Are you playing in the right park?

Yesterday, I got back from the first 2-day ‘Small Business Marketing Workshop’ run by the very smart Jonathan Jay in his new business venture Success Track.

The purpose of the 2-day workshop was for Jonathan to share his own experience in what does and doesn’t work in terms of marketing a business. Jonathan also offered a ‘marketing clinic’, where attendees could (perhaps crushingly honestly in some cases!) receive a critique of their current marketing materials and approach (note to anyone who attended here — you will of course get the irony of Jonathan describing this in his own words as “a clinic”!).

It’s all about perspective.

I always say that your Thing is your filter on the world and how you see things differently. That’s why your Thing is very often a different way of working, a different order, different detail, different language or a different approach entirely to how something is done. It’s your take on the world, not necessarily a brand spanking new eureka moment Thing. Which of course is all about perspective.

Sometimes when your perspective is very different to everyone else around you it can be hard to share. Perhaps you don’t want to ‘stand out’ or be different. For many of us it’s inbuilt not to be a show off or get noticed to much. Certainly in my life experience that didn’t always end well (it does now, but not back then).

You’d think I have this Thing all figured out, right? Well, most of the time I do and then sometimes some-thing comes along and I get a big smack round the chops to remind me I MUST do it my way!

Yes, I know that you are supposed to get ‘small’ and specific with what you do—you can’t be everything to everyone, after all. BUT sometimes you can think too small.

Now, when I say small what I really mean is ‘blinkered’—if you’re good at something and that’s what you ‘do’, it’s sometimes difficult to see everything that’s ‘around’ what you do—but that’s what your Thing is: everything!

There’s detail that you notice that other people don’t. There’s elements that are invisible to others that are in plain sight to you. There are steps, ideas, processes, projects that to everyone else don’t make sense or don’t even occur in their thoughts. All this is your Thing. But even though you may ‘see’ all this, if you can’t talk about it clearly then it’s going to be hard to sell

How DO you make MONEY from your web site? Or, how I like to think about it: how can your web site make your business more successful?