What Do You Do?
It sounds like a simple question.
The reason I ask this particular question is because a lot of people just don’t think about this and when they think they know what they do, their actions often say they do something else.
For example, many people in the Internet marketing industry have products that don’t relate to each other. They may have one on Google AdWords and their next product is how to use Pinterest, the next product is about how to use Twitter and the next product is how to use PLR products.
Then, if you ask them what they do they tell you they are a digital publisher. Really? Seriously? No, not really, because what they’re really trying to do is be everything to everybody.
The digital publisher idea is a brilliant one, except for one thing, does a publisher print their own information or does a publisher print other people’s information?
As you probably guessed, a publisher typically prints someone else’s information, which means the publisher is only responsible for printing and distributing the information.
When most people believe themselves to be a digital publisher or information marketer, they try to do all the work themselves which means they create the product, spend their time researching a new idea and figuring out how to make it work. They go in this big circle of jumping from new subject to new subject and so on.
You can do that if everything’s woven around a specific topic or genre. For example, let’s just say you’re an expert on auto mechanics. Your topic should have everything to do with and be 100% geared towards auto mechanics, whether it’s how to fix a head gasket, change your tires or checking the tire pressure in your car, whatever it is, it has have something to do with a car.
That all makes sense, because then each of your products can be marketed to all of your customers. But what happens typically and in many cases within the Internet marketing industry is that a person would have five products on five different subjects which may not cross over to one another because people, in my opinion, are just trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.
That’s okay for a certain period of time, but there comes a point in your business where you need to solidify and create a commonality between your products, in order to increase your profit and make better use of your time.
If all the areas covered a different aspect of the same topic, then each of these customers that you had in each of these products could be cross-marketed to as well. So you could then take the customers from product one and promote product two to them, moving forward in also promoting products 3, 4 and 5. Or, maybe you could have it come the other way where if a customer bought product number five that they would also want to buy product number 3, 2, 4, or 1.
What you’re doing is making it easier for your customers to buy all of your products, simply by sitting down and figuring out what you do.
It’s an evolution. I’m not one to say that you’ll figure out what you want to do just by thinking about it for a few minutes and making a list of things. No, you have to look at it this way:
1. What do you like?
What do you like to do? That’s the first step. Knowing what you like to do will help you create products that are focused in that area.
2. What are you good at?
What you like may not necessarily be what you’re good at. I know you may want to think that you are actually good at whatever you like to do or talk about, but that’s not always true. It can be, but isn’t always. That makes it a little easier to narrow down and focus in on what you like and what you’re good at.
3. What is it that you feel you can be the best in the world at?
This is a broad type of question, but at the same time you have to have that level of confidence in business. Hopefully, you have some sort of ego to you, which I mean in a good way.
An out of control ego is bad, but feeling good about yourself and what you know is a very good thing. You’ve seen it in other people and I’m sure you’ve seen it in yourself at certain times throughout your life.
When it comes to business you have to have that air of confidence about you, in order to move forward, because if you don’t feel confident in what you’re doing then how can anyone else feel confident in what you’re doing? They aren’t going to.
So if you like what you’re doing and you’re good at what you are doing and then on top of that, you feel that you can be the best at it then I’ll tell you one thing…jump in with both feet.
The reason I say that is because the sooner you make this decision as far as what you do in your business, the more profitable your business will be. That’s the bottom line. Your business is going to be successful because you’ll have that cross-pollinating marketing going on between all of your products and you’ll also, inevitably become an expert on your overall topic because everything you talk about is about one subject.
I believe in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he talks about the 10,000th hour principle which is very basic and says this…if you study, focus and practice any particular subject for 10,000 hours then during that timeframe you become an expert in that subject.
Well, if you’re trying to divide your time over five to eight different topics, then you won’t become an expert in each of them. Very few people are able to do that.
You can make your life easier by simply focusing on one subject or area of expertise and become the expert at that. Then maybe, at a certain time in the future, you can take on another subject, another category or another area, but you need that 10,000 hours to become an expert.
So by focusing all your time and energy on one topic and one area, you surround the marketplace with products about that topic so you inevitably take over the space on that topic.
So again, the question is what do you do? I want you to take some time and think about that. It’s an important question and one that many people don’t ask themselves often enough.
