Conscious Marketing Sessions

A launch is complete the moment your offer can be found, understood, and purchased. Everything after that is marketing, and it can move at the pace you can actually sustain.

Most of us learned launching from a 2018 playbook: waitlists, countdowns, email sequences, months of runway, all of it built on the assumption that people are volume and inboxes are spacious. Some of that worked. Almost ten years later, it's stale, and the people we're trying to reach are overwhelmed, financially stretched, and very good at smelling a sales email.

So this session boiled launching down to its simplest form. A launch is a single event: the moment an offer can be found (someone can search for it and land on it), understood (they get enough clear, plain information to make an informed decision), and purchased (systems exist so they can actually say yes). Clicking publish on a web page counts. So does one line in a newsletter. So does a casual reel with a link in your bio, which is how I opened preorders for my book.

That separates launching from marketing. Launching happens once. Marketing is everything after.

Key takeaways

❋ A launch is finished when your offer can be found, understood, and purchased. That's one moment, usually as simple as hitting publish.

❋ Launching and marketing are two separate jobs. The launch happens once; the marketing lasts as long as the offer does.

❋ The more time and money you're asking for, the more time people need to decide. Say the deadline, the cap, and the price change again, and again.

❋ Write in the words people type into a search bar at 10 o'clock at night. Clarity first; poetry has its place, and it's rarely on the sales page.

❋ Choose a rhythm you can sustain. Moving one piece forward each week beats a calendar you'll abandon.

❋ Measure relationship: replies, return visits, referrals. A canceled workshop is data about the moment, and says nothing final about you or your work.

Mentioned in this session

❋ Michelle Cassandra Johnson's books and teaching

❋ Tanya Geisler, on why she uses "imposter complex" rather than "imposter syndrome" (an example of content written to meet the term people actually search)

❋ We Are the Message, preorders open now

❋ Visibility Is Not Neutral, Tristan's Substack

❋ Tristan's article on the word "womxn"

Come to the next CONSCIOUS MARKETING CLUB

The Conscious Marketing Club meets free and live on the second Friday of every month, 10am PT / 1pm ET, on Zoom. Live captions, spot coaching, and the replay within 24 hours.

November 13 - FROM SCROLL-TO-STORE: Instagram is the commercial + newsletters are the store. Nobody gets up mid-commercial to go buy dish soap. We see the same ad dozens of times, then one day we reach for the one we recognize.

→ LEARN MORE + REGISTER

I started my business in 2018 making websites for yoga teachers. On paper it was a reasonable niche. I was trained as a yoga teacher, I was deep in the local yoga community, and I'd spent years studying how yoga teachers built their websites. The problem showed up in the arithmetic. No amount of work was going to build a living out of a client base that is, as a matter of industry reality, underpaid.

What took me much longer to see was the structural error underneath it. "Yoga teachers" described who was walking in the door. It said nothing about what I was bringing with me.

This session works through that distinction and everything that follows from it.

Four things to take from it

Your audience is who's in the room. Your niche is what you bring into the room.

Niching narrowly makes the room smaller and the business less sustainable.

Niche is a foundation question that gets expressed at positioning and then in your marketing.

Your constellation will keep evolving, and a complete pivot is always available to you.

Try this

Change one sentence. Your about page, a bio, the description of one offer. Move the thing you've been burying up to the front where people can see it. And try to release attachment to a “perfect tagline.” In my experience, they don’t really exist!

Mentioned in this session

The constellation worksheet.

The Business Puzzle, created with Brooke Monaghan. A map of how foundation, positioning, offers, pricing, messaging, branding, strategy, systems, and impact connect to each other.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson. My clearest example of one person holding many constellations: seven books spanning yoga philosophy, honeybees, affinity spaces for BIPOC facilitators, and now spiritual and magical protection, plus a background in social work and a stint as an elected official. You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy is out September 15.

Gary Katz. Carpenter, photographer, author, educator, fly fisherman, and holder of a master's thesis in English Literature, which he can easily connect to every other constellation in his life. His new book, American Mantelpieces: A Carpenter’s Journey Through Architectural Styles, is now available.

Canva. For anyone making visual frameworks on a budget: search the flowchart or spoke-and-wheel templates and use the structure as scaffolding rather than starting from an empty canvas. Analog counts too!

