It’s been over a year now since I took up the “I’m self-employed” reigns and blimey, the things I have learnt!  I take my learnings from the self-development and marketing courses that I have taken and also the observations that I have made whilst networking.  I can now put people more or less into 2 different camps.  We all like a good categorising of things – so people kind of fall into old and new ways of marketing in my eyes, sometimes both.

The old way is the personal networking, the buying of advertising space, the cold calling etc.  The new way is social media, not actually leaving your desk, but being in front of a computer and having the opportunity to connect to not thousands, but millions of people.  Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying log on and there they all are waiting for you, everything in business takes effort after all.  If you can get a grasp of both, my personal opinion is that you are going to crack it.

Another thing that I have learnt is that people, at this current time – call it recession, call it an economic downturn – don’t want to develop their minds, they want to stay afloat and keep paying the bills.  They want business to be a success, they want to have a holiday that perhaps they didn’t get to have this year.  With this in mind I have to update my business model, I have to move with the times.  I have to take what is important to me and combine it with what is important to the people who I meet.  If I truly want to help people, I have to offer them the help that they need and not the help I want to give them.

Another major point of learning for me is that it is great being in a classroom or at a conference venue getting hints and tips for having a very successful business - it is the putting it into practice that is the most important thing, with this in mind not only will I help people with strategies and step by step plans for their social media, I will do it for them!  If people don’t have the time to dedicate to something that they can’t grasp or don’t see the point of – why I go the whole hog and do it for them?  That is helping out in a way that people can value and appreciate.