Blogging about your struggles with marketing – tweeting about not having enough clients – describing the loneliness of being self-employed … all that bleeding and struggling and suffering in public is really, really bad for your business.

Being in business can feel difficult and lonely.  Been there, done that, and I’ll undoubtedly be there and do it again, over and over.  We all do.

Asking your customers to support you emotionally as well as financially is unfair

It won’t build your customer base. 

It won’t make your marketing easier.

It will drive away your customers. 

You will struggle even harder to market your work and make sales.

A friend and colleague calls it “sucking the life force out of your customers.” 

Your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are not “just friends” – they’re potential customers and referral sources

When you’re on any social media platform – Facebook, Twitter, your best friend’s blog comments, LinkedIn, and anywhere else online – you’re there as a representative of your business.

I don’t care if this seems “fair” or not; it’s reality.

And it’s even more real and important if your specialty – what you do – is at all related to what you’re complaining about.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to buy from someone who in one moment is promoting her ability to help me do something, and in the next moment is bemoaning her inability to cope with a similar situation. 

I may be very sympathetic.  I may write a supportive tweet, blog comment, or email.  But I’m certainly not going to trust her to help me … so I’m certainly not going to buy from her.

Sometimes the lessons we learn as we struggle are valuable for our clients.  Sometimes telling the story of what we overcame can be useful in helping our customers overcome similar problems and reach similar understandings.  There are a number of bloggers and consultants I know and respect who are very good at using stories of their personal experience to create powerful expressions of credibility and expertise.

But please, for the sake of your business, wait till you’ve solved the problem before you write about it.

Everyone needs support sometimes.  I’m not for a second suggesting that you cut yourself off from support.  I am saying … do your bleeding in private, and not all over your customers.  Join a mastermind group, ask for help from a circle of close friends and family … whatever works for you. 

For that matter, if what works for you is to write about it in public, then go for it.

Just don’t believe that you have a business if you do.  Because you don’t.  What you do have is a social support network.  Which is perfectly fine, if that’s what you want.  But you might want to consider finding another way to pay your bills.

I know one person who searched for her tagline for over a decade.

Other people seem to change their taglines as often as they change their socks.

And still others are like terriers:  no matter how much they recognize that they need to drop it and walk away for a while, they remain stuck, worrying at their tagline, incessantly trying to find the perfect phrase that exactly captures what they do.

Taglines are hard – legitimately hard.  But for some reason, we think they should be easy.  After all, they’re short, and they just say what we do, and we know what we do!

But they’re hard.  And while I don’t have a magic formula for creating a tagline, I do know the two main reasons why they’re hard.  Hopefully, this will help you relax a little (if you’re one of the terrier sort), or feel less weird about changing yours (if you’re one of the clean-socks sort).

1. They’re short. 
   It’s very hard to express any idea – especially an idea as complex and emotionally significant as your tagline – in just a few words.  It’s easy to explain anything in a lot of words – as 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have made this letter longer because I had not the time to make it shorter.”   It’s hard to use just few words.
2. They require you to really get your customers’ experience. 
   And as I’ve written in several places – especially the “blind spots” blog posts here recently – it’s very difficult for any business to really understand their customers’ experience, even – and especially – when we’re so aware of the solutions we offer.  We simply see our work from a completely different perspective than our customers.

My strongest advice to you is … relax.  Let your process of creating a tagline be messy, and let it take some time.  Play with it.  Allow your customers to tell you what it should be.  Try out different options in your networking conversations and pay attention to what people respond to.

I know of one successful small business owner who doesn’t even have a tagline.   Because of its strong headers and focused content, her website is clear about what she does, so the lack of a tagline isn’t even noticed by the majority of her readers.  So not having a tagline hasn’t hurt her business at all!

I know it’s easy.  Just go to WordPress.com or Blogspot.com, or whichever free blog host is your preference, and it’s magic.  Within minutes, you have a blog. 

You put a link onto your website, and there you are.  You’re a blogger!

Well…  not quite.

