Exposure: Show Em Your Laundry

When attention is currency, everyone is chasing exposure.

And yet, for many of us, hitting the publish button leaves us feeling downright vulnerable.

There we are, out in the world, showing off our laundry. We imagine ourselves blinking in the hot lights, straining to see friendly faces, but all we can find in the crowd is a vivid, unrelenting vision of perfection.

In other words, what other, better, more successful people have put out there.

“Clearly,” we think to ourselves, “they hired professional stylists.” There’s not a wrinkle, not a speck of lint.

We wince and pray no one sees that faded spot where the pasta sauce landed after one of our clumsier moments, the stain still visible in spite of our best efforts to clean it away.

Exposure is far from desirable under those circumstances.

Ignore the competition

Notice I said “We imagine ourselves . . . ”.

If you’ve done your homework — and homework means market research — you know that scenario isn’t true.

Sure, there are businesses far bigger than yours, entrepreneurs with huge followings and seven-figure revenues. That’s fine.

First, remember those figures are gross sales, not net profit. And there’s plenty of room in the marketplace for them and for you.

So you can stop worrying, and maybe study those people to see if anything they do might be adaptable for your business.

Those folks are human, too.

If you’re a dedicated market researcher with a keen eye for detail, I guarantee you’ll find typos in rock star copywriting. Typos happen to everyone, no matter how many sets of eyes scan the material.

We all have laundry.

The exposure you’re looking for is in your audience. It’s not about all the attention, it’s about the right attention for your best work, as it is, right now.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay