My A-ha Moment as a Marketer

Written by Leo Dimilo on Mar 23, 2010 7:51 am

I am no stranger to marketing online....been doing it for a little over a decade now. But believe it or not, my a-ha moment came nearly five years after I started. It was profound; so profound that if only one person gets something out of this, I will feel like the time I put into writing this would be time well spent.

So what was my a-ha moment?

If you give, you get. That shouldn't be profound to anyone but in business, where taking seems to be more important than giving, where the idea of art and creativity is replaced with spreadsheets and people become numbers, the idea of giving without looking for reciprocation is as foreign as a flamingo in Alaska.

The moment came at a weird time. I had written a guest post for a fellow webmaster and was thinking about the possibility of syndicating it. I obviously needed his approval since the content was on his website. And so I pitched him on the benefits of me syndicating the article.

I told him that I would strip the url links in the bio box so that my website wouldn't receive any direct benefit from it...
I also told him that I would add another link to his website and asked him what page he wanted me to direct them to....

This webmaster was flattered and happily agreed. The article was syndicated, his traffic increased and I got a future partner out of the deal (although I didn't realize that at the time).

The morale to the story for any small business owner or blogger or webmaster is that sometimes the benefits of you doing something for someone else can sometimes affect you in the most profound ways....when you aren't expecting to get anything out of the deal..

And we, as marketers, who find it easier to view spreadsheets of data and numbers that would otherwise be known as real people can actually improve our sales, our business and even ourselves as people by focusing on showing people how to get what they want.

Zig Ziglar said it best....(paraphrased) "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want." I thought I knew what that meant but it took 5 years for it to actual really make sense...

So what have you given lately? Are you paying it forward?

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