Competition. We have all experienced it. Some of us have more of it than others. Why are some businesses surrounded by flames, drowning in the noise of the competition, while others seem to thrive and soar forth from the fire like a phoenix?

If you’ve experienced intense competition, learning how to position your business as unique can help. Think of the scenario where you have an online store where the products you offer are also sold by 20+ other online stores, albeit at lower price. If you can figure out how to compete in that scenario, don’t you think you can figure it out elsewhere? Perhaps these techniques can apply to you.

Do you hear yourself saying “Google Adwords for my category are too expensive”? If you answered yes, then listen up.

I know the drill. I’ve been there. I’ve had a business, an online store, where each of the products I sold was also available through numerous other online retailers and at a lower price. So how did I grow that business to produce over 6-Figures of recurring income?

Position Yourself as Unique

One technique to position your business as unique in the marketplace is to define a niche.

How do you become unique when there are hundreds in your niche?

1)      Get exclusivity: Get an exclusive license to distribute a particular product line.

2)      Create unique products. Become a creator, manufacturer or importer of unique goods or services.

3)      Carve out a niche to promote your products.

Carve out a niche

Identify a niche and position yourself uniquely in that niche. Anyone can do it. You just have to train your brain to think a little differently.

You see, while most people are selling their products and services based on topic, or category or supplier or brand, very few actually promote their products based on the solution they provide the customer. Focus on the solution, and you can set yourself apart from the field.

“What does this actually mean? How do I apply this?” You ask. Let me give you an example.

My company sold contemporary furniture and accessories. So I spent time paying for Google Adwords related to bed, dresser and nightstand unsuccessfully. These Google Adwords were too expensive. And there was too much competition. I had a little success buying keywords based on the name of the designer of one particular product line. But, the people searching by the designer’s name were looking for the lowest cost. I didn’t want to nor could I afford to lower our profit margins by competing on price. Sound like a familiar scenario?

What happened next transformed the business. You see, while talking with the supplier one day I asked “Why do you think people buy your product? What is the big appeal?”

You know what he said? “Storage. Originally the designer created this line because there was no space in the apartments here in the city. So people bought the beds to get more storage.”

That 2 minute conversation transformed my business into producing a 6-figure a year income with NO COMPETITION.

Focus on the solution

I went home and switched our Google Adwords to “storage beds”. Our customers were looking for a solution. We were the only ones to give them a solution that also made a design statement. Style and function in one.

Our customers were now buying from us because we offered a solution to their problem of no storage. There was no one else selling this product line as a solution. Our customers didn’t even know that the product was available elsewhere. They thought it was exclusive to us. Why? No one else thought to sell the solution to the customer. Everyone else was still competing for the people seeking the brand; the ones that wanted the cheapest price. We kept our margins and got more customers.

How can you find a niche for your non-unique product or service where your competitors aren’t competing for the same keyword? Can you focus on the solution?

If you’d like to learn more about how to sell online, listen to our free teleclass “5 Simple Strategies to a 6-Figure Online Store: How to make FAST RECURRING INCOME so you can live the life YOU want!” Register at http://www.6FigureOnlineStore.com.

Don’t you hate when you get a great idea at 2am? Especially one too long to write down on a pad of paper?

That’s right. I got this awesome brainstorm at 2:08 am and I’m here at my computer doing a brain dump so I can get back to sleep.

So, here it is….

How to improve ecommerce conversions.

Most people think that once you get your traffic up on your ecommerce site and you have a ton of visitors, the next thing to do is to focus on improving conversions. Its true, but its also too late.

You see, your ability to convert customers all happens before they get to your site. It actually happens before you even put up a web page. How to improve website conversion happens at the idea phase.

Before you do a thing, you need to define the WHY. Why are you  in business. What is your purpose and mission.another way to think of this is WHY ME?

From that you need to think of your customer. Why does your customer have pain? Why are they looking for help? Before you begin, you need to know WHY YOU?

Are  you getting the trend here?

Step 3 is to know your competitor and what alternatives there are to your offering. What are they offering your customer? Why would your customer choose them? WHY THEM?

And finally, we get to ask ourselves, “Why would my customer choose me over them?” What is the trans-formative experience they get from working with me? Why will their lives be better off by choosing us? WHY US?

This video of Simon Sinek below provides a fantastic example of WHY. It’s less than 20 minutes long and it explains WHY ecommerce conversions are determined before your customer gets to your web site.

