Across industries and niches, entrepreneurs are confused and stalled by the ever-evolving marketing monster. Here are the 5 areas you should focus on in your 2020 marketing plan. They are all about who you are and how you show up for your tribe. Which tools and strategies you should use, we’ll figure out. The right strategies and skills are important, but what I have often seen is that a tendency to strive to become professional ‘corporate-like’ brands instead of making the distinctive and unique qualities solopreneurs naturally have the very cornerstone of the business. In the 2020s, the human-centered approach ought to be the pivot of marketing strategy, and that starts with showing up as a relatable human.

1. The happy customer is your best marketer

Distrust, discomfort, disrespect and a sense of overstepping boundaries arise in many of us when exposed to traditional marketing. This nasty gut feeling is sparked when we remember the decades of...

To monetize your skill you need to shift your mind

Mere thinking about kick-starting a business gives you chills. Being the boss of your own self and branding yourself requires overcoming fears. But I have news for you: You don't have to fear marketing and selling. Not anymore. 

Being a solopreneur takes getting a little out of your comfort zone. Or rather you need to push the boundaries. I am here to help you gain the confidence so that you can expand your comfort zone and go from stopping your own progress to confidently showing up as the leader YOUR people need you to.

Confidence can be gained by taking actions and dealing with a fear of failures. Stop ignoring your fears and face them head-on. Fear is only our natural response towards anything new, even though there’s no actual danger. Taking baby steps and persistently moving forward will slowly change your self-confidence.

TIP #1: SHOW UP AS A REAL PERSON

The importance of human marketing...

Are you considering if you should offer coaching services? Is it a role you want? Can you truly help and also stay scalable?

You already know that by gaining new skills and unlocking their potential, any willing person can completely overhaul their life. Coaching isn’t just creating a pathway for someone and telling them to follow it. Far from it! It’s late nights, early mornings, stress, sweat, and sometimes tears as you walk through growth journeys alongside your clients. So is it worth incorporating it in your business?

You’re not alone. I’m here to help you learn:

• Your role as a coach and how it’s different from other roles
• How to apply coaching to your business
• What kind of services can you offer and stay scalable?
• Guidelines for great coaching

What does a coach do?

A coach is someone who uses their experience and skills to help others achieve goals by asking questions and helping clients discover the answers they held inside all along....

You have a product, your website is online, and you are building a vibrant community on social media. It is time to start attracting new audiences and experiment with paid advertising. Lucky for you, there are many opportunities to create the perfect ad on any social media platform. For now, let’s focus on one of the most effective social media platforms in the world. Yep, it’s Facebook.

Here’s what we’ll be covering in this blog post:

• Identifying your target audience
• Knowing your competition
• Choosing the best method of presenting your ad
• Creating content for an effective Facebook ad

You’ll discover how to create an ad on Facebook by combining your audience data with the power of Facebook Ads Manager! Let’s get started.

Amaze your target audience with near-psychic ad placement

You can target different audiences with your ads: your first-time acquaintances, your luke-warm followers and repeat customers. Describe the customers who have the...

Copywriting is crucial to present your voice in the way your audience best understands. You are wondering whether you should write your own copy or hire someone to do it for you.

Let’s discuss what a copywriter does, and take a look at your options. You’ll be able to better choose whether to hire a copywriter or not.

What does a copywriter do?

Simply put, a copywriter writes marketing content. In a day, a copywriter might write a sales email, a landing page, and 10 social media posts, all before lunch. Written content is necessary to increase your brand awareness, get you ranked for search results, and ultimately persuade your audience to take action.

Your written content affects your reputation and your brand image. How your copy is written affects the effectiveness of your communication. What you say influences your customers’ ability to understand your message and make decisions.

A good copywriter doesn’t just throw words together. They understand...

Like a city cannot work efficiently without great infrastructure, neither can your business grow without systems that make it easy to become and stay a member of your community. 

The difference between poor and thriving cities comes down to very few factors. To thrive financially and become popular, a city needs to provide safety, a warm atmosphere, opportunities to feel involved and prosper - and a great infrastructure.

Imagine if a city did not appear on Google maps and nobody knew where it is. Imagine if, when trying to arrive at the city, you went sent in all kinds of directions, there was nobody to ask for directions in a language you could understand or if there were no roads arriving at your destination.

A sales funnel is basically the path visitors take on the way to buying your product or service. Your job as a marketer is to make it easy for them to understand what your city is offering, explain who lives there so they can understand if they would like to belong...

Investing time in defining and finding your perfect audience is one of the best investment of your time you'll ever make. 

Just putting your product or service out there and hoping the right people see it is just a waste of your time and money. There are really two big problems in skipping doing thorough audience research:

1. You’ll design and explain your product in a more general way which makes it harder to relate to for your perfect customer, and for any customer really. Nobody wants 'average' or one size fits all.
2. Your spending money getting in front of people that are not your target market and thereby reducing your ROAS (return on ad spend) as well

There are different ways to approach this.

1. Market analysis -> Segments -> Pick a niche -> Perfect customer profile
2. Analyse customers -> Profitable segments -> Survey -> Perfect customer profile

In this case, we’ll assume you don’t already have an audience or lots of profitable customers....

It’s never been easier or more difficult to build a powerful personal brand business.

• On one hand, there are really no barriers to keeping skilled people from sharing their knowledge and create a profitable personal brand.
• On the other hand, there is so much information out there about how to do so, and most of it has become irrelevant because what used to work is no longer working.

But for sure, if you are ahead of someone and you have great teaching skills, you can help them solve problems and build a business doing so. Zero barriers - except maybe your mindset and beliefs. You just need to figure out how.

With that in mind, here are five things that personal brand entrepreneurs should be doing each week. Most of them, you need to do a lot more of when you are new in the game, but all of them are things you should continue doing far beyond the start-up phase.

1. Have a real conversation with a customer

Talking to your customers might appear so obvious a task it does not...

The short answer...it's worth a lot!

Spoiler alert
This article claims it does NOT have to be painful
Watch the video below!

Yeeeeaars ago, a survey and article Joseph Epstein in the New York Times indicated that “81% of Americans feel that they have a book in them — and should write it.”

I am pretty darn sure, the number among coaches, consultants, speakers, teachers , and others who are building a business based on their personal brand, is a lot higher!

Anyways, even among “normal” people, there is a good chance ANY person you meet would love to be in your shoes if you are an author!

As humans, we feel an urge to share good ideas.

We are superior to all other animals because this is a key strength of ours.

We feel an obligation to make a contribution to the survival, safety and happiness of others when we can.

From personal experience, I can tell you “my” authors are standing proudly in their own...