I was recently inter­viewed by a print mag­a­zine about how I started my busi­ness. In it, I offered sev­eral tips and ideas on how to carve a niche in the mar­ket­place that I per­son­ally applied.

I real­ized some of these tips were par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful. So I wanted to reprint some of my answers here for you.

If you know my per­sonal story, you know how niche mar­ket­ing played an impor­tant role in my career.

Long story short, as the child of an alco­holic I feared rejec­tion immensely, which led to a reclu­sive child­hood. We all fear rejec­tion to some degree. But for me, it was debilitating.

I wanted to over­come my fears and decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight them head-​​on. Years passed and many fail­ures ensued until I finally became the top pro­duc­ing sales­per­son in Canada for a major For­tune 500 company.

How did I accom­plish that?

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Today, mar­keters are scram­bling to find ways to increase cash­flow. Some will try to find new prod­ucts to sell. Oth­ers will try to drive more traf­fic to their exist­ing sales pages.

How­ever, one area most peo­ple tend to over­look is the abil­ity to increase their cur­rent sales by upselling their cus­tomers the moment they checkout.

But I’m not refer­ring to one-​​time offers or addi­tional prod­ucts offered in the same sales fun­nel. I’m talk­ing about offer­ing cus­tomers the abil­ity to upgrade their purchases.

I pre­fer “upgrade” rather than “upsell” because the lat­ter has received a bad rap of late due to a few overzeal­ous or unscrupu­lous marketers.

Sell­ing “upgrades” is an area that can become prof­itable for many busi­nesses in increas­ing their exist­ing sales. It’s by sell­ing extended ser­vices or ben­e­fits pack­ages before or at the time of check­out, also known as the “extended warranty.”

There are numer­ous ways to sell extended war­ranties (or what I pre­fer to call “extended ben­e­fits”). These silent profit cen­ters exist in almost any busi­ness, which can increase the size of a customer’s pur­chase by 50%, 100%, even 200% or more.

Very often, the sale of these extended ben­e­fits have higher profit mar­gins, too.

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“If you like to gam­ble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, you lose some, it’s all the same to me.” — Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”

I’m get­ting fed up.

It seems to me that prod­uct launches of late have less to do with sub­stance and strat­egy, and more to do with tricks and tac­tics. Blame it on the econ­omy. But I think we need to blame it on some­thing else. Some­thing more sinister.

In fact, have you not noticed that a grow­ing num­ber of mar­keters are urg­ing you to join their “club,” as if it’s some secret, back-​​of-​​the-​​room, clan­des­tine poker game?

Speak­ing of poker, busi­ness is some­what of a gam­ble. And admit­tedly, gam­bling can be prof­itable. Very prof­itable. After all, the more you gam­ble, the greater you win, right?

But do we really need to gam­ble with our customers?

What about the long-​​term? What about build­ing busi­nesses rather than just mak­ing money? What about invest­ing instead? What about invest­ing in your cus­tomers that can pay some­times 10 to 100 times more over the long run?

For exam­ple, some­one men­tioned a new pay-​​per-​​follower pro­gram on Twit­ter. (Ugh. How is that any dif­fer­ent than from spam­mers buy­ing bulk email lists?) I responded, and this pretty much sums up my phi­los­o­phy — it should be yours, too — with:

“I’d hate to treat my cus­tomers like pris­on­ers or prostitutes.”

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Why is it that suc­cess­ful mar­keters and online entre­pre­neurs seem to have this vir­tual “6th sense” when it comes to pin­point­ing hot, hun­gry, and highly prof­itable mar­kets they can sell prod­ucts to?

We see this again and again and again.

They seem to have this “Midas touch” when it comes to sell­ing online. Any prod­uct they launch sells like gang­busters. Every pro­mo­tion they do bal­loons their bank accounts. Every new mar­ket they enter becomes a sure­fire winner.

But ask them how they tap these hid­den gold­mines with an almost impec­ca­ble accu­racy, and the likely response you will get is, “I don’t know, it just feels right.”

There’s a reason.

(Stay with me, because in a moment I’m going to show you how you can do this your­self, and you don’t have to be psy­chic or shell out a lot of money!)

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Before we begin, you must under­stand the con­cept that under­lies this book. In today’s soci­ety, I believe we have expe­ri­enced two major shifts that have almost com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ized the entire busi­ness landscape.

The first and most impor­tant one is com­pe­ti­tion.

The mere fact that busi­ness is becom­ing increas­ingly hyper­com­pet­i­tive is an under­state­ment. Busi­nesses, par­tic­u­larly home-​​based busi­nesses and self-​​employed pro­fes­sion­als, are grow­ing at an explo­sive rate.

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If there’s one prob­lem in all adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing, it is the sheer fact that there is too much com­pe­ti­tion out there. Every­thing just seems to look like every­thing else. If one copies another com­pany let alone another company’s pro­mo­tion, it only serves as a reminder of one’s competition!

You don’t want to remind your prospects about your com­pe­ti­tion, do you?

So, don’t copy them — or as Earl Nightin­gale once said, “Don’t copy, cre­ate!” Be unique. Be orig­i­nal. Be spe­cial. Be dif­fer­ent. In fact, be so dif­fer­ent that, if pos­si­ble (and it is), your name or the name of your firm as well as the ser­vices you deliver become generic in the minds of prospects.

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A recently under­stood seg­ment of mar­ket­ing is the immense power behind the prod­uct cat­e­gory. Often, many busi­nesses build their entire mar­ket­ing strat­egy around a par­tic­u­lar brand and its bet­ter qual­i­ties within a cur­rently known prod­uct cat­e­gory, only to have it all go down the drain in the end.

Remem­ber the “New Coke”? In the 80’s, Pepsi con­ducted taste tests called “The Pepsi Chal­lenge.” Coke, on the side­lines, also heard from their own research that a newer, bet­ter tast­ing brand would beat Pepsi.

Only 77 days later, accord­ing to Coke’s for­mer mar­ket­ing vice-​​president Ser­gio Zyman in his book “The End of Mar­ket­ing As We Know It,” not only were they forced to rein­tro­duce the older ver­sion as “Clas­sic Coke” but they also had to even­tu­ally wipe the New Coke out. Bet­ter is not always bet­ter.

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