Marketing your business can feel like pushing a boulder uphill when you’re a team of one.
Most marketing advice isn’t built for people like us who handle everything alone. The gurus tell you to “be everywhere” or “post every day” while conveniently ignoring that they have entire teams helping them execute those strategies.
You try implementing their advice for two weeks, burn out, and go back to relying on referrals while feeling guilty about your inconsistent marketing.
Instead, you need marketing systems—not schedules. When you have a system to do this well, you can bring opportunities to your inbox while focusing on serving clients and living your life.
In this article, I’ll share 15 practical solopreneur marketing strategies for building a sustainable marketing engine that fits the reality of running a one-person business.
What are the most common marketing problems solopreneurs face?
When you’re handling every aspect of your business alone, marketing often becomes the activity that gets pushed to someday. The irony is that without consistent marketing, someday, it usually involves wondering why your pipeline has dried up.
Let’s address the five core challenges I’ve seen repeatedly with founders, consultants, and agency owners:
Problem #1: “No one knows my business exists”
This is the fundamental marketing challenge. You might be the best in the world at what you do, but it doesn’t matter if no one knows you exist.
Many solopreneurs struggle with visibility because they’re focused solely on delivery. They perfect their craft but invest zero time in making themselves discoverable.
The result? Months of feast-or-famine cycles where you’re either too busy with client work to market yourself or desperately searching for your next project.
Creating systems that maintain your visibility—even when you’re heads-down in client work—is critical for sustainable growth.
Problem #2: “I don’t have time for marketing”
The reality of running a solo business is brutal: there are never enough hours in the day.
Between client deliverables, administrative tasks, and having a life outside work, marketing often falls to the top of the priority list.
This isn’t about poor time management. When the choice is between serving to pay clients or creating content that might generate future business, the immediate need usually wins.
The solution isn’t working more hours. It’s building marketing systems that require minimal ongoing maintenance while still generating consistent results.
Problem #3: “I don’t know where to focus my efforts”
The paradox of modern marketing is that while you have more options than ever before, this abundance creates decision paralysis.
Should you be on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, or all three? Is video better than written content? Should you start a podcast or a newsletter?
Many solopreneurs try to do everything, spread themselves too thin, and end up with mediocre results across multiple channels rather than outstanding results in one.
Counterintuitively, narrowing your focus often leads to better outcomes than attempting to be everywhere.
Problem #4: “I attract prospects but I’m unable to convert them”
This is particularly frustrating. You’re getting attention and inquiries, but they never become paying clients.
Often, this happens because there’s a disconnect between your marketing message and your actual offer. You might be attracting the wrong people or the right people with the wrong expectations.
The issue typically isn’t your marketing tactics but your positioning and how well your marketing aligns with your service offerings.
Problem #5: “I’m too scared to put myself out there”
For many solopreneurs, the biggest marketing barrier is psychological rather than tactical.
The fear of judgment, criticism, or simply being ignored can be paralyzing. This is particularly true for those who identify primarily as practitioners rather than promoters.
Creating distance between yourself and your marketing through systems and frameworks can reduce this emotional burden while still building your business visibility.
Now that we’ve identified the core challenges, let’s look at specific strategies to address them through sustainable marketing systems.
15 tips to help you market your solopreneur business with confidence
The following strategies aren’t just theoretical concepts. They’re practical systems I’ve used in my own seven-figure businesses and helped hundreds of solopreneurs implement in theirs.
What makes these approaches different is their focus on creating marketing systems rather than endless marketing tasks. Each strategy is designed to maximize impact with minimal ongoing time investment.
1. Define your scalable service offer (SSO)
Most solopreneurs make a critical mistake: they market skills instead of solutions.
Clients don’t hire you because you know how to do something. They hire you because you can solve a specific problem causing them pain.
Your SSO answers three questions:
- What specific problem do you solve?
- Who exactly do you solve it for?
- How is your approach different from alternatives?
