I have had a similar experience when I brought my car in to get a oil change and the sales guy tried selling me a car. The car was brand new and I was bringing it in for the two free oil changes I got. Pretty absurd right? You may have been agreeing with some of the sales reps statements or claims because they were undeniably true, but that doesn’t mean that you were being persuaded. When a sales person is getting you to agree to undeniably true statements that means they are getting you to engage in what is call a “Yes Set”. Yes sets are not usually enough to close some one, but once the potential customer is agreeing to statements or questions that are undeniably true it will be much harder to say no and much easier to say yes at closing time. See my upcoming posts on closes to learn more on Yes set closes.

Everyone has a

D – Desire

A- Authority

The sales rep obviously didn’t ask the right qualifying questions to determine the desire and need. Someone will come off as pushy when they have not built the right amount of rapport with the potential client. Sales people will show signs of being pushy when they convey they have no interest in your feelings or concerns.

There is no doubt that in today’s world we are being exposed to more information than ever before. Email, video games, social media, advertising, television, blogs, and news sites all want our full attention. We call this information overload.

Here are some staggering statistics by scientists from the University of San Diego, California. People are exposed to 100,500 words a day. This is the equivalent of 23 words a second. Can we even comprehend this much data? The brain processes much more than just words. Every time we look around, our brain is processing information. Information is abundant and plentiful and it is increasing everyday.

Roger Bohn, co-author of the study called How Much Information show’s studies conducted estimate that the total amount of words “consumed” in the United States has more than doubled from 4,500 trillion in 1980 to 10,845 trillion in 2008. The estimates do not include people simply talking to one another.  Robert Anton Wilson is the godfather of discussing the doubling of information. His works on information doubling are very true as well as very scary.

Total information consumption from televisions, computers and other media was estimated at 3.6 zettabytes (3.6 million gigabytes) in 2008.

Dr. Edward Hallowell the author of Crazy Busy and Delivering us from Distraction has written up words of 20 + books on the subject of Distraction and A.D.D.

Hallowell makes great points in his writing on how to deal with distraction and operate under such extreme conditions. I recommend checking out his books.

Marketing a product or service to everyone is not realistic

Keep your focus targeted and isolated so that your audience perceives you or your company as the go-to company in that specific industry. Your company should not aim to please all of the people all of the time. It’s impossible.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. You may think everyone needs your product, but when you break it down you will see that every product has a niche market.

Don’t go for broke. If you want to target the world to market to then you may have the best idea in the entire universe, or you just haven’t thought it through yet. You will need lots of money to compete against the larger companies in your field, and your approach maybe seen negatively by your potential customers. Defining your niche allows your customers to see your company as genuine subject matter experts (SME).

It is very important for a business owner to define their target market, because it will help marketing efforts to be well spent. Lets look at the business that I work in and how someone could be successful with reselling services such as domains and hosting. We provide our customers with turnkey websites and they have to drive traffic to the site they are provided. They can say “I want to market to everyone that needs domains and hosting.” If they go this route they have a 100% chance of not being successful. Why? The market is saturated with domain providers and resellers, and the market has companies that have large budgets to use on advertising.

If you segment your market properly and defined your niche, you will have a better chance for marketing success. Identify your niche. Review the example included in this article to help you see how a large market is segmented down.

• Bad Example: I want to market to people who need domains.

(way to broad)

• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women

(Still very broad)  So lets keep going.

• Bad Example:  I want to sell domains to women
• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women who are (insert religion)

Now we have taken our market from billions to millions.

• Bad Example:   I want to sell domains to women who are (insert religion)

• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women, who are (insert religion),(Insert Ethnicity), between the age of 35-45, Located in NY

We have now taken possible search terms in Google from Millions to thousands. I hope this helps you to help identify your niche market better.

Look for follow up posts on how to track your online marketing efforts.

Marketing a product or service to everyone is not realistic

Keep your focus targeted and isolated so that your audience perceives you or your company as the go-to company in that specific industry. Your company should not aim to please all of the people all of the time. It’s impossible.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. You may think everyone needs your product, but when you break it down you will see that every product has a niche market.

Don’t go for broke. If you want to target the world to market to then you may have the best idea in the entire universe, or you just haven’t thought it through yet. You will need lots of money to compete against the larger companies in your field, and your approach maybe seen negatively by your potential customers. Defining your niche allows your customers to see your company as genuine and as subject matter experts (SME) if it applies.

