Did you know I’ve always done my own marketing?
It’s true!
Not very impressed yet?
For a small business just starting out in 2018, not only did I not have funds to allocate to paid advertising and marketing yet, I actually wanted to challenge myself to learn the industry in order to understand and track my growth, in addition to making necessary changes when something wasn’t working. The knowledge I’ve acquired over the years is how I’ve ended up in countless published materials, across numerous business websites, high-end advertisements, helped re-brand entities, and grow other businesses from a Google search result of 0 in their industry to the front page in less than five weeks and no paid sponsorship!
The turning point for me was the Southern Women’s Show in 2018, which was not only an invaluable learning experience, it provided me with the ability to network with some amazing people I continue to work with to this day!
As networking is natural for me, it has become my favorite way of extending my industry roots. And because I love photographing people and events candidly, I collected email addresses, imported them into my email campaign database, and gave the people something they wanted at the end of an exciting event: high quality photos of them, their audience, and their products. See, I wasn’t the only business owner there; this event provided a fun experience for thousands of people in a single weekend in addition to allowing other business owners to get directly in front of a very large audience. Being able to showcase the business owners in a way that exhibited their hard work was - and still is - something I’ve always been eager to do. (It. Makes. Me. So. Happy!) The result was so much traffic to my website in such a short amount of time that I ended up in the number one spot on the local SERP and my business took off from there.
Of course, unexpected events can and will occur. Unfortunately, my hiccup was COVID-19, at which point I prioritized one of my other biggest passions: nursing. (I was always exceptionally grateful to have this degree and talent on which to fall back as I witnessed hundreds of my friends loose their jobs during this time.) However, in exiting the nursing industry indefinitely, I began focusing on the growth of other people/businesses. -Another invaluable learning experience as it became further validation that my time and efforts could (and should) only ever be utilized in growing my business first.
But, a true educator at heart, I always become excited to share my knowledge and talents with others. Nothing makes me happier than witnessing the growth of another business and it makes that happiness just a little sweeter knowing I had a heavy hand in it.
That’s why I’ve decided to market my own marketing skills and create a level of transparency with my audience where they can track my growth as closely as me.
November was the start of several brand new adventures for me and I absolutely can’t wait to share over time what has already come to fruition! But it only made sense to use the month of October as a starting point as I was doing very little for my own business at that time.
I continue to research and experiment with old techniques and strategies, in addition to allowing myself to be creative enough to implement some new and innovative ones!
I invite you to join my email newsletter and keep checking back in for marketing tips and updates through my online analytics tracker! I’ve already seen significant growth in just the last month and can’t wait to share more as the numbers continue to climb!
