Marketing for solo professionals who hate the idea of it
Let’s break that feast-and-famine cycle!
Lead generation, marketing, sales… None of these words belongs in the vocabulary of someone who started a business to do meaningful, creative work. At least, that’s how it feels.
These words carry baggage. They conjure images of cold pitches and pushy self-promotion. So we avoid those salesy activities — whether consciously or not. We tell ourselves we’ll get to it later, when we deliver the work we have at hand, somehow believing the next project will just show up. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t.
Most solo professionals only start marketing when things get quiet. But marketing doesn’t produce instant results. Depending on your sales cycle and the nature of your services, it can take months to see the impact of what you put out today. By the time anything gains traction, you get busy. And pause. Again. Paving the way to be trapped in the feast-and-famine cycle.
Define your marketing baseline
What breaks the feast-and-famine cycle is building a baseline: a simple, steady rhythm of marketing activities you maintain alongside your client work — not instead of it, and not only when things get quiet.
Think of it like bookkeeping. You don’t leave your accounts untouched for months and then try to sort everything out the day before the tax deadline. (If you do, you know how stressful it is.) You do it regularly, so it never becomes a crisis. Your marketing should follow the same principle: a small amount of consistent effort.
Share what you know. Show how you work. Write about the problems you solve. Be present wherever your ideal clients already spend their time. Talk to people.
You don’t need to have conversations that feel transactional and uncomfortable. But you need to make it easy for the right people to find and know you.
Think about the people who are already looking for what you offer. What do they value? What are they trying to achieve? Where do they spend their time? The clearer you are on your ideal clients, the easier it is to speak directly to them.
— Denise Strohsahl, How to make marketing your jam
Marketing baseline comes down to three essential principles: existence, insistence, and persistence.
Existence — Be visible.
You can’t attract anyone if no one knows you exist. Existence means showing up regularly in at least one place where your ideal clients spend time.
Where you show up matters because a candle maker and a business coach won’t find their ideal clients in the same place. Choosing where to be visible is a critical business decision, and it starts with knowing who you’re trying to reach.
Insistence — Make time for it.
When you’re a team of one, client work always feels more urgent because someone is waiting for it, and you’re the only one who can deliver it. But no one is pushing you to do your marketing. That’s exactly why it gets bumped week after week until the work dries up.
Insistence means treating your marketing activities as a non-negotiable part of your work and protecting them as you’d protect client commitments.
Persistence — Stick to the plan.
Most solo professionals try something, don’t see results fast enough, and switch to something else. I’ve fallen into that trap because it’s almost unavoidable. But no marketing effort delivers overnight results. People need to see you enough times* to know you, like you, and trust you, before they’re ready to work with you.
Persistence means giving your approach enough time to actually show results before changing direction.
*Okay, that podcast link above is not a business resource, but it’s about relationship building and worth hearing.
From survival to stability
Creating a marketing baseline is more doable than you think. You don’t need a complex funnel or a content empire. You need to be visible, make time for your marketing, and keep going long enough for it to work.
Because without a baseline, you’re always in survival mode — anxious, reactive, making decisions from pressure rather than intention. Every quiet period triggers anxiety. Every new client feels like luck rather than the result of something you built.
But with that baseline in place, the dynamic of your business changes. You can say no to wrong-fit work because you know that better opportunities will come. You make decisions from stability, not anxiety. You can take a break without worrying that the work will dry up.
And once you find your rhythm, running a business will get easier and more enjoyable.
If this article made you think, "I need to sort my marketing out", the Slow Summer Club is where you belong. Details here.
Great read and so many interesting points, love the existence - be visible, so true, how can we be known if we are not visible in some way. It is great to network and it doesn't always have to feel like a chore, it should be fun, connected and interesting and it can be.
Rather than seeing it as something to dread, like you type, make time for it, so it doesn't become a crisis either!
Thanks for the great read.