The Internet gives you a worldwide market for your product and service. That’s the good news. The Internet also gives you worldwide competition for those same customers. The bad news is most companies don’t realize or accept them.

The Internet gives you a worldwide market for your product and service. That’s the good news. The Internet also gives you worldwide competition for those same customers. That’s the bad news most companies don’t realize or accept.

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. You either have competitors right this minute trying to sell to your customers…or you’ll have competitors within the next year. They are out to sell products and services to your customers so you’re not needed anymore.

The only way to win in this overcrowded marketplace is to develop strong offers, great sales copy, and an enduring brand name. Of the three, developing a brand name is probably the most misunderstood and underutilized. Most people never realize they can create an enduring recognizable brand as a small business.

Read more in Marketing and Advertising
« How to Write Copy for Radio Advertising
Create a Great Public Relations Campaign »

Sure, you may never have name recognition like Nike does, but you don’t need to be that well known in the general population. Small businesses such as yours only want to be “branded” in their own little niche audience.

For example, the general population has no idea who “Terry Dean” is, but if you ask most e-zine publishers,they know exactly who I am. I don’t sell to a general audience so I don’t care if they know who I am or not. I only sell to people who are passionate about building their own small or home-based businesses on the Net. A large portion of this market knows my name quite well. My name is my brand to them (I’ll explain how and why more in the information section of this special report).

People like to buy from brand names they can trust. Think about your own buying habits. All things being equal…you will go for the well-known brand names over the unknown competitors any day.

Products without established brand names are forced to go after only one specific type of shopper…the bargain shopper. This is the type of customer who gives you the lowest margins and very limited profits.

This is not the market you want to be in. Establishing your company as having the lowest prices is one of the most dangerous positions to put yourself. Although it can and will work for a while, as soon as a larger competitor with greater buying power comes into the market to compete with you…you’re dead. They can quickly establish themselves as cheaper than you and wipe out everything that may have taken you years to build.

Look at most of the big brand name companies such as Nike, Reebok, Harley-Davidson, Adidas, and Microsoft.

None of those companies have the lowest prices in their markets. Look closely at few of them and you’ll realize they’re the most expensive companies in their markets. Does Nike make the lowest price sporting goods? No.

Is Microsoft the cheapest software developer? No. Are Harleys the cheapest motorcycles you can buy? No.

Harley-Davidson is a brand name synonymous with motorcycles. Say

Motorcycle to many people and the first image in their head is a Harley. They have over a dozen competitors, but they’ve ingrained their name onto people’s consciousness. Even more interesting is the fact that most of their competitors cost around ½ the price for the exact same quality motorcycle.

They developed their brand name as the American Made motorcycle even though there were other American motorcycle companies. They built their entire mystique around this brand. They were American motorcycles and anyone who was serious about motorcycling needed to have a Harley (this also shows they built themselves on an exclusive appeal as well since they’re the most expensive and have the longest waiting lists to purchase).

Most big companies don’t figure out how to create a brand this well. For example,” Where’s the Beef” may be a well known commercial in the US, but it didn’t help Wendy’s sales one bit. It was an expensive experiment, which entertained the public, but it didn’t leave many people remembering Wendy’s as having larger burgers than other competitors.

How does this apply to you…the small or home based business?

Direct Response Branding

Most direct marketing experts immediately ignore the word “branding” it because it has been so misused and misunderstood that we haven’t wanted to have any part of it.

When most people think of “brands” online they think of cute little logos, corporate mission statements, and other useless items. We’re not talking about any of that. We’re talking about branding your name into the minds of your customers so they want to continue to do business with you. Then, they tell their friends to work with you as well.

Your Internet brand can’t be focused on you or your company. It must be focused on your customer and only your customer. I’ve taught thousands of people how to write effective ad copy and the key to success with ads is focusing on the benefits. When writing an ad, online or offline, you focus every sentence and every line on your customer. What benefits will they receive? What can you do for them? What problems can you help them with? Every visitor to your web site is tuned into the station WIIFM which stands for

“What’s In It For Me?” Let’s make this a little easier to understand.

Trying to build a web site around the brand, “Business Systems 2000: The Company who Cares” would be a horrible idea. Nobody cares. They don’t care about your company name or what you care about.

They want to know what’s in it for them. Using the brand, “When You Buy Any Book From ABC Online Booksellers…You Get a 90 Day Money Back No Questions Asked Guarantee” is a much better idea. Most booksellers don’t offer full money-back guarantee on everything in their bookstore. If you give customers an ability to reduce their buying risk, then you’ve branded yourself as the company who cares (unlike just trying to tell them you care from the paragraph above).

