Melanie Benson Strick is not a doctor, but she specializes in treating a condition she calls the "Bright Shiny Object Syndrome."
"When you are chasing a new, bright shiny object every day, you’re going to be overwhelmed,” Melanie explains. “When I tell people I have a formula to break free of that syndrome, they get curious and want to go the next step with me."
And that is how Melanie morphed into an engineer of sorts – she identifies where her clients want to go, and she designs a process to get them there.
Melanie’s creative approach is featured in a new book, "The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing on the Internet" by Robert Skrob and Bob Regnerus, because she cleverly turned her Internet marketing savvy into a cash cow.
Melanie started out as a trade events organizer and later worked for Motorola, helping the company establish the 9-1-1 call centers. "But I began to look for ways to have more fun," she recalls. "Lifestyle coaching seemed like an interesting field, where I could use my previous experiences."
However, Melanie realized she couldn’t just plunge head-on into her new career. "I was pretty naïve to think I could just go out and become a coach because I didn’t know how to pull this together," she says. "I had no clue how to recruit clients."
That’s when Melanie turned for help to consultant Alexandria Brown, who has been very successful in her own information marketing business. Alexandria looked at Melanie’s website and offered this assessment: the site, though eye-pleasing, would not attract customers. "She said it was a waste of space on the Internet because it was not doing anything for me," Melanie relates.
In fact, websites cluttered with too many graphics and too much useless information is counterproductive, Skrob notes. "The more choices you put in front of people, the longer it will take them to make a decision and the less likely they are to be happy with the choice they make. When the number of options gets really overwhelming, people often respond by making no decision at all. So when it comes to getting responses from your website visitors, ONE is the magic number. When you present your visitors with ONE yes-or-no decision at a time, you’re more likely to get the results you want."
So Alexandria advised Melanie to restructure her website, adding a landing page that invited visitors to leave their e-mail addresses in exchange for a free report and an assessment of the potential client’s business. The report, which also included a CD and a subscription to an e-zine, helped Melanie connect with people who needed help building their own businesses.
With this new, focused website Melanie hit the jackpot. To attract more clients, she developed different levels at which people could access her information, ranging from a reasonably priced entry level to more elaborate packages. "This way I maximize my conversion of prospects into mentoring clients" she says.
It is no wonder that info-marketers like Melanie and numerous others profiled in the book, a sequel to last year’s "The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing," became extraordinarily successful by packaging their expertise and selling it to others. "The development of the Internet has been good for every type of business," notes Skrob, president of the Tallahassee FL-based Information Marketing Association. "And there has never been a better time to be in the Internet information marketing business because it is responsive to and fueled by the ever-increasing pressure on people’s time."
The book, out in September 2008, "picks up where the last one ended," Skrob adds. "The last book taught the big picture business plan; this book shows how to implement that plan on the Internet. If you have an information marketing business now, you can’t afford to miss out on what the Internet has to offer. And if you’re just getting started in information marketing, the Internet will help you make your first sale more quickly and with less risk – just as Melanie did."