It's amazing how insecure I can get if I go to Harvest or wherever and start looking at shiatsu practitioners' leaflets. They all have their strings of letters after their names and their blurbs about how they've done their three years of practitioner training and their lists of medical conditions they can treat, and I think, “damn, I can't say that, how can I compete?” It's times like this I need to keep my marketing strategy in mind, because when I stop and think I'm prepared to bet that leaflets in Harvest are a pretty ineffective way of getting customers.

It's a question of who you're reaching out to. There are two types of people: those who know what shiatsu is and those that don't, and for the former I'm thinking that nobody thinks, “oh, I want some shiatsu, best pop down to Harvest and get a leaflet.” They're much more likely to search the web for “shiatsu bath” or whatever and hit on the prettiest website. My theory is that having a nice leaflet won't get this group of people, but having a nice website that ranks highly in search engines will, which is why the first half of my marketing strategy is “have a nice website that ranks highly in search engines.”

And for the people who don't know what shiatsu is? If I watch myself as I look at these big leaflet racks I find that my eye slides right over anything I've not heard of. I read the words — “bioenergetics, rolfing, kinesiology, feldenkrais” — but by the time they get to my brain they've been translated into “whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever”. The leaflets that catch my eye — the leaflets I stop and look at — are the leaflets advertising something I've heard of. People who don't know what shiatsu is are going to lose the shiatsu leaflets in a sea of whatevers.

I don't plan on making leaflets. I plan on making business cards. You can put business cards in a lot more places than you can put leaflets, shop windows for example, and they're going to be bright green and have the word “relax” splashed across them in huge writing. The fact that I am a shiatsu practitioner will be almost incidental to the fact that I will help you relax, because regardless of whether people have heard of shiatsu they damn well know what relaxation is — and they'll probably think they can do with some. Finally, I plan to put them in my local shops. While I'll probably put them in Harvest too it seems a bit daft to pitch myself in with all the other shiatsu practitioners when I can stick some up in shops and on noticeboards around Combe Down where all the middle class people with plenty of spare cash live and no other practitioners advertise. That's the second half of my marketing strategy: “pin eye-catching business cards where people with spare cash will see them and not be confused by other practitioners' marketing.”

The best thing is that I only want two people a week, which hopefully I can manage even if I have got this all wrong :)