Be Seen, Be Known and Be Heard Online by Being Remarkable!

Are you remarkable?

All humans crave ‘authentic’ attention and connection, period!  You’ve only got to look at the huge popularity of Facebook as proof of this.  Social media users are smart, affluent, internet-savvy people whom business owners can no longer ignore.  A different kind of marketing is now required in order to score with these influential players.

If you think you are the only business doing what you do, think again! You might have had a ‘unique selling proposition’ (USP), when you first launched, but now in today’s competitive online world, your uniqueness is becoming the norm.

In order to ‘get found’ online by your target market (as opposed to you finding your target market), you need to ensure your ‘unique selling and value proposition’ is truly remarkable.  I have borrowed this term from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot, who have also authored the book ‘Inbound Marketing’ (which I will be reviewing as part of this post).

Brian and Dharmesh pose the question to their readers “are your products and services worthy of people’s remarks”.  Having a ‘remarkable strategy’ in the inbound marketing era is more critical than ever for 2 reasons:

1. The internet enables you to reach many more people than you could pre-internet and it also opens you up to potential competitors everywhere.  The trick is to stand out by becoming remarkable (unique and valuable) as possible to a segment of buyers.
2. The internet enables remarkable ideas to spread extremely quickly – far more than pre-internet days. Unremarkable ideas languish unfound.

Ask yourself this question “what are you remarkable at and what are you best at in the world?”  If you’re not the world’s best within your niche then you need to narrow down your niche until you are.  It’s no use being a ‘Jack of all trades but a Master of none’.  The more narrow and niched you are the better chance you have of dominating and owning your target market.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a very profound quote. He said “either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.”

Many marketing gurus have a saying “be an inch wide and a mile deep in your niche”. This means don’t try and be everything to everyone.  For example if your target market is women with self esteem issues, that’s a huge niche!  A narrow niche in this instance could be women over 45 who have recently divorced and are now raising teenage children as a single Mum.  Once you’ve narrowed your niche down to an inch wide you can then start to add remarkable products and services that are a mile deep. For example:

• Personal development
• Cooking and recipes
• Dating advice
• Holiday destinations
• Weight loss tips
• Understanding teenagers

Beyond a remarkable USP, you must also create remarkable content about your business and products for 2 important reasons:

1. Remarkable content attracts links from other websites pointing to your website.  In other words you want your content to prompt other content producers on the web to “remark” about your products and services and link back to your site.  Everyone of these “remarks” gives you 2 bangs for your buck: the links send you qualified visitors and they signal Google that your website is worthy of ranking for important keywords in your market.  More links equals more traffic from relevant sites in addition to more traffic via Google via search.
2. Remarkable content is easily and quickly spread on social sites, such as Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Reddit, Facebook etc.  If you create a remarkable blog article, it will spread like wildfire within your market today, relative to how quickly it would have spread just a few years ago.

To make this double win work for your business you need to create lots of remarkable content.  A savvy marketer spends half their time as a traditional marketer and half their time as a content creator. You not only need to produce remarkable content but you also need to make sure the content has many links to and from it.  The good thing about this marketing approach is that the links never go away; as you create more content, it just produces more qualified traffic on top of the traffic you are getting on your older content.

Remarkable content works in the exact opposite way of paid advertising where you pay and have to keep paying to get visitors to your site.  Remarkable content is the gift that keeps on giving, so you need to become really good at creating lots of it!

Variety is the Spice of Life

Many people think that it’s time consuming creating remarkable content.  It’s not if you know how to repurpose your content.  Here is one way you can do it:

1. Write a whitepaper
2. Turn the whitepaper into a blog post
3. Turn the whitepaper into an article
4. Turn the whitepaper into a video
5. Turn the whitepaper into a webinar or tele-seminar
6. Strip the audio from the video/webinar/tele-seminar and turn it into a podcast
7. Bundle the whitepaper with a video and sell it as a home-study program

You’ve Gotta Give to Get

The counter-intuitive thing about remarkable content is that the more you give, the more you get.  Human behaviour tells us that the more you give people, the more they want you to do it for them.  In other words, give away your most valuable knowledge and nuggets and the more customers and clients will still want you to do it for them.

The more remarkable the content and the more transparent you are about your remarkable content, the more links to your site and the better it will rank in the search engines.  Think abundance here not scarcity!! You want to move away from the mindset of hiding all of your remarkable content in your head and use that content to attract links to your site, which will then attract visitors and move your site up the Google ranks.

Move Beyond the Width of Your Wallet

10 years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the  width of your wallet. Today your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain.  You no longer need to spend tons of money interrupting your potential customers. Instead you need to create remarkable content, optimise that content (for search engines, RSS readers and social media sites), publish the content, market the content through the blogosphere and social mediasphere.

Homework for you!

As I mentioned earlier in this blog I have borrowed much of this blog’s content and terms from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot, who have also authored the book called ‘Inbound Marketing’.  You can find Hubspot at http://www.hubspot.com.  Hubspot have also created a very clever piece of technology and accompanying service called Website Grader (which can be found at http://www.websitegrader.com).  Website Grader has a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website.  I highly recommend you take advantage of this free tool. Go and check out the number of links to your website, the number of Delicious bookmarks to your website and the number of pages Google has indexed from your site.

Until next week, keep struttin your stuff!

Kylie Bartlett – The Web Celeb

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