When you exile your blog to an external host, you take a serious hit in terms of what a blog can do for you – and how readers will view your professional reputation.

Google and other search engines love websites with relevant content that’s updated often.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, sounds like a blog to me, too.  But when your blog is exiled to a remote host, it’s not part of your website.  And so none of the search engines consider it when they’re evaluating the relevance of your site – or considering your site’s search term ranking.

Then there’s a difficult choice:  do you have the blog open in a new window (thereby really emphasizing the fact that it’s externally hosted), or do you allow your reader to leave your website? 

It’s a no-win choice.  You certainly don’t want to allow an interested reader to escape from your site (and as far as I’ve seen, there’s no easy way to enable seamless navigation between your site and an externally-hosted blog).  Yet opening your blog in a new window is a dead giveaway that your blog is in exile. 

And professionally speaking, it’s sadly amateurish to have your blog exiled to a remote host.  Whenever I see an external link – whether it leaves the home website or not – I always end up downgrading the professionalism and web-savvy-ness of the business involved.  Even, sadly, when it’s run by someone I know and respect.

It’s not hard to have your blog on your site.  You can incorporate a WordPress blog into your site very easily. 

WordPress itself is free. 

And you don’t have to change your entire site over to WordPress in order to incorporate a WordPress blog with exactly the same look-and-feel as your current site. 

Yeah, unless you know a little HTML and CSS, you’ll have to pay someone to create a WordPress theme that looks and behaves like, and integrates with, your site.

But if you’re going to go to all the trouble of writing a blog … why wouldn’t you want to reap the benefits it gives you?

The benefits of better search-engine rankings for keywords and relevance.

And the benefits of appearing like the professional you are.

So please … don’t exile your blog!

“Not enough time” is a reason for not doing an enormous number of things.

I’m convinced it’s 99% untrue. 

Seems to me … we do what we really want to do.

So don’t tell me what you don’t have time for.

Tell me what you do have time for.

I write marketing content for a living, and I still stop and look and think:  Is this a feature, or a benefit, or what?

And I can clearly remember my early days trying to understand the difference – and ending up confused about which one, features or benefits, I was supposed to be focusing on.  (It’s benefits, just in case you were wondering.) 

I also remember my past life in the corporate world, helping the sales staff write proposals and conduct sales meetings with clients…and even those professional, high-$ sales guys didn’t always get it right.

For most people, the linguistic distinction between “feature” and “benefit” – your understanding of the difference between the two words – is subtle, to say the least.  You might even call it obscure. 

So if you’re confused sometimes, don’t feel bad.  Instead, look at it this way:  you’ve got a lot of company, since it’s something so many people struggle with!

Here’s one way to decipher it.

A feature is a part of your work that matters to you.  It’s probably something you’re especially proud of, and therefore are eager to talk about.

A benefit is something that matters to your customer.  It’s what they get from working with you.

(Want to get really geeky about it?  “B” for Benefit comes right before “C” for Customer.  So the Benefit is what matters to your Customer, and so it’s what you want to focus on when you’re talking to them.)

Benefits and features should be closely related (if they’re not, you’re probably not selling very much).  They’re often, though not always, flip sides of the same coin – which only serves to further complicate things!

I recently had a fascinating discussion with a colleague about this whole question, including ways to help people really get the difference, and really get what it means to talk about your work from the customer’s perspective.  The whole conversation is far too much to go into here, but I’m chewing on it and thinking about how to turn it into a workshop and/or a workbook. 

He made two key points.

1. Everyone operates from a perspective of “what’s in it for me,” also known as WIIFM (the oldest radio station in the world!).
2. Even when this is explained, and even when people think they get it, they still don’t get it.  WIIFM operates on such a loud, wide, powerful bandwidth that it drowns out other perspectives even when you’re trying to see them.

I can remember thinking, way back when, that it didn’t really matter.  Of course, that was because I was so frustrated trying to figure it out.  

It does matter.  And it’s not hopeless.  But it takes practice to stop listening to WIIFM, to set aside all those lovely aspects of your work that you’re deservedly proud of, and to step into your customers’ world.

