Thanks for visiting! We are a copywriting and editing consultant boutique for small, creative businesses. We encourage you to find out more about us. If you'd like to work with us, here's how to do it. Also, We are offering a discount right now on our website packages in celebration of our partnership.

You can keep track of us here via our RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter as @copygeniusgirl (Holly) and @thecopycorner (Laura). Thanks again for stopping in!

So Laura couldn’t find an unconventional looking set of keys so instead we have gyoza (meat dumpling) keychains. How is that for niche marketing?

Photo credit: Rainbowcats on Flickr

It’s no secret that we work with a lot of unconventional businesses and products around here. We love it that way, and it’s really very satisfying work. There’s a lot of confusion on the internet about how to market weird and unconventional products or services. I suspect that most of this comes from the assumption that it’s hard to market anything that doesn’t have an inherent and obvious value.

These kinds of products and services can be anything from life coaching to art to niche products that are just nifty. None of these products fit neatly in the features and benefits model that we’re taught to use as copywriters and marketers.

For example, when you’re faced with marketing a piece of art, can you name some features?

“Well, it’s pretty.”, you say. Okay, but isn’t all art pretty? What makes this art different from any other art, other than the fact that it’s yours and you’d really like to pay your rent?

“Well, art makes people happy.”, you say. Well, yeah, but so do massages. Or new furniture, or new clothes. Why should they spend the money on your art?

The more you work with this stuff, the more you realize that traditional marketing is just plain ineffective when it comes to marketing niche products, especially online; this is where people start freaking out, normally. You realize that you need to market in a whole new way, but you don’t know how to do it. You can read all about features and benefits, but what happens when you need to sell your high end niche product?

Here’s the truth: you know your stuff is great, but pure belief won’t get you very far in an internet business. At some point, you’re going to have to use marketing to convince other people that your stuff is as cool as you say it is, or you won’t grow.

Today, I’m giving you the guide on how to get started. No platitudes, no freaking out, just good solid advice you can start using right now (well, when you’re done reading all this, that is).

1. Go out on a limb. Then step a little to the left, take two steps more, and market from that place.

When you start marketing unconventional stuff, you step into dealing with unconventional people. In some ways this really works to your advantage; after all, unconventional people tend to be more willing to spend money on things that represent ideals, in my experience. And unconventional people, when you find them, will be the best word of mouth marketing that you can possibly hope for.

However, to get there, you’ve got to grab them and suck them in. You can’t do this by writing inoffensive sales copy that appeals to everyone. When you start marketing to cool and unconventional people, your market gets a lot smaller. What does this mean in terms of marketing and actually making money?

If you’re going to appeal to a smaller group, you need to appeal to them strongly enough that every last person in that group will buy your awesome new thing. Every single one.

If you subscribe to this philosophy, you really can sell anything you want on the internet successfully. Want some examples? Try repurposed paper goods, or an even just an idea. All of these weird things are totally marketable, but they all rely on going all out to grab their audience.

Here’s the trick, and the part that terrifies people about this type of marketing:

When you go all out and go for one part of your audience, you’re alienating the rest of the population. You won’t see money from them. And that’s okay.

There was this great quote on Twitter yesterday from @gapingvoid who says, “It’s easier to find 1 person to give you $200, than 10 people to give you $20.” This is the essential thing that you have to believe to market this way. If you take a deep breath, go out on that limb, and figure out the heart of what appeals to your select audience, you can sell anything you like, no matter how weird or abstract it is.

2. Make Your Website Tell a Story.

All the conventional copywriting advice tells you to focus on features and benefits. All of the traditional marketing experts will tell you that focusing on you and your story is a mistake. When you blog, they say, make the blog about your audience, don’t make it about you. When you write sales copy, hammer in the features and benefits. While you’re at it, make sure to add in some extra bullet points and repeat everything at the bottom.

A lot of my clients end up working with me because they don’t know how to make their websites work with this method of selling. Their stuff is just too personal, and the idea of turning it all into a features and benefits model doesn’t work for them.

I have a personal theory that this model doesn’t work because people don’t usually start online businesses for nice neat reasons. They do it to change their lifestyle, or to escape a problem, or to follow a lifelong dream. Many of us do it with zero startup money. When your drive to start a business is so personal, so ingrained in the fiber of your being that you feel driven to work 16 hour days to make it successful, it’s pretty hard to fit yourself into this traditional sales environment.

The good news is that that there are whole lot of people making tons of money online off being themselves and using their personality to help other people.

So what’s the alternative? Well, if your business is personal and you’re passionate about it, tell people why.

If you started your business on a shoestring and you’re trying to help other people do the same, tell them how and why you’re driven to do this. If you started this business because it’s the way you live, tell them.

