• Hundreds of TV channels to surf from home (at home and on your cell phone)
  
• Your email inbox crammed with a never ending-stream of messages
  
• Millions of possible websites to surf
  
• A mailbox full of junk mail, catalogs, …
  
• More commercials (on TV, the radio, …)
  
• Music over radio, satellite and TV
  
• Did I mention voicemail and newspapers?
  
• Let’s throw in social media, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  

All these choices create a huge problem for you. But there is a solution.

When I was a kid. There were pretty much three TV stations (ABC, CBS, NBC), the local paper and radio stations.

Now we live in the most fragmented information society that has ever existed.

In fact, it is overwhelming. So much so, that people are literally tuning out (my friend just canceled his cable TV service)!
This spells trouble to a lot of us!

So what can we do?

What are obvious the options?

Option A: Try to communicate across all the channels
Option B: Ignore how the world is changing and do what you have always done?
If you attempt to engage all the channels, it will cost you a fortune and kill you. There’s just too much and new channels seems to be emerging annually.

Hiding your head under a pillow will also lead to your demise. If you cannot see the need to change, you will slowly shrink your audience or kill your business.

So what’s the solution?

Narrow casting. This is a word I crafted to help convey the point. You now have an opportunity to build favor with very focused groups of people that have very specific interests.

Unlike the past, you can now build businesses, blogs, etc. in micro niches that are under served by the general market (and would be impossible to build 20 years ago).

For example, let’s say you are an artist who likes to teach people how to turn their junk into useful household products. You could very quickly build an audience and a rather large following by simply leveraging social media.

OR, you could use me as an example. I would have never been able to build 20,000 followers on a niche topic of white papers in the past. But now I was able to pull people together from all around the world that share a single thing in common: the creation and marketing of white papers.

The take home message: When your message is unique and highly relevant to a special group of people, all you need to do is focus on that group. Other like-minded people will flock to you.

How do you need to change: Stop being a generalist. Focus on doing one or a few things exceptionally well. Hand pick the channels where your people area and begin marketing. Ignore everyone outside your ideal target. Tweak, enhance, expand and repeat.

What do you think? Are you a narrow caster who has found success? I’d like to hear from you.