Do you ever feel like marketing your work is exhausting, overwhelming, confusing, and a giant pain in the butt?

Do you wish you could just do your thing and leave the marketing to someone else?

Do the words “marketing” and “self-promotion” simply make you feel icky?

Well, I’m afraid I gotta give you some tough love.

Almost all the creative people you admire are also good marketers. It might not seem like “marketing” (especially if they’re outside-the-box types), but trust me, every successful creative person has spent a lot of time learning how to sell themselves and their work effectively.

The key is that they’ve learned how to think about marketing in constructive, creative ways.

You could spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars learning how to leverage social media or master SEO, but if your heart isn’t in it and you’re fundamentally not as enthusiastic about social media and SEO as you are about your own creative work, stop right now.

There is no magic social media formula or secret Google code that is going to solve your marketing problems for you.

There are, however, some simple mindset shifts that will make a HUGE difference in the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

If you are trying to figure out social media or SEO or any other marketing tactics without tackling these mindset shifts first, you will just waste a lot of time and money.

Let’s take a look at four of the biggest mindset problems when it comes to promoting yourself, and how to solve them.

Mindset Problem #1: Marketing takes too much time and if I do it as much as I’m supposed to, I won’t be able to work on my creative stuff.

“I don’t have enough time” is one of the most common mindset blocks that I hear. We all feel like we don’t have enough time. We all suffer from information overload and digital overwhelm.

This mental block arises from fear.

You might wonder, what the heck does fear have to do with my lack of time?

Our brains are clever. The part of our brain that is responsible for emotion and knee-jerk responses to situations, that acts out of habit and not out of rational thought, is your limbic system. Your limbic system’s number one priority is keeping you safe.

Promoting yourself effectively requires a) learning a bunch of new skills; and b) putting yourself and your work into the public realm and inviting attention. Neither of which keeps you safe. On the contrary, they make you exposed and vulnerable.

So your limbic system kicks into high gear and floods your brain with thoughts that will keep you from moving in that dangerous direction. And guess which thought is often the first one to pop up?

“I don’t have enough time.”

Why? Because it’s usually true! You ARE busy! You do have a lot of things on your plate.

It seems like the most rational, inarguable statement in the world. But it’s actually an emotional, habitual type of thought.

You do have control over your time. You do have the ability to decide what is most important to you, and what isn’t.

If building an audience for your creative work and making more money as a creator is important to you, you must take control over your time. You must consciously decide how to allocate it, and you must consciously devote a significant portion of time to things that take you out of your comfort zone.

Mindset Problem #2: I have no idea how to find my audience.

Actually, you probably already have an audience. Who likes your work? To whom do you show your stuff? Who are your favorite customers, if you have any? Who are your strongest connections on social media?

Maybe you’ll retort, “Well, Janna, of everything you just said, that’s about 15 people!”

Great! Your audience is 15 people. That is perfectly OK.

Your existing audience should be your priority. Those 15 people are super important!

They have already raised their hands to say they’re interested. By paying close attention to them and figuring out what they want from you and what they like about your work, you are setting the stage that will allow you to grow your audience much faster in the future.

Be a detective. What do they ask you about? Why are they interested in your work?

Really good marketing starts with really good listening.

The next step is to combine what your audience is interested in, with what you love to talk about. Maybe your audience wants to be inspired by dreamy, evocative stories. You love talking about the technical details of creating your work.

So you create a plan to consistently post your best work online, and tell stories about how you created it.

The next step is old-fashioned hustle. You must go out and actively grow your audience from 15 people to 16, then 18, then 23, and so on… it doesn’t happen automatically.

Maybe you start a meetup. Or host an open studio at home. Or post a weekly tutorial on YouTube.

There are countless ways to reach out and introduce new people to your work. What’s important is that you take the initiative to decide what feels right to you, and then do it — consistently.

Mindset Problem #3: Promoting yourself is annoying and drives people away.

This is the extremely prevalent “used car salesman” fallacy of self-promotion. When people think about promoting themselves, they often envision a pushy, self-important dude yelling, “Hey guys, check out my stuff! It is AWESOME!”

But this is a false stereotype. The most effective marketing is usually invisible.

You know you’ve encountered creative, thoughtful marketing when you find out about a person or a company and something they do makes you exclaim to yourself, “Wow, the stuff they’re doing is really cool!”

They’ve connected with you on an emotional level. Maybe they’re telling an inspiring story about their work; or they’re creating something valuable that makes your life or the world a better place; or they’re just entertaining you in a really engaging way.

You need to adopt the exact same approach to your marketing as you do to your actual creative work. Start by asking yourself:

• What am I passionate about? How can I share that?
• What do I know that other people want to learn? How can I teach it?
• How can I use my work to make a positive difference in people’s lives, even if they never buy anything from me?

If you promote yourself in this way, you will never drive people away. You will steadily attract people toward you.

Mindset Problem #4: I get overwhelmed by social media and can’t figure out the best place to promote myself.

That feeling of “overwhelm” happens because you don’t have a strategy and a plan. When you’re trying things willy-nilly, you feel scattered and unsure about whether your actions are effective.

These days, people tend to equate “marketing” with “social media” — but no, social media does not equal marketing!

Social media is just one marketing tool in a huge arsenal of possibilities.

There is no one-size-fits-all marketing plan. Every person and every business is unique, and the path to effective marketing starts with uncovering exactly what makes you unique.

Once you’ve figured that out, you can then decide which social media platform makes the most sense for you, and how to use it. Or you might decide to forego social media altogether and use other tactics instead.

That’s right — I believe it is possible to design an effective 21st century self-promotion plan without using any social media at all.

This isn’t necessarily what I would recommend for most people, but sometimes it’s the right choice. I mention it here because I want to emphasize that social media is just one piece of the puzzle, and not necessarily the most important piece. It all depends on you and your audience.

Conclusion

The single best way to succeed in promoting yourself is to apply the same passion, genuineness, creativity, drive, and care into your marketing as you do to your creative work.

Doing this requires that you think of marketing not as some sort of tactic that a certain breed of people do well, or that only people with a specific skill set can handle. You have to think of marketing as an integral component of your creative work itself.

Over the next few months, on this blog, I’m going to focus on how to do this, step by step. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments, does your mindset ever get in the way of you promoting your work effectively? How?