Whatever you do, tell them a story that is honest, authentic, and shows that you have a reason to keep going on a daily basis. There are so many products and people to buy from online that people are willing to pay a premium to buy from people they like personally. Sometimes the only thing you have to do to get the sale instead of the other guy is to tell people why it matters to you more than it does to him.

I swear, sometimes, it’s just that easy.

3. Kick Down Your Barriers.

There are all kind of barriers that we set up for ourselves online. We filter our email, we use scary and complicated shopping carts, we write huge cumbersome sales pages that give people headaches. We don’t even think of these as barriers because we live with this stuff everyday. We understand how the shopping cart works, so it never even occurs to us that no one else would. We’ve read all the statistics on sales pages, so we know that placing the button there works. Why wouldn’t anyone else get it?

The problem is that your customers and clients haven’t read all this stuff, and sometimes it can be incredibly confusing. I ran into this a few months ago with the teleclasses. I made the sign up page, blogged about it, and was happy when it all worked the way my research said it would.

That’s when my mother called, trying to figure out how the hell to sign up for my teleclass. I had this realization that the books didn’t account for my slightly technology challenged mother, and that she genuinely couldn’t figure out how to get from the blog post to the signup page, or what to do at the signup page. As a result, I ended up simplifying the signup process, and all of the sudden the amount of signups I got skyrocketed.

I had put up this accidental barrier to entry, and getting rid of it improved my business overall.

If you’re struggling with sales, it’s easy to just assume that your copy sucks or no one wants to buy your stuff. What we sometimes fail to emphasize is that making a sale involves way more than getting people ready to buy. It involves getting people through the system to the end page, with their payment information entered.

Sometimes you just need to go through your systems and figure out what you can do to make it easier on people.

If you’re struggling with figuring out what you could change, find the most technologically inept family member or friend that you have and have them try and make a purchase using the systems you have in place (Just don’t call them technologically inept while they’re doing it).

Where do they get stuck? At what point would they just have given up? Use them as a diagnostic tool to figure out what barriers you’ve put up accidentally, and how to kick them down to make things easier on people.

4. Take Advantage of Social Media.

Social media is another one of those subjects online where if you research it even a little bit, you’ll develop the urge to run away from your computer screaming because it’s so overwhelming.

This is really a shame, because everyone acts like you have to get a damn master’s degree in the stuff before you can even think about picking a Twitter name, and it’s not true at all.

Social media can help your business even if you just play with it for five minutes a day and have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll say it again because it deserves repeating: Social media is the best marketing tool out there if you truly hate marketing.

The whole system is designed so that by hanging out with people you’d probably like to chat with anyway, you’re also letting other people market your cool stuff for you. It’s awesome, and even a little bit will raise your business profile online by leaps and bounds. Also, it’s fun, and there really isn’t much about marketing that is genuinely fun most days.

If the idea still scares you to death, sign up for a one hour consulting session with Laura and me. I can teach you how to rock Twitter, and Laura is a Facebook wizard. It’s not expensive, and we promise to not make you feel like a fourth grader while we help you out.

5. Have a Blog.

This is another subject that my clients tend to freak out about, and I understand that. The idea of running a blog, especially if you’re not a writer, is pretty intimidating. Again, this is also a subject where there’s so much information out there on the internet that it makes you want to just ignore the entire thing. I offer you these pieces of advice to help you feel better, because you really do need a blog for your business website.

You don’t have to update multiple times a week.

You don’t have to be Shakespeare.

You can blog about yourself occasionally, and people won’t get out the pitchforks and come after you for it. You can even blog about how you’re having a horrible day and you think you suck every so often.

You don’t have to run a blog full of sage advice and give out little pearls of wisdom.

These are really common fears that I hear from clients, and I understand all of them. But the benefits of running a blog, even if you just update once a month are enormous.

You keep Google happy, you help convert readers into customers (90% of my work inquiries come through this blog), and most of all you show people that your business is thriving, thoughtful, and in it for the long haul. A blog demonstrates a commitment to your business, your clients, and to the community at large.

In other words, trust me and just do it already.

Here’s the good part if you’ve made it all the way through this: absolutely none of this is rocket science. Most of it isn’t even scary. All of these are solid ways to give your business a rock solid marketing foundation that you can build on as you become rich, famous, and in demand.

If this still sounds scary, please just go ahead and sign up for a consultation with us. We’re experts at getting people on the right track and helping them deal with their marketing fears while developing a solid plan that doesn’t require a 10 hour a day commitment.

The bottom line is that successful marketing can be fun, unconventional, and fabulously effective with some common sense and very little effort.

Related posts:

1. On Emotional Marketing (Or Why What You Do Is Not What You Sell) Man, the blog titles are getting more and more unwieldy...
2. Storytelling As Marketing: Rags to Riches If you’re missed the earlier posts in this series, check...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.