Promoting your own business feels daunting: here is why

Promoting your own business is daunting because you are not promoting a product. You are standing in a shop window holding a sign with your own face on it. The fear is not irrational and you are not soft for feeling it.

I feel it too, and I build this stuff for a living, so take that as you will.

Why does posting about your own work feel so personal?

Kara Lambert, a small business psychology consultant, puts it as plainly as anyone I have read. On her page about fear and business growth she writes: "Fear of rejection is understandable. We all want to be wanted or needed."

And then the bit that made me put my cup down: "When we put our business, our services, or our product out there and forward for all to see - we put ourselves out there. Wide open for criticism and/or rejection."

That is the whole thing in two sentences. A big company putting out an advert has a marketing department between the brand and the human beings. You have a phone and your own name.

So when a post gets four likes and one of them is your mum, it does not feel like a content performance issue. It feels like a small, quiet no from the world.

The jack of all trades problem

Here is my version of it, and it took me ages to work out that it was even a thing.

I have never been traditionally trained in anything. Not one subject, not one trade, not one qualification I can point at and say right, that is the receipt, that is why you should listen to me. I have always just given things a go, got good enough at them to be paid for them, and then either stuck around or wandered off to the next thing.

The strangest one was an ice cream factory in Australia. Stocking and unstocking freezers, loading lorries, up at some unholy hour. Honestly though, not the worst job I have had, because the early shift meant the rest of the day was mine and I spent it at the beach. I am not sure I have ever had a genuinely bad job. I have just had a lot of different ones.

That is a decent way to earn a living. It is a rubbish way to feel like an expert. Jack of all trades, master of none, and the second half of that sentence is the one that pipes up the moment you go to write a post telling people what you know.

And if someone pushes back on me, I back down. Every time. Unless I have had a beer, in which case I will apparently defend my position until closing. Which tells you the knowledge was there all along. It was the nerve that needed a drink.

So is the fear telling you something true?

No, and this matters, because the fear is a terrible witness and it gives evidence with great confidence.

What the fear says is: you are not qualified, someone will call you out, people will think you are full of yourself. What is actually true is narrower and much more boring.

Someone might disagree with a post. That is a thing that can happen. Being disagreed with on the internet is roughly as serious as a stranger not liking your coat.

The bit Kara Lambert names, the wanting to be wanted, is the real engine. We read silence as rejection when silence is almost always just the algorithm, the time of day, or the fact that your customer was loading a dishwasher. If you want the longer version of that argument, I have written about imposter syndrome and posting anyway elsewhere.

A few things that help me separate the two:

• Write down what the criticism actually was, in their words. Usually it is about one line, not about you.
• Ask whether the person saying it is your customer. Most critics are not buying anything from anyone.
• Give it twenty four hours before you decide to never post again. The urge passes. It genuinely does.

What do you post when you do not feel like the expert?

This is where I got unstuck, so I will hand it over as a suggestion rather than a rule.

Stop trying to post like an authority. Post like a person who does the work. There is a difference and your customers can feel it from across the room.

Authority posting sounds like: "Three mistakes most homeowners make with their boiler." Fine, but it is written in the voice of someone standing at a lectern, and if you do not feel like that person, writing it will hurt.

Doing the work posting sounds like: "Had a call out this morning where the pressure had dropped again. Nine times out of ten it is this one valve. Here is what it looks like." No claim to mastery. Just the thing you saw, on a Tuesday, with your own eyes.

Some easy sources of that, none of which require a certificate:

• A question a customer asked you this week. Answer it as you answered them.
• Something you used to get wrong and now do differently.
• A job that went well, with the before and the after.
• A myth you are quietly sick of hearing in your trade.
• The thing you are asked about prices, answered honestly.

None of that is you declaring yourself the best. It is you showing your working. And showing your working is far harder to criticise than claiming a title.

How do you make yourself press publish?

The flinch does not go away. I have stopped waiting for it to. What I do instead is move the brave bit away from the scary bit.

Write when you feel capable. Publish later, when you do not. If you only ever write at the moment you are about to post, every caption gets negotiated down by the part of your brain that wants to be liked, and you end up with something so hedged it says nothing at all.

Other things that take the edge off:

• Decide the week's posts in one sitting. One decision made once beats five decisions made nervously.
• Use the same shapes every time. A question post, a tip post, a before and after. A familiar format is a handrail.
• Keep a list. Every time a customer asks something, write it down. A list of real questions is the opposite of a blank page.
• Set a floor, not a target. One post a week you actually publish beats four you plan and bin.

And be honest in the caption when you are not sure. "This is how I do it, there are other ways" is a complete sentence and it has saved me a lot of grief. You are allowed to be a person who knows a few things rather than a person who knows everything.

Where Zoshl helps, and where it does not

I will be straight with you: Zoshl cannot make you feel qualified. Nothing can do that except time and a few customers saying thanks.

What it can do is take away the bits of the job that give the fear somewhere to hide. You tell it about your business, or paste your website and let it read, and it picks up what you do, who for, your colours, your photos and your logo. Then you can make a post, a carousel, a short video of words over your own photos, or a talking head video of you.

The practical bits that matter here:

• It writes in your business's voice, from what you have told it: what you sell, your customer questions, your real reviews, your own words. No hashtags, no emoji, no generic marketing phrasing.
• It never makes things up. No invented numbers, prices, quotes, reviews or stories. Figures come only from facts you recorded, with a source, or real facts found on the web for that piece.
• You can set rules: things you would never say, and wording you must include, for trade body or finance terms. Those rules always win.
• If you do not like a line, ask for another way of saying it. Three alternatives for one slide or one part, without disturbing the rest.
• The Ideas list means you can jot down a customer question the moment it happens and turn it into a post later, when you have five minutes.

For talking head videos, the words show at the top of the screen like a prompter, you film a part at a time on your phone, and the ums and long pauses get cut. That alone removes the "I will fluff it in one take" excuse, which was mine for a long while. There is more on the whole setup in the help centre.

But the pressing publish bit is still yours. I have not found a way round that one, and I am not going to pretend I have.

The bit I keep coming back to

You are not putting out an advert. You are putting out yourself, which is exactly why it is uncomfortable and exactly why it works when it works.

The jack of all trades thing stopped bothering me when I noticed that my customers were not looking for a master. They were looking for someone who had done this before and would answer the phone. That I can do, trained or not.

So post the thing. You do not need the beer.