Everyone knows the Internet Marketing drill.
- Spot a trend (or niche)
- Capitalize on it
Rinse and repeat
Let’s look at trendspotting more deeply.
You probably already know to go to Overture.com, do a keyword search.
Find keywords with a high number of searches.
Next go to Google.com and key in the same keywords.
Find something with as few results as possible.
Optimally, you’d want keywords for which there are many searches, but few results.
This’ll ensure that creating a website with these keywords will garner you sufficient traffic to monetize your adsense, affiliate marketing, product marketing, domain parking or other strategy.
This approach may be shallow though, if you’re merely looking at the supply-demand side of things (your results-search ratio so to speak).
Besides the Quantitative element, you will need to consider the qualitative elements too.
There are qualitative elements like cost-per-click, clickthrough ratios, but I’d like to expand the horizon more and adopt a macro perspective.
I’d like to introduce three dimensions which will help you further analyze, capitalize and profit from these trends.
The first dimension:
- Intensity: Is this a high intensity niche? Is it a major event? Or merely a blip on the radar screen?
Obviously all sports events are not created equal.
If intensity was on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, the Summer Olympics might be a 10, the Soccer World Cup might be an 8, the Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games might be a 6.
Even events in the same sport and category might have differing rates, for example the Wimbledon and US Open might rank higher than the French Open, which conversely has a higher profile/intensity in comparison to the Australian Open.
Bear in mind that intensity may incorporate geographical, cultural and other dimensions.
- Lifespan: What is the duration of the niche? For the Olympics it may be a month. The US campaign against Iraq could be considered nearly decades long (assuming the campaign was backdated to the 1990s)
Does the niche kick off further niches, prolonging it’s lifespan? For example, the Punk movement manifests itself in culture, music, fashion, art, and some say even food. Most contemporary counterculture traces some of it’s origins back to punk. A long lifespan indeed.
- Evolution: Does the niche permutate and evolve itself? Does it become a different animal over time? Witness the computer industry, going from mainframe computers -> minicomputers -> microcomputers -> desktops – > laptops -> PDAs -> palmtops. Maybe the next permutations might be fingertops? Who knows but the certainty is there.
Likewise with game consoles, you can witness the evolution from the old Atari consoles, Colecos, Atari ST, Nintendo, Sega Megadrive, SNES, Super Famicom, Playstation, Xbox and the new versions. (excuse if I left out your favourite console).
Analyzed outside of the typical RS ratios, the three factors can further enhance your analysis of these niches and give you a broader and informed perspective of the niche potential.
Would you like to get a tip to get ahead in Internet Marketing?
Find your greatest fear.
Got it?
Face it head on.
Seriously, you will find your efforts yielding massive results.
Consider the following:
- Afraid of making sales presentations and the prospect of having doors slammed in your face, being abused and getting turned down?
Go ahead and adopt an aggressive offline campaign, pitch to corporate prospects, venture capitalists, private equity specialists, whoever might be your target group.
- Have poor proficiency in Mandarin (like me and most of my ACS brethren)? Afraid to venture into the China market?
Take up the challenge and create a China-focused Internet Marketing strategy.
Teach the Chinese conversational and business English if you need to.
Are you crazy? What’s the point of all this? What are you trying to prove?
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damaged capacitor…
There’s nothing to ‘prove’, but consider this.
The barrier to our greatest success is our greatest fear.
Fear paralyzes us. It creates a vicious cycle of procrastination.
The biggest failure anyone can every make is not to have tried and failed.
The greatest failure is never to have tried.
By conquering our greatest fear, won’t everything pale in comparison?
If you are afraid of heights, take this as a challenge.
Go find the highest bungee jump location you can find.
Confront your fears.
Now, this is the most important part.
MAKE the decision to jump.
YOU have to make the decision to jump.
As you jump, keep your eyes wide open.
Here’s the important part, YOU make the decision to jump because you are in the driver’s seat.
You are the captain of the ship, the pilot of your destiny. [fill in your own analogy here]
If you had someone push you, it doesn’t count.
Go up and jump again.
Are you proving anything?
Do you end up ‘better‘ having done that?
Yes, you do actually.
And it’s not what you think.
You didn’t ‘prove’ anything to me.
Nor anyone else for that matter.
You ‘proved’ it to yourself. You raised your threshold, you stretched out of your comfort zone a little more.
