Marketing Yourself

in Marketing Yourself

This articles is a continuation of Creating Your Success Through Balance which describes the Skills we need to create Balance in the Five areas of our life that is important.

What Is Marketing Yourself All About?

Let’s assume for the purpose of this article you have some written goals and now need to get out there as part of achieving those goals. (If you don’t have written goals read the article “Choosing Success”)

People are constantly looking for opportunities that will help them to achieve their goals.

Marketing Yourself creates a situation where there is demand for you and for your services that will help them achieve goals. While the connection seems obvious, its not always obvious to people outside the realm of sales and marketing.

While marketing usually is about generating a sale, it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

For example:

If you are an employee – you want your boss and your company to implement your ideas
If you are job hunting – you want to find a company that you want to work for and they want you as an employee
If you are a recruiter – you want clients so that you can place your candidates and you want candidates for your clients
If you manage a company – you need to find the hot qualified employees to work at your company
If you are a financier – you need to explain to companies why your expertise and money is the best solution
If you are single – you are looking to find your soulmate

But in reality marketing leads to the sale, so the same situations expressed slightly differently:

If you are an employee – you need to sell your ideas to your boss
If you are job hunting – you need to make one sale and that sales is selling your expertise to an employer. The purchase price is your salary.
If you are a recruiter – you need to find clients and you need to sell your placements to candidates
If you manage a company – you need to sell the advantages of working at your company to the hot employees
If you are a financier – you need to sell why companies would want your money
If you are single – you need to sell yourself to your soul mate (Did I really say that??? – but its true)

The problem with marketing is that most people feel that its tacky to market themselves. (For Canadians, its part of our heritage.) Or they think it only applies to a business. This is untrue as we saw above in sales. Each person, no matter what they do, must market and promote themselves to achieve the success theu desire and deserve.

In every endeavour you attempt, think of yourself as a marketing machine. This means that you must continuously help people understand who you are, what you do, and what you stand for. The stronger and better that you market yourself, the more opportunities you will find and the more opportunities will find you. Marketing doesn’t mean telling everyone how wonderful you are, it simply means letting the appropriate people know about your existence. We will describe later what I mean by appropriate.

You can meet all your goals in life. You can be approached by people who are looking for somebody with your expertise. You have the possibility of generating much greater income than you already make. You may have the possibility of doing something better.

There are many different ways of marketing yourself, but most of my readers are also one of my 9,000,000 LinkedIn Connections, I have tilted my discussion to using the LinkedIn Social Network. However, all the same principles apply everywhere else. By the way, If you aren’t one of my connections – its worth your time to check out What Is A LinkedIn Connection To Zale Is Worth.

There are two primary approaches to marketing you can implement.

The first is finding ways to reach out and touch others, and
The second is to create ways for people to find and connect up with you.

Both of these methods have an infinite number of solutions. On an ongoing basis I will be adding to the solutions presented here today. I will be writing more about different marketing solutions in the future, Use the Registration on the side to receive notice when new articles are posted to www.ZaleTabakman.ca.

Reaching Out And Touching Others

Reaching out and touching others applies best when you know exactly the kind of people you want to speak with as in my CATA Lunch With Leaders example above. The more focused you are on whom you are targeting, helps solve the conversion rate and the appropriateness problem I described above. There is nothing worse than contacting somebody who is totally not interested in what you have to offer. Its bothers them and it costs you wasted time. I will be talking about niche and long tail marketing in future articles. These articles will address how to decide whom to call and why.

Use the Registration on the side to receive notice when new articles are posted to www.ZaleTabakman.ca.

The simplest and most effective solution is to call the people directly whom needs you or your service. Telemarketing is the strongest and best way to create one-on-one relationships with people. I know that most people think of LinkedIn as a place for e-mail marketing because I receive frequent e-mail each day from my contacts, but I have only received a smattering of telephone calls from my LinkedIn Social Network connections. Most of the calls were from people looking for help on LinkedIn, only two of these calls contacted me to do business with them. I am totally shocked at that ratio. I have over 9,000,000 connections. My contact information is easy to get.

I suspect that most people are too shy or they feel that converting an online social network connection into a real one-on-one connection is wrong somehow. LinkedIn’s ease at e-mail is and introductions are another reason people hesitate to pick up the phone and call.

You can read much more about outbound calling in this article here which is found by clicking here.

E-mail seems on the surface a cheap and fast way of marketing yourself. However they are rarely an effective way of marketing and mass e-mail blasts without pre-establishing a relationship with the recipient. is the worst. Typically, you get a 2% opening rate and then you are lucky if 1/4 of those actually engage, giving an effective rate of 0.05%. Which seems to be good if you have a very large database. But the more you do it, the less response rate you will get and eventually you can be listed as a Spammer and end up forever in the junk e-mail box, in effect you have spent a large amount of time to achieve very little.

If you have a pre-created relationship your numbers will be much higher. In fact, about 25% of all my e-mails to my list are opened and the majority of those are acted upon. Why? Because (a) I try to create a relationship of some form with each of my contacts (b) I never sell them anything in an e-mail, and (c) the e-mails always provide more information about how the reader can do things better.

Lastly, there is direct mail which is all about sending somebody something in the mail. I will write about Direct Mail sometime in the future.

Having People Find You

The other major approach to marketing is to create a situation where people who are looking for a solution seek you out. The goal of this method is for people to seek you out, decide if you can help them, and then approach you to ask for your help.

I believe in living a life of Balance. I believe in being successful. My approach to life is called Success Through Balance. Marketing Yourself is just one skill in the components of a successful life. You can find my description of Success Through Balance by clicking here.

If you are looking to learn how to market yourself for the purposes of finding a job – let me tell you about the 66 Day Job Club.

The 66 Day Job Club is a virtual job club is my way to help 10,000 people find a job. The club has an online chat room, a forum to ask questions, and a series of e-letters that connect the articles on www.ZaleTabakman.ca into action items.