How to Be Invaluable

In many ways, marketing is about making yourself, your product or your brand noticeable. If you can stand out from the crowd and offer something unique or superior, half your marketing is already done.

The good news is that there is one simple factor that will contribute to you standing out from the crowd more than anything else and in this post, I'll tell you exactly what it is.

Watch the video below to see what I mean:

What if You Just Don't Feel Like It?

One thing about drive is that you can't really force it. If a project or niche is unappealing to you, it can be difficult to get any kind of real ambition going.

If you are involved in work that you cannot get yourself to feel a personal drive for, then it's a sign that you need to start doing something else.

I used to be very attracted to the idea of "uninvolved" income streams, like building up small niche sites that generate affiliate income, while I myself would remain anonymous and behind the scenes. There's nothing inherently wrong with this business model and I think you can be truly ambitious and passionate about something like this: becoming better and better and building up and optimizing these sites, targeting them for very specific keywords and niches and seeing them generate income can be quite a rush.

I discovered, however, that this particular model doesn't really do it for me, in the long term. It doesn't keep me interested and in most cases, I just don't have the ambition to deliver a truly fantastic website on the topic of competitive speed knitting or whatever the niche may be.

If you choose something like niche site building because you hope it to be an "easy way out", you'll end up wasting your time. The real shortcut is to find something that you can turn into a viable business, but that you're also ambitious about.

It's Not a Money Issue

Whenever I look for a freelancer to hire for a job, I'm always surprised at how many people offer their work for extremely low wages. Of course, these contractors usually work from countries with relatively weak currencies and low living costs, but even taking that into account, it seems to me like most people are caught up in a race to the bottom, as Seth Godin calls it.

I've found that the old adage of "you get what you pay for" often holds true and people who are competent and ambitious will usually charge a lot more than people who aren't. Personally, I'd much rather pay a high rate for someone who insists on doing high quality work only, even though that increases costs, than buy cheap, mediocre work.

If you are offering any kind of service or selling your own product (which you should be), realize that from the perspective of your customers and clients, it's often not a money issue. Sure, some of them will be looking for the cheapest possible solution, but they'll get burnt soon enough and will then come back looking for quality, instead. The priority for you should always be offering an excellent service, not keeping prices as low as possible.

Invaluable Marketing

The bottom line is that if you are competent and driven, you become a rare exception and people will seek you out.

Among all the projects I've been involved in, the most ambitious ones have always been the easiest to promote, the easiest to generate more traffic to and the ones most often leading to new opportunities.

From the perspective of an employer, it's very unfortunate that so few people are ambitious and self-motivated. From the perspective of an entrepreneur, service-provider or freelancer, you can rejoice: the fact that most people are setting the bar so low just makes it easier for you to stand out and stand out further from the crowd.