My friend, Adam Khoo, says he constantly does things that scare the hell out of himself.
Whether it’s addressing a crowd of thousands, or entering into a wholly new arena, he’s there putting himself on the line.
And he sees results.
He’s sharing many business secrets in his latest venture here.
Will we always be successful?
I doubt it, otherwise there’s no fear.
But the biggest things we can come up with is not the accomplishment of having facing fear.
Rather it’s the COURAGE to have faced it, and of our own free will too.
After all, conquer your fears and you can conquer the world.
Someone was asking me how to accelerate their Internet Marketing efforts.
They’d be putting in many more hours, sleeping less, were getting run down, and worst yet, felt they were on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Worst still, they only saw a small increase in their results.
It’s physically impossible to increase their results, they proclaimed.
Not necessarily, I said.
You’ve been working hard, yes?
Yes, It’s killing me.
That’s the problem. You don’t need to work hard.
Nope.
There are two components to time usage. Quantity and quality. Instead of working hard, you need to work smart too.
This is what I told him.
We have several factors within our work framework:
- We have 24 hours a day
- Depending on your biorhythmn, you need about 8 hours of sleep a day
- You have between 16 waking hours every day
- You will spend about 2 hours eating each day
- You will spend about 1 hour in the toilet and shower
- You will spend about 1 hour travelling each day
That leaves 12 hours of work time.
If you have a full time job, that will take another 8 hours a day, leaving 4 hours.
You may just have 4 hours a day!
If you watch 2 hours of TV each day, you’ll kill off half your productive time.
Is it any wonder why many complain they don’t have any time to grow their business?
How you use your time each day will determine your results.
Here’re 3 ways to squeeze more time.
- Planning helps (a great deal!)
Spending 5 minutes at the start of the day is akin to planning your destination before setting out on your journey.
Knowing you will have 4 hours and deciding how you want to spend those 4 hours will be best.
If you wait to see what free time is available, there’ll usually be nothing left.
Planning your time means cutting out and making the time available to do the important tasks.
- Most important things first
The toughest tasks will usually be the ones that give the most leverage in accomplishing our goals.
Do those first, especially when you are fresh.
Putting them off another day will delay the achievement of your goals, and ultimately the outcome you desire.
Perhaps the most important. It takes 21 days to establish a new behavioral pattern. (Try waking up at 4am and start your workday at that time every day)
It will be difficult at first (as with all things), but as you establish new inertia, your new behavior will become unstoppable.
Taking these 3 simple steps will bring you massive results.
Test them out and leave a comment.
Rational and Emotional Appeals
We’ll skip the intellectual appeals because this should be second nature.
More than 90% of sales appeals are geared towards giving the product’s factual features or benefits.
Most of the time this doesn’t work.
Consider using emotional appeals instead.
Emotional Hotspots
Emotional Hotspots are a prospect’s sensitive areas. Their Achilles’ heel, so to speak.
 If triggered, these hotspots will leave the prospect defenseless.
If you drive a prospect’s emotional hotspots and you are successful, they’d be powerless and usually buy the product or service.
Let’s look at some practical applications.
Interweaved in this are elements of features, benefits and needs-based selling.
Rational-based appeal:
“By this MP3 player which comes with 4gigabytes of storage space, latest communication technology USB and bluetooth connectivity.High capacity NiMH battery with 5000 mAh capacity. Use the EzTunes software to transfer files.”
Emotional-based appeal:
“Enjoy hundreds of hours of your favourite music and enjoy your favourite tunes on the move. Supreme portability and convenience as you wirelessly transfer music to and from your desktop.”
Emotional appeal can target higher level values like comfort, luxury, prestige.
You are more likely to get a consensus when you focus on the macro perspective (it will improve your quality of life), rather than the micro (“what’s the battery life like?”)
As you get the prospect more involved in your presentation, you’ll be able to direct the flow of the transaction and they will follow your lead.
Poll the prospect
By asking the prospect the attributes that they’re looking for (reliablity, effectiveness, durability) you can continually emphasize those attributes.
Appeal to emotional attributes
For a customer who’s interested in durability, they would particularly keen if they find out your product is designed and engineered to provide ten years of trouble-free service.
For a customer who’s interested in effectiveness, an analysis showing that it’s more powerful than competitive products would help address their needs.
Emotions can be a double-edged sword.
