Tag Archives | Internet Marketing
How To Figure Out If You Matter In Your Market (And What To Do When You Find Out You Don’t!!)
Well, that was some trip!
I started off by singing Rebecca Blacks seminal classic “Friday” with only my iPad as accompaniment in front of 480 people.
It was a dream come true.
And then as a guest on Andy Jenkins boss-a-thon, I was able to plank live in front of 1000 people.
To top it all off, he then presented me with my very own bobble head. I think it’s fair to say you’ve made it in some capacity, when you have a bobble head. (That’s what I tell myself, anyway)
As proof of this, the picture of me and my bobble head was the highest viewing piece of content I have ever done on my Facebook page!
I don’t know whether I should be happy or sad about this!
On the 14 hour flight home from Los Angeles to Melbourne I had an incredible “slap myself upside the head” moment. I was reading the awesome book “Evil Plans” by Hugh MacLeod, I could write at least 30 blog posts on all the incredible “a-ha moments” I had reading this book.
The most important one to me, was the chapter titled…
The 20- “control the conversation by improving the conversation”
The practice of market leadership in any niche is where you start owning, control or simply contribute to the conversation.
The depth of your market leadership, is directly related to how high up the “food chain” you are. The higher up the food chain, the more likely they are talking about you.
This is where the forehead slapping moment comes in.
Hugh suggests you make a list of the 20 top people in your market. In a moment, I’ll show you exactly how to do this using an example market I’m interested in.
Now this is where it gets hard (or perhaps, to put it more nicely, interesting) of those top 20 on your list, how many of them know you exist?
Who’s reading your stuff?
Who’s following you on Twitter?
If most of the people on the top 20 list are following you/reading your stuff, you’re golden, as Hugh says, everyone else will follow you eventually.
BUT…
What if they don’t know you exist, as you will see in my example 
You need to get on their radar.
The easiest way to get on someones radar is to create brilliant stuff! Hugh says, “stuff that speaks to the market in a way it has never heard/seen before”.
If your stuff is different enough then it changes the conversation and will draw people in.
Gee, I can just hear you saying, is that all we have to do!
How the heck do I create brilliant stuff?
For starters, you have to create matter consistently.
Some stuff will be rubbish.
Some stuff will be okay.
Some stuff will rule!
The cruel irony in all of this, is you’ll never know which one is which… until you release your matter into the market.
Remeber, my bobble head photo has been the most viewed thing I’ve done on Facebook! I share gold with you people and all you wanted was photos of my bobblehead!!!
Who knew!
Let’s Get Practical
What I’d like to do now is take you step-by-step through an example. Let’s do the “20 technique” in a market I love!
Step 1 – Who Are The Top 20?
The first thing we need to do is identify the top 20 movers and shakers in your particular market. For this example, I picked a market close to my heart, Apple.
So the first thing I did was simply write down just from my knowledge of the market who were movers and shakers. I was able to get 12 straight off the top of my head.
I new I was missing people, so I started thinking about some good places to find people.
The first place I went was Twitter. I had a look at who I was following and came up with some extra names.
Then I looked at the blogs I am subscribed to and I was able to get enough to round out my top 20.
Important!
As I was doing this, I had another flash! Now we have this top 20 filter, it seemed to me it was important to look at the way the 20 communicated with the market.
How do they get their ideas across?
You see, if they’re all writers, and you’re producing videos on YouTube, what’s the likelihood they will see your video? It’s possible, but if all the top 20 in your marketplace primarily communicate through blogs – If you want to contribute to the conversation – you better have a blog as well!
Of course, if they do videos, then you would be best doing videos and indeed, you might be at a disadvantage if you’re doing long thoughtful blogs articles!
It’s funny how before I thought about the market in this way, I’d never thought about this filtering process.
Step 2 – Tracking
Now we have our top 20 – let’s create a very specific twitter list.
There are a couple of ways you can do this.
You can do this on Twitter’s website.
Or you can use the amazing new iPhone app, TweetBot.
This app is amazing for creating and managing twitter lists on the fly.
You can create a list inside the program , and then use the people that you follow in the market to quickly add people to your top 20.
Here’s a video showing you how it’s done. I can’t tell you how handy and quick this feature is!
In the video, I also show you how to use my favourite application to monitor, manage and interact with my top 20.
Sidenote: Yes, Flipboard is iPad only, I thinks it’s the best way to do this (would love to hear if you’ve found something better) dont get caught up in the tech. You can do all of this from the Twitter Website. I just love the efficency and elegance of this tool.
Oh and Flipboard for the iPhone will be out soon too….
Step Three – Interact
Now we’re tracking the market inside Flipboard. We can begin to interact with our top 20.
(I hate the word interact, maybe I should call it contributing or helping.)
The best way to “interact”, is to comment, give feedback and generally try to help with requests for information.
Sadly, most people are so obsessed with their agenda, their project, wanting help with their stuff, they come across as being the 21st century version of Veruca Salt! “I want it now!!!”
Heres a tip – Never ask for anything! Even more importantly, never be needy!
There’s nothing worse than approaching somebody like they owe you the time of day. It happens to me all the time, it’s just ridiculous and never ends well.
The market you’re trying to break into owes you NOTHING. It will motor along quite happily without ever acknowledging your exsistence. And like in all biology, if you’re not contributing to your enviornment, you’ll be extinct before you know it.
On the flip side, people who help me out, I’m eternally grateful to. People who continuously help start to get noticed. I can think of a number of examples with people I follow on Twitter who have helped me out. I started following them because they have interesting things to say.
When you’re first starting out in your market trying to attract the attention of the top 20, you must continuously be asking yourself…
How can I help?
How can I serve?
Everything so far is just the start, but ultimately are completely useless unless you follow Step Four. To quote Hugh MacLeod here again…
Step Four – Make Art Every Day!
Creating content consistently is the cornerstone of market leadership, by participating (Contributing! Helping!) in the market conversation, you’ll ultimately be seen as one of the Top 20.
It’s only by dependably publishing content, you earn the street cred to become one of the Top 20. I bet you right now, every single one of your Top 20 follow the market leadership rule of shipping content consistently.
The awesome thing now is you have a roadmap on how to get noticed and ultimately participate in the marketplace.
It all starts (and ends!) by regularly expressing your opinion about your marker in your own unique voice every day.
It’s that simple, it’s that hard.
It’s every day, week after week, month after month, with the only reward – you feeling good about the fact you’ve contributed to your market today.
That’s It.
Ed
PS Michelle MacPherson and I created a course which i’m extremely proud of called Always Be Shipping. This course is a step-by-step guide in all the ways you can contribute to and create content in your marketplace. There is a webinar you can look at which talks about all that course contains and the issues and challenges it addresses. It’s a great way to decide if the course is to you.
You can check out the webinar at http://alwaysbeshipping.co
