 times the business.  He works with technology companies.  Surely what he does only works with profit-driven, non-green businesses, right?  And those companies lie, manufacture a sense of scarcity so that they can sell their products.  I want to make a positive change in the world.  Can I possibly benefit that much from this?

    You can benefit as much relative to where you started.  You won’t have the same wealth as those companies, but the benefit is the aligning of your marketing and increase in its effectiveness, so percentage-wise you are benefiting as much as they are. 
    If you truly have a high-quality product/service, you can get enough clients or customers without lying, intruding, or manufacturing a sense of scarcity.  There is a genuine desire in the world for the beneifits you offer, so you only need to shine a light on this desire, on where people have settled for less (in conventional medicine, in energy-wasting technologies, in social fragmentation) and articulate clearly the possibility you hold for meeting it.  You can restrict your advertising to legal bulletin boards and community lists and still get enough clients if each posting has substance.  And lying would only hurt your business, even if you’re a tech giant.
    Your experience of life, as an entrepreneurial or idealistic soul, has probably conditioned you to expect your gifts to be ignored.  This is a big change.

Will I have to be a genius to understand this? Will I be sitting for hours with my eyes glazed over, feeling nothing?

A) You are a genius.  Everyone has genius.  B) You don’t have to be a genius at marketing, I believe that parts you need to understand will all seem obvious in hindsight. C) I am the most intense, “crazy,” bleeding-heart radical I know and I have found this information riveting to learn and deeply fulfilling to implement.  It’s psychology, poetry, street-wisdom, commonsense, personal relating, and inspiration.  I think you will enjoy it. 
    But since I can’t know for sure that you will, I can only say, “if you try it and don’t like it, you can always stop.”  The brain likes to paint it as a permanent situation you’ll get into if you take in new information, but you can choose later whether or not you want to pursue it.

Will I have to do a lot of math?

No. Nothing beyond multiplication of decimals—and if you’re really stuck, I can do that part.

What track record do you have?

I have worked with fourteen clients so far--prior to working with my new proprietary tool--and twelve of those fourteen have been very pleased with my work.  I have not yet shown the kind of numbers I aspire to show and feel cetrain I can show—multiplying your customers by three to seven times—but I am doing that now with a client. 

The proprietary tool I’ve mentioned has a track record of 30 years success in a business that does not advertise anywhere and is BBB rated, and is the epitome of being green and holistic both. 

There must be some catch here, nothing in the universe is free.  Will I have to lose all my friends who feel threatened by my success?

A lot of people find this fear comes up for them.  Obviously, if they’re that jealous, they’re not real friends.  Still, that’s not much comfort for the fear inside.  First of all, you can usually count on at least some people to  be genuinely happy for you.

But more to the point, remember why you started this business or project or practice in the first place—for your gift, your envisioned impact on the world, your act of service.  It’s not for ego.  So not only aren’t you hurting those “friends” by creating a success-facilitating marketing system, you’re heeding your calling with greater alignment and therefore are more likely to be of service to them.

Who are your clients?

Since engaging with the proprietary tool I have brought on one new client.  She is a feng shui consultant, and she is very excited about the use of the proprietary tool. Before engaging with the proprietary tool, I had seven male clients and seven female; four have been of African ancestry, (which is slightly more than the percentage in the general population). They are: a poet, an art photographer, two life-coaches, a medicine man, an actor/producer, a spiritual community organizer, a yogi planning to build a retreat center, an acupuncturist and an organizer of a visionary academic conference.

I’m a holistic, non-linear person.  Doesn’t this approach require me to squeeze into a box for it to work? 

I don’t squeeze people into boxes.  My approach is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive: I don’t tell you what to do, I just tell you what will generate higher numbers of responses.  You may not want to use the most effective marketing (by numbers) in favor of using something that suits your non-linear style more, or brings you only a certain kind of client, or gives you a break from clients.  That’s perfect.  I’m not trying to change you.  And I’m pretty non-linear myself.

Aren’t you a weaver of illusion—aren’t all marketers liars?

No, and if you read Seth Godwin’s book (All Markters are Liars) you’ll see that he doesn’t really mean that either, it’s just a title to get your attention.  I market by uncovering truth and getting the wording of it clear, not by illusion.  Most marketers do make use of transference (projections on to a person)—I avoid that, and also I’m an activist before I’m a marketer.  My approach is logical, reality-tested, and demonstrable, so there’s no need to overcompensate and get clients to “love” me.  Some success gurus you may have run across focus only on “change your thinking and you’ll get results,” harnessing the power of transference in the process, since you’re supposed to keep going to the guru’s workshops and seminars.  My approach doesn’t really need you to change your thinking, and I believe people are all doing their thinking just fine without my help.

Isn’t success twice as scary as failure?

Many people do experience “backlash” and I have too.  Our culture has a deeply engrained idea that riches are evil: the story is this, a poor man once went to a witch/wizard/genie who granted him three wishes, and he chose to have riches, and then his uncle, wife, and children all died in a horrible way and he inherited lots of money.  My marketing won’t make you that rich, nor will it involve family tragedy.  You’re a person who’s making a wish for a way to bring your talents into the world, so you’d get a very different result from those stories.  The fear of cultural attitudes like this one are engrained in us at a deep level and may be challenging to dislodge.

But again, remember why you’re in business—your gift, your passion for nature, your love of community.  You want others to benefit the way you benefited from your teachers, healers, heroes, and inspirations.  Yeah, it’s scary.  You may need to set aside some time for grieving when you get successes, but if you’re going on your soul’s path you’ll be OK.

What if my acupuncture skills/green idea/community building skills aren’t good enough/green enough? 

The tools I have to give you can also help you think of ways to improve the level of your service.  You can learn about non-obvious things that you can add to what you’re doing, many without a lot of effort, that will leverage the impact you can have.  For example, if you’re a holistic healer, you might invest some time in each session to really establish concrete, specific measures of the changes occurring in your client.  I have only been to one holistic healer who really did this, and it made a huge difference.  (Maybe the others could tell just from my pulses, but they never told this to me in a way that I really got—like showing me a chart of how healthy I had been week by week and giving me a sense of where we were headed). 

Ron Richards talks about “removing poison language”—isn’t this focusing on the negative?  That feels punitive and shaming.

Again, I only describe, I don’t prescribe.  And you can think of poison language as pesticides—everybody’s been using them for many years, no judgments there, but there’s a better way, and they do turn your customer off.  An example of some useless language would be hype: "best green product"; another would be platitudes: “friendly and affordable acupuncture”—both of these adjectives only make the reader say, automatically, “I should hope so!”  They don’t really handle the reader's fears of needles, the fact that insurance covers pills but not acupuncture, etc.  “Friendly and affordable” isn’t adding anything, it’s just taking up space that could contain real information.

But I am not going to look at your ad and say, “This has to be gotten rid of.”  My approach is first to face the challenge of coming up with something better, something you and I both like, and then to have you feel so much better about the new thing that you really want to use it more than what you had before.  And ultimately it comes down to trying it out in the real world—and seeing what makes your numbers go up and what doesn’t.

Isn’t “market testing” and “customer interviewing” the most important element in marketing approaches like this one, and don’t those cost thousands of dollars?  

These other marketers (Rich Harshaw, Ron Richards, etc.) don’t make use of the proprietary tool; and also there are work-arounds even without it.  You may not have the money of the big guys, but you have a lot of social capital.  I can help you figure out how to use it maximally.

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