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Guest post by: Helen Dowling Become an Author

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I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day about our newsletters. He said he received them and I asked him whether he found them useful. He said he did, but mentioned that 70% of what I included, he already knew. Good point, I thought - but often it's not about what you already know is it? There's very few new things in this world, so the chances are fairly high that you're going to come across what I cover somewhere else.

The point really is this - even though you heard my messages before or come across them somewhere else, have you actually done anything about it? Have you taken any action on your marketing?

Now, I know we're all busy; I know we've all got things we need to do and get on with, but if you don't take action on your marketing and put into place some of what I talk about, you're missing a massive opportunity for your business.

I'm not exaggerating when I use the word ‘massive' here. If you're getting business and you're doing little or no marketing, just imagine what could happen if you actually did some marketing?

There are usually three things that stop small businesses doing any marketing - I thought I'd cover them in this article and then (hopefully) you'll have no excuse and you'll have to get on with it.

Reason number 1 is the fear of being too busy. People really talk themselves into this one. If they got tons of new customers from doing some marketing, how would they cope with the extra workload?

I can understand this fear to some extent. After all, you may not want to take on anyone else and you may not want to get that big in your business.

But, let's also be realistic here. The chances of you being snowed under with work after doing some marketing are very remote. If you did some marketing today, it would take between 2-3 months to actually see the results of that marketing. You would also be able to see business increasing and then choose to scale down your marketing accordingly.

When people give me this reason for not doing marketing, I always tell them that we should get them to the point of being too busy first and then we'll worry about it. Getting too busy will take a lot longer than you think and doing a bit more marketing than you're doing already is unlikely to get you to the point where you need to employ someone else - it is likely just to even out the peaks and the troughs, which is probably not a bad thing.

Reason number 2 is not knowing what to do. When you first start in business, most of us try the traditional marketing methods of advertising, cold calling, direct mail or leaflet drops and networking. If these don't work as well as we want them too, it's very difficult to know what to do next.

If you're not sure what to do next to market your business, most of us fall back to relying on word of mouth and referrals in order to get business.

What if I told you that there are over 100 different methods to get business, most of which cost nothing at all to do? If you'd like to see 50 ideas to promote your business, just drop me an email - details at the bottom.

Reason number 3 is just not having any time to do marketing. This reason is an accumulation of the first two reasons - in that, because people don't know what to do and they're worried about getting too busy, marketing doesn't look very attractive to them.

Consequently many small business owners find lots of other things to do before they get on with doing any marketing. And as I said earlier in this article, if you've got customers with little or no marketing, you probably do have lots of other things to do too.

With this reason, I would suggest a couple of solutions. The first is to get yourself a marketing coach who will work with you to keep you motivated on marketing. I'm putting together a new membership group launching in 2010 called The Marketing Gym to address this very problem - more about this shortly.

The other solution is to get a company to do your marketing for you - again I'm very happy to have a chat about this - just give us a call.

The simple fact is that even though you know that you should be doing all of these things I talk about, it's hard to actually get motivated to do them. The first two reasons for not taking action are relatively easy to sort out, but if you really haven't got the time to concentrate on marketing, drop us a line. That way, your marketing will get done, leaving you time to do what your best at - running your business.

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