Give or take?

After my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you can choose to steal the attention of others.

As I look back over the 13 years of GreenMellen, we’ve never resorted to cold call, spam emails, or any of that foolishness. When things were slow, our reaction was to give more away and it’s worked amazingly well.

• We’ve hosted a free monthly Meetup for more than a decade now. In the early days, we even did it twice a month. We met lots of folks, shared lots of advice, and they’ve been fantastic.
• I’ve also attended hundreds of other Meetups. Spending time being led by folks like Kathy Drewien, and her incredible ability to match those in need with those that can help, created dozens of wonderful relationships for me.
• I’ve volunteered with dozens of organizations. I’ve spent a good bit of time with groups like KBA, NCBA and ANA, and tons of time with WordCamp Atlanta.
• I’ve published over 1400 posts on my blog, and as a team there are nearly 800 posts on the GreenMellen blog, all with free tips, ideas and advice for others to use.
• I had a few paid courses for a while, but later made them free on my YouTube channel. Along with those, I’ve published tons of other great content across 100+ videos that have been viewed over 700,000 times, including those courses on blogging, Notion, and Roam Research.
• We have a podcast that Robert Carnes and I put out every two weeks, and we’re more than a year into that, covering marketing topics that would likely be of value to those of you reading this post.

I look at this through a similar lens to how we eventually connected with (and hired) Blumer CPAs to help with our books. They never cold called, never spammed, but put themselves in a position to be seen by us (speaking at WordCamps) and then produced consistently valuable content to help show their value.

If you’re new, or if business is slow, you have three options in front of you:

1. Continue as-is, and hope for things to improve.
2. Cold call and spam as many people as you can, and hope that you get enough people to hire you to overcome those that you annoy.
3. Get out there and give of your time and talent, and make yourself known as a knowledgeable, generous person.

If option 3 sounds appealing, go do it. Like, right now. There’s nothing stopping you from publishing a short blog post or video today. If you need more encouragement to head that direction, Bob Burg’s book “The Go-Giver” is a great story on how that can work in your favor.