Will Pull Marketing Generate Leads?

If you know your prospects and have their contact details in your CRM system or database, well… pull marketing may not be the most effective method to use for increasing sales leads this month. That said, it could be a viable way for converting prospects into Customers using our Triangle of Trust process if you have some very compelling content to give away to your prospects as teasers.

Folks, if you need new business from potential Customers that are currently unknown to you… pull marketing can be a highly effective weapon in your arsenal. Many people have asked us to present a list of best practices when they need more leads for their business so we collected a few of the best tips and posted them here for your review – hope it helps to answer some of your questions. If you’d like more concrete information or a customized process map, just get in touch with our sales team by filling out this form. Just to be sure that we are on the same page, please understand that it is essential to integrate push marketing techniques to support your pull marketing efforts. This helps to ensure that your brand’s buzz generates leads that you can convert into sales.  A good pull campaign will:

• engage your audience in a dialogue
• compile consumer data
• build and maintain trust
• provide value to the Customer
• compile leads
• empower your Prospect and Customer
• provide an authoritative knowledge base about your brand or niche
• increase your search engine visibility
• give your Customer the tools they need to inform others about your product or brand

Here are a few action steps to get you started.

Establish your marketing objectives:

What exactly is your goal? What will you use to measure your success? Once you have established your optimal end result you can begins to lay out a road map of specific milestones which will help you to achieve your goal in a timely fashion.

Master your keywords:

Which search terms do you want maximum visibility for? B6 Group has developed a set of processes to create first page search results in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other engines for virtually any long tail keyword. Always consider optimizing the ‘buying terms’ (those keywords that carry the highest potential for commercial intent). Positioning articles, pages and lenses for a wide variety of buying terms is an effective step in each campaign. For example; instead of focusing on “widget”, strive to target phrases such as “widget price”, “cheapest widget” or “buy widget”. Microsoft has an effective tool for measuring terms with commercial intent here.

Know your PPC

Get very familiar with driving traffic for low cost using PPC. In order to achieve this objective, you will need to achieve a high quality score on your landing page which means that the page your PPC ad points to must be highly relevant to the keywords in your Ad and it helps if the keyword is also included in your URL, your title tag and even your domain name.

Empower your Customers:

A well run campaign will give consumers the tools that they need to send your brand “viral”. If you gain your Customer’s trust and provided them with value, they will not hesitate to spread the word. Integrate your brand with social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg or Squidoo.  The key value to your brand in this category is that you are giving the Customer an opportunity to do your marketing for you, as well as providing valuable feedback and metrics.

Video:

Videos are useful in two primary ways. First, a video allows you to provide value to your Customer. Information always has value and a video is the most effective way to transmit your message. Secondly, a video that is hosted on Youtube, Google Video or metacafe is an excellent vehicle for traffic generation. Next time you check out a YouTube video, click the link under the user avatar and chances are you will wind up on a sales page.

Social Bookmarking:

Always distribute links to your blog posts, web pages, press releases and videos to social bookmarking services such as StumbleUpon, del.ic.us, reddit to name a few.

Interaction:

Get out there an begin a dialog, learn how to tweet, set up accounts on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites in the name of your business or your product and then personally develop the dialog with your target market. You can search for prospects, interact with them directly and even pitch them in real time but be careful… social media is extremely powerful and can have lasting results on your brand image so be prepared before you cross the line. If you always act with your Customer’s best interests in mind, you should do just fine. An examples of how to do it right can be found here.

Link Building:

Link building will increase your search engine rank and increase your online visibility. We can organize a unique linking system that is proven to place your website among the first page results for all major search engines. One easy method of gaining search visibility is to swap links with the owners of other websites, or include a url with comments wherever possible. Remember that on-site linking with good quality, long tail anchor text is equally important to off-site linking from other sites and article directories. Try to focus on optimizing each page for one single keyword and you can expect to experience a real boost in SERP rankings.

If you have specific questions or wish us to prepare a quote to help you with one of your projects, you can always reach us with questions.  Remember that an effective pull marketing campaign is only effective if it is thoroughly planned and executed in a professional manner.  A really effective pull marketing campaign requires months of planning and years of daily maintenance and execution.

