When Is It Time To Stop Modelling Others and Blaze Your Own Path?
By Anna Johnson on March 24th, 2010Internet marketing gurus often tell us to model other successful businesses and ‘copy what works’. But when is it time to stop modeling others… and start blazing your own path?
Billionaire entrepreneurs – the likes of Richard Branson, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – are hardly guys who simply modeled others to get to where they are.
That’s not to say they didn’t model others though. In fact, each of these individuals is renown for putting a new brand and spin on an existing business (Richard Branson), investing in existing businesses (Warren Buffett) and copying or buying other businesses (Bill Gates / Microsoft).
In fact, can you think of ANY entrepreneur who hasn’t built on something that already works? Isn’t entrepreneurship really just about seizing marketing opportunities which, by definition, are gaps between what a market wants and what is already being provided?
On the other hand, there is no-one on the planet who is just like Richard Branson… or Warren Buffett… or Bill Gates. So, while, as an entrepreneur, you’re wise to observe what people want and what they’re getting, it’s just as critical to find the gaps and fill them with your own unique and superior solution.
This is where you want to stop modeling and be innovative in some meaningful way that resonates with your market. Let’s face it, if you don’t come up with anything new and better… why on Earth will anyone want to buy from you?
of course, you can be innovative in a range of ways. For instance, you may not come up with a different product per se… but you may come up with a different and better way to deliver it.
Or let’s say you want to build an affiliate marketing business to promote pet products. You can use standard website templates to sell the same products as hundreds (perhaps thousands) of other affiliates. In so doing, you could rely on superior SEO or other traffic getting methods to get visitors to your site in order to refer them to the vendors’ sites… or you can carve out a unique position for yourself and use this, as well as various traffic getting methods, to increase your odds of referring sales and making commissions.
To do so, consider adopting these key differences:
- Using a unique website design
- Focusing on a specific kind of pet and breed e.g. German Shepherd dogs
- Promoting a particular kind of pet product e.g. collars
- Positioning yourself as the expert in the market for German Shepherd collars
If you’re concerned about this niche being too small to make any reasonable amount of money… set up other websites to focus on other specific pet products. You could also set up distinct sections within one website – as long as your overall website and brand is distinctive.
But, even better, you could see yourself as more than just an affiliate and work out how to build on your target market’s desire for pet products, identify how this desire is currently being met, spot the gaps, and consider how to provide a unique and better solution than simply following the affiliate marketing business model.
Sure, there is money to be made modeling others – e.g. modeling other affiliate marketers’ businesses – but there are also limits to what you can achieve by copying others. In fact, by definition, you ALWAYS limit yourself by copying others, simply because you have the potential to create and achieve more by combining your own unique insights, talents and abilities to what others have done.