To create the brand, “XYZ: Our Products Work” wouldn’t tell anyone anything. I hope your products work, but it doesn’t provide a real benefit to your customers. How about this one, “XYZ – Our Staff Is Available 24 Hours a Day at 1-800-Help Now to Help You With Any Problems.”

In other words, you have to build a Direct Response Brand. Your brand needs to get over to people the benefits they only get if they buy from you instead of doing business with your competitors.

Find out what your customers want from you instead of trying to force your game plan on them. Do this and you will already be ahead of 99% of your competitors? Become a friend to your customer.

Stop thinking like a marketer or a business owner and start thinking more like a customer. You will learn more about what your customers want and what they are thinking if you take on their mindset. Become a customer in your market.

What does a customer want from your business? What pains are they experiencing already? What are their desires and dreams? How can you help them either relieve the pain in their life or reach their desires in life? That is your goal in developing a direct response brand.

How to Build a Brand: Here’s the simple step-by-step solution for building your own powerful web brand.

Step One: Research Your Competitors:

Find out what your competitors do well…and where they are lacking. Visit their web sites. I love to do this research using the Goto.com search engine because I can find out how much my competitors are willing to pay for visitors while I do my research.

Start searching for your competition using the keywords your customers would be searching for. Mark down your opinions of the web sites you visit (this would require you to keep a small notebook handy to take notes). Make at least one note of something you like and something you don’t like on each site you visit.

Step Two: Research Your Market

Go to Forumone and Liszt to watch and listen to your future customers. Do a search for your keywords and then join the groups who are most representative of your target market.

Start watching the discussions for at least a week or two. Take notes when people ask questions about web sites or are having trouble looking for specific items. If people seem to keep talking about the same problems over and over again, then you know this is a desire that needs to be filled.

Step Three: Look At Some Other Companies and Ideas

One of the major reasons most Internet marketers never come up with any good ideas is because they only visit web sites in their own market. Most of the breakthrough marketing strategies you will come up with will occur when visiting websites, which aren’t in your niche.

Go over to Hot100 and visit some of the top sites on the Net. Do the exact same thing you did when visiting your competitor’s sites. Mark down something you like and something you don’t like about every one of these websites when you visit. Do any of them make outstanding offers you could somehow apply to your product?

Step Four: Prepare a Sheet of Paper

This is where we get down to the real nitty-gritty of developing your web brand. Take one sheet of paper and at the top write, “Most ________ web sites…” Write the type of business you have in the blank (gift shops, tennis, marketing, etc.). Then go through and write the average offer being made by your competing sites. Halfway down the page, write, “What we do is…” Now write how you are going to make your web site and brand different from every single one of your competitors.

Why should a customer buy from you instead of any of your competitors? Take the whole rest of the page if necessary. How are you going to stand out in the crowded online marketplace? How will you make your business unique?

Step Five: Break It Down

You’ve written down how your brand is going to be unique on the web. Now you’re going to cut it down to just one sentence that will become your unique web brand. If the above step focused on the fact that you guarantee your electronics for 3 years while most online companies only give a 90-day guarantee, then focus on this. Write Down something simple, “If Your Electronics Aren’t Perfect…We’ll Fix Them Free For 3 Full Years.”

The reason we want to cut it down to just one sentence is so we can use it everywhere for your online business. You will want to use it in your signature file, on your business cards, on your letterhead, on your web site, etc. You are going to want to create a phrase, which can become synonymous with your business, product, and service.

If and when you have a logo designed for your business, it will feature your phrase. Your sentence will be put on your answering machine and voicemail. It will become the guide for your sales letters and future products.

10 Possible Brands

1. Price

Having the lowest prices will always force you to have razor-thin margins and to make up for it in high volume.

If a bigger better financed competitor opens up a store right next to you, you’re in trouble. This is what has happened to a multitude of small shops across the US when a Wal-mart appears in their town. They didn’t recognize or capitalize on any other advantage they could have had…so they were put out of business by not being able to offer the same level of pricing.

On the Internet, this is even more likely to happen. Large corporations go online with no intention of earning a profit for years…so they are quite willing to under price you and put you out of business completely.

2. Higher Quality

You can focus on developing a high quality product and market to a more exclusive market. For example, Mercedes has no intention of pricing themselves at the same level as a Ford. They price themselves significantly higher and then focus on the quality of their cars.

You could follow this same model for your products. Instead of being known as having the cheapest prices, focus on providing the most value for someone’s dollar. Think value, not prices for this model. Value and price are two different things completely.

