Day 402 – Friday

So I’m doing this thing to build my marketing email list for my business.

When I add people to my marketing email list they get an automated welcome message letting them know a little more about the list and asking the favor of emailing me back with their biggest business challenge. It’s a way to solicit ideas for future writing and to do customer research.

Happily a handful of people have written back and it’s been good info.

One in particular wrote back two paragraphs and we had been trying to find a time to meet so I tried harder and we met today.

She runs her own business and despite not wanting to be focused on money her biggest issue is not enough money and customers. Funny how that is. And not really having a focus on a specific client. And trying to differentiate her business of making custom gift baskets from people who make custom gift baskets for their business.

That last bit might be confusing. If we imagine that her superpower is coming up with just the right custom gift selection for a given client, then what she is doing is definitely not a commodity product. And that service is what she needs to sell.

She wants to go for the corporate market so I gave some pointers on how to improve her Linkedin profile. And a bunch of other pointers. She was happy and grateful. Another fan. I learned a lot. We will keep talking.

As always, my strategy here is to provide just enough help to get people going so they can make enough money to afford me. Plus I’m very sure she would pay for the online course I’m eventually planning on making better social media profiles for your business. (There is a lot of strategy in that which people don’t take the time to research.)