Dale King Interviews Internet Marketing Expert Soni Pitts

Soni Pitts: Sometime back in 2001, I retired from my previous career in
entertainment and started my own life coaching business, which was
primarilyconducted virtually. Since I had virtually no start-up capital and am one of those types who enjoys doing as much as possible myself and learning about new things in the process, I decided to bootstrap an Internet marketing degree (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof) on my own.

It's not a path I recommend for everyone, but it suits my personality. Since then, I've discovered that the marketing part is at least as much fun for me as the rest of it, so I'm working on integrating that as part of my income
stream on its own.

Dale King: Some Internet Marketing experts advise newbies to
steer clear of curtains areas of Internet Marketing, like selling
e-books on how to make money, advertising services, SEO services,
copywriting, etc., because those areas are too competitive. Do you
agree with that assessment?

Soni Pitts: I do feel that there's such a thing as the dynamics of a
learning curve, the understanding of which is vital to any successful
endeavor and which I feel is a far bigger obstacle for the newbie than
the competition. But that's because I also think that competition is the
price you pay for not being creative enough to find a way around it.

If you try to do the same thing everyone else is doing, the same way
they're doing it, you're going to be fighting against an insurmountable signal
to noise ratio, especially on the Internet. However, the Internet is a big
place and the best way to get attention in a big place is not to do
what everyone else is doing, but to be completely original and use that
originality to create a brand that literally screens out 99% of the
potential market. Now that may sound counterintuitive, but in reality
being able to focus everything you've got on reaching the 1% of the market
that your product fits perfectly is way easier and far more profitable than
working your butt off trying to A) get the attention of everyone (or
anyone), over the roar of all the other generalists and B) trying to
convince those you do manage to flag down to buy something that most of
them will never want, need or even have the slightest interest in.

In other words, you make more money being "Li's Certified Authentic
Japanese Sushi" than by being "Eddie's Everything Buffet," because finding a roomful of sushi lovers in any population is always cheaper and easier, in terms of time, energy and money, than trying to reach, appeal to and please everyone at once. At the same time, the market assumes that someone who specializes is always going to have infinitely better offerings that someone who's trying to appeal to everyone, so by being generic you're already putting yourself at a disadvantage in the eyes of the consumer. Nobody wants tosettle for "nothing special." People want to read your sales letter or open your email and feel like you're talking specifically to them, not to be targeted with an offer addressed to "Dear Resident."

Of course, in order to specialize you have to have access to a large
enough marketplace to assure that, to use our previous example, a restaurant's worth of sushi lovers will be present in sufficient numbers to make the venture a success (which is why you see more generic buffet places than specialized restaurants in rural and low-population areas, most of which serve food that can only be described as not entirely inedible).

When you have a small market, you do have to appeal to everyone in order to get enough cash flow to make your overhead. But the Internet is the world's biggest marketplace, so you absolutely have to specialize if you're going to succeed. And when you specialize, there is simply no such thing as competition. It's called niche marketing.

Here's an example: Got a financial management ebook? Good for you. But
marketing-wise, it's too general to be worth the price of writing the
sales page. But an ebook touting, "20 Ways to Take Your Finances From An F to an A+ On a Teacher's Salary" will sell like half-priced ten dollar bills, if properly priced and marketed - and will be cheaper and easier to
market, to boot. Niche marketing is the ultimate competition eliminator, because you can always adapt your product to target tighter and/or different niches if the competition catches on and starts to flood the market you're currently targeting. 200 new teacher-oriented finance manuals hit the web yesterday? Maybe it's time to rewrite and target retired teachers.

Or snowboarders. Or retired snowboarders, for that matter. The formula is simple - down to a certain point (which is different in every situation, so you've got to know your field and market intimately), the tighter the niche, the more money you can make for the same amount of effort.

Dale King: How is Internet Marketing different now, as opposed
to when you first got started online?

Soni Pitts: Well, for starters, the audience/market has gotten a lot
more sales savvy and way more B.S. resistant. You really have to find
something that speaks to your market where they are, presents something that is attractive to them and really solves their problem and you have to be
authentic, transparent and honest for it to even register on their
radar.

And these days, it's all about building mutually beneficial
relationships that are as much about giving to your market (help, resources, information, advice) as they are about getting sales. As an example, the wine salesman that sends out a monthly e-zine featuring useful information and buyers'guides, and who holds free preview tastings and discounts of new wines to select VIP customers before he makes those wines available to the general public, is going to clobber the guy who keeps to the "me only" marketing strategy of email marketing pitches and e-catalogs.

For the nuts and bolts stuff like SEO and marketing trends, my
suggestion is to find a good source of updated marketing discussion among pros and users and refer to it regularly during marketing activities. I recommend the search engine forums at http://www.virtualpromote.com/.

They've got a strong population of dedicated SEO experts, webmasters and Internet marketers who keep a running conversation going on pretty much any aspect of SEO or Internet marketing you could ask for. I also suggest subscribing to the Trendwatching.com Trend Briefing http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/.

Every issue keeps you up to date on consumer trends (with cool,
real-world examples and inspiring future-casting) which can help you update or adapt your product offerings and marketing strategy.

