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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In the com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place of the new mil­len­nium, the demand for spe­cial­ized prod­ucts or ser­vices will increase. If your site sells every­thing or to every­one, chances are that your audi­ence will not per­ceive any greater value in shop­ping from you than any­one else.

The more generic you are, the greater your com­pe­ti­tion will be since you’ve placed your offer­ing in the same ring as the Wal-​​Marts, Tar­gets, and eBays of the world.

To bor­row the fish­ing anal­ogy, some peo­ple say that going after a larger mar­ket is cast­ing a wider net. Not so. (The net is really your website.)

Rather, it’s like fish­ing in a larger body of water where there are more fish, the fish are more spread out, and there are more com­peti­tors going after the same fish you are.

Unless you are try­ing to be another Wal-​​Mart, there’s no point in com­pet­ing with them. The sheer size of such big box Goliaths gives them a size­able com­pet­i­tive advan­tage — par­tic­u­larly pur­chas­ing power, both in terms of prod­ucts sold and adver­tis­ing dollars.

In addi­tion to being able to buy more ad space than small busi­nesses can, they can buy their stock at con­sid­er­able bulk dis­counts, osten­si­bly giv­ing them the lower price-​​point advan­tage against which most small busi­nesses can­not compete.

So how do you increase your sales in such a com­pet­i­tive, price-​​sensitive marketplace?

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The 10 Com­mand­ments of Power Posi­tion­ing: Mag­i­cal Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies for Cre­at­ing an End­less Stream of New, Repeat, and Refer­ral Busi­ness is Michel Fortin’s ebook that brings together the art of posi­tion­ing with the sci­ence of direct response.

This ver­sion is the 3rd edi­tion with over 140,000 copies dis­trib­uted to date! This is includes third party dis­tri­b­u­tion since peo­ple are invited to freely pass the ebook around. In fact, the esti­mate is in excess of 140,000 copies in all. (It’s prob­a­bly closer to 300,000 copies if not more.)

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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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In John Reese’s Mar­ket­ing Secrets Forum, a forum in which I am the senior mod­er­a­tor, mem­ber John Jarowski posted a really impor­tant ques­tion. He asked, and I’m para­phras­ing John for the sake of brevity:

“When a new strat­egy is taught by some ‘guru’, every­body seems to copy it with­out tweak­ing it. This dilutes their effec­tive­ness and puts me off tremen­dously. I would think that using any ‘new’ mar­ket­ing strat­egy is a lot less effec­tive once it gets diluted by lazy mar­keters who want to do cookie cut­ter style marketing.”

I agree. And let me tell you why this is true, and share with you impor­tant tips on how to avoid this.

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