I never really understood good marketing until I started to respect my own time more. These days, I'm trying to really live 24 hours per day the way I want to be living them. Do you know how much time there is in 24 hours? It's a lot.

Before I respected my own time, I didn't really respect other people's time as much. Don't get me wrong - I was always cool enough, I didn't waste people's time, but I never realized what a magnificent thing people choosing to spend their time with you is. There's so many good places to spend your time - getting entertainment, learning, connecting with good people, building things, inventing, relaxing, thinking, working. When someone spends their time with me, whatever the medium, that's a tremendous honor.

When someone comes to join me at my blog, reads something I write, listens to me speak, meets me for a coffee or we go on an adventure together - there's a hell of a lot of other places they could be, and a hell of a lot of other great things they could be doing with their time.

I think good marketing respects that. Good marketing goes, "This person could be anywhere else - let's make it worth their while." Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin, and Chet Holmes all talk about this - educating people, teaching them, making them want to spend time with you. Being entertaining, or informative, building a place people feel welcome, or strong, or get smarter at.

I think that's most of good marketing - having people want to spend time in and around you, your company, wanting to be associated with what you've got. The rest of good marketing is offering people something worth many, many times more than what you're charging. My current target is 10x - if I'm working to help someone build their revenues, I'm aiming to get them 10 times my fees in net profit, for a 1000% ROI. To be honest with you, I'll settle for 4x and 400%, but I'm aiming for 10.

I want to build and get stronger after that too. Ideally I could offer people things that are worth 100 times what I charge, to give people things so marvelous and amazing and such good quality that they're amazed it could cost so little.

But honestly, the second part - offering immense quality worth many times what the person pays - that's second to having people want to spend time with you. If people want to spend time with you, because they're learning, because they're entertained, because they feel strong and cool and fashionable and amazing being around you - then everything else goes smoothly. You can tell people what you're doing and let them decide if it's right for them. You're not in such a tremendous hurry when people want to see you and return again and again.

I think the first step to being a great marketer is respecting your own time, and seeing how much is possible to get done when you respect your time. Then start really respecting other people's time - it's amazing what wonderful things can be done with time if you're spending it well. So acknowledge that, be aware that it's an honor, a privilege, a blessing if people want to spend even 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes with you here and there. Make it the best time they ever spend, give people what they want, really respect their time. If you do that, if you deliver and make every minute someone spends with you a great minute, marketing will become easier and more joyful all the time.