Push and Pull?

One significant marketing trend in recent years has been the growing use of pull marketing techniques and channels.  Outsell, Inc., a media research firm, recently estimated that U.S. marketers will spend $65 billion in 2009 on their websites, which are constructed for the purpose of pulling Customers.  MediaPost recently reported that U.S. spending on search engine marketing (another pull marketing technique) will grow from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $22.4 billion in 2013.

Strictly speaking, pull marketing refers to marketing communications that are initiated by the prospective Customer.  In a general sense pull marketing is a distinct approach to marketing that relies heavily on engaging or informational communications to engage with potential Customers.  The single most important characteristic of good pull marketing communications is that the content is not overtly promotional.  The primary focus of most pull marketing efforts is on providing information that prospective Customers will consider to be valuable.  So for example, you might create a series of white papers, recorded webinars, articles or even micro-sites that address a concern your Customers have raised. We can show you how to efficiently discover your Customer’s concerns online and then deliver an ongoing stream of information to help both your Customers and Prospects get back in sync with your brand values and core messages.

The basic objective of pull marketing is to demonstrate your expertise and thereby establish your company as a credible and trusted source of information about a particular subject matter area. By doing this, you have provided the consumer with value even before they consider buying your product. When potential Customers go looking for solutions that fall within your area of expertise your company is more likely to receive favorable consideration because you have already established a bond of trust with the consumer.  Better yet, consumers who trust and value your content and products are more likely to use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to help build your buzz.

The effectiveness of traditional push marketing techniques is clearly declining. The fact is that people like you and me are bombarded with up to 3,000 advertisements each and every day! It’s a wonder that we are able to remember any of these ads. Sure, chances are still good that the ones that appeal to our sense of humor have at least a shot at our daily top 10 list but we have our own agenda today and we have access to the internet which means that we can PULL information that we need toward us when we need it.

The Internet has also contributed to the diminished effectiveness of traditional push marketing.  We have become confident that we can use the Web to find information about almost any product or service.  More importantly, we are confident that we can obtain that information whenever we want or need it. We rarely pay attention to marketing messages that aren’t relevant to our immediate interests or priorities.

Pull marketing is growing because marketers have recognized that their prospects are determined to control when and how they access marketing information.  Rather than fighting this mindset, savvy marketers are using pull marketing techniques to build credibility and trust enabling potential Customers to obtain the information that they want exactly when they want it.  We don’t believe that pull marketing will ever replace push, but it has become an essential strategy for many companies to reach out to those prospects that live by today’s social networking norms. 

Today’s most effective marketing programs are often a combination of push and pull.  For example, I frequently receive e-mails (push) that invite me to attend a Webinar (pull), watch a video (pull) or download a white paper (pull).

Are you ready to integrate pull marketing? Click here and let us know if we can help you set up a successful strategy.

Push or Pull?

With SEO initiatives trying to wrestle with the ubiquity of search engine dominance in our daily quest for information… it turns out that if you really want to succeed in promoting and selling products online, you need both push and pull strategies in place before you launch.

OK, sure, social networking technologies have raised the bar even further so that pull strategies are no longer an option… they are a must have for online marketing success. So, let’s start with some brief definitions and then move into a few suggestions.

Marketing theory distinguishes between two main kinds of promotional strategy – “push” and “pull”.

Push marketing is where you develop advertising and promotional strategies geared toward your marketing and distribution channels to entice them into promoting your product. As consumers, we rarely see this type of marketing because it is directed to the importers and distributors. It might include wholesale discounts, kickbacks, bonuses, and other types of support. It’s all designed to have the retailer promote your product to the end users instead of promoting a different or competing product.

Pull marketing on the other hand is when you develop advertising and promotional strategies that are meant to entice the prospect to buy your product or service. Some classic examples are Sales Events such as “bring in this coupon to save 25%” or “buy two get one free” etc. With pull marketing, you are trying to create a sense of increased, time limited value so that the Customer will come into your store to buy something today. When companies encourage happy Customers to spread the word to their friends and families – that’s a type of pull marketing also known as referrals or word of mouth (WOM) marketing. When companies produce ads that are controversial, edgy or downright shocking, they create a ‘buzz’ – and that’s another type of pull marketing. The ad pulls prospects into the distribution channel and if done well – right into the retailer’s arms.

