Maggie Patterson

You’ve got a smokin’ hot package or service, you are out there hustling on social media and blogging like a fiend, but things are slooooow. Even worse, you are starting to panic because you were SO sure this was IT.

It could be a lot of things from poor market research to simply bad copy on your sales page. But amid the hype every where you turn about launching your 6-figure program and messages about making millions on the Internet doing what you love…there’s something freakin’ missing.

The Numbers Game

Selling anything on the Internet is a numbers game, which truly is no different than in the “real” world. If you were opening up a brick and mortar store you’d do research to make sure you were on a street with lots of traffic or in the right neighbourhood.

When we set up shop on the Internet, we neglect to think about our foot traffic. Instead we keep putting out signs in front of our store hoping people will come in. We blog. We post on Facebook. But if enough people don’t know we are there, they cannot buy from us.

There’s two type of marketing – push and pull. When we push, we are doing the type of marketing where we focus on sending out our message such as blogging or social media. With push marketing, we are basically our own journalists publishing our content.

On the flip side, pull marketing focuses on bringing people to us. These are PR and publicity driven activities such as guest posting, speaking, interviews, and more.

Push and pull marketing should work together in harmony to create the strongest possible platform for your business. Push marketing without the pull is like peanut butter without jelly or Bert without Ernie is straight up wrong.

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Why Your Push Marketing Isn’t Working

Push marketing is powerful, but the reality is that you need people to push it to for it to actually work.

Do you need a million followers? Definitely not. But to sell effectively you need the pull part of your strategy.

You can talk about yourself and your ideas all day long, but the real magic happens when you have someone else giving you a big old vote of confidence in your business. Every single guest post or interview signals to the world that you are someone who’s credible and knows their stuff.

Forget the social proof of 2500 followers on Facebook, press and publicity is equally – if not more – powerful.

It’s just way too easy to ignore the pull part of things and not go beyond our own blog and social media bubble. In fact, many entrepreneurs simply don’t do it because it takes time and energy. And let’s face it, pushing out of your comfort zone and figuring this all out can be downright intimidating.

PR, publicity, promotion…no matter what you want to call it, you can totally do it yourself and have it be a game changer in your business. In fact, it can actually be a lot of fun once you learn the ropes.

Which is why all month long, I’m focusing on talking about publicity in a really practical and tangible way on the blog. I believe so much in the power of publicity to transform a business by bringing the right people to through your door. So, stop playing it safe with your self-promotion this Summer and let someone else promote you instead.

I’d love to hear your two cents on PR, publicity and promotion. If you are so inclined, you can fill out this survey below.

[Tweet “Publicity can transform your business, so stop playing it safe. New blog post. via @magspatterson”]

“Without publicity there is no prosperity.” – Yakov Zel’dovich

Last week I was listening to author Lewis Schiff on a webinar and something hit me in the gut. Hard. So much so, that his words are stuck on a continuous loop in my head more than 7 days later.

Schiff’s book Business Brilliant studies the mindset and habits of the middle class versus those of self-made millionaires and billionaires. It’s fascinating stuff and I’ve read the book at least three times in the last year.

On the webinar, he was talking about how the middle class approach to things teaches us to work on improving skills where we are weak. How the school system and traditional workplace train us into this focus on skills improvement, when in reality we should really just work on what we are really really good at.

Is this new information? No. Call it the zone of genius, your sweet spot…whatever you call it, for the love of entrepreneurship, it’s a message I needed to hear. It’s something I knew in grade 12 when I dropped math because it was dragging down my GPA and a career that involved math at that level was never going to happen.

All these years later, why in the hell do I think I need to be able to “do” everything in my business?

Does this Sound Familiar?

Do you do everything because you love to learn?

Because having someone else do it costs too much?

Or worse yet, you don’t trust anyone to do it quite like you?

Hi there. Guilty as charged!

I’m a dabbler because I like to know how things work. I don’t want to eat my profits any pay someone else when I can do it super quick…and it turns into an hour of Googling because I am so damn stubborn.

Who’s with me?

I will say this, I’m probably 100x better at delegating and outsourcing than I was a year ago, but after judging by my reaction to Schiff’s point, I still have a long way to go.

