Your Courageous Life

learning curve: marketing

Okay–calling all people who have an opinion!

If you really knew me, you’d know that marketing is a huge learning curve for me. Actually, I dislike it a lot because I see so much inauthenticity, and that’s part of the reason it’s a learning curve. Authentic marketing is fantastic. When someone is genuinely excited to share a neat idea or pass along something great, I love seeing that and being part of the enthusiasm. What I find difficult, especially on the web, is seeing places where I suspect that the marketing is not authentic. For instance, when researching travel, I frequently come across websites where someone tries to pretend as though they had a personally great experience with a hotel, when in fact it’s just someone faking the personal in order to pimp the hotel. Not cool.

That said, I also know that marketing is not a dirty word, so I’m getting more into reading about it and talking to people about it. One question that keeps coming up for me is feeling that there’s “too much” going on with my websites.

The trajectory looks something like this–the blog, thisyhere one, is what came first.

Wanting to have a writing portfolio is what came next, and as I branched out into doing photography, what eventually came forth was http://www.katecourageous.com.

Coaching, under the website http://www.healgrowcreate.com was next. For years, I only worked with clients individually. Now I want to branch out into doing more workshops, retreats, and finally (!) getting brave enough to put forth the e-course I’ve always been dreaming of doing.

The Courageous Traveler was a passion that I came to. I’m excited about travel, enjoy writing about it and talking about it with people, and wanted to play with that a bit online.

Four websites. All of them have a different look. And now the question–Should I consolidate them in some way? If not, what are the reasons to keep them separate? If so, what are the benefits of consolidating? Do you find the different websites confusing in any way? Or is it good that they are separate–does this keep them nice and compartmentalized, with one site focused on one particular thing, and that’s it?

Here’s my line of thinking: I want a person to go to any of these websites and just find whatever information they might want to find about the other things that I do on each website. So I would like it if someone who visits this journal also has the option of seeing that I have creative pursuits and work for myself, both because that’s a piece of understanding me and where I’m coming from, and also because I find that my best clients are people who find me through my journal. They already get what I’m about on some level.

I’d like someone who visits Kate Courageous.com to see that I also coach. However, I established healgrowcreate.com as its own separate website because I thought it would be good to give someone who was considering coaching a lot of information about the subject. I’d also like anyone considering coaching–especially because so many of my clients are creative entrepreneurs taking bold leaps into scary territory like working for themselves–to know that I, too, know what it is like to put myself out there creatively. I feel like there’s too much that I want to say about coaching and retreats to glob it all in with katecourageous. That’s a “pro” for keeping the websites separate–the information sort of stays organized within its own place. Yet with separate websites, this becomes more places a person to click in order to find information. Someone who finds me via katecourageous.com would have to click over to healgrowcreate.com to get information about retreats, unless I make several different “retreats” pages (which is the current mode I’m in). That’s more places to make updates–to the katecourageous.com page, plus the healgrowcreate.com page, etc. So that’s a “con” for keeping them separate.

Truth be told I don’t actually mind making multiple updates–if I know for sure that the multiple sites are not causing confusion for readers.

So, I’m incredibly curious (and feeling really vulnerable in asking for feedback). Is it confusing that I have a blog, a writing/photography portfolio, and a coaching website? Should they all be consolidated to one? Or should they remain separate?

Ideas either via comments or email (kate -at- selftaughtgirl -dot- com) are appreciated.