One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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One of my favorite shows on TV of late is Shark Tank.

The show cen­ters on aspir­ing, brave, and some­times down­right idi­otic inven­tors and entre­pre­neurs who pitch their ideas in front of a group of mer­ci­less, seem­ingly heart­less mul­ti­mil­lion­aires, beg­ging for invest­ment capital.

Some of the advice that come from these “sharks” are pretty obvi­ous and com­mon­sen­si­cal, espe­cially to peo­ple who’s been in busi­ness for as long as I have.

But a lot of it is bril­liant. Bril­liant, but also brazen, unabashed, and bru­tally hon­est. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you don’t like see­ing peo­ple, along with their hopes, dreams, and busi­ness ideas being shred to pieces on TV, then this show is cer­tainly not for you.

The more I watch that show, the more I learn. It’s not just a fas­ci­nat­ing pro­gram, it’s a million-​​dollar edu­ca­tion in just one hour a week. And for free to boot. If you ever get a chance to watch that show, do it. You’re going to learn so much. It’s an amaz­ing show.

If an idea or busi­ness is dumb, dead, or down­right dread­ful, they will say it. Often, in no uncer­tain terms. They have to. After all, their money is on the line.

But then again, so should it be with you.

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If your car needed repair work, would you go to a garage that offers free esti­mates? You likely would. Today, most garages offer them.

Not only has it become a cus­tom­ary prac­tice, but also every­one expects a free esti­mate from mechanics.

How­ever, here’s an inter­est­ing sce­nario. Let’s say your car broke down at the worst pos­si­ble time, and you are in a ter­ri­ble hurry. (If you’re like most peo­ple these days, you are.) Plus, you specif­i­cally wanted a free estimate.

If you had to choose a garage quickly, which garage would you choose? Would you go to the one you only think that offers free esti­mates? Or would you go to the one you know for sure that does? Espe­cially if you don’t have much time?

As sim­ple as it may sound, by com­mu­ni­cat­ing some­thing that’s usu­ally taken for granted by your tar­get mar­ket, you will be cho­sen more often. Rather than claim­ing supe­ri­or­ity, like “we’re #1,” you’re imply­ing it by demon­strat­ing what makes you superior.

A men­tor once told me, “Impli­ca­tion is more pow­er­ful than spec­i­fi­ca­tion.” In mar­ket­ing, it means that you should imply your supe­ri­or­ity rather than claim it outright.

If you claim supe­ri­or­ity, your claim appears self-​​serving and what­ever you do say is sus­pect at best. But if you imply supe­ri­or­ity, your claim, although not directly stated, is accepted as more cred­i­ble, gen­uine, and, para­dox­i­cally, concrete.

Peo­ple will uncon­sciously assume that you are supe­rior. You are com­mu­ni­cat­ing your supe­ri­or­ity, not in some mar­ket­ing piece you wrote or paid for, but in that most elu­sive yet vital of places in all of marketing…

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Is the Inter­net mar­ket­ing indus­try implod­ing? I think it is. But if not, it sure seems like it. In fact, it seems to be a sign of the times.

For exam­ple, we see it with the FTC crack­ing down on mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ers, Visa and Mas­ter­Card clos­ing down mer­chant accounts for forced con­ti­nu­ity billings, and Google per­ma­nently ban­ning adver­tis­ers for rea­sons still unclear but some­how related to the lat­est crackdown.

Harsh? Per­haps. But we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Remem­ber, it was about three years ago — wow, has it been three years already? — when my wife, Sylvie Fortin, put out her scathing report, called “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins.”

It was highly con­tro­ver­sial at the time because peo­ple didn’t expect it. How­ever, since then many mar­keters, blog­gers, jour­nal­ists, dis­grun­tled clients, unpaid affil­i­ates, even social media experts have joined in the cho­rus. Some, qui­etly. Oth­ers, not so quietly.

For instance, copy­writer Ryan Healy ruf­fled a few feath­ers recently by post­ing a scathing report, enti­tled “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing on Life Sup­port,” in which he sin­gled out a few mar­keters for their ques­tion­able, uneth­i­cal, or allegedly ille­gal practices.

One com­menter praised Ryan for his will­ing­ness to name names, and by the same token crit­i­cized my wife for not doing so in her Sins report. In fact, since it was pub­lished, we received a lot of flak for not nam­ing names. I cer­tainly under­stand their cynicism.

So I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to elab­o­rate on why we chose not to name names.

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One of the things I love about new year’s is read­ing about year-​​end pre­dic­tions. I don’t know why. Per­haps it’s my curi­ous nature.

But I’m fas­ci­nated when I see where some peo­ple think we’re headed. There are some blog­gers whose pre­dic­tions fas­ci­nate me. Two have cap­tured my atten­tion: Read­WriteWeb and the Man­hat­tan Mar­ket­ing Maven.

And yes, even yours truly loves mak­ing them, too.

As with all pre­dic­tions, it’s no dif­fer­ent than flip­ping a coin. The law of aver­ages kicks in. But it’s not a 50–50 ratio. A third will come true, usu­ally dead on the money. Another third won’t at all. And the final third may come true, but not exactly as predicted.

I’m sub­jected to that same law, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Nev­er­the­less, in keep­ing with that sacred tra­di­tion of new-​​year pro­jec­tions, prog­nos­ti­ca­tions, and picayune pon­tif­i­ca­tions, here are two major areas I believe we will see hap­pen­ing in the new year, if not the near future. Are you ready? Here goes…

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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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I remem­ber 10 years ago.

In the wake of rumored pro­pos­als to reg­u­late the web, in 1999 the CRTC, com­pa­ra­ble to America’s FCC, offi­cially declared that the Inter­net is not a broad­cast medium.

Now, that rul­ing was sig­nif­i­cant for many reasons.

Tech­ni­cally, the Inter­net is a medium. But the gov­ern­ment based its deci­sion on the fact that the web is inter­ac­tive with its audi­ence — unlike other uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way broad­cast media such as the TV or radio. As a result, reg­u­la­tors con­cluded the Inter­net could there­fore police itself.

(The “Net Neu­tral­ity” debate of late is a per­fect exam­ple that it is different.)

Nev­er­the­less, my point here is not a polit­i­cal one but a marketing-​​related one.

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