How To Be An Effective Internet Entreprenuer Part 2: Monetizing Your Expertise

One of the more common marketing mistakes is that of attempting to sell people what they need instead of what they want. This is closely related to promoting on the basis of features rather than benefits. Often this arises from adopting an insider's elitist mindset (however subtly) rather than understanding how an outsider might view what is being provided from a "What's in it for me?" perspective.

I remember being introduced to a raw food diet in terms of "it's good for you" and as such, I resisted. It wasn't until I actually tried it for a while and noticed how good I felt that I realized I would feel better if I had more raw food in my diet. So "What's in it for me?"  was answered by the benefit, "you'll feel great" rather than the feature, "it's good for you." 

So the question becomes one of figuring out how to get past what I call insider mindset using obscure terms about features and into the uninformed consumer's way of thinking about benefits. Another way to think about it is, "Find out what people want and sell it to them along with what they don't know they need."

A great example of this is David DeAngelo's marketing of lifestyle effectiveness coaching for men by serving it up with what the men seem to want which is pickup lines and advice on how to approach women. The key is confidence, and what his customers don't know they need is training in how to "get it together" in all areas of their life.

So how does one learn to apply a similar "stroke of genius" to one's own offering? Answer: Market Analysis & Keyword Research! (Eeew! Sounds boring.) Actually, once you lear how to do it, it's fascinating.

As far as market research goes, take a walk past a magazine rack. They've done the work for you. Choose a few magazines from the eye-level row, and look at the articles and advertisements. Notice that a magazine designed for young professional women has articles about workouts and relationships and advertisements for makeup and clothes. Notice several other magazines designed for different audiences and what their articles and advertisements are promoting. This should give you a sense of how target audiences differ and may suggest the market segments which would be willing to spend money on what you have to offer.

If you find one or two magazine that are a match for your offering, I would advise buying them and taking them home to dig deeper. Why? Because you want to get a feel for the mindsets, interests and language being used by your target markets. The words are important. They will help you with the keyword research part. 

My favorite keyword research tool is Wordtracker. They have both a free and a paid service. To use the free service, perform a google search on "keyword suggestion tool."  One of the top entries will be for Wordtracker's Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. Using this tool you can discover how many people are looking up particular keyword phrases in a day. The results can be surprising.

Try an experiment to see what I mean. Take an insider term like "polarity therapy" and enter it into the Keyword field. Notice how many searches were performed for all related terms. Then try it with a benefit such as "relax". Then try it with a problem such as "headache." If you are like me, you will wind up rewriting all you cards and flyers using terms that state benefits and solve problems instead of using labels for features and the various types of training I have had. (Such things have a place, but not as headlines).

Wordtracker's paid tool goes several steps further and shows not only the first few terms searched for, but also provides suggestions for related keyword phrases and the ability to analyze the competition for each set of terms to determine not only popularity but also effectiveness. For example, I once discovered that 30 people a day were looking up "hawaiian arm tattoos" but only two sites were responding. I wrote an article explaining that they weren't really Hawaiian but rather Tahitian or Samoan arm tattoos, linked it to another great article that was much harder to find, and got around 900 page hits a month for the last 3 years as a result. 

After performing both market research and keyword research, many people find that they would be better off re-languaging their offering in terms that others might use. If you are like me, you may find yourself doing supplemental training in order to respond more fully to what people want.

For example, I moonlight as a massage therapist. When I revamped my list of benefits, I added "help correct posture-related problems." I took additional training in how to assess posture and recommend corrective exercise to augment my skills as a massage therapist and add value.