You’re ready for the BIG time. You’ve got the website. The packages. The dream. The guts. The glory.
You are out there rock n’ rolling. Blogging. Tweeting. Hell, you’ve even thrown some PR into the mix.
But your growth isn’t happening as fast as you’d like. So you are anxious, edgy and maybe even feeling borderline desperate.
There’s a million reasons WHY things are they way they are in your business, but a big one likely is the fact that somewhere along the way your expectations went seriously off track.
I could throw around some blame here that would land firmly on the shoulders of the live your dream, make millions BS crowd. Or make your first $100k in five easy steps. You know the drill.
Do I believe this is possible? Yes. Do I believe this is possible for most of us and in the way that we’re sold? No. Make that a hell no. It’s utterly ridiculous. But it puts butts in online seats and leaves the rest of us going after the dream.
Call me the dream killer. Call me harsh reality. But no PR or marketing can fix your broken ass expectations, market research or subpar product. No program has the magical solution to get you to a cool 1 million.
That’s why when someone shows up on my door with the expectation that I can fix this, I run. I’m damn good at what I do, but I’m not the Olivia Pope of online business.
[Tweet “Don’t chase a fix with PR. Focus on your body of work says @magspatterson”]
How This PR Thing Really Works
Every so often, I regret my career choice. As much as going into communications was a total no-brainer for me, I sometimes wish I’d gone into a field where I could give my clients more definitive answers.
PR, publicity, marketing is an art. It’s not science where I can say with 100% certainty that if we do X, Y will happen. The best we can do is take the information we have, apply knowledge and experience and go from there. Results may vary.
That’s why, as much as I know that if you guest post or do interviews, the results will come. They just don’t come in the same way every single time. Or in the same form. One person may get 100 email sign ups and 3 sales from a guest post, while one may get 20 sign signups and that’s it. Sometimes you get lucky because you are in the right place at the right time. Other times you will need infinite patience and a whole lot of faith.
The act of promoting your business, consistently month over month is where the real magic happens. Little things add up to big things and you start to build momentum. Smaller opportunities turn into bigger ones. That’s a practical PR approach to getting things done.
That’s my friend is how it’s done.
[Tweet “The real PR magic happens when you focus on turning the little things into big ones”]
If you are going to play the PR and publicity game, you need to stop seeking a quick fix and focus on how this contributes as part of a bigger push to meet your business goals and your body of work.
All of your efforts from interviews to speaking engagements to guest posts come together to build into a body of work that establishes you a thought leader. That’s what helps you sell out programs, book your calendar for months to come and helps get you to the BIG time, or at least on the road to where you want to go.