It is very important for a business owner to define their target market, because it will help marketing efforts to be well spent. Lets look at the business that I work in and how someone could be successful with reselling services such as domains and hosting. We provide our customers with turnkey websites and they have to drive traffic to the site they are provided. They can say ” I want to market to everyone that needs domains and hosting.” If they go this route they have a 100% chance of not being successful. Why? The market is saturated with domain providers and resellers, and the market has companies that have large budgets to use on advertising.

If you segment your market properly and defined your niche, you will have a better chance for marketing success. Identify your niche. Review the example included in this article to help you see how a large market is segmented down.

• Bad Example: I want to market to people who need domains.

(way to broad)

• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women

(Still very broad)  So lets keep going.

• Bad Example:  I want to sell domains to women
• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women who are (insert religion)

Now we have taken our market from billions to millions.

• Bad Example:   I want to sell domains to women who are (insert religion)

• Good Example: I want to sell domains to women, who are (insert religion),(Insert Ethnicity), between the age of 35-45, Located in NY

We have now taken possible search terms in Google from Millions to thousands. I hope this helps you to help identify your niche market better.

Look for follow up posts on how to track your online marketing efforts.

This week Rockable Press launched its latest eBook, Get Going with Google AdWords by author Chandler Nguyen and we couldn’t be more excited!

This book is designed with the beginner in mind, introducing you to the world of Google AdWords. Once you start to get a handle on them, you’ll be bidding on keywords that will help push your site higher in the Google rankings — without all of the time it usually takes for that to happen organically.

Nguyen has put together an “easy to grasp” guide on what AdWords are, what using them can do to give your site that added exposure and how to get started using them right away.

In this book you will:

• Learn how to put together AdWords campaigns that are simple and effective
• Gain a better understanding of your audience’s search behavior
• Discover ways to draw more people to your website
• Find practical examples offered throughout, and find other tools that you can use to get started with Google AdWords right away.

So if you’re new to Google AdWords and what an easy-to-understand guide of how to get started or if you just haven’t been able to wrap your head around this valuable tool before, this book is for you. You can pick up a copy of Get Going with Google AdWords by clicking on the link below — the book is available now!

Rockable Press: Get Going with Google AdWords

“How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People”

Recently in my current position at work, I have taken an interest in software development and project management. Currently I have been researching the ways to manage teams better and become a better Project Manager. The video below goes into detail about how Google helps to maintain there open source projects from poisonous people. Poisonous people? Yup, we can’t have people running around biting people. All joking set aside, poisonous people are the ones who just make your project go to hell. Simple as that. What can managers learn from this video and this article? Well a few suggestions that I have come up with that can be applied to training are the following;

1. Define your mission
2. Avoid scope creep
3. Document your experiences in a project team
4. Document mistakes and failures
5. Create conformity early

Defining the scope of your project will help your team know when they have arrived at there goal. Document your experiences so that if a team member leaves the team, new members will be able to see history of the projects.

When a project is a success, everyone knows it. When it has failed, people rarely want the world to see it.

Documentation is a great key to success. If you are a project manager then you should have a change system to document changes.

Conformity in a group early in the development stages of a project will help avoid project creep. Make sure your team members are on the same page as you and the project sponsors. A great way to avoid creep is by making sure that clear expectations are set forth in the project early. I hope you gain something from watching the video. Even if you have no interest in developing software, learning new techniques to managing a team can be learned from many different facets of business.

Old Spice’s ‘Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ was one of the most popular memes of 2010, and his campaign was the most popular online video campaign of all time.  It all started with a Super Bowl commercial, which made its way to YouTube, then Twitter and won the hearts of women and men alike all over the world.

I personally don’t care for Old Spice, but I do give it up to there marketing department for coming up with a marketing plan, that was good enough to make people do several things.

1. Remember the commercial
2. Remember the name
3. Create a buzz
4. Make the audience love it so much they duplicated it

If you are in the marketing department and you aren’t driving the traffic to make the purchase, well then your “FIRED”. All joking set aside, few people understand how to successfully cut through the “noise” and get the message through to the recipient.  I can’t show you in just one post, so perhaps we will have a follow up to this topic.

