Welcome!

My son is seven months old. He can’t talk yet but he loves it when you sing familiar songs.

Whether it’s Twinkle Twinkle or or Patty Cake, he can go from crying to laughing in a matter of seconds.

That’s the power of familiarity.

As humans, we are naturally drawn to things we are familiar with. There’s a certain comfort in knowing something enough to become familiar with it.

As an independent marketer, your goal is to build that familiarity into your brand.

So how do we build familiarity with our audience?

The best way to build familiarity with your audience or target market is to be consistent.

There’s a few ways to do this:

• Communicate the same things consistently (i.e. sing the same songs)
• Show up regularly (sing the songs at least once a day)
• Show up often (i.e. sing the songs multiple times a day, every day)

The power in all of this is consistency, repetition, and frequency—which is easier said than done!

That’s why consistency is such a big pillar in any marketing strategy. Without it, you don’t build the familiarity required to keep a figurative smile on the face of your audience.

There’s a certain comfort in knowing what to expect. Our minds can’t handle too much uncertainty. We like closure.

What things should you communicate consistently?

The best way to communicate consistently is to maintain a stance on specific things. Something you feel strongly about.

Having a distinct point of view and talking about it from many different angles becomes your form of familiarity. Your flavour.

Those who agree with and relate to your point of view will keep following you. They will look forward to your deep exploration on a few topics they agree with, too.

So what do you feel strongly enough about that you can turn into your “themes”?

If you think back to your favourite bands, what did you like about them? What made you keep buying their albums over time?

I’d guess, it was their style. You liked their lyrics, instrumentals, and/or their unique persona.

And what about those bands that lost you along the way? Chances are, at least one of two things happened:

1. You outgrew their style
2. They changed their style

When we like something, we want as much of it as we can get.

When we feel strongly about something, such as a life goal or belief system, we kind of tie our identities to it. It becomes part of how we see ourselves. It says something about us.

So, we seek to validate our worldview. We want to reinforce our beliefs and we do that through repetition.

The repetition brings comfort. Like your favourite song or album from your teenage years, it feels good to know every nook and cranny of it.

We can’t get enough.

The thing about frequency and recency

We naturally trust things or people we see most recently or most frequently. That’s why politicians try to drown out the airwaves with their messaging.

That’s why they pick one or two phrases and say them until they are blue in the face.

The more often we see things, people, ideas, and brands, the more likely we are to trust them. It’s a bias we all have.

So, in order to build in familiarity and create trust with your audience or target market, you have to be consistent and show up frequently. We need to do it in a way that aligns with their beliefs and identity, too.

This is key.

Yes, it helps to be authentic and transparent. It also helps to blend in your story and unique personality.

But the thing that drives the most familiarity is repetition, consistency, and frequency.

So what do you stand for? What ideas can you own? What aspirations do you share with your audience/target market? What can you repeat consistently until you’re blue in the face?

Try it out. Go deep on a few big topics. See what resonates.

Once you find your unique flavour, stick to it. Evolve it if you need to, but do so conservatively. It’s repetition that matters. People stick to a unique flavour they like.

Be everyone’s favourite nostalgic rock band. Keep singing your songs.

—k

P.S. I asked Twitter what their best writing tips were yesterday. There were lots of great replies. Check it out and say hi to me while you’re there!

When you get busy, the easiest thing to drop off your schedule is self-promotion.

And yet, self-promotion is the only way you have a business.

It’s like watering a plant; you can forget to do it for a while, but eventually, the plant will die. When you stop self-promoting, your business starts dying, too.

Everything you do means you have decided NOT to do something else. Whether you realize it or not.

You don’t have unlimited time, resources, and energy. You can’t be all things to all people. You have to make choices and trade-offs.

And one of the choices you need to make as an independent professional is to show up every single day.

That’s right, every day. Not every-so-often. Every day.

I heard Dan Kennedy say that you’re not in the business of whatever it is you do. You’re in the business of getting clients.

I’m paraphrasing, but that stuck with me.

I realized that delivering good work was table stakes (still important). But it wouldn’t be possible if you weren’t able to keep getting new clients.

So, what if you’re too busy to keep marketing yourself?

• It might be time to raise your rates
• It might be time to redesign your services
• It might be time to start productizing your expertise

Business is an iterative game.

I spoke last week about how I went from hobbyist to employee to freelancer, to consultant, advisor, educator, and so on over the course of nearly 20 years.

When I got too busy as a freelancer, I hired sub-contractors. Leverage.

When I got busy as an agency owner, I stopped marking up other people’s time and starting selling marketing strategy, management, and oversight as a fractional chief marketing officer. 100% margins.