It is all about selling dollars for dimes…give a dollar worth of value for every 10cents that your item costs. In other words, you must show the customer how much more value they will get out of your quality product for their money than they will out of a lower priced item.

3. Longer Warranty or Guarantee

Forget those wimpy 30-day guarantees that are required by law anyway. Show how good your products are to your customers. Guarantee your work for 90 days, 180 days, 365 days, 3 years, or for a lifetime. If everyone else in your market only offers 30-day guarantees, then your two-year guarantee will stick out in the marketplace.

You could quickly develop market dominance by simply providing a better warranty and guarantee than everyone else. You can show your customers you are willing to stand behind your products even if none of your competition is.

You could even do a slight variation on this theme and let your customer receive your product before they have to pay. Give them a 30-day trial period where you don’t deposit their check or process their credit card. Then, if they are satisfied that the product is everything you say it is, you process their payment. This way you take all of the risk from your customer.

4. Better Education

This method can work wonders on the web. You can be the one who provides the best education for your prospects and customers. A statement that has worked for many web sites is “Give First and Prove Your Worth.” Give education to your prospects on your products. Then, also continue the education process with customers and show them how to get the maximum value out of your products or services.

Home Depot has built a thriving home development business on this type of theme. They not only sell you the items that you need for your house, but they also teach you how to do home projects through articles and even live training classes. If you attended one of their classes, any competitor would be very hard pressed to switch you away from them.

5. Greater Bonuses

This goes back to the dollars for dimes principle again. If you can provide a much greater value for your customer’s money, then they will be more than willing to buy from you instead of your competitors. Include free bonuses in every product you sell. Hint: They don’t have to be provided by you. You could contract with a magazine that is interesting to your customers and ask for a very wholesale discount for you to buy subscriptions for aloof your customers (or you could also ask for free subscriptions for your customers since they are the exact target market the magazine is trying to reach cost effectively).

You could buy the rights to a book and include the book as a bonus with all product purchases. Start thinking in terms of value added packages instead of just individual products for the best results from your online marketing.

6. Customer Service

Many companies have neglected their customer service horribly. This opens the door to those companies, which truly put their customers first place. You could have a customer service UWP.

Not only do you sell the product, but you also are available by 800 number follow-up calls if your customer has any trouble using it. Computer companies have started using this method quite effectively. Everyone knows they are going to have computer problems. So, if they become the company who cares, they become the company everyone wants to buy from.

7. Greater Selection

This is Amazon’s brand. They are the World’s Largest Bookstore. Whereas most large bookstores carry 60,000 books, Amazon can send you every book currently being published (this numbers in the millions).

If most companies only offer one or two colors in 3 models…then, your company can offer 27 colors in 15 models. This is an advantage you can really work on with the web. Most stores are limited in the size of potential inventory they can carry. If you set up contracts with outside distributors, then you could potentially have hundreds of warehouses at your beck and call.

Look at what Blockbuster video has done. They now have “Guaranteed Rentals.” If you want to rent a movie on Blockbuster’s guaranteed rental list, then if they don’t have it, you get a coupon to rent it free next time. So, if there is movie you are sure everybody wants, you should check Blockbuster first.

8. Trade-In Programs

This is the exact method Gateway is using to build their customer base. You get computer today and they will provide upgrades on your trade-in in the future (plus they get to keep you as a customer forever this way with new products). Many software manufacturers build in their residual backend incomes this way. Whenever they come out with a new software version, they give a discounted price for upgrades. Then, they have a built in profit stream every year or every two years for each of their new versions. Bill Gates is quite an intelligent marketer, isn’t he?

9. Specific Market

Instead of selling web sites to every business, you could focus on only selling websites to consultants, golf clubs, real estate agents, etc. In other words, narrow down your market and specialize. Then, when a real estate agent needs a web site, they are much more likely to go with the real estate web site developer over everyone else. You begin to build a name for yourself in one specific market.

Plus, you will also begin to understand the particular needs for your market and their mindset in setting up a web site. Not only can you command more business in one niche market, but you are actually much more valuable in your market because you will understand it better than all of your competitors.

10. Faster Service

We live in the microwave generation. We want things we order to be in our hands yesterday. Don’t you dare tell me the product I want to order will take 4 to 6weeks for delivery? I guarantee I’ll go somewhere else. Fed Ex has built a business on when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. Use them as one of your shipping options to get your products in customer’s hands quickly.

Urbanfetch.com, a company that has only been in business one year, expects to earn over 30 million dollars this year. Guess what their brand is. They guarantee free delivery within an hour in New York City. No one can beat that for quick shipping and convenience.