When you try to learn marketing, you’ll come across a lot of “tips and tricks” to get more visibility on social media, more traffic to your website, more ways to “grab” the audience’s attention, more software to automate your outreach. 

Sometimes you find a few marketing tricks that feel authentic to you -- if so, keep using them and keep trying things that intrigue you.

Most of the time, though, learning marketing means always feeling slightly (or very much) behind... there’s a constant pressure to keep up with the latest trends and techniques, otherwise risk falling behind others.

Breathless. 

In this post, I offer you a deeper and more sustainable way of doing marketing that you can count on, month after month and year after year.

I used to fear that people would share my paid courses forward, without their friends paying for it.

I would try to lock down my content, putting password protections on it, and making people feel badly if they even considered sharing my paid content.

One day, I realized that those protections were futile.

Most people are honest and honorable, and shouldn't be made to feel like suspects. And the very few who might share my paid content with people who didn't pay for it, are going to find clever ways that I cannot prevent. Plus, karma always eventually comes around.

Also I noticed something interesting:

Every ounce of energy I put towards fear of theft/piracy was at the same time stifling my creativity.

What’s more important than trying to get more clients?

• Getting great clients that truly respect you
• Maintaining your sense of integrity

Neither are accomplished by using marketing strategies that feel “off” to you.

Although some people will buy when we resort to hype and manipulation, it increases doubt about our integrity, in our buyer’s mind, and in ours. The best clients will be pushed away.

This is marketing from desperation energy.

We empower whatever we fight against… especially if the enemy is intangible, such as “limiting beliefs”, which can multiply based on our rich imagination, and our continued attention on “clearing” them. 

I’ve written about this before: Don’t worry about your limiting beliefs.

So, although I don’t believe in limiting beliefs, I do see the evidence of limiting structures, i.e. the systems and processes of someone’s life and behaviors.

You are in charge of the structures of your life. (Unless you’re a child, or you’re in jail!)

​Limiting structures include: