Marketing and the Solopreneur

I don't think Ivanka Trump is actually a solopreneur, I think she is probably an entire industry.  I like to include photos at the beginning of a post and went to PicApp [a great place to get photos for blog posts by-the-way] to find one for the word 'businesswoman.'  And I got photos of Ivanka Trump!  Well, it does show her holding a book she wrote, "The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life' and attending a book signing.  A book signing is a great marketing strategy where the producer meets directly with the buying public...kind of like direct marketing don't you think?

Solopreneurs are small businesses; actually they are one-person businesses.  Solopreneur businesses run the gamut from virtual assistant to business consultant to network marketing opportunity independent distributor to writer to artist.  Solopreneurs have all the same business stuff to deal with as businesses of any size: accounts receivables, planning, marketing, producing products or fine-tuning services...whatever the owner of the local tavern has to do for his business the solopreneur has to do for hers just in differing ways and degrees.

Marketing is important to the solopreneur just as for the huge multi-national business.  I found a great website, The Solopreneur Life by Larry Kelto, himself a solopreneur.  He has a post on his site titled, "Our Hunt for the Best Marketing Web Sites for Solopreneurs."  In an interesting take on writing a post, he has listed some great resources in the 'comments' section of that post.  It's well worth checking out.

An online marketing venue that is new to my art business is that of YouTube.  Now everyone knows what YouTube is and people are always talking about interesting, funny or outrageous videos they've seen.  What didn't occur to me until recently was that YouTube can be a valuable part of a social media marketing strategy.  I read a book recently by Michael Miller, "YouTube for Business: Online Video Marketing for Any Business."   His book does a good job covering "How YouTube can help you market your business."  He asks good questions to consider such as:

• What is the purpose of your YourTube videos?
• Who is your customer?
• What does your customer want or need?
• What are you promoting?
• What is your message?
• How does YouTube fit within your overall marketing mix?

He gives a great list of possible online strategies:

1. email
2. websites
3. search engines
4. blogs
5. social networks
6. photo-sharing sites
7. video-sharing sites

I read through and studied Miller's book with the idea of using YouTube as part of my business' marketing strategy.  My newest marketing strategy was to sign on with a print-on-demand company, Fine Art America, as I mentioned in my last post on Linda's Business Blog.  At local art events this year, prints and notecards of my art images have been selling well so I wondered how I might expand that and Fine Art America fits that piece of marketing.  Now, how to spread the word about that?  After reading the book about marketing on YouTube and looking at videos by other artists and photographers it began to make sense.  I made my first "sales" video and uploaded it yesterday which you can see below.

There are many good 'tips for making YouTube work for your business' out there just by entering that phrase into a search engine.  I found a good one at Mashable, "Top 10 YouTube Tips for Small Businesses" written by Amy-Mae Elliott.  Her tips:

1. Create and customize your channel.  As a 'first' tip this is a good one.  Miller's book gives quite a bit of how-to on this.  So, it was the first thing I did.
2. Add subtitles.  I haven't done this yet as I have yet to make a video that is a "movie" with talking; right now my videos are artistic slideshows with text.
3. Don't overuse annotations.  Seems YouTube allows you to "write over" parts of your video but I don't see the need.  I agree with Elliott that "...Sure, you want to grab people’s attention and make an immediate impression, but your video content and other info you’ve added to the site should be enough to not have to rely on extraneous text...."
4. Act to remove offensive comments.  Elliot gives good advice for this tip and so does Miller in his book.  He says, "...There's no right or wrong here. Just know that if you enable comments, you will receive some negatives one. How you respond to those negative comments depends on how your company deals with them...."  Since my company is just me I decided to enable 'moderated' comments so that I can best handle this issue.
5. Engage with the YouTube community.  This is good advice whether you are participating on YouTube or any other social media site for business reasons.  In the real world, if you belong to the local chamber of commerce and derive a portion of business from the community itself, especially business-to-business, then you really ought to go to the mixers.  Be a good business neighbor.
6. Organize your content. 
7. Don't overlook tags.  Both Elliott and Miller give great advice here.  Anyone familiar with social media, blogging, websites, and article writing knows how very important tags and keywords are for search engine reasons...people need to find you.
8. Promote your YouTube videos elsewhere.  Of course.
9. Use YouTube's free analytics tools.  I've just gotten started on YouTube and have already found value here.
10. Don't neglect your channel.  The obvious here is that making social media of any kind or variety a part of your marketing strategy is also you making a commitment to your business - a commitment of time and creativity. 

I would encourage any type of solopreneur business that is not already utilizing YouTube to take a look.  Also during this month's review of your business plan, see where this might fit.  -  You do review your business plan every month don't you?