How Marketing Can Change Everything For You (And how it did for me!)
In 2025, visibility isn’t optional—it’s essential. Not just for sales, but for the impact your work can have on others. Today, I want to share the real impact of marketing my work as a creative: how showing up led to life-changing opportunities, deeper connections with readers, and messages I’ll never forget.
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A question that I get asked a lot is how I continue to show up and stay consistent in my marketing. And the answer is because the impact that I get to make from doing so is life changing for me. I was at a business retreat a couple months ago, and we had to go around and share our biggest strength in our business, what we felt like drove the most impact for us. And what I said was that I've shown up consistently for the past decade without hesitation.
I've shown up on social media, I've emailed my list, and I've shown up here on YouTube consistently. That has led to building a community, a personal brand, and results that I could have never dreamed of if I hadn't gotten visible.
This year and beyond
We are seeing people trust personal brands—humans—more than ever. They need that connection in order to make the decision to buy. With the rise of AI and the change in economy, people want to hear from people that they connect with, whether that be your values, the way you show up, or just getting to see a person on the other side of things versus a brand.
So, Brand Builders Group did a study. I saw the founder speak at the Social Media Marketing World Conference a few months ago, and he shared a lot of data about personal brand. One of them being that almost three-fourths of those surveyed are more likely to trust someone who has an established personal brand and who is showing up consistently in their marketing.
When we think of impacts, a lot of us think of sales. Whenever I ask my community, my subscribers, my followers on YouTube, what they want from their marketing, I get the answer of “sales,” and I get it. Sales pay the bills, and we need income coming in, but I want to go a little bit deeper.
Making an impact
The next step for me is making an impact. And that's something that I'm really passionate about, for myself and for helping you do as well.
In the last couple of months, I've gotten some awesome inquiries that have made a huge impact on my life and my reader's lives. And I want to share them with you to show you what’s potentially possible when you keep showing up and getting visible, because guess what? The last few months have felt so quiet on social media for me, and for maybe many of you.
My likes have been down, and I talked about that in a recent video. The economy has felt shaky, and the world in general has just felt weird and off and different this year. But I'm still making an impact by showing up, even if it feels like things are quiet. I've been doing this for almost 10 years, showing up consistently to my readers and promoting my books. Even when I haven't had new books out for years, I continued to market the ones that I did have out, staying visible.
Life-changing examples
Not long ago, I got a message from someone in high school who, for English class, is doing a project about making a portfolio of a poet and doing a presentation acting as them. The student chose me and reached out to let me know to thank me for my art. Wow!
“I connect with your words in a way I cannot express. And I'm so thankful for artists like you who say the things that I cannot.”
Talk about impact! That is exactly what I want to do. What I envisioned growing up, wanting to be an author, is people like this. And I have no idea if she went and bought my books or not, or if she just found some things online—it doesn't matter to me because that's a huge impact.
And even more so knowing how awful I was at presentations in high school. It is so funny to me and amazing to me to envision a student now presenting as me, but it's amazing to know that someone would choose me to give a presentation on in school. Especially since in school, I think I was only allowed to choose from Shakespeare and that's it.
Okay, another great one who reached out is a reader who already had my book and wanted to mail it to me for me to sign it for them as a graduation present. And my favorite part about these things is that I can choose what I want to do, meaning I get to do these things! So I responded to her and we ended up coordinating that I would just send her a new signed copy instead.
I also had a teacher who has a book club reach out; they’re reading one of my books for their book club and the teacher shared that they have absolutely fallen in love with poetry.
“Your book has sparked deep discussions about mental health and our students would be honored to hear from you.”
How amazing is that, getting to impact a whole classroom of students who are reading my book and not only enjoying the genre and falling in love with poetry, but having discussions about mental health? One of my biggest missions as a mental health author is encouraging those conversations. So I got to send a short video back to them talking about my writing process for that book, why that book means so much to me about my mental health journey, and some advice for people who want to pursue their passion.
Knowing that I would have loved to hear from an author that I enjoyed in high school and gotten a note from them or a video from them puts me in their shoes, and that makes me remember the impact that I'm having. So that was also an amazing moment as well.
I got another one from a teacher recently:
“My students have been working on a poetry project. And so many of them have chosen a poem from your book out of about a hundred poetry books in our classroom to practice and recite to the class. Your poetry resonates with ninth graders.”
Amazing and life-changing for me! So impactful, knowing that people are resonating with my book and choosing it.
And here's the thing—I don't advertise signed books. I don't ask people to buy my books for their schools or clubs. But I continue to get these messages on a regular basis because I continue to stay visible, because I've built a personal brand, because I engage with my community and people who reach out to me who comment or send me messages or emails.
I know that even when engagement and reaches are down on social media, when it looks like sales are down, even when the world feels different this year, the economy feels different, I'm still making an impact with my work. These wonderful messages remind me of my mission and reinvigorates me to continue marketing my work and making an impact.
Patience in key
If I didn't work each day to be visible while things were slow to promote my products, to build my brand, to make sure readers know about my work, I wouldn't have gotten these messages. Now this takes traction and time to build. And of course I have a long, long way to go to.
If you're in the beginning stages or the messy middle stages and it feels like things aren't working for you, remember that momentum starts to compound the more that you go. So I don't want you to give up. And I wanted to just share this pep talk with you about the impact you can make when you do show up consistently.
Some of my best experiences have come from creating a brand. I was invited to one of the largest book festivals in the world a couple of years ago. I got to travel to schools to speak to hundreds of students, did multiple panels, and got flown to Dubai for this event. And that came because I had a brand and an audience to share the experience with. That's why I was chosen. I'm, I'm 99% sure that's why—because I got visible.
What you can do to keep showing up
So your assignment from me is to think about what impact looks like to you and how you can work towards making that impact this week. How can you get visible this week to work on building that compounding momentum and growing your brand?
If you would like my support in growing your brand, this is something we talk about in the Creative’s Content Club. There's a whole module on setting your marketing strategy, your messaging, your brand, and building that consistency and familiarity with your audience. That's how we build trust in the long run.
If you are interested in learning more about the club and getting my support inside, I'd love to see you there. We’re currently closed for enrollment until later this year, but if you sign up for the waitlist, you could get an offer to join sooner when a spot opens up: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/creatives-content-club-waitlist
Thank you so much for joining me today, and I hope I’ve given you some encouragement to keep pushing through and getting visible. I will see you in the next one. Bye!