(If you have not done so, please read Part I and Part II first)

Alex Jeffreys was a struggling marketer trying to make money from the internet, but something amazing happened.

His blog marketingwithyou.com got a sudden massive growth of raving followers, and he now commonly gets 100 – 200 comments per blog post.

Within one year, he saw his annual income jump by over $571,456.00.

And all this happened after he finally “got it”.

Just like how Starbucks’s meteoric rise to world-wide success began when Howard Schultz got his, Alex Jeffreys amazing success started…

… when he got his own BIG IDEA.

And what’s even more amazing is his Big Idea involved changing only ONE word. But that ONE word made all the difference.

Here, you are going to discover what that one word is, but more importantly, what a Big Idea is and what it does for you.

I’ve already explained what ideas are in part II, saying people gather together because they share similar ideas, (meaning similar opinions, views and beliefs). That’s where you get the saying “Birds of the same feathers (ideas) flock together”.

But what makes YOU the LEADER and these people become the followers? In other words, why would they come to YOUR blog instead of the blogs of other like-minded people?

Well, this happens when you communicate a Big Idea to your readers.

So what is this Big Idea?

To make things easier for you to understand, I’ll give you some simple background knowledge of two marketing concepts straight from the famous book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. They are called…

Positioning and Mental Categories

Positioning is the process of creating an identity in the collective minds of your target prospects, so that they remember you or your blog as whatever you want to portray.

Some people called it branding, but it’s basically the same thing. Also, notice that all this happens in the mind of the prospect.

As a blogger, positioning is critical to your success. You need to have a position in the minds of our readers.

If not, they would not remember you, or as some people would say, you would not be in their “radar”. This means they would not visit your blog, or even if they do know of you, they would not get their information from you.

Positioning is that important. No position, no loyal readers.

To understand positioning, you need to know how our mind works.

You see, the way we remember and store knowledge is by creating Mental Categories and then filing the memories into various categories.

A mental category is what Eben Pagan calls a “brain bucket”. We file new information into these brain buckets.

Once a mental category has been created in a brain, we can only fit 7 items into that category or “brain bucket” before it gets full. In other words, our mind can automatically recall only about 7 items per category.

To illustrate this, let’s do a simple exercise. Name all the phone brands that you can recall off your head right now.

For me, offhand these are what I can recall: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC and iPhone. I have 6 here. What about you? If I’m not wrong, you probably have 6 or 7, like most people.

So in the category of mobile phones, these 6 brands have a position in my mind. If other mobile phone brands want to achieve a position in my mind, it’s going to be hard for them because my “brain bucket” for the mobile phone category is almost full.

Another thing to note is, within the same mental category, we have an item or brand that we are most familiar. It’s usually the 1st one we recall and have the strongest preference to. This item has #1 position in our mind.

For me, the mobile phone brand with #1 position in my mind is Nokia, so whenever I want to get a new phone, Nokia is my prefered brand. And as you may have guessed, I’m using a Nokia phone right now

Now let’s apply this to blogging

Let’s say there is a mental category in your mind that is “how to make money from blogging”.

1. You would probably only recall about 7 bloggers.

2. The first one you recall is likely to have #1 position in your mind, meaning it’s the dominant one you visit whenever you want information about “how to make money from blogging”.

For me, the ones in my mind are Darren Rowse (who is has the #1 position to me), Yaro Starak, John Chow and Shoemoney.

(Yup, I can only recall 4. That’s not surprising, because when it comes to getting information from the internet, this number 7 shrinks to 3 or 4 because we want to prevent information overload to our mind.)

So, this mental category is almost full in my mind, and I would guess it’s the same for most people.

If we want to choose a niche, we would be wise not to choose the “how to make money from blogging” niche, because it would be hard for us to squeeze in a position in the minds of your prospect within this category.

Remember, if we don’t have a position in our prospect’s mind, they won’t remember us, or visit our blog, or come to us for their information needs.

And if you ask me, there is only ONE position you want, and that is the #1 position.

Because the 80/20 rule applies here. By being #1, you get 80% or the lion’s share of the readership in your niche. All other positions get the 20% scraps.

So then, how do you achieve the #1 position in your niche, especially if it’s a competitive one?

There are several ways, but here is the best way -

You Create a New Mental Category.

By this I mean you create a category that doesn’t yet exist in the consciousness of your target readers.

When you create a new mental category or “brain bucket” in the mind of your prospect, and you are the first one to do it, get this -

You or your blog automatically gets #1 position! You get the dominant position!

Why? Because there are no one else in the same category!

Other people may come along and join this category, but as long as you are careful not to allow others to out-market you, you will get to keep this #1 position for a long long time.

To better understand this, let’s look at the example of Starbucks for a moment.

Before Starbucks, virtually no one outside of Italy had ever experienced drinking coffee in a classy and cultured manner, in a comfy and warm ambience.

But Starbucks came along and created a whole new “cultured coffee-drinking” category.

Because Starbucks was the first to introduce this new category, they became the market leaders. And even though other coffee companies came along, Starbucks is still enjoying #1 position because they were the first to create this category.

Now comes the question. How do you create a new category? Here’s how.

You create a new category by introducing a BIG IDEA!

In Part I of this series, I told you how Howard Schultz of Starbucks introduced his Big Idea (coffee-drinking being a classy and comfy affair, that the coffee-drinker appears cultured and sophisticated).

One of the most powerful results that Big Idea was that it created an entirely new category of “cultured coffee-drinking”…

… and because Starbucks was the first to create the category, they opened a whole new market, automatically achieved the dominant #1 position in that market and stayed there ever since.

The same applies to blogging.

By introducing a Big Idea that creates a new category in your niche, you automatically get the #1 position!

You become the go-to expert, the first person that people recall straight away and rely for information when it comes to your category.

You become the “thought-leader” of your own Big Idea and everyone else who share the same idea come to you and become your followers.

In short, you become the A-list blogger in your niche! (And let’s not forget the money!)

One of the best examples to illustrate this is Brian Clark of copyblogger. He is one of the A-list bloggers who people go to for advice about writing compelling blog articles. He has tens of thousands of regular readers on his blog and earns a six-figure income.

Before Brian came along, no one had heard that copywriting skills are needed to write great blog articles. Or they may have it in their minds, but nobody had ever articulated it in his way.

Brian saw this opportunity and came in with his Big Idea, and immediately, he created a new category and got the dominant #1 position in people’s minds.

Can you guess what Brian’s Big Idea is?

Copywriting should be incorporated to blog writing.

And he wrapped it all up in one word: Copy-Blogging.

Immediately he created a new “copy-blogging” category by introducing his Big Idea that he calls by the same name as his blog – CopyBlogger!

So now when you ask most people where to learn blog writing skills, which blog comes to mind? Copyblogger!

Powerful stuff, isn’t it?

Now comes the question. How do you get your Big Idea? I’ll show you in the next part to this series.

But before I end, I promised to tell you the ONE word that Alex Jeffreys changed that caused a sudden massive influx of followers to him.

That word is in his blog name MarketingWithYou. Can you guess what it is?

It’s the word “with”.

By changing this one word, from “to” to “with”, he introduced his Big Idea, that is “marketing WITH you and not TO you”…

…separated himself from other marketers who were doing something perceived to be less desirable (marketing TO you)…

… created a new category of marketing called “marketing WITH you”…

… achieved the #1 position automatically….

… and got the massive jump in readership and $$$ almost overnight.

A small change that resulted in a BIG difference. This, my friend, is the power of a BIG IDEA.