When I got busy as a fractional CMO, I removed project management from my scope and started selling purely consulting and advisory services. More time back.

Now I also sell info products and a membership program for my niche consultancy, which is further helping me stop trading time for money. I’m creating an asset I can sell repeatedly.

Bringing it home

Whenever you do—don’t stop marketing yourself. ​​It will be tempting. You will be tired. You won’t feel like showing up. But do it anyway. Every day.

Your job is to create opportunity for yourself. You must keep showing up. Again and again and again.

I recently invested in a Buffer account to help me schedule some posts and keep my content going.

I also write two newsletters, do group coaching, and run a membership in addition to private consulting and workshops. I’m busy.

But I make no excuses. I keep showing up.

So if your goal is to remain independent, you have to keep iterating your business model, freeing up more time, and investing everything you can BACK into your marketing to ALLOW you to keep levelling up.

Otherwise, you’ll stay at the level you’re at—trading time for money. Never fully realizing the upside that you could have.

Make the trade-off to invest in your marketing, even if it comes at short-term cost.

​Otherwise, the trade-off will be made for you in the form of fewer opportunities.

As an independent professional, you want to make a great income, control your schedule, enjoy the work you do, and eventually, free yourself from trading time for money.

In other words, you want to be truly independent.

For many, this seems like a far-off dream that is more fantasy than reality. But in reality, it’s just a series of steps you can climb.

Yes, it will take time. No, you can’t skip to the end without putting in the work. But you can build a roadmap and you can work the process until you get there.

So, without further ado, here is the path of the Independent Professional, as I see it and have experienced.

​​My hope is that it inspires you to find the path that’s right for you.

1. Employee

When you first start your career, chances are you still have a job. Maybe it’s not anything to do with your core skill.

It’s just something to pay the bills while you figure out what skills you have that are even marketable.

For many years, I thought my skills as a web developer weren’t really super valuable. I started building static HTML websites in about 2001. I started treating it like a “business” in about 2006. Every job I worked in, I ended up designing a brochure or building a website for them.

But it wasn’t until much later did I realize it was an actual marketable skill. My career was largely in the hospitality industry after university until I suddenly found myself in a corporate job as a web administrator.

Then it clicked—not only did I have extremely valuable skills, but I could also sell them to people and make even more money than my corporate job.

Enter, freelancing.

2. Freelancer

I started taking my freelance web design skills seriously when I got my corporate job in marketing. I had just finished a post-grad certificate program in Entrepreneurship and I knew I wanted to be doing something of my own, but I wasn’t able to support myself with it full time yet.

So, I did what I advise most people to do: freelance on the side.

I probably broke a few rules by not disclosing the fact that I had a side hustle, but the way I saw it, it was after hours, on my own time, and I was sharpening my skills which I immediately used to improve my work.

I wasn’t competing with the firm I worked for (different industries) and frankly what I did on my own time for my own personal contacts was up to me.

Anyway, the side gig eventually started paying what my corporate gig was paying, but I was getting exhausted doing both.

I worked… a LOT.

So, I saved all my money from freelancing, had a few clients and some momentum behind me, and eventually went out on my own.

I charged by the hour ($50, then $75, then $100+). Way better than my corporate job, right?

Well, I eventually ran out of time in the day, and frankly, my skills were being pushed to their limits. So, I hired a sub-contractor. A web developer in the Philippines, with whom I still work today.

And so, life as a “contractor” began.

3. Contractor

Sure, I was always a contractor in the eyes of the client. A freelancer and a contractor are interchangeable terms. But now I had a sub-contractor working beneath me.

This was my first taste of leverage.

I would find the clients, scope the work, get an agreement, then hand off the instructions to my developer who would work opposite hours from me at ~$15/hour.

He was—and still is—amazing at his work. This helped enormously.

Now, I would hand off the work, it would be done by the next day without my involvement, I’d pay him a fraction of my hourly rate, and suddenly it felt like I had a business!

I was “making money while I slept”! Or, at least kinda.

My margins would get eroded over time if I did a lot of fixed-work projects and under-scoped.

Eventually, I was doing a range of digital marketing work and had an entire remote team of sub-contractors working for me.

Money was a bit better, but boy did I have to do a LOT of work. I was making about 30% “profit” at the end of the day (aka income).

I wasn’t confident enough to raise my rates (another issue entirely), which meant I needed to do a fair amount of volume to make a good living.

But revenue was recurring, so I had a relatively stable base amount of income to work from each month, which helped.

I managed to end my first year with a similar income to my corporate salary (~$60k), and it went up from there.

