I hear this question a lot. And let me give you the bad news first. . .

Short answer – You can’t.

BUT the good news is you can market your message in a way that’s totally in alignment with your values.

Here’s the problem with trying to avoid marketing altogether – people won’t know what you have to offer. The only way you can create transformation for your clients is to let them know how they can work with you. That requires marketing and asking for the sale.

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When most people think of marketing, they think of advertising. That’s not exactly true.

While advertising is a part of marketing, that’s all it is. A part. Marketing is much bigger than that.

A better way to think about marketing is anything you do that touches either your customers or potential customers.

Yes, I do mean anything. Whether it’s sending an invoice, handling a complaint call, running a radio ad or sending an e-mail, you’re marketing your business if you’re touching a customer or a potential customer.

That said, let’s talk about ways to use marketing to increase business and get new customers. To simplify things, I’ve broken it down into five key components:

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Having worked with thousands of creative women entrepreneurs over the years, I see the common trend: you fall into the “safe marketing” place. Doing what everyone else is doing, using the same descriptor words, offering the same types of products and programs…and then wondering why your marketing efforts aren’t paying off with client interest and joint venture opportunities.

Turn your marketing around with these three Marketing Mojo perspectives.

1. What is your Movement? People don’t want to be marketed “to” or “at” anymore. Their days are too busy – they want to be moved. They want stories, passions, reasons to take action. They want hope and solutions presented to them that will change their routines and better their worlds in some way – whether it’s because they’ll change their habits, they’ll heal, they’ll laugh, they’ll be entertained, or they’ll achieve their dreams.

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When I was 14, my weekends were taken away, and I was put to work. No, I wasn’t tossed into a juvenile chain gang…. I was born into a family business and my time had come.

I worked at my Dad’s Flea Market all through high school, and the place was interesting to say the least. From a product perspective, there were collectibles, antiques and things from people’s garages. You had bikers, cholos, eclectics, artists, thrift shoppers, collectors, antiquers, and a host of others filling the place every Saturday and Sunday. Regular folks (and this was decades before eBay) would drive in each weekend to set up and sell their wares, others simply wandered around enjoying the atmosphere.

The Flea Market was a very colorful place, which is putting it lightly. If I were to pitch it as a movie, I’d say it would be a cross between “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Northern Exposure” and “The Apprentice”. Irreverence was part of the brand.

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While internet marketers have online businesses, not all online businesses consider themselves internet marketers.

I was recently introduced as an “internet marketer” and was surprised at the immediate feeling of “oh no, not me” that welled up inside.

Before I ask whether you think of yourself as being an “internet marketer” or having an “online business”, let me share the definitions as I see them:

An internet marketer appears to focus first and foremost on the money — how much can he earn and how quickly?  He tends to send lots of emails and is always promoting something, whether his product or an affiliate’s.

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Once you’ve figured out your niche (or you’ve at least narrowed it down significantly), it’s time to figure out what problems they are struggling with, and what they want by way of solutions. Remember, if you will only ask your market, it wants to help you create the products it wants to buy!

How do you find out what your target market wants? There are several ways to get this information and use it to help you create an offering that will solve your niche’s problems and make a profit for you at the same time.

The best way is to do your research. The most critical research to do is to join the conversations that your market is having:

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Contact 5 Live or Silent Auction committees and donate one product or service to their upcoming silent auctions.  This may require you do a little research to find upcoming silent auctions.  You may do this in your local community or you can do a national search and offer a product to be shipped or a telephone consultation depending on your target market.

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Take your top ten article, and turn this into a Tip of the Day for your voice mail. If you have a phone system that will allow you to have multiple mailboxes then you can set up your voice mail to say something like “To speak with Susan press 1. To listen to the tip of the day, press 2.”

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The Grand Poohbah Speaks:

I recently had the pleasure of experiencing a marketing epiphany while having my car washed.

Let me explain. On Saturday, I got a call from a friend saying that a local family had organized a car wash to help raise the last few thousand dollars they needed to qualify for a first-time buyer mortgage. She explained they were “this close” to achieving their dream of raising their kids in their own home (rather than apartments) and were asking the community for help.

They first had enlisted friends and co-workers to put out the word (referral marketing).

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Taking my struggling consulting business online and following the business model I now do turned everything around for me, financially and otherwise. So when I started hearing from my mentors that I might want to add some offline or direct marketing tactics back into the mix, I was hesitant to say the least.

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