Two people asked me questions about how to stand out in a crowded market.
“How to grab people’s attention? It is not like it used to be. Everyone and their sister is now a coach or trainer.”
“How do I differentiate in a market that has low barriers to entry and is crowded with crud?”
These people are asking the right question! It’s true that you need to figure out how to stand out and be different and I think there are 2 ways to do that.
A different question is how to promote yourself to grab people’s attention, but that’s a much larger question. I’ll discuss that a little bit at the end, but in this post, I’ll focus on how to establish yourself as unique so that the right people — your ideal, target customers and clients — will be attracted to what you have to offer.
1) You need to focus
When you serve everyone, no one is attracted to you. That’s because what you say doesn’t speak to people personally and individually. So you need to focus on whom you want to serve and that shouldn’t be everyone.
The process of focusing on helping a narrow slice of people is sometimes called “niching down.” It means that you want to choose the slice of people that you can best serve. This becomes your target market and it affects all of your promotion, the products you offer, your services, your keywords, and even your branding.
When you niche down, you gain the following benefits: Continue reading →
In spite of what the gurus and coaches say, there is no one way to make a good living online.
I believe that you need to speak to get your message out to the world. Yes, you can write, but people get to know you better when you speak. And I’m a firm believer in speaking online because you can:
A subscriber wrote me, “Mostly I need to learn how to promote my books. I am good at writing but a novice at promoting.”
You can’t sell your services if people don’t know what you’re all about.
A subscriber told me she was having problems selling her own products and also affiliate products (products of others that she would get a commission on). When I asked her why she thought she was having these problems, she answered:
Once upon a time, you could build a blog post and people would come and they would subscribe just because the opt-in form was in the sidebar.
A subscriber asked me, “What is the one most popular/ profitable/ easiest to produce / easiest to market product or service for a beginner to start with?”