Castle building for beginners: marketing yourself — Bitfield Consulting

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Jul 13

Jul 13 Castle building for beginners: marketing yourself

John Arundel

Photo by Karl Hedin on Unsplash

“Marketing” is everything you do to help people know you, like<br>you, and trust you.

—Sam Bennett

Are you a self-driving<br>person who wants to run your own business? Great! It’s about time<br>you started earning what you’re actually worth, as opposed to what your<br>employer deigns to pay you. To do that, you’ve got to cut out the<br>middle-man and start selling your value directly to customers.

See, it doesn’t matter how fantastic you or your products are if<br>nobody knows about them. “If you build it, they will come” is just for<br>the movies: in real life, you’ve got to get the word out, and no one<br>else is going to do it for you.

That’s where marketing comes in. This is yet another of those<br>wonderful and mysterious things that you probably never thought about<br>when you were an employee, because someone else took care of it:<br>probably someone from the marketing department.

Now that you’re the marketing department, there’s a lot<br>you’ll need to know, so let’s get right to it.

What we’re doing here

When you create a product or service, it’s wise to start with a clear<br>picture of who will be interested in buying it. Of course it would be<br>lovely if your product appealed to everyone, but when you aim<br>at too many targets at once, there’s a danger you might miss all of<br>them.

Let’s visualise the situation as follows: there’s some set of people<br>who would likely buy your product, and another set containing the people<br>who know about the product. Your potential customers live in<br>the intersection of these two sets: they’re in the market for what you<br>sell, and they’re aware of it.

It doesn’t matter how big either of the two sets is, in itself: what<br>matters is by how much they overlap. If everyone on Earth knows about<br>your stuff, but doesn’t want it or can’t afford it, you’ll starve.<br>Conversely, even if a billion people want, need, and would happily buy<br>your product, but they’ve never heard of it, you’ll still starve. Your<br>business will live or die based on the size of the intersection in this<br>Venn diagram. (High school math turned out useful after all!)

Build your castle on your<br>own land

It makes sense to create a single website where people can go to find<br>out about your business. This will be the hub of your marketing efforts,<br>so ideally it will also be the place where people can buy your<br>products.

The website is essentially the home of your brand. It’s well worth<br>investing a little to get your own DNS domain (maybe $15 a year) and web<br>hosting ($20/month): once you’ve bought your land, you get to keep all<br>the value you add to it.

Rule #1: Build your castle on land you own

—Don’t<br>Build Your Castle in Other People’s Kingdoms

Only in your own kingdom can you truly be in control. Other people’s<br>kingdoms may offer you greater visibility, but there’s always an<br>ulterior motive, and it’s usually profit—for them, not for you.

For example, if you write a tutorial or blog post on Medium, you’re<br>building business value for Medium, not for yourself. If you post a<br>video on TikTok, you’re building business value for TikTok. If you write<br>a thoughtful essay on LinkedIn, you’re building business value for<br>LinkedIn. You get the idea.

Yes, some crumbs may drop from their table onto yours, but crumbs is<br>about all you’ll get. If you want a square meal instead of a starvation<br>diet, you need to own the table. That means all the value you’re<br>creating should be visible under the name of your brand, not someone<br>else’s.

Your website doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to convey three<br>key points about the product (even if that’s you):

What it is

What problem it solves

How to buy it

Just one page with this information, or one page per product<br>offering, is fine. That way, all you need to give out is the link to<br>this landing page, and people can go there to find out<br>everything they want to know.

“Take my money!”

Remember, the whole point of your website is to smooth the way as<br>much as possible for people who are excited about your products or<br>services to be able to purchase them. It’s not there to win design<br>awards. It’s there to oblige people who are practically shouting at the<br>screen, “Take my money!”

For example, the article you’re reading right now is an extract from<br>my book Master of Your Domain, and<br>if you follow the link you’ll see the product page for it. The “take my<br>money!” button is right there at the top, but if you need more<br>convincing, you can read about the benefit:

Many engineers dream of working for themselves, but the path<br>isn’t obvious. How do you find clients? How much should you charge? How<br>do you market your work without feeling like a salesperson? Where does<br>money come from when you’re not employed by a company?

This book is a complete manual for the self-driving independent<br>engineer. It covers everything you need to know:...