As you probe the prospect’s emotional responses, you will also discover their points of sensitivity.
This will help you refine your approach to enhance the chances of success.
If you haven’t read the previous article which covers the other 2 important Internet Marketing sales techniques, you can view it at “The three types of Internet Marketing sales techniques“.
At this point, you’re already familiar with features-based selling and benefits-based selling,
shouldn’t that already help secure the customer?
You’re right, these are really powerful selling techniques and sales trainers like Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, Blair Singer have become rich off them.
But, there is one way to substantially increase your sales closure rate.
Again, my partner is going to nag at me, because I’ve already given it away for free in the Best Kept Business Secret course at BizExcellerator.com.
I’m starting to believe him, that giving people stuff for free, means they’re not likely to read it or take action.
Only when I charge them $1,000 for the course, will there be a stronger commitment for action.
I’ve been involved with Stuart’s Internet Marketing training recently, and only a handful of participants have taken action. Maybe you should charge more for the training, then you’ll have more people taking action, Stuart!
But here’s a real-world application of the sales insider secret.
I got a lot of it from my real estate mentor, Edwin Teo.
Using this technique we sold a good class bungalow in November last year.
If you’re familiar with property, there’re only a few hundred of such properties in Singapore.
Because the supply is limited, and the pool of people who can afford such properties is also limited, it’s difficult to close these deals.
But if you do, boy oh boy, a major payday!
In fact, the fees for this deal was in the high five figure amount.
Imagine this, a SINGLE deal amounts to more than what 80% of Singaporeans make in a year!
Just ONE deal.
Now here’s the secret.
“Needs-based selling“.
That was simple wasn’t it?
Go forth and embrace success.
I told you it was so simple and straight in front of your face that it’s a surprise more people aren’t successful.
If you need to, re-read the section on “Abraham Maslow Hierarchy of Needs” at the BizExcellerator Best Kept Business Secret course.
Successful selling, specifically seeing a quantum increase in sales (where we’re talking about sales increase by 5 times, 10 times, instead of 30% or 50%), requires a major paradigm shift.
The sales approach needs to go from product-centric (features or benefits-focus) to customer-focused.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will help you pinpoint with laser-like accuracy the basis of greatest need and meet it with your product.
Even if you have the world’s best quality mineral water-based ice cubes and you’re selling it to an Eskimo, you’re going to need a lot of luck.
If you have a low-priced energy-efficient igloo heater, I’m fairly sure you’re going to be top salesman pretty soon.
Commonsensical, isn’t it? The application is more challenging though.
This paradigm shift will net you greater results.
To put the hands-on spin to Maslow’s framework, consider the following:
1) All human beings have needs
2) Meeting higher level needs may enable you to price your products and services at a premium
3) Emotional components are more important than intellectual appeals.
Emotion vs Intellect
Do you typically make decisions based on emotion (how you feel about a product) or intellect (your rational opinion about it).
Although you may sometimes use intellect as a basis, most of the time it will be based on an emotional decision.
For example, among the food choices, our diet might best be met by a high fiber, medium carbohydrate, low fat food combination. Maybe boiled barley and soy milk. Since this is our optimum food choice, we should be eating the same thing every day.
But we don’t!
Instead we crave (an emotional response) salmon, french fries, chocolate cake, ice-cream, because we want (an emotional response) rather than need (an intellectual response) these foods.
Is this logical? Shouldn’t we eat the ‘best food’ every day?
Our bodies will be in peak condition, won’t it?
Instead, emotion overrules logic!
Needs-based selling if executed correctly, will:
- have a high emotional component
- be customer-centric (but still must have some product focus too)
If you have questions regarding:
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- needs-based selling
- emotional vs intellectual appeals
please leave a comment.
If you might find crafting of needs-based selling appeals, or examples useful, drop a comment too.
Needs-based selling is a very powerful too.
Because many people aren’t using it (or using it well), you will see massive increases in your results if used successfully.
Test it out and do report your results.
After coming up with yesterday’s post. “The three types of Internet Marketing sales techniques“, and offering to share information on the most powerful technique, I’ve seen some interest on the blog and outside of it for the information.
And my partners have been asking me if I really want to share this information.
I’ve told them yes, it would be useful and helpful for my readers.
And it will be the first time too, that I’m explaining and sharing this information.
It will be published in the next day or so, and i’m currently editing the information.
Thanks for your patience.
Cheers,
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