Entrepreneurs: Differentiate Yourself First

An entrepreneur started an online home-based business and has “websites up the galore”. She blogs and, I assume figuratively, “is on websites from here to China.” This entrepreneur wants to know how to get clients for her business.

I can only speak from personal experience and my business is very much virtual and based on intellectual property (i.e. advisory, consulting, training and mentoring). When I hear new business owners say this, especially those operating web based business, is that their challenge is actually coming from “doing way too much of what everyone else is also doing”.

Participate in Business as Usual but Differentiate Yourself First!

Yes, we need a website. We need to participate. We want to be “out there” and “be seen” whether virtually or in real life. Where online businesses are concerned, entry barriers are low and this means everyone else will do the same things because of the access and ease of modern technology.

Low business entry barrier and access to technology creates an supersaturated, overcrowded environment. This means customers and prospective clients have a more difficult time knowing who you really are and how you are different from countless other online entrepreneurs they encounter (or worse - receive spam from!) every day.

It is not your product or your service that defines define your success. It is not the number of activities you engage in that determine how much business you potentially develop. For entrepreneurs in a competitive market, it is the personal brand you establish for yourself.

Your personal brand must be immediately recognizable and ultimately memorable, so that a prospective client will pick you out from a sea of many faces and know that you are the right person to do business with.

How Do You Become Memorable?

My answer - you have to figure out how (or for what) you want to be remembered.

Think about 5 other people doing exactly the same thing as you.

Ask yourself, “if we’re all lined up in a row, and a prospective client has to sum each of us up in 1 sentence, what would he or she say about each of us, and especially about me?”

Answer your question. If you can’t, this is where you should spend significant time before doing a lot of busy work.

On My Plurk Page: How do you differentiate yourself?

More about personal branding from branding guru Steve Woodruff

Photograph by Stefanie L. of Meppen, Germany.