Don't compete. Create. Earl Nightingale said it. Then he did it. Together with Lloyd Conant he created the educational cassette industry. Today, Nightingale Conant leads the field and produces the highest profits while delivering superior value to their customers. You can do this, too. I propose to show you how here, now.
1. Do you have unique expertise now? Package it into marketable products and/or services. . .
2. Are you without unique expertise? Find a cutting-edge 21st century niche in which you can make yourself the world expert. (See 6, below.) Buy all the books on your chosen niche. Subscribe to journals, newsletters, magazines addressing your specialty. Identify and join associations in that field. Attend their meetings and conferences. Become a sponge, an information vacuum cleaner. Buy the educational cassettes. Take copious notes. Organize your research. Then synthesize your own new understandings. These are your original findings. Now, prepare your first off-the-shelf products and/or services.
3. Create a unique, benefit-laced name for your operating entity. Ideally, make the name one that implies benefits and promises. For example, when I created my entity, I named it Personal Achievement Institute. Conceive exciting prose that tells prospects "What's in this for me." Provide solid reasons why anyone should listen to you. Brainstorm. Let your intuition help you identify those reasons.
What about your product and/or service? Let me give you as an example, the name I created for what I primarily market: I call it the Speaking Success System. Notice the implication of a benefit and a promise.
Here's one more example; When I conceived a unique e-zine for speakers and aspiring speakers, I named it the Speaking Biz Success Letter. Engage these principles to create your own unique names.
4. When you prepare to market your offering, consider your anticipated market. What can you deliver that they yearn for, hunger for, long for? Translate your findings into what all this means. Do this in terms of benefits serving and satisfying the respective interests and concerns of your market.
5. Place your key points boldly in your marketing materials. Know the benefits you deliver, the wants you satisfy. Know them inside out, upside down, backward and forward. be able to articulate them any time anywhere.
6. Here's how to find and claim a market for a niche in which you are to make yourself a world-class expert: Go to a library or bookstore. Get your hands on American Renaissance by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davis, and Megatrends 2000 by Naisbitt and Aburdene. Look for newer books focusing on the future and on emerging industries and markets in the same sections of your bookstore. Read these books. Ideas will leap off the pages at you, page after page.
Dozens of untapped markets and niches await your inquisitive and perceptive focus. List all the niches that attract you. Review your list for a few days. Meditate on your favorites for a few evenings. At night, as you drop off to sleep, direct your subconscious mind to review your list, to give you insights regarding the most ideal niches for you. Be guided by your feelings. One niche will rise, like the cream to the top of the milk. You'll be drawn to it. It's yours.
Now, steep yourself in your niche orgiastically. Immerse yourself in its lore. Allow yourself to reach a perceptive point, an outlook, a height from which you attain an intuitive vision of what will be hot months and years from now. (Alvin Toffler has done this for over 20 years. Today, he's one of the most in-demand speakers anywhere.)
Listen to your intuition. Be fearless, even outrageous, when you have a hunch. Follow your hunch regardless of objective evidence. (Tom Peters, then working for McKinsey & Co., followed his hunch in defiance of his company. He was then researching the book, In Search of Excellence, written with Bob Waterman. The outcome was he had to resign. He quickly became a fearlessly audacious business guru.) Choose your niche dauntlessly. Then, lavish energy into developing it to its fullest potential. In the words of Peter Drucker, be a monomaniac with a vision.
Copyright Burt Dubin - Burt Dubin is president of the Personal Achievement Institute. Burt works with people who want to be speakers
and speakers who want to be masters.
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