Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business

Chapter 9. The Keys to Marketing, Promoting, and Building Your Community

In the business world, if you can't market it, promote it, and leverage it, you might as well not do it. That is the fluff-free reality of it. You can have the world's greatest product. You can be the world's greatest person. You could be an absolute all-star at creating content. But, if it doesn't spread and reach the right people, you will have a cold glass of no sales mixed with a shot of irrelevance.

A big misconception is you create something incredible and everyone comes beating down your door with money, fame, and glory. Does this happen? Maybe once in a zillion times.

Rookie Mistakes: Zero Patience and Wasting Time

Although I've emphasized the importance of smarter, faster, and cheaper (as opposed to dumber, slower, expensive), don't confuse "faster" with "instantaneous." At the end of the day, all of this takes time. Very, very few people watched Wine Library TV for the first eight months when Gary Vaynerchuk initially launched it. My first blog posts got about nine views. Eight of those views were my dad. Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software and author of the A Smart Bear blog, told me in an interview that he started blogging, and blogging, and blogging ... a lot of time passed ... and then after several years it became popular.

Realize that a community and audience isn't built overnight. It evolves and grows over time. But the time you spend will be worth it.

If you are impatient like me, this ...