4. Consultant

For me, a consultant works on projects, produces deliverables, and generally implements complex solutions with a combination of their hands and their strategic expertise.

It’s like a freelancer mixed with an advisor. A higher level engagement than a typical freelancer but still using “hands” and not just the “head”.

In about 2017, I was doing ~$250/year in revenue but working way too hard for the money I made at the end of the day.

I read a book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz and it changed everything.

Actually, the book itself didn’t have much of the info that changed my perspective. But the idea of building guaranteed profit into your business from day one was what changed things for me.

I had a wave of inspiration based on two factors:

1. I only wanted to do what I was best at—which I felt would lead me to success.
2. I wanted to build my profit into every engagement UPFRONT instead of hoping it shakes out in the end.

I knew what I did best (and love doing) is matching business goals with marketing strategies. I’m a natural strategist. Some people love to code, I love to solve business problems with marketing.

So, I started selling just that. I sold a “fractional CMO” service to my first client in 2016 or 2017 and that began a path away from “implementation” to “advisory/oversight/management”.

The clients would pay me a fixed fee, I would basically bring in and manage the other suppliers, and they would charge the client directly for their work without my markup.

I’d win because I built a sizeable margin into the engagement for me ($4k/month with no sub-contractors).

The client would win because a) they didn’t need to hire a marketing manager yet and b) they could benefit from direct supplier pricing (like my web developer who was under $20/hour).

I ended up taking on a second client like this and suddenly it became too much. I realized that “managing” the implementation was not scalable.

Managing the marketing of two big clients was like having two jobs. I had no more room to do work for others.

Which brings me to the next part…

5. Advisor

Advisory is where I live and spend most of my time today.

I basically removed the “managed” part from my scope of work, putting the task on the client to push projects forward and handle the back-and-forth (which is hard but low-value work).

They still got my advice and oversight. I still made intro’s to freelancers and specialist consultants to implement the work we did (avoiding the need to get stuck on “who’s going to actually implement this?”).

I became a trusted advisor. Neutral about who we chose to work with or how we got the results. Similar to a fiduciary financial advisor, for a fixed fee I would help the client get results and was not incentivized to “do the work” for more money.

It’s a bit like comparing a butcher to a nutritionist. If I ask a butcher what to eat, they will say meat. If I ask a nutritionist (who doesn’t sell the food and therefore has no financial interest in the answer) they will suggest a wide range of options to keep me healthy.

Or, like when you go to a car mechanic and they tell you you need a new “Johnson Rod” (Seinfeld reference).

You have no idea whether you can trust them or not. They’re financially incentivized to “do more stuff”. It doesn’t make them unethical, it just puts the responsibility to make a good decision back on you, the buyer, who is not an expert at cars.

It works the same in marketing.

And this has worked quite well for me. Pre-pandemic I was able to generate about CAD$30k/month (USD$~20k) consistently in pure advisory retainers.

Ongoing, month over month revenue. Stable and consistent.

I was (and still am) able to work on client work mostly after 12pm and be done by 5pm each day, even with up to 10 clients.

I work on my business in the morning and with clients in the afternoon. It just works.

I’ll get into this more in future articles, but a big help in achieving this success was having a two-pronged strategy: specializing in an industry while maintaining a more general position here on this (separate) website.

Specializing allowed me to guest on podcasts, speak at conferences, build a niche audience on my email list, sell workshops, coaching, membership program, you name it.

Specializing is a life hack.

But having a general site (this one) to bring people to at the same time helped me buy the time needed to build up my specialization and client base in the process.

I didn’t market it, but I did have a place to point people to who came from word of mouth/referrals and were not in the coworking industry (my specialization).

I was still specialized “horizontally” as a marketing strategy advisor but also vertically by industry. It worked well for me, even if it’s against conventional logic to have two positions in the market. I still do this.

Onto the next phase.

6. Educator (leveraged info products, paid subscriptions, memberships, workshops, and group coaching models)

Specializing helped me become a known industry expert where very few exist.

As a result, it helped me begin to sell info products and membership subscriptions. This is an area I’m still learning, but it’s the most exciting to me so far.

Having a membership (with about 30 members) forces me to create webinars and a “system” I can produce once and leverage many times. It’s scalable.

It allows me to take some of that content and package it up into smaller chunks, such as a mini-course on web design for coworking spaces. More leverage and scale.

I’m now in the process of creating additional small products to see if that sells better than my membership program. My hope is that bite-sized products are more convenient for people to buy than bigger products, so that’s my plan. We’ll soon see!

I also had some success running a group coaching cohort of five coworking spaces, which is where my focus has been since the pandemic. It’s a lower-cost option for clients and I can design a curriculum that is easy to repeat next time. It also sold right away, which is a good sign.

