Make Money By Getting and Keeping Attention
Aptly illustrated by pretty pictures
This is intended to be a lighter look at the serious business of business as it compares to getting a date with the girl everyone wants to talk to.
Success and Failure in Business
Success and failure in business are not so different to success or failure when dating. If you talk about yourself all the time then your date is going to loose interest in you very quickly. If you get her to talk about herself then she will feel important and you will have her attention.
Likewise if you send your date to sleep with stories and talk that does not interest her then she is not likely to want to repeat the experience. Rather than win her heart you have put her off for life. Product marketing is not so different.
There is a fine line between a successful attraction process and a failed one. If your attraction process fails totally then you loose everything that you invested into it. Therefore, you can not afford to hold back and must do your best to "show the girl a good time".
However, in the world of business you and your date don't have the luxury of a little privacy but all your love rivals are right there too competing to win her away from you. It is vital that you do not loose her interest. Not even for a second.
The modern business world (especially the on-line business world) has more to interest your potential clients and customers than they could possible have time to even be aware of. Worse still the chances are that the girl you want to date is currently laughing at some one else's jokes.
She is not interested in your stamp collection.
No one cares about you and no one is interested in your product. (Unless that product is pictures of beautiful women).
It does not mater if you are selling cars, pills or websites - no one is interested. Why should they be? What is in it for them?
Picture the party you are at. She's the only girl there and you want her attention - so do all the other men folk.
Some are dancing on the tables with their pants on their heads shouting "look at me!" while others are standing there repeating the "my name is buddy and I collect stamps, my name is buddy..."
She's been to this sort of party before and is simply ignoring everyone but the guy telling jokes. The truth is the jokes are not that funny and tend to revolve around the theme of cats and walruses.
Once you understand that you hobbies are very unlikely to be of an interest to your date you realise that you need to stop talking about them. The time to tell the girl about how interesting collecting stamps really can be is that magic moment when she asks you what you like to do.
She tips her head back and laughs at your witty joke then she says "...that's about it. What about you?"
By being interested in your date and her interests you have reached a point where she has invited you to tell her about yourself.
How to get her attention
Before you get a chance to make her laugh and ask her about her hobbies you need to get her attention.
This is where a fully functional website can help. A great website can act as a magnet for all the good things you want but once those good things arrive you need a way to cause them to want to stay there.
Without that "something" you are like the guy with the great "cut in" line but nothing to follow it up with. Imagine a guy pulls up in a great car wows the room with his fancy parking, struts in and orders drinks as he whisks the girl away. He leans in close and says "my name if bobby and I collect stamps".
It doesn't really work for me...
An attractive website is only part of the story. A good website needs to have something more interesting to say and something along the lines of "tell me about yourself" would go down very nicely.
Sadly most businesses manage to come off as creepy or nosey when they want to know about their customers. There are good ways and poor ways to say that line.
How to make people care about your products
What might surprise you is that even though your only hobby is, like every other guy in the room, collecting stamps she might be interested. For example George said he spoke to her for six minutes about stamps and she smiled too. Later on he tried to show her his 1912 regional misprint and she was not very interested preferring the bad cat jokes.
It is possible to cause a person to be fanatically interested in what you have to share by being fanatically interested in who they are!
There was a technology company that took the relatively dull MP3 player dressed it up to appeal to the fashions and taste of a generation and one a following that was interested in any stamp they might bring to the party to the exclusion of all other collectors.
This was Apple and the MP3 player was the iPod.
They did not get such a fanatical following by chance. It was something that arose from the fact that when they said "tell me about yourself" they listened to the girl.
When she said "I love micro art" Apple was able to say, "I have micro art in my pocket - this one dates back to 1943!".
Suddenly when Apple talked about stamps it was interesting because they knew what was interesting to the girl and addressed their hobbies (products) to her interests.
Are you ready to put this into action?
Now that you understand how to interest the girl and how to present your message so that she is likely to care about what you have to say it is time to put it into action.
Until you do that you will be like the person that goes to the party and sits in the corner without talking to anyone.
To make money on-line or off you need to present your message so that it addresses the wants and needs of the person listening. To get that person to listen you need to also listen.
Show an interest in people and then they will show an interest in you.
It's not rocket science which is why so many marketers miss the entire point of marketing. In a way its a bit like being part of the fashion industry - you have to be the "hot product" in order to achieve huge sales.
Even if you are not the next big noise if you are genuinely interested in other people then they are going to, on the whole, reciprocate with interest in you.
That's what marketing, making friends and dating all have in common.
So are you ready to stop being the dork that she ignores and start being the star? Aim for gold - be interested in the people you wish to talk to.