It can be inferred from the above descriptions that Push is generally used by larger organizations with minimal if any direct contact with consumers (thus B2B) and Pull is preferred by the retailer (B2C) who deals directly with consumers and needs more sales this week. As technology provides increased and direct access to the consumer – larger organizations are starting to see the light – they too want to own a piece of the consumer’s attention.

Until recently, TV was the medium of choice for launching pull campaigns but the costs are high and the metrics are delayed so success can only be measured months later – much too late to change tack. Most large firms lack experience in communicating with consumers online and given their sloth like execution speed, achieving success with cost effective pull strategies can quite a challenge.

Online, this is a different story as long as the pull strategy is process based, systematized and supported by a team of experienced online marketers. Yes… online, large firms can help foster communities, create buzz, influence the winds of change and even view the success metrics of a pull campaign in close to real time.

The questions are:
Are large firms ready for real-time interaction?
Are they able to read the metrics, see the wind changing and then tack in time to catch the next breeze?
or do they still wish to act like supertankers heading toward the same destination with no regard for wind and weather?

Let’s dig a bit deeper… before responding.

Push

A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company’s sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. Typically this involves a reasonable investment in materials to get things rolling and placed in the right hands for maximum effect along the chain of distribution. The producer’s cost for push campaigns is often complemented by wholesaler’s and retailer’s advertising campaigns that are used regularly to drive traffic and leads into their shops.

Following the distribution chain, the producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote it to retailers, and the retailers promote it to consumers.

A good example of “push” selling is mobile phones, where the major handset manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia promote their products via retailers such as Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions are often the most effective promotional tools for companies like these – for example offering subsidies on the handsets to encourage retailers to sell higher volumes.

A “push” strategy tries to sell directly to the consumer, bypassing other distribution channels. With this type of strategy, consumer promotions and advertising are the most likely promotional tools.

Pull

A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up demand for a product.

If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers.

A good example of an effective (but expensive) pull strategy is the intense advertising and promotion of fast food restaurants and also kiddie toys – mostly on TV. Fast food restaurants often use children’s toys as a hook in order to target the primary influencer (the child) and insert desire into this very vocal and assertive segment of the population. Parents find it very challenging to resist visiting the restaurant that their child talks (and often sings) about day after day and hour after hour.

Thus, in this example, the producer creates demand using a loss leader to lure their target into the retail shops. Ten years of research has revealed that the more memorable and emotional the promotion is – the better the ROI.

In the online world, there are many different ways to create demand including leveraging social networks, viral tactics, videos, mobile phones, software applications and utilities like Twitter and community forums. The online difference is that the internet is quite transparent to feedback (both positive and negative). Marketers need to be aware of and plan for damage control to minimize the impact that potentially disruptive individuals can have on their pull campaigns.

Sure, you can filter out negative comments and such but, with social networking… the consumer really has a voice in this medium and the marketer’s task is often to convert the negative input into something more neutral should it occur while driving more and more traffic toward the core promotional message and thus the distribution channel.

Over-delivering on promises and flooding the media with video testimonials has helped many of our Clients overcome undesirable input by drowning out the noise of negative feedback or converting it into something more positive and constructive.

The focus of an effective online pull promotion is to create consumer demand for a reasonable cost and have consumers pull the product into a given online or OFFLINE distribution channel.

With careful planning and best practices pull campaign success is easier to achieve today than ever before. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in creating, launching or maintaining pull campaigns online. We have an entire library of process maps dedicated to serving our Clients with proven methods to achieve pull strategy success.

Did you know this about SEO?

Here are a few facts that most people don’t know about Ranking their sites in the Search Engines:

1 – Any Page that you make and publish creates Google Page Rank that is greater than ZERO.

This violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics
“Matter (Page Rank) is neither created nor destroyed”.