It’s the foundation that makes all your other marketing efforts more effective because it creates clarity for both you and your potential clients.
For example, instead of marketing yourself as a “web designer,” position yourself as “the designer who creates conversion-focused websites for B2B service providers that generate leads while they sleep.”
This level of specificity may feel restrictive at first, but it makes your marketing simpler and more powerful.
2. Identify your Lighthouse Client
Generic marketing creates generic results. To attract premium clients who value your expertise, you need to know exactly who you’re speaking to.
I recommend focusing on what I call “Lighthouse Clients” (LCs) rather than broad demographics. These are the clients who:
- Have the specific problem you solve
- Recognize the value of solving it
- Have the budget to invest in your solution
- Respect your expertise and process
The more precisely you can describe these clients, the more effectively you can create marketing that resonates with them. This isn’t about excluding people—it’s about creating messaging that strongly attracts your ideal clients.
Develop a detailed Lighthouse Client profile that includes:
- Their role and industry
- The specific business problem they face
- How this problem affects their personal and professional life
- What solutions they’ve already tried
- Why those solutions haven’t worked
- What success looks like to them
This profile becomes your compass for all marketing decisions.
3. Craft your positioning and messaging
Once you know your SSO and Lighthouse Client, you need to develop messaging that connects them.
Most solopreneurs make their marketing all about themselves—their capabilities, experience, and approach. It’s a mistake.
Effective messaging focuses on the client’s journey from their current state (problem) to their desired state (solution). Your role is simply to be the guide who helps them make that transition.
Develop a simple messaging framework that includes:
- The current reality your client faces
- The desired outcome they want to achieve
- The obstacles preventing them from getting there
- How your approach overcomes those obstacles
- What makes your approach different
This becomes the foundation for all your marketing content. Every email, social post, or article should reflect elements of this framework.
4. Understand that marketing is the activation of sales
Many solopreneurs see marketing and sales as separate activities. They aren’t.
Marketing is simply sales at scale. It’s the process of communicating your value proposition to potential clients before you have one-on-one conversations with them.
Every piece of marketing content should move prospects closer to purchasing. If it doesn’t, it’s just noise. This mental shift changes how you approach marketing.
Instead of creating content to “build awareness” or “establish thought leadership,” you create content that:
- Identifies and emphasizes specific pain points
- Explains why these problems matter
- Presents your approach as the solution
- Provides evidence that your solution works
- Helps prospects self-qualify
- Creates a clear next step
When you view marketing as “pre-sales,” creating content that generates business results becomes much easier.
5. Link marketing efforts to offers
Random marketing activity produces random results. You need to link specific marketing activities to specific offerings to create a marketing system that consistently delivers clients.
Most solopreneurs try to market their entire business with every piece of content. This dilutes your message and confuses potential clients.
Instead, map your marketing activities to specific offerings:
- Content A targets Lighthouse Client X and promotes Offering 1
- Content B targets Lighthouse Client X and promotes Offering 2
- Content C deepens relationships with existing clients
This targeted approach makes your marketing more focused and measurable. You can track which content generates interest in which services, and adjust accordingly.
It also prevents the common trap of creating content that attracts lots of the wrong prospects and none of the right ones.
🔥 Pro tip: Make sure you’re always speaking to one Lighthouse Client about one offer. If you’re talking to everybody or throwing out too many different messages at the same time, you won’t see any results.
While you might have multiple offers for a single client type or a single offer for multiple client types (especially in the offer validation phase), you can’t go to market without dialing into your service and LC.
6. Dominate one channel and warm two channels at any time
The biggest marketing mistake solopreneurs make is trying to be everywhere at once. This approach guarantees mediocrity across all platforms.
Instead, focus on dominating a single primary channel where your Lighthouse Clients spend time. This might be LinkedIn, Twitter, a podcast, a newsletter, or even in-person networking events.
Pour 80% of your marketing energy into this channel until you establish a strong presence. Master the platform’s nuances and build a system to maintain consistent visibility there.