I’ve also started to sell workshops to groups of coworking spaces, which has been another interesting way to use the content I’ve produced before. I can sell it in 4 one-hour segments, and create a high return on my time.

My goal is to eventually live off information products and membership subscriptions so that my time is highly removed from my income. At this stage, so far it’s mostly been about removing mental blocks around what is possible and getting out of my own way.

7. Advisor Equity

This step is what I imagine will come at some point in the future, especially if I continue specializing in the coworking industry.

The idea that your skills are rare and strong enough to get paid in advisor equity shares is something that is totally realistic, but I have not yet tried to do it.

This would allow me to remain at the advisor level—to be a trusted and valuable guide—but without being in the trenches every day dealing with the minutia of marketing (which is something that drains me).

The strategy piece is what I am good at and gives me energy. That’s all I want to do.

True wealth comes from equity, so I imagine this level being fun and challenging when the opportunity eventually arises.

If you figure this out, let me know!

In closing

There are many steps and nuances to this that I did not cover. Things like selling mostly recurring revenue engagements (which was important for me), productizing your services, and various other details along the way that helped in this process.

I’ll cover that another time.

In the meantime, I’d like to know what stage of the journey you’re at.

Leave a reply and/or tell me what you are up to on Twitter.

Platforms come and go. Algorithms control what we consume. The rules are always changing. We need to “pay to play”.

Does this sound familiar?

The Internet was founded on a belief in an open exchange of information.

And in many ways, that’s exactly what it is.

But as tech matures, big players have amassed major audiences on the back of your content. Companies like Google, Facebook, Medium, Shopify, and more.

Now, they throttle attention, decide what people see, and/or constantly change the rules without notice.

If you rely too much on any of these platforms for your business, you’re putting yourself at some degree of risk.

Some examples:

• Search engines like Google push your website further down the search results, putting ads front and centre instead.
• Social media sites like Facebook show your posts to fewer than 10% of your followers.
• Shopify limiting integrations with MailChimp because it conflicts with their interests.
• Apple setting the rules for companies like HEY in their app store.
• Platforms like Medium get you to invest your content in their platform only to put a paywall in front of it several years later.
• Companies like Amazon suddenly changing their affiliate commissions from ~8 to ~3%.

Copyblogger popularized a term for this called digital sharecropping (originally coined by Nicolas Carr). It stems from the feudalistic farming days when people would grow crops on land owned by the landlord—becoming subject to their rules.

There are endless examples of companies changing the rules and putting businesses in jeopardy.

As an independent professional, you need to decide what you’re going to “own” and what you’re going to “borrow”.

My advice is to own your core platform and not build it on borrowed land.

The four ingredients of an independent platform

There are at least four things you can “own” as part of your marketing stack/platform.

1. A domain such as yourname.com. This is the foundation for everything.
2. A self-hosted, open-source website with your domain pointed to it.
3. An email newsletter and mailing list.
4. A podcast/blog RSS feed.

Building your business with these four ingredients will make your business less vulnerable to disruption.

Why? Because they are mostly open. As long as the internet exists, they are free to use with limited disruption.

Much like a ham radio, they’re in the hands of independent people.

But aren’t you still beholden to third parties?

Yes, it’s possible for your domain registrar to shut down (pick a good one). But I’ve never heard of that happening and there would be upstream ways to reclaim your domain if it did.

Yes, it’s possible for your website host to shut down your site. But you can always move it, or at worst, host it from your own computer.

Yes, it’s possible for companies like Gmail to mark your domain as spam across their platform. But if you own your list, you can always switch sending addresses.

Yes, it’s possible for Apple to hide your podcast from their app. But anyone with your self-hosted RSS feed can add it manually.

As much as a person can have a truly independent platform, this is what it looks like.

Closing thoughts

There’s something romantic about an independent platform. Your voice, your message, your rules.

And while that idea might seem idealistic, it’s closer to the truth than not (assuming you’re not doing illegal things).

As an independent professional with a voice, I plan to be around a long, long time. Platforms will come and go. Social media sites will die off and change.

But your domain, website, email address, mailing list, and podcast feed are all yours to keep. You can transport them anywhere you want.

So, those are where I will invest most of my time, resources, and content.

From there, I’ll supplement my presence with social media, advertising, and other things that rely on third-parties. They’re still valuable.

But I’ll never build my house in those places. I’ll never rely on a single platform for anything.

My house is an open-source, self-hosted website built on a domain I own, with an email list I own, and perhaps a podcast coming in the future.

Got something to add? Leave a comment below!