Come to the next CONSCIOUS MARKETING CLUB

The Conscious Marketing Club meets free and live on the second Friday of every month, 10am PT / 1pm ET, on Zoom. Live captions, spot coaching, and the replay within 24 hours.

October 9 — The One-Day Launch. I don't teach launching, on the grounds that none of us need to launch anything. This one is about what marketing an offer actually asks of you in 2026.

→ LEARN MORE + REGISTER

Instagram is one piece of a marketing ecosystem. Building an entire business on a platform you don't own is a fragile plan, and this session worked through what else is available to you.

We started somewhere unexpected for a marketing conversation: business modeling. Your marketing depends on your business model, so before deciding where to put your energy, you need a clear picture of how many people you work with, what they pay you, and what you can actually deliver at each tier.

We talked through:

A simplified version of a framework I learned from Brooke Monaghan—do it yourself, do it with you, do it for you—using my dog Layla's imaginary business as the example.

Connecting the threads of marketing and choosing our channels or platforms.

Understanding where we’re “borrowing” an audience and where we have more direct contact.

Freebies or lead magnets that serve your clients and your business model.

The importance of creating consistently, not constantly.

Mentioned in this session

❋ Brooke Monaghan — the business modeling framework this session adapts, and the line resonance and readiness are two different things

❋ Business Modeling for Equity, co-facilitated with Brooke Monaghan · Fruition Growth Network

❋ Your Business Is a Puzzle — the free business strategy worksheet used as the freebie example

❋ Free resources — including Beyond the Feed, Burn the Blueprint, and the gender-neutral language tool

❋ Stephanie Ghoston Paul, on returning to your why

❋ September’s Conscious Marketing Club: reframing the niching conversation

Welcome to the first episode of the CONSCIOUS MARKETING Podcast with Tristan Katz, a podcast for people who want to market their work with integrity in a world that often teaches us to do the opposite.

This episode is a recording from the live, monthly Conscious Marketing Club in which we explored the classic question, “How do I market myself when selling myself feels gross?”

For many entrepreneurs and service providers, marketing can bring up discomfort, vulnerability, urgency, and overwhelm. We know we need to tell people what we’re doing. We know we need to be findable. We know we need to get paid. And also, the dominant marketing world often teaches us to use pressure, fake scarcity, polished performance, and pain-point manipulation to get people to buy.

This conversation offers another way.

In this episode, Tristan explores:

→ How capitalism teaches us to equate marketing with money, transaction, and return on investment

→ Why getting paid for your work matters—and why that doesn’t mean your marketing has to become extractive

→ The difference between transactional marketing and relational marketing

→ Why “selling yourself” feels especially vulnerable when your work is personal, relational, creative, healing, or care-based

→ How to help people discern whether your work is right for them

→ Why trust is built over time, not manufactured through urgency

→ How repetition supports visibility, recognition, and relationship-building

→ Why pricing is not about “charging your worth”

→ How free content, newsletters, podcasts, and community spaces can function as meaningful entry points into your work

Key takeaways

→ Marketing is not only about selling. It is also about visibility, education, relationship-building, trust, service, and helping people understand who you are, what you do, and whether your work is right for them.

→ Transaction is not the enemy. You deserve to get paid for your labor. Extraction is the problem.

→ Relational marketing asks a different question. Instead of “How do I get people to buy?” we can ask, “How do I help people make informed, consensual decisions about whether my work is right for them?”

→ Metrics can offer useful information, but they are not the whole story. One email reply, one person saying “thank you for this,” one conversation sparked by your content—these things matter.

→ Pricing is not about reducing your worth to a number. Your humanity is not for sale. Pricing is about business modeling, sustainability, access, capacity, and finding structures that help you live while serving others.

→ You are allowed to repeat yourself. Repetition is not redundancy. Repetition builds trust.

Resources mentioned

Conscious Marketing Club → LEARN MORE
A free monthly gathering for values-rooted entrepreneurs, educators, facilitators, healers, creatives, and service providers exploring marketing, business, visibility, content, and showing up with integrity.

Free marketing resources from Tristan Katz → LEARN MORE
Explore workbooks, guides, and resources on marketing ecosystems, content strategy, conscious marketing, and creating more sustainable visibility.

Business Modeling + Pricing for Equity with Brooke Monaghan → LEARN MORE
A deeper exploration of offers, pricing, accessibility, sustainability, sliding scale structures, and building business models that support both your clients and your capacity.