If there is one thing that you must be getting tired of seeing in the Internet Marketing world, it is those e-mails where someone is offering you their cut and paste strategy so that you can become the next millionaire.
I personally must get at least 8 to 10 offers like this a week and often from marketers to whom I never even signed up asking for their information.
The pitch goes something like this:
“I have placed all of my best money making strategies in this package and if you buy this product all you have to do is cut and paste my exact strategies and you’ll be raking in the big bucks in no time.”
The only problem is that this type of thing only attract a few people who want to make easy money without ever doing any real work.
Will it really make money without any effort or originality? Of course not.
If you are skeptical then go ahead and try it next time you get one of those “easy riches” offers. But you are far wiser to save your money.
What is at the root of these types of offers?
It is simply some guy (often without even a real name) who is writing a persuasive sales letter so that he can be the one making money on the more gullible types of people out there.
It’s Time To Stir Up Your Creativity, Instead:
If you are going to start some new business, you are far wiser to be an original than to be a follower. When you work to come up with an original angle for your new business – it completely separates you from all of the competition.
A great question to be asking your self about your new business is this:
“How am I going to be different than everyone else out there?
This aspect is important because it is what makes you unique. How will your product be uniquely different than everyone else?
Of course this will take some work on your part in the way of creativity, but the results once you establish them will make it all worth while.
Back in the early days of SEO, I had wanted to start a company where I could teach people the genuine skills in a very different learning format. Back in 2002 there really was no company around that was teaching SEO the way I envisioned teaching it. (I know, because I looked around) carefully and I think I would have paid to go to a class back then, if I could have found someone teaching in a live hands-on workshop format.
But there was nothing like that around.
Back in 2002 of course you had seminars, which were fun to attend. Then you had a few online forums around, but the problem with the forums back then was that some of them were not all that friendly. I always felt that it was important to know who it was that you were learning from – in these forums, you were always talking to people who were hiding behind some alias.
My original unique angle was that I wanted to create a live, hands-on SEO workshop where you could get personalized instruction, see actual examples of optimization, see demonstrations and hear about case
studies in detail and have a place where the students learning the skills could do exercises and drills to really refine their skills.
So there you have my own example.
That is exactly how we started performing our very first SEO workshops way back in 2002 with our very first effort in San Antonio, Texas by the beautiful river walk.
How else did we flesh out our unique selling proposition?
Traditional:
Many typical seminars would give you the opportunity to do an evaluation at the end of a speaker’s presentation.
Being Different:
What we decided to do was teach the SEO student how to evaluate their own progress each and every day. This was amazingly helpful in identifying any problems and getting them corrected right away the next day.
Traditional:
Many typical seminars were more or less a speaking type engagement, where you’d sit and just listen to someone talk.
Being Different:
What we did differently, was we actually had the attendees bring their laptops to class so we could not only teach them, but we’d give them exercises to practice while we watched to ensure they did not miss anything.
Traditional:
At a traditional seminar, most speakers would leave room at the end of their talk, for asking questions.
Being Different:
We answered questions for student every day and we came up with the unique concept of a 6 month mentoring program after class finished. This way, student could stay in touch with their instructors, they could send in their newly optimized pages to be reviewed plus it gave them a 6 month window to get any additional questions answered as well as enjoy ongoing support at no extra charge.
One of the things we found was that our students like to be updated on new strategies so they’d come back each year or every second year. So we created the student Alumni discount so that any returning student who successfully completed the workshop could return in the future and get a 50% Alumni discount.
Of course there are many other differences as well that we built into the workshops over time.
But I share these example only to encourage you in your building new business. Put on your thinking cap and get creative too. Pretty soon, what you’ll find is others attempting to copy you.
The cool thing is they can try and clone your business, but they can never clone your experiences because you’ll be the one leading the way.