If you're in small business, I know something about you. You think there's something great about your business.

You may be in accounting or planning special events or helping others stay healthy or teaching or being a great virtual assistant. It's the reason you went into business. It's something you love to do. And it's something you find easy.

Unless you're a marketing consultant, you probably don't love the marketing part. You may even hate it.

Some people hate marketing because they think marketers are pushy people who wear loud clothing. Others hate marketing because they think that marketing is all about tricking people into doing something they don't want to do.

Many people hate marketing because they don't know how to do it and it seems hard. It doesn't matter whether you hate it, though. You have to do it.

You have to do marketing or you will not have customers. Without them there's no way for you to ply your trade and it doesn't matter how good you are at it.

As long as you have to do marketing, you may as well make it easy. Easy marketing is marketing that gets results because you put your time and money and effort into the important things. Easy marketing is doing the right things over and over and avoiding common marketing mistakes.

Easy doesn't mean magical. You have to do the work. Or you have to hire someone to do it and then make sure they do it correctly.

You have to do your homework. It starts with identifying what you're good at and passionate about. That's what you build a successful business on. Define what's distinctive about you.

You have to learn about your customers, too. What are their problems? What do they want?

You have to learn a little about people buy things. The short version is that people buy benefits, what's in it for them. People buy primarily on emotion, not logic, even for services like accounting. And buying is a process, not an event.

The process is important. The first thing is to get their attention. Next you have a conversation with them about what you do and how it can help them. Then you make your first sale. And then, you keep them coming back.

You have to keep working on the process. If you stop working on the process, the customers stop coming. Then you can't do the work that you love to do.

Easy is doing the effective things routinely, so they become a habit. The habit, or business process, is the key. That way you don't need to spend a lot of time and energy on marketing, but the marketing still gets done.

There's good news. Easy marketing is the way you can do more of the things you like to do in business and less of the things you don't like.

Figure out how you're distinctive and how that matters to your customers. Outline the simple things you should do to get their attention, to have a conversation, to make that first sale, and then keep them as customers.

Then turn those into simple steps you can make a routine part of your business life. That's easy marketing.