Great news about your website—it’s beautiful, easy to navigate, and positions you as a trustworthy provider of high-level services.
Here’s the bad news: I could say the exact same thing about everyone else in your industry. Their websites are just as attractive, just as professional, and from a marketing perspective, just as disastrous.
How could a beautifully designed website be a disaster from a marketing perspective? It’s because most website designers follow the same concepts about what makes a website look appealing and up-to-date. You spent a lot on yours but so did your competitors. And the result is that everyone has something attractive, easy to navigate, and utterly generic.
This wouldn’t be a problem except for what’s known as the “Commodity Trap”—the fact that the internet gives more options than ever. Those who cannot distinguish themselves from their competitors end up as commodities. Sadly, even high-level commodities like top financial advisors, consultants, realtors, surgeons, or other professionals all end up being commoditized by the internet.
And the news gets worse, because commodities, even high-level ones, are judged entirely, or primarily on price. So seemingly the only way out of the commodity trap is to compete on price. Most professionals don’t want to do that. Instead, they want to command premium pricing for their training, knowledge, and experience.
Think about it. Have you ever seen a website for a financial advisor that didn’t have the requisite “Viagra couple” on a bicycle built for two on a beach at sunset?
Or a law firm website with all of the elegantly dressed partners sitting in a law library, with legal tomes behind them and a polished mahogany table in front of them?
Or a website for a consulting firm lacking the requisite stock image of six, attractive, well-dressed, smiling individuals shaking hands across a glass table?
So, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you tell your story in full? How do you create trust and escape the commodity trap? The answer is simple—with a book. Your book.
Books allow you to tell your story in full, in an atmosphere that creates a sense of distinctiveness, preeminence, and authority.
While a good book-as-marketing-tool makes the reader the hero of the journey, the subtle implication throughout the book is that you are the only real choice. Your experience and knowledge can get the client over whatever finish line he or she faces.
People skim websites, but people read books. They sit up straight and pay attention, whether they are experiencing the book as a physical item, a PDF, or an audiobook.
Ironically, in an era where people read fewer and fewer books, authors enjoy even greater status. It seems miraculous to most people that anyone could write a book.
The good news is that you don’t have to write your own book. Firms like ours help professionals by identifying what’s most meaningful and unique, by focusing on the specific audience or audiences that are most beneficial to the author, by organizing, interviewing, writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and monetizing books for our clients.
It’s been my privilege to serve more than a thousand ghostwriting clients over the past 35 years. They come from backgrounds as diverse as business, finance, real estate, law, body-mind-spirit, arts and music, memoirs, novels, and even screenplays.
What these thousand plus clients all have in common are two things—they’re a positive people with a positive message.
If you’d like to escape the commodity trap, if you’d like to enjoy the authority that comes from being a published author, if you’d like to have a book to present to prospects instead of some whitepapers that nobody reads or an attractive website that unfortunately looks just like those of everyone else in your industry, give us a call.
You’ve worked too hard to end up in the commodity trap. We can get you out.