Dale King: How important has goal-setting been to your overall
success?

Soni Pitts: Depends on the goal. LOL!

Seriously, though, bad goals are worse than no goals at all. If you set
"expectation" goals (I should, I need to, I ought to) then they
probably won't be of much help, since they come from outside of your own motivations. Setting "inspiration" goals (I want to, I'd love to, I can't wait to) is much more fun.

For myself, I prefer an overall and flexible sense of direction
combined with intermediary deadlines and checkpoints than a series of rigid goals. In my experience, hard-and-fast goals can become the ends towards which the means are directed, to the point that the original intent of the goals become forgotten in the process. These sorts of goals also tend to be doggedly worked toward even if the person's needs have changed since the beginning, because they don't want to be seen as "quitters" or dilettantes.

On a practical level, also, I tend to shy away from structured
goal-setting or task mastering activities such as to-do lists or charts simply
because personality-wise, I'm very organic and free-form in my thinking and action. I make lists, but then I lose them or toss them in a corner and never refer to them. So you might say I'm more of an "objective" person than a "goal" person.

Dale King: How important has reading been to your overall
success?

Soni Pitts: Where do I even begin on this subject. Reading is my life.
It's no exaggeration to say that 90% or more of everything that ever had a
positive, important or world-changing effect in my life came from
something I read. If I weren't able to read, I don't know what I'd do with
myself. When I was a child, my Mom even learned to send me to my room without a book if she really wanted to punish me. Otherwise, sending me to my room was just a way to get out of doing other stuff and spend time in my books, something I hardly considered to be a bad thing. :-D

Dale King: If you could recommend one book that all Internet
marketers should read, what would it be?

Soni Pitts: It's a series, rather than one book, but the PsychoCombo
Power Pack http://www.psychotactics.com/hiddenlinkSmallBusiness.htm by Sean D'Souza of Psychotactics.com is in my opinion the most amazing and yetaccessible piece of marketing know-how I've seen. I review the whole series whenever I sit down to write a really important or tricky piece of marketing copy. Sean approaches marketing from a psychological standpoint and not only tells you what works, but why it works. It's like having a cheat sheet for your customer's brain. (No, I'm not an affiliate or anything - just that holy grail of marketing, an evangelistically satisfied customer.)

I'd also suggest dropping by The Million Dollar Bookshelf
http://www.milliondollarbookshelf.com/, a site that offers free
downloads of famous marketing canon books like Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" and Claude Hopkins' "Scientific Advertising" (you also get a copy of S.A. when you subscribe to Sean D'Sousa's "Psychotactics" e-newsletter, which I strongly recommend doing. It's free, but it's taught me more useful information about Internet marketing than several top-rated books put together, in a light and engaging manner that's actually fun to read).

Dale King: In your opinion, what technology has changed Internet
Marketing the most over the last 5 years?

Soni Pitts: Google, hands down. And yes, I consider Google to be a
technology all on it's own, given the scope of the beast they've
created out of what started out as a basic data search algorithm.

Dale King: What new technology do you see changing Internet
Marketing over the next 5 years?

Soni Pitts: I'm not sure - there's a lot of cool stuff out there.
Blogging and similar concepts related to personal expression, such as Flickr and YouTube, are drastically changing the very nature of "word of mouth" marketing(for good or ill, depending on who you ask). And the On Demand trend of instant, customizable access (everything from customized Google homepages to designing your own car on a company website and having it shipped directly to a local dealer later that week) is another developing concept that will have a huge effect on how people do business and how that business is therefore marketed. Whatever changes occur, though, I'll bet my paycheck that Google will be right there on top of it like a pro surfer riding a
monster wave!

Dale King: What person has influenced you the most in your
lifetime, and how?

Soni Pitts: Well, there are a lot of folks who've had a lot of
influence in different areas of my life, so that's a hard question to answer. But one of my favorite role models for life is Ben Franklin - the epitome of the "if you can dream it, you can do it" mentality combined with the ultimate in bootstrapping sensibilities! I can only imagine what our current
culture would look like if he'd had the Internet to work with.

Dale King: If you could give my readers one piece of advice,
what would it be?

Soni Pitts: Be real - be yourself, be original. Don't be afraid to
scare off a good portion of the market, because the one's who stay will keep you in positive cash flow for years to come. But also, in doing so, never ever lose your integrity. Change is inevitable. Business models, the
economy, trends, etc - it all changes, whether you like it or not. Things like 9/11, a natural disaster or even the emergence of the Internet can sweep a
generation's worth of planning and success right out the window. But
someone with integrity can always find a place and a way through even the most unimaginable changes. However, trying to hold on to the status quo by trading away your integrity leaves you nothing and no one to work with
when change inevitably wins the battle.

Dale King: Thank you very much . I appreciate you taking the
time to do this interview.

Soni Pitts: Thank you. And thanks to your readers, too, for their time
and attention. I hope I was able to be of some help. If anyone has any
questions or comments, they can contact me directly at soni@sonipitts.com.

Soni's website: http://sonipitts.com

Warning: This interview is the exclusive property of Soni Pitts. It may not be reprinted in any format...period!