Google doesn’t care. Every time you publish a web page and it gets crawled, it gets assigned Page Rank just for existing.

That means that the more legitimate, non-duplicate pages you have on your site, the more you can affect your OWN rankings with internal links!

2 – Duplicate Content “OFF-SITE” is practically irrelevant.

“ON-SITE” Duplicate Content will kill your rankings.

3 – Your Web Page Template (Navigation Links, Footer Content, Side Bar Content) counts in the Duplicate Content calculation.

That means if your Web Page Template’s content has 200 words, and the rest of the content on your page is 50 words, you probably have Duplicate content issues.

4 – The Google Cache Date of any web page can indicate the relative power of the links on that page.

The more CURRENT (Fresher) Google’s Cache date of a web page is, the more likely that the links on that page are getting counted. If the page cache is CONSTANTLY getting updated, that’s a pretty strong sign that the links are getting counted MORE than a page where the cache date is OLD.

Want to optimize your site for the search engines so that you improve your position and ranking?
Then let us know about your needs by clicking here

email Policy

The Problem

E-mail typically takes too long to respond to which results in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

Given that our Time and Attention (two of our most valuable assets) are finite, we strive to find a way of responding to email effectively while managing our projects and building success stories for our Clients.

One Interesting Solution

Treat all email responses as we would SMS text messages and use a fixed number of characters per response – instead of counting characters in our emails, we count sentences. In addition, we do not check email more than 4 times each day.

To increase productivity and deliver the results that our Clients expect from us, we now spend less time checking email and have adopted the policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less.

At BoxOnline, we believe that how you spend your time and attention says a lot about who you are.

Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

SEO Lessons from the Field 1

This is the first of a series of posts we are going to publish on state of the art search engine optimization techniques to help you rank your site organically in the top search engines as high as possible for your top keyword phrases.

There are two main areas that search engines consider when they’re deciding how to rank your page and the first is what you publish on your page and how relevant that is to what people are actually searching for. We call these on-page elements. The good news is that you can optimize on-page elements easily. All you need to do is edit the text on your website.

The second thing the search engines look at is how popular your site is on the internet.

• How many other sites are linking to you?
• Do you have important authority sites linking to you?
• What text do such sites use to link to your site?

These are called off-page elements and we will address them in the next post on this topic.

On-page elements are important in determining your rankings but off-page elements are even more important. You’re unlikely to get to the #1 spot in Google, MSN or Yahoo purely because of your on-page elements, but they could mean the difference between being on page 3 or page 1 – So be sure to read Lesson 2 in this series for some off-page tips.

Here are a few critical on-page elements that you need to optimize in order to get reasonable organic listings for your keyword phrases.

Ensure that your <title> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

<title></title> tags indicate the title of your web page and gives the search engines a strong clue as to what a specific web page is about. This text appears on the very top of your browser window when you are on a given web page and this very same text is what the search engines will display in their organic listings as the clickable text link to your site. So, it’s really important that your <title> tags contain the keywords that you’re optimizing that particular page for.

For example:

If you wrote an article about how to read text faster, then the title of the page could be:

How to read text faster | Read Text Faster.

notice that I used the separator ‘|’ to boost the importance of my keywords for this page: this is an easy and natural way of doing it. You can use another separator if you wish, the idea is to present your keywords clearly for both users and search engine consumption.

Ensure that your <h1> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

Search engines read H1 tags first to find out what your page is about like headlines in a newspaper. If the search engine spiders discover your most important keywords in your <h1> tags, your page will be seen as more relevant for that search term and you will rank higher.

In your first 50 words of text be sure to include your keyword phrase.

Many search engines pay more attention to the first 50 words on a page than to the rest of the content on that page so be sure to include your keywords at least once within the first 50 words for each page you publish.

Keyword density: at least once in every 100 words of text on your page, incorporate your keywords and keyword phrases.

Your keywords need to appear a few times on your page integrated into the text but not more than 4 times for every 100 words. This is also known as 4% keyword density. If you go any higher than 4%, your site may be penalized for using a spam tactic.