If you’d like to learn more about how to increase your ecommerce conversions, please join me on this complimentary teleclass “5 Simple Strategies to a 6-Figure Online Store“.

I want to thank Janine for sending me the link to the video which resulted in me getting no sleep tonight I wish you all a good night’s sleep and let me know how you see the WHY ME, YOU, THEM, US applies in your business. How will it change what you do?

You see, after composing a response to him, I realized how the 9 steps I outlined could be converted into an article. Then I thought it could become a series of articles or a case study using his site as the example. Then I thought well I might as well turn it into a class.

So that’s what I did.

Next week, I’m teaching a live one-time only teleclass called

“5 Simple Strategies to a 6-Figure Online Store:

How to make FAST RECURRING INCOME so you can live the life YOU Want!”.

If you or anyone else you know is interested, here’s where you can find out more:

http://www.6figureonlinestore.com

I want to thank Larry for the inspiration. It is my hope that I can help business owners like him to create the income they need to live the life they want.

All my best, Debra

The request for help:

Recommendations on SMALL business marketing

Marketing is something that I never pursued much, and I realize now that I need some help marketing my small business. I don’t have much money to spend – my business is SMALL, and there’s not usually much cash flow. Anyone have any suggestions that won’t break the bank besides SCORE and SBA? The business is an on line business, mostly word-of-mouth. I do some magazine and specialty ads, but that’s about it. I am looking for ideas, or recommendations, or just ways to get the word out.
I am envisioning people getting to the part about not much money and then lots of ‘deletes’!!

-Larry

9 Tips to a Profitable Online Store:

Larry, as a former owner of an online retail store, and an internet marketing coach here are a few tips:

Strategy:

1. Don’t compete on price. It won’t get you anywhere.
   When you are a retailer of products that are available through other sources, the reason people will come to you above all others is…. the relationship! Without a relationship, you can only compete on price (which is typically a no win situation).
2. You must provide value-add.
   A blog would help you to establish a relationship with your readers, and create traffic through SEO and establish you as the go-to source for your products. Give them tips and ideas. You need to be a content creator.
3. You need to focus on your customer. Is it the jewelry crafter or other? You need to speak to each subset of crafter differently and have different supplies for each niche. Pick on niche and be the best you can at meeting their needs.

Tactics:

1. Traffic:
   You need to generate traffic. In your case, SEO and a blog would be the starting places. Improve the description on your site. Let people know who the right customer for you is and why they should be your customer. Networking both online and off in craft related forums is next and the fastest way to build relationships. Commenting on other craft related blogs will also get you attention.
2. Capture names and build a list:
   You need to have a way to capture your customer’s name and build your list as soon as they come to you site. Give away something for free in exchange for their name. It can be anything from a product to a free report on jewelry making. Make it relevant to the customers you are targeting.
3. Communicate:
   Send out weekly tips via email and your social media connections. Give away your expertise. Build trust. Eventually ask for a sale.
4. Ask for the sale, and transact business.
   You may need to use some sales techniques such as special offers, bundles, time-limited offers, etc.
5. Build community and Upsell.
   Know what type of products your customer buys and offer them related products at the time of sale. Create upsells. Don’t inundate your customer with more and more offers. Give them your expertise and build the relationship. Deliver world-class customer service. Delight them.
6. Measure results.
   Measure what works and what doesn’t. Learn where your efforts are best spent and focus on those.

That’s it.

If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your online store sales, please join us for this FREE one time teleclass http://www.6figureonlinestore.com.

Have you ever heard someone say “I don’t need a blog, there isn’t enough to say about my product/service/subject?” Have you ever said it yourself? I used to think that way as well. How would I ever come up with enough to say about one particular subject? Well, there are all kinds of blogs with all kinds of purposes. The key to a successful blog is to know why your doing it and having a clear focused mission and strategy behind it.

Let’s say you are a crafts-person. A photo blog would be a practical and very effective means of sharing your custom work. A photo blog would do many things for your business, such as:

1) Create a portfolio of projects for your customers to review before making a purchase decision. For example, a painter, you can post before and after photos of her work.

2) A crafts-person could post photos of their booth and customers at the latest event they attended.

3) Allow your existing clients to post comments about the success of the project or event, thereby improving trust and probably conversion of potential clients and increasing the connection and relationship you have with your existing customers.

4) Your clients could link back to your blog post, increasing your search engine rankings and improving traffic to your site

5) When you add comments about the event/project/etc. in your post you can include keywords and increase your traffic and SEO.