What’s your experience trying to distinguish between benefits and features?  Do you feel like you’re successful?  I’d love to hear your success stories, and I’d also love to hear of your challenges. 

Let’s open this up and see if we can help distinguish benefits from features.  What are some that you’ve been working with, and how have you approached it?

Have you noticed how many people in business for themselves use an email address that’s not connected with their website?

They’re using the email they get through their internet service provider.  Or they’re using one of the free email services.

So their email extension (the bit after the @) is something like cox.net, san.rr.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, or hotmail.com.

There’s no excuse for this.  None.

I know many self-employed folks aren’t technical.  I get that, and that’s perfectly okay.  But there are plenty of people out there who can help you get a professional email address set up.  It’s not hard!

Here are the two biggest reasons why this is important.

1. PROFESSIONALISM 
   Simply put, if your business card has an email on it that’s not related to your website, I immediately – probably unfairly, but there it is – feel as if you’re not really serious.  There’s an implication that you’re running an expensive hobby, or that you’ve only just gotten started and aren’t really in business. 
2. Marketing! 
   If I can figure out your website URL from your email address, I might go look at it.  (Do you do this?  I often do.) But I never have that option if your email address doesn’t have your website URL in it.

Your website hosting service should include unlimited email addresses.  If not unlimited, it should certainly include at least enough for you, your partner(s) or team member(s), your webmaster, an assistant, and maybe a generic “info” email.

If you don’t know how to set up an email with your website URL, find out how.  Find someone who can help.  Get it done. 

And then reprint those business cards.

That is, if you want people to take you as a serious professional.

Everyone loves getting referrals.  It feels good to know your work was appreciated and trusted enough to be recommended, and it’s a wonderful way to enroll quality clients with relatively little effort.

As delightful as they are, referral clients are also a two-edged sword.  They can cut both ways – positively and negatively – and need to be handled carefully.  Because if you screw up, even the slightest bit, with a client who found you through someone else’s recommendation, you risk cutting off that stream of referrals. 

I recently referred a client to the photographer who took the photos I use here on my website.  I’d enjoyed working with this person, and I thought he did a good job for a good price.  So I was happy to recommend him, and have done so several times.

My client had a very different experience.  Not only that, but when she gently mentioned that she wasn’t happy with the results of her photo shoot, the response was unhelpful – it boiled down to “too bad, so sad.”

I’ll never refer business to this photographer again.  I’m emailing everyone I’ve told about him in the past to tell them the story and suggest they look elsewhere.  And although I’d planned to call him when I need my photos updated in the future – well, I’m sure it’s obvious that I’ll be looking for someone else.

Being unresponsive to any customer has the potential to hurt your business.  Sometimes it’s necessary – I’m the last to suggest we should all bend over backwards to take abuse from a client! – but it should be done consciously and carefully.

Being unresponsive to a customer who’s been referred to you is even more likely to hurt your business, and in my view, makes very little sense.

Being unresponsive to a customer who’s been referred by someone who works with people in your ideal market … well, sorry, but that’s just dumb.

I was going to start the week by writing about how doing what works - by which I mean, what works for YOU, not what works for anyone else – is the best way I know to succeed.

But then Marissa Bracke beat me to it.  So I felt a bit stuck about what to post instead.

And then I spent yesterday morning in the most fantastic meeting with a corporate client.

This is a delightful company who I won’t name because I haven’t got permission and there’s no one there right now to ask (it being almost 8:00 p.m.!).  They brought me in to help them do market research to validate key assumptions they’re making about their customers and their marketplace.  These key assumptions are foundational to strategic business decisions they’re making – decisions that will set the direction for what’s next for the company.  Serious stuff.

There’s a lot that’s fun and interesting about this company and the project.  What I’m particularly interested in – and very happy about having a part in revealing – is how they’ve got a powerful cultural attribute that they were overlooking.  It wasn’t figuring into their strategic discussions, and it was likely to be badly undermined if they’d taken the direction they were thinking about.

