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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“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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A fair warn­ing: this post delves into some­thing I’m pas­sion­ate about, which is some­what philo­soph­i­cal in nature. So if you’re of a cer­tain reli­gious per­sua­sion and eas­ily offended by oth­ers, then please skip over this blog post. If not, read on…

“The Secret” is tak­ing the entire world by storm. It deals with the “Law of Attrac­tion,” in that we attract to our­selves what we think and feel, and that our per­cep­tions mold our reality.

As Earl Nightin­gale pro­claimed in “The Strangest Secret,” one of the first self-​​help pro­grams I’ve ever bought: “We become what we think about.”

You may have seen it talked about on Larry King, Oprah, and many other talk shows. It’s the most suc­cess­ful Inter­net launch of any prod­uct. It hit Alexa #1 soon after its launch, and pro­pelled to the Amazon.com’s #1 best sell­ing book and DVD within a few months.

It appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, New York Times, and Time Mag­a­zine, and even on the cover of Newsweek, which came shortly thereafter.

But is “The Secret” truly worth the buzz? Or is it just an old-​​world phi­los­o­phy pack­aged in some new­fan­gled mar­ket­ing? The answer to the for­mer is def­i­nitely “yes.” But for the lat­ter, it’s “yes” and “no.” Let me explain…

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