How to Tie Your MANY Interests to Your Primary FOCUS

How to Tie Your MANY Interests to Your Primary FOCUS

The other night, an interesting question came up during the Blogging section of a 5-part marketing series I am teaching: How can I focus on one topic if I have a diverse range of interests?

There are a couple ways to answer that question.

The first is the realization that you MUST find some way to focus your blog, article marketing, and branding. I learned this a long time ago from branding expert extraordinaire, Peter Montoya: The best branding repels as much as it attracts. Which means we must not be afraid to niche (aka FOCUS).

We were at a weekend bootcamp in Costa Mesa and I asked Peter from the audience: “I’d rather live in my car than be bored. How can I keep from getting bored if I have to niche with one subject or type of client?”

His answer? “Get ready to live in your car.”

The point being, we will surely fail if we try to be all things to all people. And unless you’re Microsoft, the whole world is NOT your market. So stop trying to figure out how you can wield a topic as big as “everything” for your blog, article marketing, or branding. Instead, determine where your focus lies. What inspires you and drives your passion? For me, it’s relationships and communication. Everything in my business is tied to those two things.

What is your PRIMARY focus? It could be health and fitness. Finance. Sports. The arts. Computer gaming. Politics. Spirituality. Come on people … it’s a HUGE world. I’m thinking you can find one common thread to tie all those diverse interests together.

Then, once you’ve got that single thread (aka FOCUS), you can begin finding creative ways to tie your many interests back to it. For example, there’s a gal in my marketing class who is a nutritionist. But because she loves to travel – and health stories are often tied to travel and other countries – she combines her passion for both, staying on top of this trend with her twitter feed.

What about golf? Another huge market, right? But if you wrote a book about golf courses around the world, you could target your marketing to both golfers and travel buffs. Starting to get the picture?

Frankly, it’s easier if your focus has a wider berth, like golf or travel, say, than garden tools or laundry detergent. But then again, gardening (easily related to garden tools) is a HUGE topic … and everyone has to clean their clothes in some way. These subjects just might take a little more creative juice when it comes to tying many diverse interests to them. But I’m willing to bet that a creative mind with all those interests can figure out a way to keep garden tools or laundry soap topical, regardless of the season or what may or may not be happening in the news.

Moral of the story: FOCUS FIRST. Then bring your other interests into view. And whatever you do, have fun in the process!
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