I couldn’t believe how quickly I got to Baltimore this afternoon. It took all of an hour. Really fast and the Baltimore airport is beautiful. Reminds me of Terminal 1 in Toronto as well as the terminal in Vancouver.

I’m here because I’ll be MC’ing Milana’s Coaching Super Summit. I’m excited. namely because I’m going to meet one of my clients and my business coach face-to-face for the first time. I have goosebumps.

I’m also jazzed to be here because it’s nice to network with people outside of the podcasting community for two very important reasons:

• It helps me understand if people who are not podcasters “get it”.
• It helps me to discover what people’s pain points are when it comes to marketing and selling so I can refine my message even more.

I get so wrapped up in my little world that I tend to forget that what pains me in my business may not pain everyone else. For example, in a teleclass I held recently, the attendees told me that they love marketing, just hate to self-promote. All along, I thought that most people hated marketing. However, my target market told me they hate promoting themselves. That was an eye-opener.

So, I challenge each of you to spend some time with your target market to find out what really keeps them up at night. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars arranging a focus group. Instead, launch a blog or a podcast and invite your target market into a conversation with you. Here’s what you should do:

1. Set up a free blog using Blogger or WordPress (if you already have a blog, skip this and go to #2).
2. Post something to your blog and ask a question.
3. Publish your blog post.
4. Share the link with your colleagues, clients and peers over email.
5. Watch the comments come streaming in.

Make this a weekend project. Then, come back here and post your link in the comments section so we can help you gather even more feedback 😉