Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

A Market of One

If you have a marketing problem, you probably have a storytelling problem.  Marketers talk about storytelling.  A lot.  Musicians talk about it.  Screenwriters talk about it.  It’s important.  I even give away a free book showing you how to do it better.  

Something is missing though.  It’s missing in your google search.  It’s missing in my PDF, and it’s probably missing from your website.

It’s YOU.  

Instead of telling people the glamour and glitz as to why you’re better tell them why you care instead.  Tell them what drives you and what made you who you are today.  

I received a 3×8 inch flyer on my house door.  It was black text on yellow paper and it had no pictures.  I have no idea if the flyer is a winner but I thought it was brilliant because it was so different.  The text began like this:

THERE’S A “HANDYMAN” IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

My name is Brandon.  My wife, family and I have lived in Surprise for the past few years.  For a number of years I have been a part of the residential remodeling and repair industry.  I now operate “My Neighborhood Handyman….

Within a  few sentences you know what he does, who he is, his background, and where he lives.  Immediately he has rapport with me and I imagine many others in my neighborhood too.  Yet, this little flyer shatters most marketing wisdom…

Where’s his compelling headline?  Where is the problem?  Why isn’t he agitating it?  Where’s the visuals?  You can’t market with just text?

Yes, you can.  When it’s you.  When you become a market of one you can ignore many of the rules.  Why?  Because sales happen when your audience knows, likes, and trusts you.  What can do that more than telling them who you are?

Shipwrecking Your Ideas

In copywriting groups on Facebook, someone asks daily what they need to do to be a copywriter.  Why none of them don’t type those exact words into Google I will never know… 

Most responses are about books to read and courses to take but almost all of them forget one important thing.  The path to being a good writer is by studying other writers.  NOT copywriters. WRITERS.  

You wanna study copywriters too but not as much as you think.  You want to learn how to tell stories and make copy that jumps off the page.  Who does that better than Michael Crichton, Stephen King, or Mark Twain?

All business have struggles and if you spend all your time looking at what everyone else is doing you’ll end up shipwrecked.  You need to use your imagination.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”   

Albert Einstein

I remember I wigged out when I learned Einstein wasn’t a quantum physicists, he was a theoretical physicist.  I read his biography and so many of his discoveries were sparked by him using his imagination and thinking about space or riding on a light beam.

Sound like something from Captain Marvel or Guardians of the Galaxy, right?

In your business, get best practices and model them.  Use great ideas from different industries.   But also use your imagination and chill!  

This is why ideas hit us in the shower or right before bed.  Our bodies ooze dopamine when we’re relaxed. Once settled down we’re able to make connections and get inspired. 

Researching, analyzing, and combing the Internet for ideas, rarely helps us connect the big dots.  It’s like buying a box of cake mix, mixing the ingredients, and never putting it in the oven to bake.