Franklin Taggart's Blog

Like many solopreneurs and freelancers, I've fallen for the belief that you have to be everywhere in order for your marketing to reach more people - every social media channel doing posts, stories, shorts, videos, live videos, reels, carousels, albums, polls, emojis, 24/7/365. And then you have to have a blog, a podcast, an email newsletter, a YouTube Channel, a snail mail publication, and a quarterly postcard to your old alumni mailing list. It was exhausting, impossible to maintain, and ineffective in reaching the right people for my business. A few years ago, I did an experiment. I evaluated all the marketing efforts I'd been doing to see which ones were getting the most desirable results. I wanted to know what they had in common. What I found ended up being the catalyst for my ideas around helping people identify their unique marketing modality. I discovered that the social media and content marketing content that was working best for me featured me in a speaking situation,

Solopreneurs, freelancers, and other small business owners often find themselves stretched thin when it comes to marketing. There are too many channels to choose from, the learning curve to gain new skills can be steep, and it's too expensive to hire an agency to handle it for you. You also may find that it's difficult to find enough time to adequately market your business and that is the beginning of the end for many small and one-person companies. For people in their first year or two of business, I usually recommend having a streamlined strategy for marketing so that your valuable resources can be used effectively and have a desirable return. A central part of this strategy is to identify and leverage your unique marketing modality. Your unique marketing modality is a combination of your strongest communication skills, your preferred relationship channels, your natural influence role, and your preferred venue. Lining these up can have a streamlining effect on your marketi

I must have struck a nerve. Some Passionistas told me I'm full of something icky. Well, Ok then. I think they didn't watch the whole video. They only read the headline. So just in case you're wondering. I love passion. I enjoy it every day. But following your passion still isn't a great idea for career decision-making.  Even the best hitters in baseball miss over two-thirds of their at-bats. Just because you love something once, doesn't mean you're going to love it the same way or at all another time. I love playing guitar and singing, but there are more nights than not that it's a less than passionate experience. Sometimes it's a downright slog.  Does that mean I regret doing it for so long? No way! I'd do it again today, although I would probably do it differently and I would've shot higher so that I didn't have to carry my own gear. But passion wasn't the driving force. The things that drove me then and still drive me today are curiosi

It's been a few years since I've been able to participate in Made In Loveland. I'll be joining the fun this year as a speaker on February 3rd. My topic for the morning will be Marketing Lessons We Learned In Kindergarten: Don't Forget the Basics. Marketing, especially for new businesses can be one of the biggest sources of frustration, confusion, and difficulty. There are so many options - the channels we use, the messages we send, the tools and tactics that fill up our email inboxes - and many times, marketing is the aspect of business that new owners are the least prepared for. They underestimate the time, energy, and money it takes to get their businesses and their customers together. In a mad scramble to cover as many bases as they can, they enlist the help of their high school-aged kids to help with Instagram and TikTok while trying to find time to create and manage an email newsletter that most of their customers never read. And the fees that marketing agencies an

▼▼▼Watch and Listen Below!▼▼▼ If you have a product, service, or program priced over $3500.00, Yifat Cohen will help you sell many more of them. Yifat is a digital marketing pioneer and innovator who helps entrepreneurs create strategies and systems that routinely deliver remarkable revenue returns. How does she do it? In this interview she lets us look behind the curtain (spoiler alert: it’s all about using technology to build trusting relationships).  Yifat, also known as The Wizard of Jackpot Moments, is an international speaker, a digital engagement expert, an online community builder, and a live video aficionado. She was one of the first non-Google employees to be invited to speak to actual Google employees about their own products. After building a large community on Google+, which disappeared from the social media realm with little warning, she has become an outspoken advocate for “not building on rented property.” In other words, build your own community and bring people there

I don't think "follow your passion" is good career advice. At least for me, it hasn't been. We make the common mistake of thinking that our passion is caused by an activity or a circumstance, but passion, like every other emotion, is created by the quality of our thinking from moment to moment.  The feeling of flow, presence, and transcendence is a simple shift in your consciousness to a state of mind in which thinking slows or stops - those moments when our self-consciousness fades into the background and our energy peaks. We mistakenly think that the activity was the reason for the feeling, but we could just as easily slip into a passionate state doing something else. That's why I suggest that passion isn't a reliable guide.  I'll tell you more about your more reliable guide in this Coffee Break. If you are ready to discover and leap into the best expression of who you are, let's schedule a coaching session. Use the contact form on the about page and

Tell me truly - are you spending most of your time producing or consuming? I had some personal revelations late last year about my own habits. I'd been frustrated for a long time about not being able to focus and get things done. I did a time audit late last year and found that I was spending way too much time on Facebook and email and blog posts - basically in a consumption mode - instead of spending my time productively. BIG PROBLEM! Life is short.  In this Coffee Break, I share a few small ideas from my own experience that have helped me gain back hours of time each day that opens the door for a more productive me.  Thanks for watching, listening, subscribing, and sharing!  Want to join me for next week's Soulful Entrepreneur Summit? Get your all-access pass today at https://getsoulfulsuccess.com #productivity #contentcreation #gettingthingsdone