You are free to use the material from these articles in whole or in part on your web site or eZine (email newsletter) as long as you include the attribution below and also let me know where the article will appear. "This article is by Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Robert's web site is a comprehensive resource on marketing for Independent Professionals. For free marketing resources and valuable marketing tools visit http://www.actionplan.com"

Marketing Articles on Positioning What is an InfoGuru Anyway? My definition: "An InfoGuru is a business person with valuable information who leverages what they know to expand his/her success while making a contribution." So an InfoGuru isn't someone who has a lot of knowledge and information, who simply sells that information. That person would be classified as an "Expert." Nor is an InfoGuru someone who does everything possible to make a contribution to his/her clients. I'd call that kind of business person a "Hard Worker." What is missing in both of these categories is "Leverage." And leverage is achieved by combining the knowledge of the Expert and the contribution of the Hard Worker. But how specifically does an InfoGuru leverage information? An Expert makes money by selling his/her information at whatever price the market will bear. And the Hard Worker sells his/her time, while the InfoGuru makes information available in various formats or packages that not only make money but create visibility and credibility. The InfoGuru gives away about 25% of their information as an enticement to those who want more. They give away principles and how-to's in the form of articles, talks, web content, Ezines and other information that is easy to distribute. They understand that giving way this information is a long- term investment in building relationships with clients and potential clients. Giving away information is their primary way of marketing themselves. Experts are loathe to give any of their information away and Hard Workers don't even realize that the information they have is valuable. InfoGurus sell about 25% of their information at a premium price, knowing that the ability to assist with hands-on implementation of this information is worth it's weight in diamonds. They sell consulting services, workshops, coaching, training and other valuable information that is delivered person-to-person. InfoGurus understand that they are selling value, not time, solutions, not processes. Experts understand this as well. Hard Workers don't full appreciate the value of what they know so they are always under-pricing themselves. What about the other 50%? InfoGurus sell the remainder of their information at a fair and affordable price through information products. This is more specific and how-to than their free information but less hands-on than their premium information. Information products consist of reports, tapes, Videos, CD Roms, Books and E-books. Some Experts sell information products as well but Hard Workers miss this category altogether. Only the InfoGuru sees the full opportunity for leveraging their information to make a contribution while making a very good living at the same time. Are you an InfoGuru an Expert or a Hard Worker? Speaking of information products: The "Client Magnet Workshop on Tape" is a great example of solid information at a fair price. You get nine hours on tape of two live workshops for the price of 40 minutes of my in-person consulting time! Check it out here. Marketing Flashes - on Being an InfoGuru --- Don't just be an InfoGuru, invest in the products and services of InfoGurus. Relatively small investments can pay huge dividends. And often you can "buy wholesale and sell retail" by reworking what you learn and providing it to your clients as a premium service. --- Study the InfoGurus. InfoGurus become famous because they share their information so generously. The InfoGurus of marketing such as Jay Conrad Levinson, Alan Weiss, Jay Abraham and Jeffrey Lant have helped me make hundreds of thousands of dollars. --- The Internet is the ultimate InfoGuru playground. You can provide all three levels of information on a web site - free through articles and reports, at a fair price through information products (many which can be downloaded) and at a premium price by promoting your services. --- InfoGurus are always learning and always sharing. They realize that information is not finite and are always learning new ways to gain and disseminate information. For instance, how many Ezines do you subscribe to other than this one? I hope a dozen or more. And, of course, you have your own Ezine, don't you??? --- InfoGurus "re-purpose" their information so that it can be used many times. An Ezine article can turn into a website article and then a re-edited article for another web site, then turned into a talk and then a cassette tape, video or book. My upcoming "Online Information Product" is going to be called "The InfoGuru - Actions Plans for Attracting New Clients by Marketing Your Expertise." It will be available sometime in February 2001 and will sell for the absurdly affordable price of $49! I'll keep you posted when it's ready. Have a great Holiday Season no matter where you may be in the world. Thank you for letting me share some of my ideas with you this year. I hope they've helped. May you have an abundant and prosperous New Year as an InfoGuru! Breaking Cassandra's Curse Thousands of years ago, according to Greek Mythology, there was a woman named Cassandra who was in a relationship with the god Apollo. He, being the God of Truth and Light, bestowed the gift of prophecy upon Cassandra. But apparently the relationship went sour and they split. Apollo wasn't able to take back his gift so he bestowed another - a curse actually - that when Cassandra foretold the future, no one would believe her. As you can imagine, this was very upsetting to Cassandra and made her someone you'd avoid inviting to parties. But there's a part to this story that you don't hear about very often. . . . Cassandra had several children and her curse was passed on to them. By the time the Industrial Revolution rolled by, most of her descendants had become small business owners and the curse