Reaching Your Ideal Audience

See also: Nonduality in Branding + Business

Admittedly, the hardest part of building a profitable business for me was branding myself.

I struggled internally for years with how to represent myself, how to own my breadth of knowledge.

It wasn’t a BAD thing to have so many certifications and experiences, a rich portfolio and many different avenues of possibility for profit… it just seemed convoluted in my own head and being, and probably confused the hell out of other people as well too.

Some knew me as a savvy webmaster and social media manager, strolling into meetings in heels and a blazer, whipping up designs and schooling people about branding and social media execution, public speaking and training agents of how to own their own marketing…

While just as many if not more people knew me as their respite and spiritual oasis during THEIR busy corporate lives.

Just as many if not more knew me as their barefoot yoga and meditation instructor teaching about the breath, body, and consciousness.

Still others knew me from advanced creative nonfiction workshops, a hardcore wanna-be writer withholding my deepest, deepest dreams of becoming a published novelist.

The truth? I am all of these things and always have been. I didn’t know how to hack myself up and didn’t want to any longer.

So, as I started to create my courses, products, and sales funnels, I also inherently struggled initially with how to reach the right people.

Many knew me as a marketing expert professionally presenting myself in corporate boardrooms.

Many more met me in their corporate boardrooms, but to lie on the floor with a huge group of their coworkers and get into the depths of guided meditation.

I served different purposes to different people and thus had to figure out how to reach these people in different ways.

My purpose is to serve people—but what do you want from me? How do you know me and what are you here to seek?

See also: eCommerce, email marketing, and tagging.

Pinterest was an obvious answer for me. I’ve always had a lot going on, and Pinterest was the perfect solution and search engine for me to organically reach the right people who had an interest in a particular avenue of what I could offer.

On Instagram, people knew me predominantly as a yoga and meditation teacher who loved to post inspirational quotes, books, and other such things. Never, ever had I promoted my marketing on that platform.

And after years of managing multiple social media platforms for divisions of the same business, I found that to be not only tedious, ridiucoulsy redundant in building TWO followings, doing TWICE as much work to ultimately lead them to the same place…

Pinterest was my way to corale the right people to my website, services, and products.

Also, though I have a pretty wonderful following on my platforms, only a handful of those people were my real life clients. People knew me in different ways and instead of ripping out my hair, I relaxed into this obvious reality and made it work for me.

AKA: you!

However could I have written this anticipating that you, of all people, should land here and read these words?

I couldn’t have.

This used to terrify me.

The idea of potentially creepy or dangerous strangers reading my words, knowing my class schedule, learning more about me in a one-sided relationship unknown to me freaked me out.

In an era of little privacy, I disliked the idea of putting myself out to the unknown masses… knowing that if I were to ever reach the level of success as many of my greatest heroes, my reach could eventually extend to millions of living, breathing human beings.

That was really scary to me for a long time.

So I sat back and felt blocked my an inner yet then subconcious block of fear. Fear of failure, of looking stupid and writing ridiculous words… but mostly, I eventually recognized, was a fear of success—a way more terrifying alternative that maybe people WOULD read my words… and then what?

A fear again of failure, of reaching the masses and having them reject me on a grand scale.

Anxiety girl, able to leap to the worst conclusion in a single bound. LOL.

Dammit, husband.

The thing about building a business or writing words to a mostly unknown audience with a vague of who is reading, watching, or actually caring, is that you want people to actually want to be there.

Without creating a free gift (which I'll get around to, promise) or an incentive of some sort, somehow, magically, I have attracted hundreds of new subscribers to my monthly newsletter.

I appreciate each and every one of you more than you know, and mostly, because you are choosing for some reason to receive these monthly emails, and to me, is that not the whole point of writing—to make deep meaning with mostly strangers, to leave a lasting impact or something to subtly change a person's life or perspective to help them in a tough time or bring more joy into their present lives?

To me, that's always been what it's about. As a result, I have taken what feels like forever to finally come out as what I am and what I've always wanted to be: a writer, an artist, and an entrepreneur.

It's intriguing to contemplate how else building a successful business could be done without owning who and what you are, and what you most value, cherish, and believe in.

To find success, it seems it must first stem from a genuine respect, liking, and belief in your own very self.

At one point or another if you hope to write, you are alone. Like a stand-up comedian you are choosing to stand up on a stage and project your observations and perspectives to an audience of mostly strangers.

As a writer, we tend to take the less ballsy risk of standing in front of people. Though we are granted the luxury of time and solitude, we are often a very isolated bunch, literally living inside our own heads, in our imaginations and ideas.

This whole free-write stemmed from being obligated to get put on an email list to a national store that I very much like and spend money at, but don't want to be blasted daily with advertisements.

I clear my inbox to zero each day, for God's sake. Ain't nobody got time for trimming excess.

I was brought up in a small town to treat others how you'd like to be treated.

I do not like to be pressured into buying things or making decisions on the spot.

Consequently, this is not how I want to treat my clients, my customers—people just like me.

This happens to make me a relatively nice person and an absolutely terrible salesperson.

But despite my slow growth to financial stability with my business, I'm not upset at the many months I went without profit.

I had to learn in my own way how to "become" a writer, how to just be everything I already was in an authentic way that didn't make people feel like I was selling out or was a total d-bag.

Seemingly more challenging than I originally anticipated.

Was I not a narrator?

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