Your internal site links need to include your keywords.

Search engines use the words in your link text (otherwise known as “anchor text”) to estimate the nature of the page you’re linking to. This can be used to your advantage in your on-page SEO efforts, giving your pages a little boost for your keywords.

We have many Clients who struggle to rank well in the search engines until they understand the importance of this tactic. Prior to working with us, they insisted on having a link on their site called ‘Home’. These people are actually optimizing their home page for the word “home” when they should be optimizing it for their main keyword instead! If they were to change the text “home” to “Read Faster Home”, or “Improve Reading Comprehension home”, they would give themselves a boost for “read faster” or “improve comprehension”. If your keyword for a page is “optimize your website”, then link to it from your menu using the text “optimize your website”, or “How to optimize your website”.

The same goes for all pages on your site. Don’t ever link to a page on your site using “Click here” unless you’d like to rank well for the phrase “click here”.

Original content means that visitors will spend more time on your site.

The search engines don’t want to display twenty sites with the same content. It doesn’t provide a good experience for their users. So you’ll find that many search engines have implemented “duplicate content penalties” for sites that seem to be displaying content very similar to content found on other website(s).

So what do you do if your content is the same as someone else’s?

This happens quite often, particularly if you’re using content from private label rights (PLR) articles, where hundreds of other people might be doing the same thing. The trick is to reword the article to make it unique. Shuffle the paragraphs, use synonyms, and try to change the article by at least 50%, and preferably more to be on the safe side.

Get the best quality content that you can for your site, because the search engines will also pay attention to how long people spend reading your pages. The longer visitors stay on your pages, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines for the keywords you have optimzed the page for. If visitors leave your site within a few seconds, the search engines may interpret this action as a poor fit for your keyword phrases. So try to write text that your visitors would be interested in and thus, try to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

What’s a Website For?

A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your potential Customers might value?

If not, this would be a very good first step in the right direction.
Always remember to use benefit’s based selling methods, track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and sign up for our Newsletter right now. BoxOnline is a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get the results that you desire.

How Big Is Your Pond?

Why you want to be a big fish in a little pond
rather than a little fish in a big pond…

Explaining this issue to my Clients got my wheels spinning last year and today, I think I have come up with a reasonable analogy.

For several years, Manchester United was the top team in football (soccer for those of you across the pond). The team’s shining star, David Beckham was bringing in more than £80 million per year while some of his team mates on the bench earned the league minimum of £200,250.

Same winning team. Why the 300:1 difference in pay?

Because Beckham was slightly better than everyone else – he developed a specialty – he could practically fly across the field and score and his PR team took advantage of this to drive sales of footballs, soft drinks, clothing, books in Barcelona, toothpaste in Torquey, bubble gum in Birmingham, shoes in Sussex, telephones in Tokyo, T-shirts in Toronto, sneakers in Sydney, Sheffield and San Diego… you get the idea.

Joe Benchwarmer got a salary but very little else – not because he lacked talent but because the perceived difference between being the best in the world and being on the team is dramatic.

The gap between first place and second place grows larger with each passing season. The gap between first place and last place is now enormous.

In many fields there is rarely one winner, but those near the top reap a disproportionate share of the rewards.

The potential market for any product or service, any author or actor, for any singer or songwriter, for any doctor or lawyer, for any athlete or academic, now extends from one end of the world to the other. Yes, we truly have achieved a global marketplace.

Lesson learned?
Either you dominate the global market in your niche or somebody else will.

The name of the game is not being “The Doctor.”
It’s about being The Specialist for Catheterization for Patients over 60.

It’s not about being “The Lawyer”.
It’s about being The Attorney for Intellectual Property, Copyright and Digital Rights Management Law for the nano imprint lithography industry.

Yes, you leverage your expertise to hyper-specialize in a given niche market so that even on the mighty Internet, you can be a big fish in a little pond.

When you’re #1 on the net for that niche – you win big time.
So, sit back, relax and plan your move into a smaller pond. Business wise, it’ll be the best move you ever made.

If you’d like some help thinking through a solid strategy that works, be sure to ask for our specialist.