I have avoided this Blog Post for too long.

It’s almost, officially, no longer the New Year, but I want to say Happy New Year anyway. And except for the fact that this is my first New Post in the New Year, I really am stretching out this concept. LOL.

Can I really just say to you “I have been really busy” – like, “Where has the year gone already?”

Some may say “So what. Mckenna missed a blog post.” In fact, I am sure many of you didn’t notice. Some might not even care. But marketing (as I always say) is a verb. So missing that blog post means something to me.

Meanwhile, if YOU are missing doing the kinds of things YOU need to do to be marketing your business, I offer a few tips and insights into how I got to this point. I think (hope) it will be valuable to learn from my mistakes.

It started with me losing my inspiration for creating the third and final blog post in the “UFO” series. I was really excited and then I really got unexcited. Unexcited is not a good starting place and I didn’t want to just put out some words, I wanted to have something that would be helpful. However, I just lost the “train of thought” for the UFO idea. (I might get back to that someday?)

Then I lost my motivation for the whole blogging “thing” and told myself, that “it’s okay” if you miss just one post. But then, later that same day, I heard myself admonishing a client for not staying on top of blogging and I just had to laugh out loud. Do as I say, not as I do? HA!

I know: it is not easy to blog…or…

…send out emails, or create posts for social media, or upload new photos, or whatever else is on that list next to your keyboard. I get it.

So, if you thought that I thought that marketing your business was easy, I confess: it’s not and I really hope you don’t think that it is supposed to be easy. It is a very challenging task. It’s why many people hire me to do emails for them or even help with their blog posts. Many people hire others to do their social media for them, too. I have consider hiring someone to help me with many tasks, but I still need to do this blog post. No one can write this for me.

A log jam broke apart!

It was just about a year ago, when I rolled out this website and people found me and started hiring me. I couldn’t imagine what I was creating in terms of demand. But as the fourth quarter got underway, I had a torrent of requests from around the world. A flood-gate opened.

Suddenly dozens of people, who had been putting off doing much with their marketing all year long, wanted my services to get their marketing message out for the holiday buying season. I had post-its all over my computer for the correct spellings of “Joyeux Noel” for my French Canadian clients, Mele Kalikimaka for my Hawaiian clients, and Chanukah for others.

I had to mark my calendar to meet strict send dates for everyone’s needs. Some even had Halloween in their agendas! Some needed several weeks because they are actually making their products – their art. For example a pet portrait artist can’t send an email invite to someone a week before Christmas, right?

Here’s the trick: to make sure you are “too busy” to do the important things, just take on extra projects

To make sure that I was not “lying” to myself about being too busy to do my blog post – I made some other things happen that proved that I was “way too busy”. So if you find yourself missing your “due dates”, and you want some excuses, here were my personal top three ways to avoid blogging (or whatever else you are trying to avoid):

  1. Decide to travel to teach classes and give 10 lectures in 4 months including the Fourth Quarter! Booking flights, and cars, and making marketing happen for multiple locations is so much more time consuming that I dreamed possible. Creating content for my slide shows, and practicing for hours was enough of a challenge. I also spent hours inside canva.com creating ads, and posters, and flyers, and other marketing collateral.  (If you don’t know what Canva.com is, you need to check it out! Just set aside a lot of time!)
  2. Upgrade an operating system and end up with days and hours of tech support to try and get “normalized” again. It was a rarely used laptop, so I eventually just fresh installed the original factory settings. I knew this was not really needed, but again, it was a way of continuing to be “too busy”. How else could I justify not doing my marketing chores.
  3. I told myself that nobody really “needs” to read my posts, so why should I worry if I miss one from my schedule.

That last one is like going down a rabbit hole. I know at least a few people do enjoy my blogs. Silly rabbit!

Snap out of it!

Blogging, or email campaigns, or creating posts for various social media sites and making sure your website is updated is what it takes to market our businesses. In addition we all must keep learning – the endless learning – about new ways to promote our product or service. It is a daunting task. But you really must be marketing and reaching out for your audience. You must stay relevant and useful and helpful. No one will buy your goods or services if you disappear or seem unattached to your business or your message.

To help you, for now, I am including my Marketing Calendar  which I helped develop with Carolyn Edlund of ArtsyShark.com.  It’s a pdf and it’s really helpful. It was created specifically for artists, but anyone can use it. It is one of more than a dozen resources we share in the E-course the Artsyshark Success Guide to Email Marketing for Artists.

Download the marketing calendar and use it. And if you are an artist, you might want to buy the E-course, too. Just sayin….

I should have been using the calendar myself, but I was too busy being too busy. Hope you aren’t too busy to tell me what keeps you from marketing your business – share in the comments! New to this blog? Join my list after you have commented.

Stick around! Join my list so you can read my next blog post.

Almost forgot: I wrote a guidebook for selling art between the 10th of November and Jan 19th. It’s 47 pages. It’s amazing. It has an entire “system” to go with it. More on that in the near future! But this was a must do – not a project to keep me from blogging. I needed it for my return trip to Scottsdale where I will present my two topic seminar. (So maybe I was too busy?) Can’t wait to share it!

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