Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business

Chapter 3. Become a Trusted Resource: Because Nobody Cares About Your Product

Now, despite what we've covered so far—just making yourself visible and acting as the face of your business—doesn't mean that everything—or really, anything—is about you. It's about your customers. Your clients. Your potential clients.

Here is a harsh reality (eloquently mentioned in David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR ... I guess Davids with three names think alike): Nobody cares about our products. People care about themselves, solving their own problems, being liked perhaps, and so on. But that is okay. This isn't a bad thing. It simply requires a shift in thinking from "product pusher" to "trusted resource"—and that creates a big opportunity. This doesn't mean your product is NEVER mentioned or plugged, it just means, in a manner of speaking, that when you shake someone's hand online or off, you aren't leading with the product. The product comes later.

By far, the number one repeated mistake that business-people make when marketing and promoting online (and offline) is to talk—excessively—about themselves ... and how amazing their product is. The "brand-new features" that are the best in class, the really "cool" new desk chair their company purchased, or a press release about how the product or service is now available in Outer Mongolia. Really riveting stuff.

This is why many websites and most corporate blogs (and business-related blogs in general) fail; these companies don't create ...