How To Sell To People Who Don't Know You Exist: Anti-SEO

Most people focus on selling their product to people who are looking for their product. There are a lot of people in this world who don’t even know you exist, much less are looking for your product.

SEO is optimizing for search engines, for people who are searching for a specific keyword. We’d love to own those keywords so that people who look for them will find us first. The whole goal of SEO is to be at the top of the list when a person types in our keyword.

That’s like putting up a bigger sign outside, so if someone is looking for your store, they can find it easily. That’s good, as long as someone is looking for your store.

Case Study

So at age 20 Debbi Fields started her first cookie store at Liddicoat’s Market in Palo Alto. She signed the lease under the name Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chippery. On August 18, 1977, she opened her store at 9 a.m., but by noon nobody had bought even one cookie. Frustrated and afraid to fail, she took samples to people on the streets. They liked the samples so returned to actually buy cookies. Providing free samples to potential customers remained a cornerstone of her business in the years to come.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Mrs-Fields-Original-Cookies-Inc-Company-History.html

Mrs. Fields didn’t sell any cookies sitting in her store. She went out into the streets and gave away free samples.

As a result, people who didn’t even know they wanted a cookie, went to her store to buy cookies. They didn’t leave their houses that morning thinking that they wanted cookies. They didn’t search for cookies. They never intended to go buy cookies. They certainly didn’t type “cookies” into Google.

She got out of her store, and went to where people were doing other things, and suggested that maybe a cookie might be nice.

If you want to sell your products to people who are not looking for you, don’t stay where you are, but go to where they are, and make a small suggestion. There is a big Internet out there, with lots of web sites and blogs and forums. There are a lot of people looking for things that are not your product, but might be related to your product.

Related Topics
Figure out what topics or products or areas of interest might be related to your product. If you sell jewelry, maybe a wedding planner might become a good friend. If you sell doors, there are architectural and home improvement sites out there that you could leave some comments on. Maybe you sell ceramic pottery and you could hook up with some interior designers, or maybe that guy who sells doors.

I can imagine that jewelry maker hanging out on men’s lifestyle sites, waiting for someone to ask about gifts for their wife.

5 Targets
After you’ve decided on at least related 5 topics, you want to find web sites that relate to those topics. Use Google or Technorati to create a list of target web sites that might be places that potential customers might hang out.

You might want to build a relationship with the owner of the site, or you might want to just establish a presence on the site with comments. Your approach depends on the specific topic and that site. Leaving comments is a great way to start any relationship. Leave valuable, insightful comments.

As you make connections with people outside of your niche, the market for your product will expand and you will be able to sell your products to people who never knew you existed and never went looking for you.

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