A Look at Entrepreneurs’ Do-It-Yourself Marketing Month

The buzzword is “branding,” and I believe it illustrates exactly what’s wrong with Entrepreneurs’ “Do It Yourself” Marketing Month (June). Every blogger, self-published author, and start-up owner wants to get his or her name out there. Perfectly understandable. They want fame and fortune like the rest of us. Yet have you noticed that those who focus on “branding” tend to forget about producing anything? You must have seen some of those blogs. No content for months because the blogger is trying to attract a readership. And those social network profiles. They say “Follow me!” on Facebook and Twitter, but the number of status updates since activating the account is…zero. And what about working day and night on designing the perfect company logo before a product is even available…because…oh, it hasn’t even been developed yet.

For the small firm, do-it-yourself marketing makes a lot of sense. You just don’t have the budget to hire an advertising staff. However, there needs to be an appropriate balance between doing that and actually spending time on whatever it is that you love and hope to be successful at. Take six-year-old artist-entrepreneur Ruthie from this One Big Happy comic strip. It looks like she’s learned her lesson about directing all of her resources towards a highly effective marketing campaign. I hope a number of bloggers out there follow suit.