Or are you focused on marketing services/products but you don't know who needs them??

Might sound like a silly question but people are constantly coming up with new ideas for products or services...but they haven't done any market research on them. Nada.

2. Establish relationships with people in your niche market.

Marketing is not selling. Marketing is not advertising. Marketing is not networking.

Here's my personal definition of marketing:

"Marketing is process of attracting, creating, and maintaining relationships with people you want to be your clients."

So, if you have not established relationships with people in your niche market, stop trying to market.

3. Get Personal Clarity. Do you have 100% clarity on what is unique, attractive, and value-added about what YOU offer your niche market?

In other words, why would I choose you over others out there?

Answer for yourself 3 questions above. Stop wasting your time and energy marketing but not getting results you deserve. You'll find it's much *easier* to market forward rather than backward! More effective, too. :-)

Imagine within minutes of meeting a stranger he tells you, “You can trust me.” Now imagine that within minutes of meeting a second stranger thought crosses your mind, “Hey, I can trust this guy.” Which stranger will you trust more? I thought so.

The point is, while most of us struggle to communicate our messages to others, there are those among us who take a different approach. They not only understand our tendency to make unconscious assumptions, they have taken it one step further. They have perfected art of leading us to make assumptions they need us to make in order to get us to do what they want us to do.

The less you rely on direct communication and instead strive to induce specific assumptions in others, more powerful your communication will be.

So how does one develop this ability? By studying masters of art.

Watch a magic or comedy act and see if you can spot when you’re being led to make specific assumptions and what is being done to get you to do so.

Buy a book of jokes and tear them apart. Break them down and discover source of their magic.

You can also learn a lot by studying riddles. Consider following:

What rock group has four members, all of whom are dead and one of which was murdered?

Already know answer? Imagine how much harder it would have been had you not been looking specifically for misleading language. Better yet, try it on someone else and watch their unconscious assumptions trip them up.

Don’t know answer? Rest assured it is right in front of you. (Write me if you’re still stumped.)

And finally, if you’ve ever been victim of a con, think back and reconstruct what happened to discover where you went wrong in your assumptions about situation.

Each of these suggestions will help you not only increase your awareness of how often we make unconscious assumptions, but also how reliably others can get us to do so.

When you learn their tricks, your communication will take on a power that few can resist. Not only will you be more likely to get what you want from others, you will have them believing it was their idea all along.