Recently I was working with a woman, who, like the rest of us, knows she needs to market but resists doing it.

This is causing her a lot of pain. She doesn’t bring in enough work, which creates severe financial stress. It also causes her to feel bad about herself. (”I know what I need to do. Why in the *&^^&%$## don’t I do it? What’s wrong with me?”)

So I asked her, ”If you do your marketing, what will happen?”

Here’s what she said:

1. I’ll be overwhelmed with business that I can’t handle and everyone will get mad when I drop the ball.

2. Marketing will create too much work for me and I’ll collapse in exhaustion because I don’t have enough people I trust to help me when I can’t do it all myself.

3. I don’t really like this work I’m doing and I don’t want more of it.

In this client’s mind, doing the marketing would actually cause MORE pain than not doing it. To her, this seems perfectly logical.

Can you relate?

If you aren’t doing your marketing regularly, it’s time to find out why. Understanding the nature of your resistence is the key to doing your marketing.

Now that my client knows what’s driving her behavior, she’s in process finding trustworthy help and shifting her perspective about her business. Her work is not what she wants to do for the rest of her life, but rather a stepping stone to better things. She’s made the commitment to regular marketing because she knows that making this business consistently profitable is how she’ll fund her next venture.

Marketing can actually be enjoyable, especially if you use social media.

Here are the links to get you started on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. (Warning: profanity alert on the Twitter link).

But before you jump in, ask yourself the question above, and really listen to the answer.

If you’re already on Facebook, you know what it is and how addictive it can be.  If you already know your customers also use Facebook, you can use it to market your business for free.  Of course, since we know there’s no free lunch, “free” means that they will run ads next to your page; so if it’s okay with you that Oprah’s Acai diet advertises itself next to your business page, go for it.

Here’s the thing.  A lot of people who are savvy Facebook users have comingled their personal and business information on their Facebook Profile (Profile is the Facebook word for your personal Facebook page).  You don’t want to do that; search engines can’t see your Profile page; only your friends can.  Not to mention the weird mixing of the personal and business on one site; you might like to get more personal with your friends and more businesslike with your customers, but you can’t do that on your Profile.

The solution is to create a separate Facebook Page (Page is the Facebook word for your business page).  Go to Facebook and type Page into the search function.  It’ll tell you how to do it.  But before you do, go look at some other Pages, especially ones that people have put up who are in your same business.  And also make sure you can devote the time.

Having a Page for your business is an E Ticket (for those of you who went to Disneyland in the ’70s) to the wild amusement park that is social networking, with all its transparency and interactivity between your and your beloved clients.  Be sure you’re ready.