“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
I had a very smart individual, Jon Cartier, once tell me that you should always choose who you work with based on Attributes rather than Skills. As a former programmer that was especially true. Finding someone who could program in a specific coding language was easy. Finding someone who was a good programmer (i.e. a creative problem-solver) was difficult. Attributes are who a person is, rather than what coding syntax they know. You can learn a new language, but learning how to be creative is extremely difficult.
People always seem to ask for how they can find the perfect procedure. You know the idea, follow steps one through twenty and success is guaranteed. There are plenty of salesmen for that as well (Ponzi wasn’t the only one).
The real trick is trying to teach someone what concepts they should follow. No one wants to pay for that. Its too much like work. After all, they are paying someone else in order to get out of doing the work in the first place. When they are given a concept, that means they now have to do even more work than what they were thinking of in the first place. Let me put this into a marketing perspective:
- What are you trying to communicate to your audience?
- No, really, what is it you want to tell them?
- Then why don’t you just give them the information and let them do what they want with it?
This is the opposite of Traditional Marketing. Traditional marketing is all about control. You must control where someone looks in order to control what they see, how they see it, and what you want them to do. “Where people’s eyes go, marketing dollars follow”.
Rather than chasing and tackling consumers in order to force-feed your information to them, why not choose a different path?
It worked for the Horse Whisperer (and Dog Whisperer, and Gerbil Whisperer, etc.)
You can find your perfect audience based on their attributes and then give them the information they are asking for. The people who want what you have, generally surf the same sites, chat in the same places, talk about and search for similar things. This does not mean you go to sites and play “marketing whack-a-mole” with the people there. The internet is a huge toolbox. If you don’t grab the right tool, you won’t get the result you want. Despite what some people think, a hammer is not always the perfect tool. Let the audience determine what tools they want and then provide it for them.
Rather than blindly following a step by step procedure, make sure you understand the concept of how the procedure was developed. Without knowing why, the how can lead you down the wrong path for reaching your audience. Selling leather chaps require a different technique than selling a Stradivarius violin, so make sure you understand the concept and not just the procedure.
Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!