Hey Reader,

If you run a solo business, you’re not just the person selling the thing — you’re also the one building it, delivering it, writing about it, supporting it, and keeping the whole thing from collapsing into a late-night existential crisis.

You’re the strategist, the implementer, the bookkeeper, the customer support team, and yes, the one who has to fix whatever just broke on your website.

So when marketing gurus tell you to “just show up more” or “be consistent,” it often feels laughably detached from the reality of being a business of one. The pressure to always be visible, always be creating, always be selling isn’t just exhausting.

It’s unsustainable.

We’ll talk about the cure in a second and you’ll find the Strategic AF Mini Marketing Map at the end of the email — free for you to download and use.

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Unsustainable as it may be, I’m sorry to say that there is some truth to the marketing advice that pushes you to be everywhere. Social and non-social media platforms reward people who post a ton of content everywhere.

​Whether we like it or not, we’re all running media companies.​

Whether we like it or not, more is more. Volume often begets quality.

The real issue starts with unhealthy comparisons: comparing yourself with the creator who has a team of six people writing, editing, and publishing content across a dozen platforms won’t get you anywhere good.

In fact, it will usually take you to a world where you jump from task to task, trying to be everywhere. According to the American Psychological Association, multitasking and context switching reduce productivity and increase stress, which makes it harder to make good decisions and follow through on the things that matter most.

In other words, constantly bouncing between writing content, delivering services, tweaking offers, and figuring out how to market them is a direct line to burnout — not business growth.

Don’t beat yourself up because you can’t keep up with the Kardashians of the world. The real issue here isn’t laziness. It’s cognitive overload.

So, instead of trying to do everything, what if you built your marketing around how your brain, your business, and your energy actually function?

A marketing strategy that doesn’t pretend you’re a 12-person team

Let’s strip things back to what works when your time is limited, your energy is finite, and your calendar already looks like a crime scene.

Say one clear thing repeatedly, even when you’re sick of it

Most solo business owners think they have a marketing problem when, in reality, they have a messaging problem.

In psychology, the mere exposure effect explains that people tend to develop a preference for things simply because they encounter them more often. This goes for your messaging and yes, even for your face — that’s why it pays off to be on multiple platforms.
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So if you’re constantly switching up your message, chasing novelty, or “trying something new,” your audience never gets the repetition they need to associate you with anything meaningful.

Your job isn’t to sound fresh every week. It’s to be so consistent in your messaging that people can repeat your core value proposition back to you.

One clear idea, expressed in multiple ways, will outperform clever, varied content that lacks strategic direction. Stop asking “What should I post?” and start asking “What do they need to believe in order to buy?”

Content marketing isn’t just about showing up and being consistent. It’s about shifting beliefs.

​Robert Cialdini says there are six buying triggers/principles of persuasion:

1. ​Reciprocity​
2. ​Authority​
3. Commitment and consistency (as in: consistent in their image)
4. Liking
5. Consensus/social proof​
6. Scarcity
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What that means for you: if you want to market effectively, don’t just share tips and insights — create content that challenges assumptions and reinforces the beliefs people need to hold in order to work with you.

Ask yourself:

• What do potential clients need to believe about their problem?
• What do they need to believe about me and the way I work?
• What doubts are keeping them from saying yes?

When your content addresses these beliefs directly, you’re not just filling a feed — you’re guiding someone toward a decision.

​Learn how to build and implement your BIG idea here.

Steal from yourself as often as possible to build “mental availability”

There is absolutely no prize for reinventing the wheel every week. Self-plagiarism is a bad thing in academia.

In business and marketing, it’s a great thing.

The best marketers are not the most creative ones. They’re the ones who know how to build message equity and IP (Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol) — a set of stories, ideas, frameworks, and phrases that they can reuse, remix, and reshare across channels.

It’s about “mental availability”, a term coined by marketing professor Byron Sharp, which he defines as:

You don’t increase mental availability by being endlessly original. You increase it by being recognizable and repeatable.

So go back to that email that resonated. Pull a sentence from it and turn it into a post.

Use a framework you shared in a client session as the foundation for a new workshop. Reference a metaphor that clicked, again and again.

You don’t need more content. You need to extract more value from the content you already have.

Learn how to do it without sounding like a broken record chamber here.

Make it easy — almost embarrassingly easy — for someone to buy from you

Most solo businesses aren’t losing sales because their marketing isn’t fancy enough. They’re losing sales because no one understands what they’re selling or how to take the next step.

​Donald Miller’s “grunt test” from StoryBrand still holds up:

Audit your presence — your homepage, your social media bios, your pinned posts. Can someone answer the following questions at a glance?

• What do you do?
• Who is it for?
• What happens next if they want to work with you?

If not, fix that first. You don’t need more traffic if no one knows what to do when they land on your website or social media profile.

I put together a little something to help you figure all this out

I call it “The Strategic AF Mini Marketing Mind Map” — rolls off your tongue, I know. But I promise you it does the job.

It’s a series of questions/mini exercises that will help you identify where to put your focus to get the needle moving aka to get business growth.

Grab it below and please reply to let me know if it was useful. I’m thinking about building one of these resources for more of the Strategic AF newsletter issues but I don’t want to do it if you don’t need them.

👉 The Strategic AF Mini Marketing Mind Map 👈

Death by comparison

Perhaps, like me, you’re also not immune to comparing yourself with other people in your industry. These comparisons are unfair more often than not — to you or to whom you’re comparing yourself with.

We tend to compare our pilot episode with someone else’s third season, and that’s a recipe for despair and burnout.

So, whatever you do, don’t let someone else’s content calendar dictate yours. Even if you’re looking at someone who started at the same time you did, you will never know all that happens behind the stage in their business, their strong suits, and their weaknesses.

Use the mini map above to figure out what your rhythm should be, what your bandwidth is, and how to align that with your business goals, not someone else’s.

Want a more detailed strategy?

The mini map above is a good starting place but if you're looking for something that can act like a real compass and guide your business, I've put together the Guided Strategy Framework — a document that takes a few hours to fill BUT can guide you for years to come. As you fill it in, I'll be in your corner every step of the way, with guidance, tips, and how-tos.

People love it and leverage it.

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​Grab your copy!​

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That's it from me today! See you next week in your inbox. Here to make you think, Adriana ​

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