I find it really hard to go out & actually promote my projects in social media, IRL, in emails. What do you do to stay motivated on the sales/marketing front?
What part do you find difficult and why? We have a checklist for promoting our blog posts etc. Whenever we do a post we just follow the checklist. Takes the thinking out of it and helps avoid procrastination. For in-person, practice your pitch.
It's basically just, after publishing a blog post:
- tweet it
- retweet from personal accounts
- post on relevant forums (e.g HN, sub-reddits)
- post on relevant mailing lists
Monitor every few hours for comments, and reply. It's important you don't turn monitoring into constant browser refreshing. Set a timer if need be, and don't check for comments till the timer expires. Suggest 2hr intervals.
Start with the interesting self-created content in social media and you'll start receive subscribers so that afterwards you can tell about your products to your audience
For motivational purposes you might try focusing on the other side of the relationship, and consider the people who need your help and will benefit from your projects, if only they could find you.
And while you're there, maybe ask where they're likely to be found, how they (or you) would be searching for you, and how best their personal or business goals would be served by what you have to offer.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 28.1 ms ] thread- tweet it - retweet from personal accounts - post on relevant forums (e.g HN, sub-reddits) - post on relevant mailing lists
Monitor every few hours for comments, and reply. It's important you don't turn monitoring into constant browser refreshing. Set a timer if need be, and don't check for comments till the timer expires. Suggest 2hr intervals.
1/ State the objectives you want to achieve. They should be measurable e.g. % increase in signups, emails collected, etc.
2/ As @noelwesh mentions, create a checklist
3/ Measure the impact of each action in the checklist
4/ At the end of a 'campaign', evaluate what worked, what didn't, how to improve things, how to learn further.
5/ Iterate.
And while you're there, maybe ask where they're likely to be found, how they (or you) would be searching for you, and how best their personal or business goals would be served by what you have to offer.
Don't underestimate the Mental Game aspect of this work, it can be absolutely brutal. Recommend reading Mark Divine on his mind gym concept, unusually good >http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465530-the-way-of-seal