Your Moral Obligation To Market Your Business

Jay Abraham, one of the world’s leading marketing experts and a major influence of mine, is famous for his statement to convince all entrepreneurs and business owners of the importance of promoting and marketing our businesses with all of the time, money, effort and skill as we possibly can:

If you truly believe that what you have is useful and valuable to your clients, then you have a moral obligation to try to serve them in every way possible.”

I wrote about this in a post on this blog a couple of years ago, where I pointed out, in part:

When it comes right down to it, there are really only three areas of any business:

1. Generating Leads (marketing)
2. Converting Leads Into Customers/Clients/Patients (sales)
3. Fulfilling the promise of the sale (the “doing” of the business)

In my 30+ years of consulting to thousands of business owners, the overwhelming majority of them tend to hide out in this third area of their business, concentrating almost all of their time, effort and resources on the “doing” of their business. If you ask them what they do, they’ll define themselves in exactly that way (“I’m a dentist,” “I’m a plumber,” “I’m a lawyer,” etc.).

The question I implore you to ask yourself every day when you wake up – and indeed, throughout every day – is:

What will I do today to promote and market myself and my business?”

It struck me two weeks ago that I haven’t gotten this point across clearly enough on this blog, which is why I’m making it here.

So what happened two weeks ago?

I asked a simple question at the end of my blog post, and said “I’ll choose one response to award a business promotion opportunity that I know you’re going to love!”

According to my website tracking statistics, over 650 people viewed that blog post (of course I can’t know how many actually read it), yet only four people – FOUR! – posted a comment.

This alerted me to the alarming fact that the overwhelming majority of my blog readers are NOT constantly thinking of and looking for opportunities to promote their businesses – in other words, not fulfilling what Jay Abraham calls their “moral obligation” (I refuse to believe the alternative: that all of these business owners and entrepreneurs simply do not truly believe that their product or service is “useful and valuable” to people).

So, I conducted another test.

This time I made it even easier (or so I thought)…

In last week’s post, I again encouraged readers to leave a comment, this time blatantly inviting everyone to unabashedly promote their businesses to their heart’s content, by telling the story of their own entrepreneurial journey – and even including a link to their website!

The result? Even fewer responses than the week before.

In fact, only ONE reader took the couple of minutes to type out his story and post it for hundreds of others to see!

This made me realize that while every entrepreneur and business owner definitely HAS an “origin story” of why and how we started our business, only a very few know how to tell it in a way that it is compelling and attractive to their ideal prospects.

The good news is that once you know how to tell your story in the right way, you automatically have something that makes you and your business stand out from the crowd in a unique way – something none of your competitors can ever take away from you.

Therefore, I’ve decided to take three steps…

 

• First, I’m officially announcing the winner of my contest from two weeks ago: For posting the best response, I’m going to interview Jennifer Trapane and feature her on an episode of my soon-to-be-launched “Rhino Daily Podcast,” which will potentially be heard by thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Congratulations, Jennifer!

 

 

• Second, I’m going to teach a special, fun “workshop” session at the upcoming “Spring 2014 Success Summit” on March 22nd in Schaumburg, Illinois to personally help everyone in attendance to craft your own unique, compelling entrepreneurial story in a way that will set you apart from the crowd and attract your ideal clients, customers or patients.

 

 

• Finally, I’m going to make it SUPER-EASY for you to promote your business right on this web page: Simply leave a comment below with the name of your business and what you do. If you want, feel free also to explain why you are an excellent choice to do business with and/or include a link to your website or any other contact information you want.

 

(*If THIS doesn’t get some responses, then I think I’ll have to question my website tracking statistics…)

Promote away, business owners and entrepreneurs!