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When I began my business, I was schooled in all the classic ways to find customers.  The basic theme was GET IN THEIR FACE.

I was taught to approach people in the grocery store.

I was told to put my business card in magazines in the newsstands.

I was told to have samples with me everywhere so that if I was in line at an amusement  park, I could speak with people while my kids went on the roller coaster.

I bought newspaper ads.  I went to expos.  I made cold calls.

And in the end, I spent hundreds of dollars making people run away from me.

Marketing by Un-Attraction–the Old Standard

One of the greatest marketers of our time, Seth Godin, in his book “Permission Marketing” describes in the evolution of marketing.

In the old way of marketing, which Seth calls “interruption marketing”, all marketing is in your face.  Commercials come on during your favorite show; billboards are placed to block your view of the countryside; and of course, you pitch your products in the grocery store line.

In this new age of internet, now we as marketers need to get people’s permission to market to them.  We must earn the right to market to them or they will vote with their exit click.  We can no longer use interruption marketing.

Marketing by Attraction–The New, Better Marketing

Seth Godin describes the new way of marketing “Permission Marketing”, and Ann Seig picks up on this and carries it farther to “Attraction Marketing”.

Attraction marketing is finding customers by attracting the people who are looking for you.

You are a beacon that they follow.

You provide answers that they need.

You make yourself useful so that people trust you and the products you offer.

In attraction marketing, you are not convincing people that they need to buy from you, you are helping them and they are grateful.

How do you become a beacon?

You must discover what solutions people are looking for, provide the answers, and make yourself “findable”.

And “findable” in this day and age means learning how to use the internet for your business.

Ann Sieg has made this whole process clear in her new  free e-book “The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto“.

This is a book for everyone who wants to grow their business–but not chase down their customers.

Find out:

• How to stand out among your competition
• How to get the attention of your customer base
• Why using the internet to reach your customers is vital to your business
• How to become trusted by your customers so that they come to you for advice
• What is your most important marketing job
• What is one of the best ways to increase your lead flow to your business
• 133 ways to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Ann Sieg provides an excellent book explaining Attraction Marketing and why it is absolutely necessary to understand these concepts and implement them to be successful in business today.

I highly recommend her free e-book “The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto” to get started attracting your business to you.

I just saw a training video and in it, I learned that I don’t need to be an expert to create a business, I just need to know a little more than the person I’m helping.

I believe this. I love how we can all extend a hand to the person behind us while grabbing the hand of the person in front. It is through the helpful hands around us that we grow.

I love shedding light on someone’s problem.

I love being the one who comes up with the solution.

But does being one step in front of someone make me an expert?

I picked up a very controversial book from the library, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values” by Andrew Keen. The title made me gulp.

The book is written by a self-proclaimed elitist. He feels there is a very different, very tangible difference between the advice you find in an article on Wikipedia, written by an amateur, and an article by a professeur who has studied a topic for decades.

When everyone becomes an expert and hosts their own private YouTube channel, quality suffers, he claims.

At first blush, I am appalled. Haven’t we all had experiences where the kid next door fixes the computer problem that your “expert” missed? Your Aunt Joan paints pictures that rivel anything you’ve seen in a museum.

Proclaimed “experts” have let us down countless times.

Yet–perhaps he has a point.

When I take a yoga class, I can feel a tangible difference in the teaching from the teacher who has lived, breathed and eaten yoga for years, with the one who thinks yoga is cool.

When I listen to talk radio, I may be intrigued with the caller’s questions, but it’s the expert who has been in the trenches for years who gives me the insights I value the most.

I can get help from anyone who knows more than I, but there is “solidness”, a depth, an authority to the person who has mastery.

And a master is rare.

I think we can all be helpful to each other. I think we all pocess expertise. But to be a master, to contribute to the world in a unique way, you must have more. You must have a devotion to your topic which makes you stand out among the crowd.

We can all become an expert at something. But will we all become a master?

In “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm suggests that all expertise is preceeded by 10,000 hours of practice.

This idea began with a study of elite musicians in Berlin’s Academy of Music.  When they asked the question, “What distinguishes the musicians who were destined to go on to be the world’s finest artists, from the ones who would be merely very good?”, they found something very interesting.

The very best musicians had practiced 10,000 hours*.

All of the students were exceptional.  Just making it into this music school meant that they were already among the very elite players.

But the very best had practiced more.  The merely very good averaged 8000 hours of practice and good musicians had practiced only 4000.

Malcolm goes on to show this trend in everyone from the computer geniuses of our time (men like Bill Joy and Bill Gates), to leading athletes to the Beatles.  It’s all over.  Great people put in hours and hours of practice.

This is very important to those of us starting a business.

Often we hear of the “instant success” story.  We marvel at the grandma from Cedar Rapids who, within a year of starting her business, was earning 6 figures.

What we don’t hear is that she was practicing for years.

All of us need to practice our skills.

And like children learning any skill, all of us need to allow ourselves to not be very good.  We become accustomed to skillfulness as adults.  Being clumsy is uncomfortable.  But clumsy is what we must do to become great.

What do you need to practice?

What are your scales that you must repeat over and over to get right?

For today, write down one thing to practice for your business and do it.  Do it poorly or well, but commit yourself to practicing fully.

And by the end of the day, you only have 9999 more hours to go.

*By the way, 10,000 hours comes to 20 hours/week for 10 years.  LOTS of practice.