Don’t make pain the point
Here’s the sneaky secret nobody tells you about the motto, “No pain, no gain.” It works for some people, but not because pain is necessary. But because those people like pain.
Joel Kelly
100 posts
Marketer. Writer. Loved by all.
Charge your value or lose it
I was talking to a good friend about a business idea he’s been mulling. He presented his (excellent) plan for the work he’d do, and the clients he’d attract. And then he said, “And I think I’ll just charge a couple hundred bucks for it.” Because I can’t help myself, I immediately blurted out, “No.”
It’s not everything—it’s this one thing
Everything is overwhelming. Writing the copy for your new website. Your social media marketing. Your latent guilt over not yet joining TikTok, and your growing worry that everyone else is moving faster than you are.
How to savour uncertainty
A lot of business owners are putting off working on their marketing strategy. They’re waiting for things to settle down, for the market to become more stable, or to simply have more certainty about the way things are going to go. But the problem is that they’re likely to be waiting forever.
It’s not that it’s wrong
Most of the small business owners and consultants we work with have, at some point, worked with other marketers before. And they’ll often come with some preconceived ideas about what they feel they should be doing.
It’s never how you wanted it
If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.
You want to be weird
There are only two dependable ways to create a profitable business: By being meaningfully different from your competition in a way that provides greater value to a specific set of customers. Or by being so streamlined, efficient, and operationally effective that you can be the cheapest option.
You can’t bargain over the price
When business owners seek out a new marketing plan, it’s rarely because the last plan didn’t work. It’s because, for one reason or another, the last plan wasn’t worked.
How to build a marketing team you trust
When I work with the leaders of marketing teams, I’ll often hear that their job has slowly mutated into mere oversight.
Will it make the boat go faster?
According to Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan in The Gap and the Gain, the British Olympic rowing team had a simple secret to their success at the 2000 Sydney games. “They developed a one-question filtering response to every single decision they made."
How to cause the effects of marketing
I’ve written before about my love of bad horror movies. In so many cases, it’s clear that the director didn’t want to make a movie. They wanted to have made a movie. And there’s a huge difference between those two desires.
Why you should celebrate every day
Have you ever been stuck in the “arrival fallacy”? That’s the idea that happiness and satisfaction are one big accomplishment away.
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