Make your marketing count, have fun with it and let it show what your company is all about. When I owned my clothing label ” Old Soul Clothing” I made mistakes. The #1 mistake I made was not showing the world what the label really stood for. There is a lot of science in marketing and advertising. If you are a start up company, you will get eaten alive by the big dogs if you try to compete with them. If you come up with something catchy and it is meant to go “viral”, then it will. The harder you try to gain the acceptance of people the less you are likely to get it.

Rapport is the perceived affinity between two or more people. People buy from people like themselves. We notice similarities on a conscious level, but we notice differences on a subconscious level. Building rapport will help you to communicate effectively on a deeper level with people to help them understand you quicker and trust you faster.

1. A person of influence must synchronize with the customer using
modeling, mirroring, pacing, and matching.
2. A person of influence shows true, genuine, and sincere interest in
clients and customers.
3. As a person of influence, confirm you are in rapport with your
client or customer.
4. Find out what is most important to your client/customer (identify
values).
5. Ask questions to discover the rules that define your customer’s
values.
6. Ask questions to identify needs.
7. Ask questions to discover the rules that define the customer’s
needs.

A few days ago, we announced that we were going to close down the Netsetter so that we could focus our resources on what we feel are stronger products with more growth potential in FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome.

While we were aware that the Netsetter had a certain loyal set of readers ever since Collis began the site as his personal spot to talk about startups, your comments on that final post encouraged us to salvage a piece of the Netsetter so that you can continue to benefit from the information you valued here. Every week on Fridays, we’ll be publishing a column on WorkAwesome bearing the Netsetter name.

You can read the first column on the new Google Keyword Tool today.

Hi folks, it seems I am writing my last Netsetter post today, as we’ve unfortunately decided to wind this blog up.

We recently tried taking it from solo-Collis blog into multi-author magazine style blog, and while we’ve had some success, it’s been clear from launch onwards that this blog isn’t as useful to the world as some of our other blogs. Utility is something that I think is always evident in the traffic a blog gets. And while there’s been some traffic here, nothing like we’ve had from some of other sites.

Recently I gave a talk at the Problogger meet where I discussed how some blog niches just seem to catch fire like they are giant oil wells of audience demand, while others are like putting a flame to a bucket of water. Well theNetsetter has had fairly small demand, so we’re going to wind it up and use the resources and money to double down on AppStorm and WorkAwesome, both of which have been experiencing some great growth lately.

So as of today, we’re moving our old posts into the WorkAwesome archives, and theNetsetter is no more. Thanks to everyone who has tuned into the site, supported it and linked to it!

I’m sorry to see theNetsetter go, but I’m sure in the long run it’ll mean we get to make more awesome blogs on topics which more people really want to see us blog about.

In the meantime, to all my fellow entrepreneurs, keep netsetting!

Collis

Adriaan Pienaar of Woo Themes fame recently wrote a book, Rockstar Business, about his experiences and insight as an entrepreneur. Pienaar is an example of a successful netsetter, and there’s a lot for budding netsetters to learn from him.

We’re proud to announce that Rockstar Business is being sold on the Tuts+ Marketplace, Envato’s marketplace for educational materials from tutorials through screencasts to books. It’s just $9 and is available right now.

You can head over to the book’s page on the marketplace to find out more and read excerpts using the “Live Preview” button, or you can read the blurb below the jump.

Rockstar Business is a special collection of inspirational stories, thought-provoking reflections, and take-it-from-me advice from author and self-described “rockstar,” Adriaan Pienaar.

For the first time since launching several popular entrepreneurial ventures based in his home country of South Africa, Adii Rockstar opens up to share his principles for living a happier life and reveals rare business insight with readers – many of whom will certainly be customers of the 25-year-old Pienaar’s popular online design companies, WooThemes and Radiiate.

Readers will be thrust into the world of a self-described Rockstar, learning how to embody a similar style of business intuitiveness, trust of the self and of others, and cunning ambition. Adii divulges the latest techniques toward successfully creating a personal brand around one’s name and image while remaining grounded and altruistic in everyday life.

Analytical and inspirational, Rockstar Business not only spans many innovative and cutting-edge pieces of insight that modern entrepreneurs and business leaders are harnessing amid the age of the Internet, but further lays out a comprehensive philosophy through which readers will live a more fulfilling and happy life.