Make Marketing Suck Less for Expertise-Driven Solo Businesses

On this series of bonus pods, I will help one business owner identify one action that solves their biggest marketing headache. This way, marketing becomes easier and more effective (and sucks less).  This week we have Elizabeth Des Roches . She is a business coach with years of experience owning her own business and has a very unique set of tools in her toolbox When Elizabeth took the Discover You...

How many marketing courses have you purchased? How many of those courses did you implement and finish?  If I were a betting person, I'd guess you'd need both hands to count the number of courses you bought, and yet the ones you've completed is probably close to zero.  There is a reason for that. These marketing courses always seem like they are the thing, the solution to grow your audience, fill y...

On this series of bonus pods, I will help one business owner identify one action that solves their biggest marketing headache. This way, marketing becomes easier and more effective (and sucks less).  This week we have Leah Steele from Searching for Serenity. When she took the discover your marketing Achilles' Heel assessment, her biggest marketing headache was around making offers to her audience....

What if the common business advice about how to grow your business is not meant for you? What if how you've been taught to market and sell was meant for the masses and not for someone with your very particular set of skills? If marketing doesn't seem to be working for your business, let me tell you, there's nothing wrong with you or your business. It is because how you've been taught to market doe...

Welcome to the first ever Make Marketing Suck Less Hotseat!  On this series of bonus pods, I will help one business owner identify one action that solves their biggest marketing headache. This way, marketing becomes easier and more effective (and sucks less).  This week we have Jenn Hume for Hell Yes Tech , through the Discover Your Marketing Achilles' Heel assessment, she realized that she was ki...

Sometimes we think we need to prove how smart we are in order to make people want to work with us.   On the surface, this makes sense in a world where we are told we only need to be one step ahead of our clients or we need to be just 20% smarter.  Being an expert is a competitive advantage, but showing how smart you are and how much you know in your marketing is not the best way to find clients. ...

Is your business flying under the radar?  Happy clients who get great results see you as their secret weapon.  Being the best-kept secret kind of sucks, doesn't it? It means that you're losing out on clients revenue, opportunities to let your expertise shine through so that it reaches more people.  How can you stop flying under the radar? Well, it starts by letting go of this one pesky little thou...

Recently, I contradicted the advice of two big name creators.  These were the type of creators who had audiences of thousands of people. They have audiences bigger than I ever want to have an audience of. And you know what? It was awkward to contradict them to be the rebel going up against these industry giants.  As I listened to them talk about what it takes to grow an audience, to grow a podcast...

What if you stopped trying to build an audience?    The common knowledge is that as a business owner, you should be growing your audience, building your email list, and growing your community.   But is that true for your business?  What if, for expert business owners, growing your audience is actually the wrong approach?  Then what should you be doing instead of focusing on building an audience so...

Have you ever asked yourself, “If I'm so good at what I do, why don't more people know about me” Honestly, I've asked this question of myself a lot, and I've become obsessed with figuring out the answer in my own business and for my clients. I get to work with many amazing people who are experts with years of education, experience, and finely honed skills, and their work with their clients is incr...

When it comes to marketing, sometimes it’s hard to know where to focus and what to do in order to make your marketing work for your business.   Plus, it doesn’t help when you kind of hate doing marketing. I know you’d rather be working with clients you love versus promoting your business all the time.   So how do you make the most of the time you spend marketing? How do you do it so that you actua...

Where are my podcasters at?   If you have a podcast or are just thinking about creating one, then today’s show is for you.   My guest, Jeremy Enns, and I are discussing what it takes to create a podcast that gets noticed and stands out in a sea of a million other podcasts.   Plus, we’re talking about how to build a podcast that actually lands you clients. We’re diving into the one step that most p...

It might be hard to believe that there is only one way left to stand out.   This has been an idea that has been floating through my head for quite a while now, and I didn't feel comfortable coming out with such a bold claim until I kept seeing signs. You know, the type of signs that are basically saying, Michelle, you are right about this thing.   And other people are saying it too. Maybe it's tim...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know all about ChatGPT. And I know there are a lot of worries about it.   Whether it’s a worry about replacing you and your business or that ChatGPT is just going to create a lot more noise in the marketing space and a lot more boring content that marketers are going to copy and paste to save time.   But I’m taking a slightly different tack today.   I wa...

What does it take to make your business stand out in 2023?   Things are weird out there right now. The marketplace is more competitive than ever and because of the Great Resignation, more and more people have decided to start businesses and hang their virtual shingle.   Plus, we’ve got a shaky, wonky economy that’s making it take longer to close sales, or even get people to have a conversation abo...

Let's face it, the process of getting known and hired for your work is terrifying, sometimes completely frustrating, and other times defeating.   The web celebs want us to believe, it's a series of win after win after win, and everything is unicorns and rainbows. The reality is that there are ups and downs and sometimes more downs than ups before we start seeing the wins.   So how do we keep going...

“The kind of people who sit there thinking about how to market themselves aren’t the kind of people who are developing these exquisite expertises.”   That quote from Michale Lewis, author of Moneyball and host of Against the Rules, has been on my mind ever since I heard it. Because that’s you, isn’t it?   The person with the exquisite expertise, the business owner who gets their clients amazing re...

How many marketing courses or programs have you purchased?   If you’re like me, it’s a shit-ton. Too many to count.   Those programs filled my head with all kinds of tactics to get my work in front of new people from Instagram, to webinars, to lead magnets that would “explode my list!”   I feel like I’ve heard it all.   But there’s something very important that these courses and programs leave out...

We've all been there. You send an email that no one responds to. You post on social media and despite spending nearly an hour on the post, you get crickets. You publish a podcast that you think is spectacular, and the downloads are meh. It happens to everyone. But the key is not to let the setback or the failure derail you. So how do you bounce back when your best efforts aren't working? That's ex...

Do you ever wish that you didn’t have to market your business at all?   Do you wish that you could spend all of your time delivering your programs and working with your fantastic clients instead of trying to find the next client?   Well, I’ve got some good news, some bad news, and some even better news for you.   The good news is that there’s a very good reason why experts hate marketing their bus...

“I just need to know the right thing to say that will resonate with my client.” I recently realized that you are a bit obsessed with getting it right. Let me explain. Last fall, I surveyed my audience and I kept hearing from you that you want the right, the best, the most appealing message that’s going to resonate with your clients and magically get them to work with you. And, boy, do I get that i...

When you’re an expert you’re in a pretty exclusive club, filled with a small number of other humans who are passionately and a bit obsessively interested in your specific topic. So of course it’s easy to talk to the other experts in your club. But how do you translate your expertise and make it interesting to other humans? How do you translate it so other human beings want to pay you for it? As a...

What if the common business advice about how to grow your business is not meant for you?   What if how you've been taught to market and sell was meant for the masses and not for someone with your very particular set of skills?   If marketing doesn't seem to be working for your business, let me tell you, there's nothing wrong with you or your business.   It is because the way you've been taught to...

“I don’t know if I’m expert enough to work with you.”   I hear this all the time from potential clients, and it’s usually followed by a list of certifications, years of experience, loads of transferable skills, frameworks they’ve developed to help clients, and years of getting them results.   So yeah, they are definitely expert enough.   But I understand why people feel this way, and why you, too,...

“If I can do it, you can do it too!”   After all, you just need to be one step ahead of your client, and if you have a rags-to-riches story about how much you’ve overcome, that gives you authority!   Messages like these have ruled the online space since its inception. These messages cast the widest net possible and basically say anyone can own an online business. No specialized  knowledge? No prob...