Then, select two “backend” channels that support and amplify your primary one. These channels should require minimal additional content creation, ideally repurposing what you’ve already created for your primary channel.
For example, if LinkedIn is your primary channel, your backend channels might be an email newsletter repurposing your top LinkedIn content and a simple website showcasing your expertise. This focused approach builds momentum in one place rather than diluting your efforts across multiple platforms.
7. Invest in personal branding
For solopreneurs, you are the business. Clients hire you, not a faceless entity. This means some form of personal branding is necessary—but it doesn’t have to be what you think.
Personal branding isn’t about becoming an influencer or creating a carefully curated online persona. It’s simply about becoming recognizable and memorable to your potential clients.
The minimum viable personal brand for a solopreneur includes:
- A professional photograph
- A consistent bio across platforms
- A clear statement of the problem you solve
- Evidence of your expertise and approach
- A simple way to contact you
Beyond these basics, find one distinctive element that makes you memorable to your Lighthouse Clients. This might be a communication style, visual element, or particular perspective on industry issues.
For instance, Kuba Czubajewski, a B2B marketing consultant I mentored recently, uses what he calls “ugly drawings” to explain marketing concepts to his target audience on LinkedIn. As a result, he has managed to differentiate himself in a crowded space—while attracting the right leads.
Remember: the goal is recognition from potential clients, not fame. So, keep that in mind when you’re investing time in this exercise.
8. Build a minimalist website that works
Most solopreneur websites try to do too much and end up accomplishing nothing. They’re filled with unnecessary pages, vague copy, and no clear next steps for visitors.
Your website has one job: to convert visitors who are already aware of you into leads or clients. It’s not primarily about attracting new visitors (unless you’re heavily investing in search engine optimization).
The most effective solopreneur website includes:
- A homepage that clearly states who you help and how
- An about page that builds credibility and connection
- A services page that outlines your offerings
- A contact page with a clear call to action
- Optional: A resources page with your best content
Every element should guide visitors toward taking a specific next step, whether that’s booking a call, subscribing to your newsletter, or downloading a resource.
For example, on The Remote Solopreneur website, I make sure visitors can only take one action: apply to the community. This way, it’s easy to measure the page’s performance and iterate as needed.
Forget fancy design elements and focus on clarity, credibility, and conversion. A simple website that generates leads is infinitely better than a beautiful one that doesn’t.
9. Create content for reach and sales
Content creation becomes overwhelming when you try to create everything for everyone. Instead, develop two specific types of content: content for reach and content for sales.
When you’re focusing on reach, you’re trying to attract a broader audience—which includes peers and potential clients. This content addresses common questions, challenges, or misconceptions in your niche. It’s optimized for your primary channel and designed to be shared.
But when you’re focusing on sales, you need to demonstrate your expertise and approach while moving prospects closer to hiring you. This content goes deeper into specific problems and solutions, positioning you as the guide.
Separating your content into these two categories lets you be strategic about what you create and when. Reach content builds visibility, while sales content converts prospects into clients.
The key is to create systems for both types rather than producing them ad hoc.
10. Create a simple content system
The biggest reason solopreneurs abandon marketing is that content creation becomes too time-consuming. The solution isn’t to create less content—it’s to create it more efficiently. But also make sure you're creating high-quality content that differentiates you.
Develop a simple content system that leverages your existing knowledge and client work:
- Set aside one “content day” per month to batch-create your primary content
- Create templates for different content types to speed up production
- Repurpose single ideas across multiple formats and platforms
- Use “content themes” around a specific goal, post format, or topic
- Document recurring client questions and turn them into content
- Build a library of core concepts you can reference and expand upon
The goal is to reduce the cognitive load of creating new content by systematizing the process. When content creation becomes predictable, it’s easier to maintain consistency, even during busy periods.
11. Collect and showcase social proof
People trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. As a solopreneur, you need to build that credibility using social proof. Basically, any evidence of the fact that you’re getting the results you promise clients and clients enjoy working with you.