6) It gives you more pages to be indexed by an search engine.

Just something to think about. There are many different types of blogs and many different reasons for creating them. One way to think of a blog is that if your business is involved in something informal, dynamic, changing, or current, perhaps it belongs in a blog. A blog is a great way to create an informal portfolio and to market your business or service.

Rating or Review sites are websites that allow you to vote on, rate or provide a review of products, web sites, services, companies, people, etc.

Why are ratings and reviews valuable? The use of ratings and reviews on your business website increases your customers trust in using your website and confidence in your brand. The ratings and reviews feature can help to establish a customer community giving your customers a way to interact with you. Your customer’s interactions and comments can be a reliable feedback mechanism to help you improve your product or service.The use of online ratings and reviews will reveal under-performing products and unexpected stars, thus giving you information and trends to use in your marketing. This is a highly measurable feedback mechanism that engages customers, gives them control, and gives you quantifiable results.

Tips:

• Get your product, service or store rated and reviewed (ratings service) on ratings sites. This also increases search engine rankings.
• Add Ratings and Reviews systems to your website.

Resources: Get rated

• Bazaarvoice – Bazaarvoice captures their opinions, questions, and stories to help organizations like yours gain sales, operational efficiencies, and – ultimately – real cultural change.
• Epinions – read and write reviews on millions of products and services
• BizRate – the BizRate consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products each year.
• Rating System -Add Rating & Review and Q&A Solutions to your website, quickly and easily, without expensive software or custom programming.

If something goes wrong after the leap, you can sometimes self correct, change your course, or make changes to salvage the trip. However, in Skydiving, if you crash, odds are that you won’t get a chance to get back up again. That’s why I’m an entrepreneurial marketer and an eternal optimist. I take that leap of faith over-and-over-and-over again. And no matter what the results (win or lose), I get back up and do it again. And that’s what I call entrepreneurship.

In 30 minutes, a new internet company will launch to the world. I am grateful to have been in the right place at the right time more than once in my life. And it doesn’t matter whether we crash and burn or rise to the top. Lessons will be learned and it sure will be a wild ride! Actually, it will be a BLAST!

Oh, you can jump with me and enjoy the ride at…

http://my.blastoffnetwork.com/debzimmer

You can always check the FTC’s Spam site at http://www.ftc.gov/spam/ for the latest updates on legal regulations. If you are sending out email for commercial purposes, these are the main points to follow (excerpt taken from The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business):

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

A survey is a means of collecting quantitative information about a group. It can be used to collect opinions or quantitative data. Surveys can be used in several ways.

Tips:

• Ask questions of your customers to engage them and start a dialog.
• Gather information on what your customers want.
• Identify the demographic you want to be talking with.
• Quantify feedback from your customers.
• Collect the opinion of your customer.

Resources: Surveys

• Zoomerang – The Leader in Online Surveys with Over 1 Million Satisfied Customers. Quickly and easily create online surveys to get the insights you need. You can build a survey in minutes with free access to over 100 professionally-designed online survey templates. Then, analyze and share your results by creating customized charts, posting them to your blog or website or just exporting your data to Excel, PowerPoint or a PDF.
• SurveyMonkey – Using just your web browser, create your survey with our intuitive survey editor.  Select from over a dozen types of questions (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more…).  Powerful options allow you to require answers to any question, control the flow with custom skip logic, and even randomize answer choices to eliminate bias.
• QuestionPro – QuestionPro is web based software for creating and distributing surveys. It consists of an intuitive wizard interface for creating survey questions, tools for distributing your survey via email or your website, and tools for analyzing and viewing your results. You simply build your survey and email it to a list of potential respondents. QuestionPro will take care collecting and recording the responses. Results are available in real time.
• PollDaddy – With your free account from PollDaddy you can create online surveys and polls for your website, blog and social network. Find out what your visitors are thinking today. Create your surveys and polls using our custom templates or create your own. Use our in-depth reporting engine to aggregate, print and export your results.
• Snap Surveys – With 27 years survey experience and thousands of users, Snap Surveys can supply survey software and research services for your specific market sector. Snap 9 is our user-friendly survey software for market research. Snap provides the tools you need to get your research done. Professional IT and research services for survey management and data processing from our in-house SurveyShop division.

Tips:

Here are some suggestions for how to use email as a marketing tool to grow your business.

