Create stuff. Give it away. Repeat.

There. You now have the secret to marketing.

…

Oh, you want to read more about this? Okay.

Most marketing, especially inbound marketing, is built around the idea of creating something of value to your audience and giving it away. Then you repeat that over and over and over.

Write a great blog post, promote it, write another.

Create an open source library, release it, add features, release it again.

(It’s not a very different process than your actual paid service.)

I like to define marketing as a regular, repeatable process to bring you clients.

And there is no stronger way to bring you clients than to deliver a ton of value for free.

Think about it if things were reversed.

If you needed a website for your new business, what would you do? You’d start by searching online or asking a friend what’s involved in building a website. What should it look like? What should it say? How does it appear online?

If a company had a page on their blog talking about the "10 Must Have Elements for New Websites", that would catch your interest. If that company mentioned a free whitepaper they had that discussed the process to building a website, you’d want that.

By the time you’ve read the blog post and the whitepaper, you’d know much more about the process to building a website. Maybe enough to do it on your own, but you’d probably be shocked at how large of a project it is. I mean, you’ve got your new business to run and you don’t have time to learn how to code a new website.

But this web design company, they seem to know what they’re talking about. If they gave away such high quality information for free then they must be experts at this. So you’d contact them about creating your website.

This story shows what could be going through the mind of your ideal client. If you’re that web design company and you know new businesses are afraid and don’t know the process to get a new website, that’s something you can help with.

And educating them positions you as the expert. Not just another web designer.

This might sound familiar to you, because this is the same process that you did when you created your authority piece a couple of months ago.

You find a problem your ideal client has. Create something to solve it. Release it.

Your entire marketing process should follow this cycle.

That’s your marketing strategy.

Create stuff. Give it away. Repeat.

Regular, repeated application of this will build your client base.

Eric Davis

P.S. Building a regular, repeatable marketing process is important for every freelancer. It’s especially important when you’re getting started which is why I spend a lot of time training new freelancers on marketing. Get it right early on and everything else becomes easy.