The Power Of “Rare” In Your Marketing

Russell Brunson talking about how the power of “rare” is more powerful then scarcity…

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the DotComSecrets “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. This is episode number one. This kind of makes me laugh, because this is something I’ve been talking about doing for five or six years, ever since I first learned what a podcast was. I have never actually done it, so this is the first podcast.

My game plan in this is that basically I have a five minute drive to work every day. I’m just going to dump some marketing ideas and concepts on you on my drive. It’s not going to be long or extensive, just about five to six minutes long, and that way, while you guys are driving to work every morning, hopefully you can listen to this as well and get some ideas for your business. That’s the game plan.

Today I want to talk about something that was kind of interesting to me. Saturday night, I was working on my computer late, and probably at about two in the morning or so is when my resistance to buying is at its lowest. Of course I decided, “I’m going to swing by eBay and see if there’s anything cool that I can buy,” which is usually a bad idea. Most days when I do that I end up a thousand dollars poorer, by the time it’s all said and done. That night was no different.

So I’m in there. I’m searching for stuff. I’m trying to find something to buy. I’m looking for different marketing things and typing all of my favorite guru’s names. Finally I found this product. It’s called something like “Guerrilla versus Gorilla”, like Jay Conrad Livingston’s guerrilla versus a gorilla. There was a whole CD course from Chet Holmes, Jay Conrad Livingston, and Jay Abraham.

When I first saw it, I was like, “Oh, this is cool,” and then I passed it, but I had it in my watch list. I went back later on that night, and I looked at it. I was looking closer. It was a cassette tape set, but Tape 2 to and Tape 4 were missing. I’m looking at it, and I’m going, “Oh man, it’s missing some tapes, so I’m probably not going to buy it,” but I was like, “I kind of want to buy it now, because this is kind of interesting to me. Let me go and see if I can’t find it anywhere else.”

I started searching everywhere else, and I kid you not, there is no copy of that product you can buy anywhere online at any site, even at their own site. It’s impossible. I searched for another hour trying to find a copy of that product. I couldn’t find it anywhere, so finally I came back to eBay. The only copy that’s there is missing 2 tapes, and it’s $200, but I go and I buy it really quickly, for $200, because I want this information. There’s no one else in the world that has it apparently. You can’t buy it anywhere, and so I bought that.

I told my brother. I’m like, “Scott, I just bought this thing, but Tapes 2 and 4 are gone. I need that information,” and so he searched for another hour or two trying to find a torrent site that would have them. We couldn’t find any torrent sites that had them, but finally there was this Internet marketing torrent site that he was able to find it on, and we were able to download it.

I’ve been listening to it this week, and it’s been great a great product. It really got me thinking a lot about the power, not so much of scarcity, but the power of rarity – of it being rare. I started thinking about how I could use that more in my business. I remember when I first got into this business, and I started learning how to do speaking, I started speaking at every single seminar. The very first seminar I ever spoke at was amazing, because they introduced me as this rare underground guy who never speaks, blah, blah, blah. Because of the fact that I was rare, the response was amazing.

After a year of me traveling the speaking circuits and speaking all of the time, I wasn’t that rare. Some of that disappears because they can go see you anywhere. After about a year and a half, I quit speaking, and now I only speak maybe once a year. Again, when I speak now, it’s kind of that rareness that comes out, and it’s different. I started thinking more about my marketing. How can I cause that?

One of my mentors and someone I’ve worked with a lot over the last years is Dan Kennedy, and Dan always talks about positioning yourself as the guru on the top of the mountain. People can see where you are, but they can’t get there directly. They have to buy things to get closer and closer to you. With Dan Kennedy obviously, you have their $40 or $50 a month newsletter, and then their $200 a month newsletter, and then their Mastermind Groups. The more money you pay, the closer to the guru you get. I just wanted to kind of throw that out there, not so much to tell you what to do, but just to get the wheels in your head spinning.

How can you become more rare, which will increase the demand for you for your time, for whatever it might be? If you’re in a consulting business, the rarer you can make your time, the more you can charge. From a publishing standpoint, if you’re blogging all of the time…

I’ve been watching recently – Ryan Deiss has been launching his Authority ROI product. I’ve been watching his prelaunch and stuff, and it’s interesting. He’s talking about bringing in a whole bunch of guest bloggers to post on your blog. I think what’s interesting about that is that fact that now you can keep consistently updating your blog and having new stuff happening so that there’s content, there’s excitement, there’s stuff still happening, but you can step back yourself and become more of a rare commodity where now you come maybe once a week or once a month and post. At that point everyone’s waiting to hear what the guru has got to say. He’s finally coming down from the mountain, and now he’s going to grace us with his presence, and talk.

I think it’s a really interesting strategy, so I just want to throw that out there for today. It’s something that’s been on my mind a little bit. Again, I’m not sure of the perfect way to execute it yet, but I’m going to start working on it more and more in my business from all sorts of different levels, from a consulting standpoint, when we do consulting work, from a product standpoint, from a blogging standpoint, just, “How can I make myself more rare?”, because again, it increases the demand and the excitement for you.

But how do you do that without becoming irrelevant either? If you’re not out there for too long, then you become irrelevant, and so it’s this mix of, “How do you do it? What’s the perfect formula?” Anyway, something for you guys to think about today.

I’m now at the office. I’m going to end this recording, and I hope you enjoyed it. We’re about six minutes and eight seconds long, because that’s about how far away my office is from my house. Now I know. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If this is your first time ever listening, we’re going to try to figure out how to get this thing on iTunes, so please subscribe there, and then also check out our site DotComSecrets.com to learn how to increase your business. I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow.