Dear
Reader,
This
is a book about having fun.
What
the…?!?
you’re saying. I
thought this was a book about building my @#%* business! Is this some
kind of bait and switch?
No.
It isn’t.
Nevertheless,
this is
a book about having fun…with your business.
Because
here’s what I know: when I met Ilise
Benun
and Peleg
Top,
I was not
having fun. I was a fledgling designer being buried alive by my nascent
business–if by “business,” you mean
“a handful of clients who barely kept me in coffee and
fonts.” I was exhausted from trying to be everything to
everybody and despondent about the prospects of changing my destiny.
Convinced
that this was my own fault—I was a bad designer, I was too
introverted to promote myself, I was missing the money-management
gene—I landed on Peleg’s doorstep a terrified
wreck. In
just under six hours,
he managed not only to change my mind about my situation being
hopeless, he actually got me excited about turning it around.
After
getting the basic principles down–the very stuff
you’ll find in between the covers of this book—I signed
on with Ilise,
who helped me work them, bit by bit. Once again, what floored me was
how much fun
it was, creating (or re-creating) this business of mine. Naming it.
Learning to connect with people. Figuring out creative, interesting
ways to promote myself. Discovering that marketing didn’t
have to be something that made me sick to my stomach, but that actually
fed
me:
• I
began enjoying myself at networking events, where—magically,
it seemed—I began to pick up new clients who didn’t
flinch at real-world prices
• Prospective
clients started calling me—cold!
• I
launched an electronic newsletter that not only went from 134 readers
to almost 500 in under eight months, but that the guy who literally
wrote the book on eNewsletters actually featured as a stellar example
in his own eNewsletter
I
grew to enjoy the process of marketing so much, I ended up partnering
with Ilise and Peleg to run The
Marketing Mix,
the official blog of Marketing Mentor.
Bottom
line: I have lived virtually every word of this book, from the choosing
of a market to growing your business by the admittedly counterintuitive
(not to mention terrifying) process of firing bad clients, and
I’m here to tell you, it works. When you work it, that is.
So
make this your work. Take this book and work it to death. Start from
the beginning, or jump to a subject you’re grappling with
now. Mark it up, highlight it, put sticky notes all over the danged
thing, but dig in. The more you work it, the harder it will work for
you.
And
keep working it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned
from Ilise and Peleg, it’s that marketing is an ongoing
process. There’s always some area of your business
you’ll need to be working on now. Keep this handy at your
desk; if you’re one of those over-workers (ahem!), take it
with you to bed, in the tub, on vacation. There is no right or wrong
way to use it, as long as you do use it.
There’s
one final thought I’ll leave you with: for the love of all
that’s holy, have fun
with this. Really. Sure, it’s a little intimidating when you
stare at the big, long list of stuff you’re going to want to
do to get your business firing on all cylinders. But if you break the
process up into little pieces, it turns into sort of a mad, crazy, and
yes, really fun game. Because piece by piece, pixel by pixel, word by
word, you’ll be building the business of your dreams. A
business that can grow as you grow, change as you change, support the
dreams you started out with and lead you down wondrous paths you never
imagined.
I’m
serious.
But
not too
serious.
Peleg
and Ilise wouldn’t have it any other way…
colleen
wainwright | the
communicatrix
©
2008 Marketing-Mentor.
All
rights reserved.
