How I first learn about marketing
About three years ago, I was struggling to create some kind of work—still lagging on at the end of the dot-com crash, and hadn’t really had any work to speak of for over a year. Finally, I got a coach (Jaquie). She is an amazing person, and turned me on the work of Robert Middleton, who specializes in helping service professionals get clients. Honestly, it had never even occured to me that one should “market” their services. Don’t ask me how I thought you were supposed to get clients! Like a whole lot of people, what marketing really is was a black box, and the only connection I had to it was an image of sleazy rich men in fancy suits lying to me and trying to convince me that I should buy their soap.
So, Robert Middleton is a really cool, high-integrity guy. And I found out that marketing can be about sincerely spreading the word about your services, so the right people can find you. The phrase you might use is:
If only the right people could find me, the people I am meant to serve, I could help make their lives better by doing something I absolutely love doing!
This was definitely not the sleazy-guy-selling-soap thing I had thought about. And I was quite ready to wipe that image from my mind (or at least, push it to the side, and allow this much more interesting one to take up the space).