had changed a bit. Now whenever they tried to communicate about their businesses and how great they were, no one would believe them! (sound familiar?) Luckily, if they did good work, news about their products and services was passed by word-of-mouth and their businesses grew. But no matter how hard they tried, they had a terrible time telling people directly about their services. In fact the best people could do was assert: "I Hate Marketing!" which made them feel a little better but really didn't do much good. Many maintained that they just didn't have time for marketing and that their kind of business really couldn't be marketed anyway. Still others tried a little marketing here and there but it didn't get good results, proving that word-of-mouth was the only way. Many years later, early in the 20th Century, a business wizard named Claude Hopkins discovered Cassandra's Curse and put all his time and effort into finding an antidote to this scourge that had held small business people back for so long. And you know what? he succeeded and he wrote a book called "Scientific Advertising" in which he shared the antidote. And several business people used his formula to great effect. Their prospective clients finally started listening to them and their businesses grew by leaps and bounds. Since then, marketing consultants like myself (spiritual descendants of Claude Hopkins, not Cassandra) have been working to spread the word far and wide, to break the curse and to set small business people free. (yeah, yeah, I know this is a little melodramatic!). The antidote, If you didn't already know, is to focus your marketing message on "what the client gets" instead of on "what you do." It almost seems too simple, but it makes all the difference. And it's amazing to me how so few small business owners actually "get it." Take a minute to look at anything you have in print and listen to what comes out of your mouth and ask if you are using the antidote or are still under the sway of Cassandra's Curse. Turn Your Marketing Messages into "Memes" Are you frustrated trying to communicate about your business? Do you do great things for your clients but just can't talk or write about your services in a way that gets any attention, let alone any response? You're not alone. As a service professional, you want to get more clients. But to do that, you first need to get noticed and create interest in your services. To stand apart from the crowd, you need to do more than just tell people about what you do. You need to communicate your unique talents and abilities in terms that are both meaningful and compelling to prospective clients. You've probably been told that it's a good idea to develop a business name, tag line, elevator speech and headlines. But have you worked on messages like this for hours and they still don't have any oomph? I'm going to show you how you can start creating marketing message that hit home every time. Don't believe me? Read on! What You Need go Know Powerful marketing messages aren't only about the content of your message. Just as important is the way in which you structure your message. That's the key that almost everyone misses. What Do You Meme? In 1976, Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a book called "The Selfish Gene" in which he introduced a new concept to the history of culture: memes (it rhymes with "seems"). A meme, Dawkins asserted, is much like its biological cousin, the gene. Like a gene, a meme is self-replicating. However, memes don't replicate biologically; instead, they are passed along in the form of ideas. Dawkins argued that memes are the "basic unit of cultural transmission." He wrote: "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. Jump ahead twenty years and to another book called "Rapid Response Advertising" by Geoff Ayling, an Australian advertising man. Ayling builds a strong case for the use of memes in marketing and advertising, and he thinks that the meme is the missing piece of the marketing and advertising puzzle. "A meme," he writes "operates through the process of chunking complex concepts or ideas down into a simple, easily communicable unit." Likewise, marketing messages can be constructed as memes to communicate the benefits of a product or service more quickly and easily. After reading Ayling's book, I realized that I had long been using a marketing meme to introduce my service: "I help service businesses attract more clients." When I explain my work that way, I frequently get an immediate "Oh! That's what I need!" response. I've used this tagline for years, but I never really understood exactly why it worked so well. The idea of marketing memes gave me the key. The Meme in Action A marketing meme always accomplishes four things: It actively transfers specific information. It's immediately and obviously beneficial. It's self-explanatory and ultra-simple. And it's easy to replicate in someone's mind. When all of these elements are in place, it works like magic. Imagine this: I'm at a networking event and I've just answered someone's question about what I do with my marketing meme. For whatever reason, they don't need my service, but they still understand immediately what I'm about. Half an hour later, that same person drags someone over to me and says, "You should talk to Sarah here, she needs to attract more clients." Bingo! This has happened to me countless times. This is why it's smart to apply marketing memes to virtually any marketing message -- people will understand you more quickly, and as a result, you'll attract more attention, interest, and response. You don't have to worry about zippy slogans or phrases. Just strive for clarity, simplicity, brevity and benefits, all wrapped up in a few words (or a combination of words and images). Great marketing memes make a direct and memorable connection. What a Marketing Meme Is Not Sometimes it's easier to understand a marketing meme by looking at what it is not. A meme is not a meaningless slogan, nor a clever play on words. Ever see a headline on a billboard that totally confused you? That's a dead meme. Memes should never confuse. They should clarify. With a meme you say, "I get it!" When it's not a meme you say, "huh?" Let's look