‘Service to many leads to greatness’ is a phrase that I first heard on a Jim Rohn audio.  This short phrase perhaps epitomises why I have pursued internet marketing as my full-time career for the last 6 years.

From 2001 to 2009 I ran a business consultancy for local businesses.  This was reasonably successful based on the relationships that I had established with some local businesses whilst I was in corporate banking.

However, I always had the dream of impacting even more businesses.  And, of course, generating more wealth for myself as a result.

The problem with my local consultancy was that it was very intensive of my time and I could only handle a relative handful of businesses.

I ran local events and even ran a business consulting group for a while.  I do remember that getting a room for my local events was always more time and trouble than I wanted to expend and also expensive.

So I guess that I was looking for a way to reach more businesses with less hassle.

Which is why internet marketing attracted me.

Initially I got into internet marketing as a way to generate online leads but quickly saw the potential to take my whole business online with blogging and product creation etc

This started in April 2009, when I signed up to a membership training site run by Ann Sieg and Mike Klingler who specifically trained network marketers to generate leads.

Looking back, my biggest mistake was to try to tackle too big a niche – I was not focused enough on specifically what is was that I could do better than anyone else. I was trying to be ‘all things to all men’.

This is difficult to overcome because, when you start out, it is hard to identify what it is that you can do better and who would most benefit from what you have to offer!  You need to be very clear about this.

If I had to start again, I would get very good at just one thing, by studying a focused problem or skill in depth, putting it into action and then teaching others how to do it.  In other words, I would move more quickly from consuming information to then taking action on what I had learnt and creating training products to teach others what I had learnt.

That is easy to say now but creating products seemed difficult at the time and I lacked the confidence to get started, even though I had been doing it in the real world!

I think the technical part was intimidating to someone who had had difficulty setting up an email account in 2001 when I left banking and started my own consultancy business.

I really have come a long way since then.  It’s easy to dismiss or forget just what I know.

My daughter has recently started her own business in the health and nutrition niche – she is an agent for Forever Living Products, whose UK headquarters is about 8 miles from where I live.

My daughter has started her own website – I set it up for her and I support her as she tries to get to grips with creating her own content.  It has been an enormous help to her for me to put the right tools in place for her and to be a sounding board for her.  It is easy to under-estimate how much time and cost I have cut from her learning experience.

I’m sure my daughter does not really know what I have saved her in terms of her learning curve.

Her biggest mistake at the moment is wanting to be independent and therefore not asking me enough questions.

I guess we are all guilty of that because my experience is that, IF you ask, most people are will to help.

It’s just finding someone that you can trust!

I do know that getting a good coach can be enormously helpful if you can find the right person – it can also be an enormous waste of money if you choose unwisely.

This is why I share so much information on my blog – to demonstrate the range and depth of my business knowledge.

In truth, when I started out, I could have created a business in the management information niche because several of my best consulting projects involved setting up complex management information systems using my accounting skills.

Nowadays, I don’t create content in this area at all although I do have a product called ‘Measure N Manage’ which covers management information in internet marketing.

What I do know is that service to many starts off with helping just one person and steadily growing the scope and reach of your business.

If you can just help one person to get a result, you have someone who can provide a testimonial or a case study to enable you to recruit more customers.

It’s also easier if initially you can narrow the scope of your business to offer one product or service that provides just one solution to one problem that the people in your niche are having.

Become great at this one product or service and expand from there.  That’s my best advice.

If you think about it, specialists in any area of life earn more than general practitioners.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly your business will take off if you can discipline yourself to follow this advice.

Word will get around that you are the ‘go-to’ expert in your particular chosen area and people will seek you out.

Soon you will find that your ‘service to many will lead to greatness’ but ‘service to many’ all starts with serving that first customer and providing a solution to their one biggest problem.

I do have a coaching programme that you can join which can help you to identify your area of expertise – it may seem ‘expensive’ but in retrospect I know that in due course you will acknowledge that it saved you a lot of time and money – I can coach you either by email or via some focused coaching sessions.  Alternatively, you can  invest in my products if you want to know more.