Create systems to consistently collect and showcase evidence that your approach works:
- Send follow-up emails to clients requesting testimonials
- Document specific results and outcomes from client work
- Keep track of positive feedback in a dedicated wins folder
- Create case studies from your most successful client engagements
- Maintain relationships with past clients who can serve as references
Also, the most powerful social proof is specific rather than generic. “Sarah helped us increase conversion rates by 37%” carries more weight than “Sarah was great to work with.”
Make social proof collection part of your client offboarding process so it happens automatically rather than sporadically.
12. Build a referral engine
For most solopreneurs, referrals are their primary source of new business. Yet, few have systems to generate referrals consistently.
A referral engine is a systematic approach to encouraging and managing referrals:
- Create a clear description of your ideal referrals
- Educate your network about precisely who you help and how
- Make specific, timely referral requests
- Provide templates to make referring you easy
- Show appreciation for referrals regardless of the outcome
- Offer incentives to encourage referrals
- Build reciprocal relationships with complementary service providers
The key is moving from passively hoping for referrals to actively facilitating them. When you make it easy for people to refer to you, they’re much more likely to do so.
13. Implement time-saving marketing systems
Marketing activities that rely solely on your time and energy will inevitably be abandoned when you get busy with client work. Automation and systems allow you to move from ad-hoc posting to consistent posting.
Identify repetitive tasks that can be systematized or automated:
- Use scheduling tools to maintain consistent content publishing
- Create templates for common marketing materials
- Maintain an idea bank for content topics
- Set up automated email sequences for new subscribers
- Develop standard operating procedures for marketing activities
- Build a content calendar to reduce decision fatigue
- Use analytics to focus on high-performing content types
Remember my DTA framework: Document → Template → Automate. First, document your process, then create templates, and finally, automate what you can.
These systems free your time while maintaining your marketing presence, even during busy client periods.
14. Maintain consistency during busy periods
Client work will always compete with marketing for your time and attention. The solution isn’t working more hours—it’s developing minimum viable marketing activities that you can maintain even during your busiest periods.
Define your non-negotiable marketing activities. For example, you can post at least twice a week on your primary channel or send at least one newsletter to your subscribers each month.
When you’re busy, you can scale back to just these core activities rather than abandoning marketing altogether. Consistency over time is far more valuable than sporadic intensity.
15. Measure what matters
Many solopreneurs either track too many marketing metrics or none at all. Both approaches lead to ineffective marketing for solopreneurs.
Focus on measuring these core indicators:
- Primary channel growth (followers, connections, subscribers)
- Engagement with your content (comments, shares, replies)
- Website visits from your marketing activities
- Inquiries and leads generated
- Conversion rate from inquiry to client
- Client acquisition cost
- Lifetime client value
Review these metrics monthly and quarterly to identify what’s working and what isn’t. This data-informed approach allows you to double down on effective strategies and adjust or abandon those that aren’t producing results.
You can use solopreneur tools like Buffer or Shield App for social platforms and Fathom or Plausible Analytics for your website.
Remember: the only marketing metrics that truly matter are those that correlate with client acquisition and revenue growth.
Focus on consistency when marketing your solo business
Marketing your solopreneur business doesn’t have to constantly drain your time and energy. By building systems rather than creating endless to-do lists, you can maintain consistent visibility with your target clients even when you’re focused on delivery.
The key is to start small and build incrementally. Don’t try to implement all 15 strategies at once. Instead:
- Define your SSO and Lighthouse Clients first
- Choose your primary marketing channel based on where those clients are
- Create a simple content system for that channel
- Gradually add the other elements as your capacity allows
The solopreneurs who succeed with marketing don’t have the biggest following or the most content. They’re the ones who create sustainable systems that consistently connect them with their ideal clients.
With these systems in place, you’ll stop seeing marketing as a burden and start experiencing it as an asset that works for your business around the clock.
