Are you trying to do all of your marketing yourself?

This is an unusual day for me. Normally Frank Reed mans this spot each Friday, but he needed a day off, so I am filling in. And it makes me realize how much I depend on Frank and on my other blog contributors to keep this thing running every day. We post almost every business day, except when I am on vacation (like next week–see you on May 2), and it could become a real grind if I needed to do it all myself. It can feel overwhelming, like you are all by yourself in the vast expanse of work with no one else to help. But I don’t need to do it alone. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. Marketing is very hard, so the more help you can get, the better.

So, I’ve given one way to get help—ask for volunteers. I attracted enough of a following on my blog that a few crazies decided that they wanted to write for it, too. They get a bit more exposure than if they stuck to writing only for their own blogs, and I get a break from the daily grind—often with a higher-quality post than I would have produced myself. And always one with a different point of view, which is good for the blogger, for me, and most important of all, for you, my reader.

Of course, you can always hire someone, if you can afford it. You might hire someone to help do your marketing, or you could hire someone to do the things you are doing that prevent you from doing all the marketing, freeing up your time for that.

But for most of us, it isn’t that easy to get volunteers from outside your business to help you with marketing. And you might not be able to afford to hire someone new. So what can you do?

Get volunteers from the two places that are most overlooked. If you have other people working in your business, the best place to get help is your co-workers. And the second best is your customers. But how do you get these two groups to do your marketing job for you?

Usually the easiest way is through social media. I have a client who just ran a contest for the best video submission. Customers are doing their marketing for them. I have another client who has provided training for vast numbers of their employees to learn social media skills. Their employees are doing their marketing for them. I have another client who uses their PR team to create ideas in social media that their employees can run with. Guess who is doing their marketing?

You get the idea. You can leverage customers and employees to do a lot more marketing for you then you can ever do yourself. And a side benefit is that your prospects will often find them more credible than you, because marketing for you is not their jobs. But even if these examples are not realistic for you, don’t give up. Take the attitude that you are destined to have other people do your marketing for you. Your job is to figure out how.