DIY mentality is keeping me (and maybe you?) firmly in a middle class mindset.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m here to do more than I ever would working for someone else sitting in a cube watching the minutes tick by as I look forward to cupcakes for someone’s birthday celebration at 3 p.m.

The things that we suck at, we need to stop doing as soon as humanly possible. The things we’re mediocre at should probably go too…because are you in this to be medi-fucking-ocre? Exactly.

Three ideas to get you on the road to ditching your mediocrity:

1. Start by keeping track of the stuff you loathe doing or that makes you slightly insane. That should be the first stuff to go. Figure out what you are really good at and start mapping out a way to focus on that only in your business.

2. Simplify your product/services or niche. Ditch things that aren’t working in your marketing or business. The social network you hate or video blogging that makes you want to barf – hasta la vista!

3. Get help. If you can’t hire a VA, project manager or subject matter expert quite yet, figure out a way to do it. Trade services, offer to help in lieu of payment, get a side hustle to pay for it, save like a mad woman to get what you need.

Persistence is the key to all of this. It can be done, but not if you simply file it away as “one day” or “not right now”.

Life is too short to be mediocre. And really, there’s enough of that going around. Save it for your friends who hate their job and spend all their time living for the weekend. You and your business deserve more.

What’s one thing you can get off your plate to help you be just a bit more brilliant starting this week? How can you ditch your mediocrity? Hit me up in the comments below.

[Tweet “Life is too short to be mediocre. You and your biz deserve more. via @magspatterson”]

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you’re likely asking yourself how you’re going to balance everything over the Summer. It may be your kids or just ensuring you have enough “fun”….but it’s kind of intimidating isn’t it?

I’ll admit, this is an item of much discussion in my house as my husband’s shifts have changed which means no support from him during work hours Monday to Friday. It’s unexpected so I’m left to patchwork things together so my 10-year old mini me is entertained and I don’t go insane in the process as I run my business full-time.

Welcome to reality. 

It’s not 4-hour work weeks or 7-figure passive income streams. Or glitz and glamour as you travel the world. Enough with the steady diet of easy lifestyle entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is hard and we are consistently fed a steady diet of this lifestyle dream that exists for only a few. Over here in the real world, these concepts are like magical unicorns we’re all chasing and we have this underlying guilt when we work too much.

Even if you simply want to spend your days sipping margaritas poolside or hanging from a rock cut, unless you have a plan in place, that’s just not going to happen. Last time I checked, someone needs to do the work.

A Heavy Dose of Summer Entrepreneurial Guilt

The last thing any entrepreneur needs is guilt over how they are spending their time as they build their business. All that hustle and heart should totally be respected and not diminished. Especially going into the Summer when we may be forced to make choices.

[Tweet “Summertime isn’t all glitz and glam – don’t feel guilty about your hard choices with @magspatterson “]

Yes, we are in charge. We are the B-O-S-S. And sometimes being the big kahuna means we’re going to kick off midday for some fun, but other days it means we’re going to have to pull a 17 hour work day sunshine be damned to deliver on time.

But it is so worth it, right?

Here’s three things I totally endorse as things to help you get more out of your summer as a guilt-free, summer’ loving entrepreneur.

1. Wildheart Community

Have you ever looked around a community and thought…this is so not my scene? If you are a ruler breaker, freedom seeker and want a place to work on your business, life and love…Sally Hope’s Wildheart community is where you need to be. Get on her list so you can stay in the know and get in on her next intake into the community.

2. How Not to (Summer) Break Your Business

Mamas, my friend Megan Flatt has put together an awesome guide designed to help you stay on track and run your business this summer. I’m using Megan’s guide to help keep me from breaking…and you can get her free guide here.

3. Get Help

Hey you, Wonder Woman, put down your lasso. Stop trying to do it all on your own. Sometimes we need to get help so we can keep things moving during certain times. There are no bonus points for going it alone. Take out your notebook and write down everything you need to do. Then figure out where you may be able to get help. Be brutal about it. If you need help with taming your to-do list, check out this service from April Sullivan.

Let’s all vow to be guilt-free, give people preaching “easy lifestyle” the middle finger and enjoy fun in the sun while we can.

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