Heading into the New Year I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to methods of really dominating the top status within any niche market.
After all…being at the top means that people come to you instead of you having to constantly chase customers.
As an expert…
- You gain the trust and credibility so important to selling information online
- You can command higher price points for your more valuable information
- You get to immediately experience "Insider" status within your market which gives you added insight into opportunities before your competitors
- Most of the authority figures within your market want to be associated with you giving you the upper hand on forming high production joint ventures and affiliate relationships
- Free publicity – the press and media want to speak to you, authority sites want to run your material all resulting in more traffic and credibility sent your way
We talked in a recent blog posting about taking a contrarian view to your marketplace as a method of pulling away from the crowd in "Taking On Your Market"
In that posting we made it clear that taking a contrarian approach must be rooted in careful analysis of your target market based on inside knowledge – either yours or someone else’s.
Here’s another great example of a contrarian – notice the NEW perspective he brings to this marketplace. Jonathan Zittrain is coming out with a book "The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop It!"
What could be more contrarian – just as everyone is going ga ga over Web2.0 with Facebook, is relishing their iPod and love Google (well almost everyone), Jonathan uses his astute analysis to notice that there is an underlying current to the build-out of the internet – central control by the big players.
The reality is this idea was ripe for the picking. There has been an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the big Internet players brewing for the last year – Zittrain simply tapped into this undercurrent, looked for patterns and validated whether some of the discourse was in fact true.
The lesson: look for major trends in your niche market, typically there will always be another "side of the story" – you want to find out what that is. Fortunately, the internet is a great place to discover alternative opinions since they tend to pop up on forums, blogs and various websites where freedom of speech is alive and well.
We do include an analysis of contrarian points of view as part of our Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package as a key method of finding a winning position within your information publishing business.
What about your market – can you find alternative points of view that may hold the power of positioning for you as THE dominant expert?