at a recent example, a billboard from IBM: Two tires in profile. Two ThinkPad portable computers in profile inside the tires. The headline: "ThinkPad. Road Trip." Huh? Sorry, Big Blue, but that's not a meme. What's the message? I have to stop and figure it out. It's not immediately obvious and beneficial. Here's an eTrade billboard that's much better: "This month, someone's going to win the lottery. Just not you. eTrade." Bingo! Without having to figure anything out, you get the message: "I'd better stop wishing and start investing." Like a good joke, it hits home immediately. Slogans, headlines, taglines and other marketing messages aren't necessarily memes. Sometimes they're just clever phrases built on a play-on-words, or they're so general that they communicate very little. "Overnight Delivery" isn't much of a meme. On the other hand, "When you positively, absolutely have to have it overnight" built a multi-million dollar business. Your challenge is to create memes for your business that communicate the benefits of your service just as powerfully. What You Need to Do A meme can be used anytime you need to communicate effectively about your business. Remember, a meme communicates quickly and effortlessly in just a few words (or sometimes in words plus images), the benefit is obvious and it it stimulates a response, either immediately or sometime in the future because it's so easy to recall. Finding Your Core Solution For instance, a recent client, a personal organizer, was struggling to position her organizing practice. She had fallen into doing the kind of organizing that didn't excite her much. I asked her what was special about her business, what made her different than everyone else. She said that, unlike most organizers who helped people throw out a lot of junk, she had an eye for valuable items that they could sell instead of putting in the garbage. We emerged with a wonderful tagline meme that said it all: "We find treasures in your clutter." This has an immediate appeal for those who want to get rid of clutter because it promises an added bonus - finding a valuable treasure or two. Using this meme as her central marketing message, she built on it in her marketing materials by telling of the treasures she had found for others and how finding just a few valuable items would pay for her services. There are several ways to use memes in marketing your business. Here's some of the major ones: The actual Name of your business; a Tagline (as outlined above) to use with your business identity; an Audio Logo (a short version of a "elevator speech") which you say out loud when someone asks what you do; a Headline on an ad, flyer or letter; and a Title to a talk or an article. All of these memes might be expressed slightly differently but they all communicate essentially the same message with clarity and impact. Cooking Up Your Meme So how do you create a powerful meme for your business? It's a bit of an art but here's some guidelines: First, ask the key question - "what do my clients get as a result of using my services?" Don't worry about the wording yet, just brainstorm a number of sentences that capture the gist of your key benefit. You might even do this with a small group. Initially you might come up with: "Our clients have problems with employee conflict and our services help reduce that conflict while building cooperation and trust." So the core idea is there, but it's pretty long. So start paring it down to its essentials. The next cut might go: "We reduce conflict while building cooperation." This is better but I'm not sure if this is for individuals or organizations. The next attempt yields: "Reducing conflict and building cooperation within organizations." But are we trying to say too much? We have a message that is both about solving a problem and offering a solution. Maybe we should go with one or the other. The final meme, used as a tagline is: "Building cooperation within organizations." Now this is simple, benefit-oriented and easy to remember. You've got a meme! Testing Your Meme - Is It Any Good? Once you've developed a meme, you need to test it to see if it really does communicate your core message. How do you know that? When you get a favorable response when you use it. You notice that when you say it, people ask the right questions and want to know more. The best way is to try this as an "Audio Logo." When someone asks what you do, say something like: "I have a company called Working Diplomacy. We help build cooperation within organizations." If most of the people say, "that's interesting, more companies need that," or "you ought to talk to our HR director," there's a very good chance you have a winner. If, on the other hand, everyone says, "what do you mean," or "why do companies need that?" you may be off track. Back to the drawing board. Rolling Out Your Meme A meme isn't just a nice thing to have. It's the core expression of your business purpose and strategy. So you want to use it everywhere you possibly can. Put it in the tag line of your business card and stationery. Use it as a headline in an ad, answer the phone with it: Prospect: "Hello, I hear you folks do conflict management for companies." You: "Yes, we help build cooperation within organizations. Is that what you're looking for?" The whole idea of a meme is that it helps prospective clients understand quickly and easily how you can help them, so you want to include it in every single piece of promotional material and in all the marketing activities you do. You Can Also Be an Expert at "Meme-Ology" With a little work, anyone can create a powerful meme for their business. It all starts with a core idea: What are the results you produce for your clients? Next you need to hone it down to a few words and make it as simple as possible. Finally, you need to apply it to several marketing messages. When you get the hang of constructing good marketing memes it's like riding a bicycle. In the same way that it's virtually impossible to lose your balance, it will be impossible to construct a meme that doesn't hit home every time. Return to Index of Marketing Articles These articles give just a taste of what you'll find in the InfoGuru Marketing Manual. Check it out!