I just watched season 3 of the Lost television series and I was shocked by episode 10. In this episode, John Locke (one of my favourite characters by the way) is told that he’s never going to be free until he kills his father.
In a business and marketing sense, it’s just oh-so-true.
We marketers and business owners tend to be way too shy about starting off a blank slate. It seems so easier to build upon something that already exists - become an affiliate instead of making your own product… becoming a guest speaker… buying lists… or looking for endorsements.
That’s such a limitating behavior. And it’s exactly what Gary Vaynerchuk means when he says that most marketers are “building the brand of somebody who’s already ahead of them”.
One of the most visible symptoms is how much time we spend on other people’s blogs or forums.
In every niche I’ve been in, I’ve spent lots of time on forums. I just love forums. However, at the beginning I was doing it the wrong way ! Instead of building my own forum and brand, I would go and post at length on other people’s boards. But at the same time, I would also run my own boards (which in common business sense means I’d be their competitor). And then one day, I would have to leave these boards - most often because even if you’re contributing and you’re not even advertising your own website on theirs, people just don’t like their “competitors” to be around. It makes them nervous somehow.
Then what ? That’s 5,000 posts of mine I’m never going to be able to use as content/branding material anymore because it’s in someone else’s database. Not mine.
This sucks.
It also happened to me in the real world with my brick-and-mortar business when the guy who started me started to see me as a threat to his business (we work in the same city and my business has been booming in less than a year). So basically we’re not even friends anymore.
It hurt a lot.
But since… I’ve realized I’ve been holding back for months. I was actually scared to hurt his business if I grew too big. Which is stupid AND not even true, because I’m not “stealing” customers from anybody - I’m extending the market.
As long as you don’t free yourself from the people who started you as a business, you won’t be free.
Tony
PS : as you can see if you’re coming here from a link on somebody else’s forum or blog, I implemented a simple solution on this website to be able to contribute to other people’s communities AND keep “my” content at hand - more on that later.
Tags: Blog Marketing, Branding, Business strategy, Forum Marketing