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The Spotlight You Don’t Want All To Yourself

by Donna Maria on September 29, 2009

Launching a business takes discipline, dedication and massive amounts of elbow grease. Choosing a brand name, creating a logo, designing a website, printing marketing materials, opening business accounts, securing financial resources … the list goes on and on. By the time you’re done, you feel like you’ve scaled Mt. Everest — and in a sense, you have!

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Once you’ve done all this work, the last thing you want to do is stand on top of the mountain shouting your awesome news to yourself and the air, right? So what’s the cure? How can you make sure that, on launch day, you have hundreds or maybe even thousands of people to share your news with? What’s the cure for standing on top of the mountain alone? Technology, that’s what!


Business Launch Without Technology. You scale the mountain, raise your hands in victory, fling your business doors wide open and shout to the air that you are open for business. Woop-d-doo! You’re excited and you congratulate yourself. You’re center stage and you have the spotlight all to yourself. But that’s one spotlight you don’t want all to yourself.

Business Launch With Technology. You scale the mountain, raise your hands in victory, high-five the other mountain climbers, share each other’s good news at your blogs and on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites (like, say, maybe this one!!?) and have a free board of directors meeting right out of the block to assess what you should do next.

Which Do You Prefer? Some people call it social media. Others call it social networking. Still others call is Web 2.0. I don’t care which trendy term you choose. Like me, you may simply call it “technology,” part of the Indie Business Trifecta. What you call it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is that you start using it before you launch your business, or as soon as humanly possible afterward, so that when you’ve scaled the mountain, you’re not standing at the top, in the glare of the spotlight, all by yourself.

Question: If you have scaled the business launch mountain, how did it feel for you? Had you used technology so you were not standing at the top of the mountain alone? If you are in the business launch process, what are you going to do to avoid having the spotlight all to yourself?

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  • Ish: Glad you enjoyed the article. Yes, I have some advice. First, decide what your goals are and who you target customers are. Second, find out where your target customers hang out. FaceBook? Twitter? Somewhere else? What are the top 3 or 4 places where they are. Third, prioritize being present at those places. Listen and watch for a while, then join the conversation naturally. Share your news, congratulate others on theirs. Share photos, videos, interesting blog posts and magazine articles that will be helpful to them. Fourth, made sure you have a blog. It can be at your ecommerce website or it can be separate (like mine is). Your blog ties everything together. Once you have a blog and a list of social spaces where your colleagues and customers are, be helpful, informative and entertaining. Say helpful things, offer helpful tips, share how your product is also helpful.

    Write the above list of things to do down, leaving space between each one. Then fill in the blanks. In a few days, you should have one sheet of paper with the above items and tasks and ideas to engage people and create the conversations that let them know how your product or service and Y-O-U can be helpful.

    Does that help?
  • Yes that's great, thank you so much Donna! I will begin working on those things ASAP, and I'll let you know how it works out for me!
  • Great article Donna! That is a terrible feeling to have...and I have experienced it! I want to build a web presence that will complement the things that I am doing, but I am having trouble both fitting it into my schedule and deciding on what are the best things to do. Any advice?
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