• Author your own ezine or newsletter
• Submit content to leading ezines.
• Create a joint venture with leaders in field to cross promote your ezines.
• Sell ad space in your ezine.
• Set up auto responders which are messages that are automatically sent to your customer when they perform an action such as signing up for your list.
• Use email to communicate with your customers about upcoming opportunities, activities, news and events.
• Set up a separate email address for sales or services issues.

Resources: Email

Here are some free ways to get an email account.

• Hotmail – owned by Microsoft MSN
• Gmail – owned by Google
• Yahoo Mail – owner by Yahoo

Resources: ezine publishing services (NOT Free!)

For a small number of subscribers you can send out the email from your email provider. As the quantity of subscribers grows, you will need a more sophisticated tool.

• Awebber – Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, we’ve got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.
• iContact – iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, send, and track email newsletters, surveys, and autoresponders.
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys from Constant Contact make it easy and affordable for you to connect with your customers or members.

Do you have other favorites tips or resources that you’d like to share?

(For more tips and resources such as this, download the Free Report, “187 Free Ways to Explode Your Business”.)

Web conferencing is when you conduct a LIVE meeting or presentation using the Internet (many to many interaction). In a web conference, you sit at your computer and are connected to others in the meeting via the internet.

A webinar is a one-way web conference (speaker to audience) but can include questions & answer sessions.

A webcast is the transmission of non-interactive audio or video content over the internet (speaker to audience).

A podcast is a series of audio or video files that are downloadable from the web. It is an acronym for Portable On-Demand Broadcast.

A teleconference or teleseminar is the live exchange of information among many remote people via a telecommunications system.

Tips for Web Conferencing:

• Hold a live webinar.
• Record your webinar and make available as a webcast or podcast.
• Record your webinar and post the audio or slideshow to share with customers or potential customers.

Resources: Web Conferencing (most of these are fee based)

• Vyew – FREE! With Vyew you can conduct meetings in real time using a shared workspace, webcam, voice over IP (VoIP), free teleconferencing, text chat and desktop sharing. In addition to uploading, sharing and presenting content you can invite participants to annotate and collaborate on content during the meeting. Participants can be allowed to navigate the workspace independently to collaborate on different portions of the content. You can also record the meeting for playback.
• Glance – up to 100 guests see your screen…you can share your mouse and keyboard with guests, or even see and control their screens!  Inviting a guest is as easy as a phone call, email or IM.  There’s even free Glance phone conferencing available with every account.
• Adobe Acrobat Connect – With Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Pro software, you can create instant, collaborative meetings with just a web browser and the Adobe Flash® Player.
• InterCall – InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider,. Our integrated web, audio and video conferencing makes web meetings, webinars, audio conferencing, online training seminars and multi-point video conferencing easier and more productive.
• Microsoft Office Live Meeting – Office Live Meeting is a conferencing solution that you can use to engage audiences in online meetings, training, and events. Learn how you can schedule, join, or present a Live Meeting by using newly available features, including audio, video conferencing, and uploading handouts for distribution.
• WebEx Communications – WebEx is an easy way to share ideas with anyone, anywhere. It combines real-time desktop sharing with phone conferencing so everyone sees the same thing while you talk.
• GoToMeeting – Easy Online Meetings – Anytime, Anywhere. Use GoToMeeting to present, demonstrate and meet all you want – for one low flat fee.

Resources: Webinars

• Dimdim – Display your presentations to anyone remotely with Dimdim, a challenger to Webex. Has a free version.
• SlideRocket – SlideRocket is the leader in online presentation software. With SlideRocket you quickly make stunning presentations, manage a library of slides and assets, share them securely with colleagues, and measure how they’re used. It has some web conferencing capabilities.
• ON24 Inc. – Global Provider of Webcasting and Virtual Events Solutions

Resources: Podcasts

• Apple iTunes – post your webcast to the iTunes store and make your content available to all iPod users.
• Podcast.com – Podcast.com is the premier podcast destination that provides access to a growing list of over 60,000 curated and constantly updated podcast feeds representing more than 1 million episodes of audio and video content.
• Podcast Alley – Podcast Alley is the podcast lovers portal. Featuring the best Podcast Directory and the Top 10 podcasts, as voted on by the listeners. Has forums covering how to make a podcast, podcast software, podcast directories, music for podcasts, etc.

For more resource lists like this, please request our FREE REPORT: “187 Free Ways to Explode Your Business” available from the right sidebar.