Based on many evidences in the marketplace, there are many ways to sell products and be proftable in the process. However, not all ways will be as efectve and give great returns in terms of your investment of tme, energy and resources.
In the internet marketng scene, you see many people who are in the background working like crazy to build links to their site manually, writng artcle afer artcle for syndicaton and building squidoo lenses afer squidoo lenses, paying per click for every visitor they get.
Now, I’m not saying that this is a wrong thing to do, I do them myself too sometmes (via outsourcing) but consider this, THE FASTEST AND SUREST WAY TOWARDS GENERATING LEADS THAT CAN QUICKLY BECOME BUYERS THAT TRUSTS YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS IS BY GAINING PREEMINENCE.
The advantages you gain from becoming the expert, the authority, having preeminence in your marketplace are numerous.1. The Trust Factor: People Believe in you and your work
2. Setng the Trend: You could infuence the directon of your market
3. Gain exposure to great opportunites
4. Could charge higher prices for your products and services
5. You could reach many more people and help them
6. Bigger list and beter open rates
One way you can start gaining preeminence is by having a home base. This home base would be vital to your marketng eforts as you would channel all your marketng eforts there, and it’s where you can start delivering value to your marketplace.
The home base I’m referring to is your blog. A blog is versatle, easy and friendly to navigate, has the ability to add onto it many diferent features like squeeze pages, download pages, membership functons, content delivery systems and more.
What I normally do when I’m entering a new niche market is to create a standout blog that delivers great content, informaton and helpful resources while expectng nothing in return.
Here are great tps to creatng a Blog as your Home Base:1. Post on your blog regularly, using a mix of diferent media types such as video, text, audio, interviews and much more to deliver great value to your marketplace.
2. Write up on popular topics that your subscribers and blog visitors are interested in. Also add evergreen content that last for a long tme while becoming your pillar content.
3. For blog posts, a variety of short, medium and long posts should be created to cater for diferent reader styles. Add images, screenshots, examples and case studies to make it even more interestng.
4. Link up with diferent blogs collaboratvely to host certain events, compettons and joint venture partnerships to increase reach and infuence.5. Ofer Free content and other resources without any obligatons and set out to help your blog visitors as much as you can.
6. Ofer as many ways as possible for your blog visitors to sign up to your newsleter. Example would be using pop-up lightboxes, optn forms on various parts of the blog, ad footers and incentves for signing up. One cool resource that I have used recently is PopUp Dominaton. It works really well and has increased the optns on some of my sites by more than double.
A secret to being successful in business and in life generally is by practcing this rule of giving more value than you receive, all the tme. It does not literally mean giving $100 away and then receiving $20 in return. I will give you an example: Say if you are an accountant with specialized skills in
analyzing account. Then a businessman turns up to you asking for advise on how to
manage their accounts as they had no idea how to do it. Then you gave them a specialized and valuable advice that would go on to save them over $100,000 in their business. They you charged him $30000 for your advice.
Let me ask you, who received more value from that transacton? Since the businessman actually saved a total of $70000 as opposed to you the accountant gaining value of $30000, then the businessman would have had more value from the transacton. I bet he would be happy to come back for more advice in the future, as you are a valuable asset to him and what’s more, he will be a RAVING FAN and a give you lots of Referrals.
So the point that I’m driving home here is that you MUST strive to create these types of value IMBALANCE favoring your customers, and to your marketplace every single day. With that you will achieve preeminence very quickly.
The next method to achieve preeminence is to represent an IDEA, represent your own set of believes and principles. You would want to represent something that is signifcant, yet diferent from the conventonal wisdom in the marketplace.
If you did things diferently, have diferent IDEAS and philosophies and also be efectve at the same tme, you would have NO ONE to compete against you, because you are unique, and there is no substtute for you and your business in the marketplace. Seth Godin describes this as being a “purple cow” in your marketplace.
You obviously have to be confdent and willing to fght for your ideas, but it is very much a beter place to be in the Blue Ocean rather than the saturated Red Ocean.What is congruency? Congruency happens when the message that you radiate to your marketplace is consistent, bares a single BIG IDEA and is predictable according to your business personality.
Incongruency happens when you represent confictng ideas, not being consistent in your marketng messages and have a confictng principle that’s driving your business.
For example, a tobacco company cannot claim that they are advocatng health and fully supportng a healthier future generaton by merely donatng a sum to a cancer charity. This does not make sense and does not convince the customers as the messages that they are radiatng out are in confict.
So think about your marketng message, make sure that it all unifes one big vision, one big idea and does not confict with the principles of your business. This way you will gain more trust and raving fans for your business.
This may not resonate well with some marketers, as it may not be a criteria that is important to them. However, in my ventures, conscience marketng is a key element. Why? Because you can only truly be successful if you help enough of others be successful.
And if I do not operate with conscience, instead get stuck in the money minded frame of mind, whereby I recommend products that do not work but pays high commissions, I’m jeopardizing my reputaton, goodwill and trust that took so long to build. Plus I wouldn’t feel good anyway if I received rewards from literally deceiving my customers of their money.
But more importantly, if you truly tap into the power of conscience marketng, it will not only elevate you from your compettors, but will also unleash an untapped force so that you will be much more convincing, much more energized in your marketng eforts and much more efectve in the way that you communicate value to your customers as you really are doing it from the heart.
Basically, to operate in the conscience-marketng zone, only sell and recommend product that you truly believe will beneft your customers and will bring them to the soluton that they are desperate for, will move them closer to the goals that they want to achieve.