What was the attribute?  A deep commitment to customer service.  A bend-over-backwards commitment.  And they simply didn’t recognize how important it was, how much their customers appreciate it, and how valuable it could be to leverage it as they move into new ways of doing business.

As I told them and also mentioned in a previous post here (There’s Value in Them Thar Blind Spots), this is incredibly common.  In fact, I’d say it’s universal:  every business, whether it’s a solopreneur operating independently or the largest company in the world, has blind spots about what their customers value. 

The largest company in the world probably doesn’t need or want help figuring out what their blind spots are. 

But if you’re an independent, or a small- or medium-sized business, you really want to look at this.  Whether you’re making strategic changes in your business model or planning to keep right on going the way you are, you want to look at this.

It’s something you’re already doing.  It’s something your clients appreciate and value.  And if you only knew what it was, you’d have something very cool to include in how you talk and write about your work.

It’s something that could significantly increase your success.  And not only that, because it’s something you just do, naturally and pretty much instinctively, it’s something that, if you were only aware of it, you could focus on a little more … and have more fun DOING and MARKETING your business.

Seriously, folks.  This is no joke.  This is something worth paying attention to.

My client?  They’re paying attention.  And they’re choosing to put strategic focus, attention, and structure around what they already do naturally.  I can’t wait to see what happens for them!

When I talk with people about their websites, one of the first things I often hear is, “I get great feedback.”

It’s always comforting to hear people say nice things about your website.  It makes you feel good to know they like your design and they think the content is clear and informative.

Nice.

But … what are they doing?

Because the only thing that really matters is the action that people take when they land on your site.

And if what they’re doing isn’t what you want them to do - then all that good feedback doesn’t mean much, does it?

We all, without exception, have blind spots in our understanding of what we do.  I see it in myself.  I see it in my clients.  I see it in my colleagues.

No matter how aware someone is about what they do well, and no matter how diligent they may be in gathering top-quality testimonials that help them understand more about what their clients appreciate, there are always blind spots.

And those blind spots hide gems.  Nuggets of value that you provide to your clients without realizing it.

I posed a question along this line to a mastermind group of small business owners that I facilitate.  I asked them to reflect on things they deeply enjoy doing – but that they’re not bringing into their businesses.  What would it be like to put more focus on that talent or activity, and bring it into their work more fully?

In a subsequent meeting, one woman, Rebecca Everett, was excited to share her report.

She’s a performance coach.  As she describes it, she works with individuals and organizations to help them improve team and individual performance.  Her particular approach is to target what she calls “interaction intelligence” – since it’s the quality of the interactions between people that ultimately determines performance.

As a result of my question, she had rediscovered her love of music and singing.  She’d signed up for classes, joined a group of fellow singers, and was scheduled to perform publicly in the upcoming month.

We were thrilled for her, of course.

What I found fascinating, though, was that she prefaced her story by saying, “I don’t think this has anything to do with my work.”

A performance coach doesn’t think that taking voice lessons, joining a group of performers, and performing in public is relevant to her business. 

Yet I’d bet that the ways she learns and grows personally in her singing and performing will impact - perhaps subtly, but probably quite directly - the work she does with clients.

And I’d also bet that potential clients would love to know this about her, and that it would be a real boost to their feelings of confidence and trust in her abilities.

Don’t misunderstand, and please don’t think I’m just confused here.  I get that it seems like we’re dealing with two different meanings of the word ”performance.”  

But … are we really? 

Isn’t it true that how an individual or team performs in their work is, in many ways, about performing in the sense of being present in their role, being alert to their audience, being able to show up in situations and interacting with people in ways that may not be altogether comfortable?

It’s fascinating to me how we all have blind spots about what we do.

What are yours?

And if you see mine, will you please point them out to me?

I get that this is tough, believe me. That’s why I created the business intensive workshop. A BIG part of what we’ll work on is this whole question of really getting your value to your clients. From your clients’ perspective. It’s all this blind-spot stuff, and then some.