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This guest post is from Chelle, a freelance real estate marketing assistant and writer. If you enjoy this post, be sure to check out her real estate marketing blog for more marketing ideas. If you would like to guest post on the Unconventional Marketing Blog go to the guest post page to learn more.

There’s a very simple question that many marketers and businesses fail to ask themselves:

“What do people need?”

We think we know the answer to this, since most businesses offer specific products/services that meet specific needs. For example, if you are sick, you see a doctor. If you need your car fixed, you go to a mechanic. If you need to buy something, you go to a store. You have a need; the business meets it.

But what many businesses fail to recognize is most consumers typically have more than “a need”. We usually have several needs. And on top of needs, we have wants, too. When you think like a customer you can identify these needs and wants and use them to enhance their experience. Enhancing their experience is one easy to implement strategy for attracting and retaining new customers, and for many businesses can even be an additional source of income.

Thinking like your customers is as easy as asking yourself these questions:

• Why does the customer need my product/service?
• What will the customer need while using my product/service?
• What will the customer do before and after using my product and/or service?

You should be able to come up with a decent sized list of things you can do to meet these extra needs of the customer. Some of these things you may not be able to provide yourself – but you could partner with existing businesses to extend your auxiliary services through referrals. Referrals, when chosen wisely, can not only bring more business to you, but also increase potential income if you are able to collect a small referral fee or commission.

To give you a few ideas on how you can use auxiliary services, here are a few examples of add-on services a business could provide:

• Shopping centers offering childcare so parents (and other shoppers!) can shop in peace
• Doctors calling in prescriptions ahead of time so the customer doesn’t have to wait in line
• Mechanics offering pick-up and drop-off services for your vehicle so you don’t have to go through the hassle of dropping your car off
• A vet offering medications, grooming supplies, and referrals to dog walking services or groomers
• A wedding planner referring a caterer, reception hall, musician, travel agency, or florist
• A moving company offering packing services, boxes, and property clean-up services
• A web based business providing forums or automated call center for support

There are endless possibilities when you start thinking like a customer and what they need. The more you offer, the more your business will grow and become profitable. Just be careful you don’t get too big or too far off base from your business – most customers would not be too keen on having surgery at an auto repair shop!

Are you thinking like your customer? Do you understand what they need? What auxiliary add-on services could you provide to enhance their experience while expanding your business?

Not long ago myself and a few others participated in a contest. The idea was to offer up one ad space on all of our blogs to one lucky winner. The contest went a lot better than we could have ever dreamed with way over 1,200 entries (picked by random.org). Here were the contest hosts:

Geek Mom Mashup, Vrtualme, Jamaipanese, Best of Stupid, AxioBlog, The Big Bald Blog, Jason Boom, Unconventional Marketing Blog, Offended Blogger and GorillaSushi

Congratulations to NotJustAMama.com for winning the contest and a month long ad on 10 blogs. You can see her ad just to the right about midway down on my blog.

Stayed tuned for the next contest notice because it should contain over 40 different blogs. Imagine having your ad on 40 blogs for FREE! I just might have to try and win that one

Once again Congrats and Good luck on the next contest. Don’t forget that each month I try to hold my own contest, go ahead and check it out HERE.

And start changing the way you go about marketing.

My girlfriend Lindsay of That Mutt: a dog blog also operates a local dog running business. The first thing we did in marketing her new business was to hang up fliers, run a newspaper ad and all the other types of traditional marketing.

What we are doing next is a little different. We had a flier designed that is short and sweet with just the minimal info on it. The plan next is to simply walk up and down the streets around the area we live and every time we hear a dog bark, leave a flier on their doorknob.

Here we are removing the mass media shotgun effect of marketing and going straight after the people we want to work with. Sounds simple enough, right? So by taking the same $100 we would spend on newspaper advertising, we are putting that to design and printing cost. The best part is it is much more direct marketing which should lead to much better conversions.

Sure enough, we could keep throwing money at marketing the traditional way including splurging on radio, TV, print, billboards, you name it. Or we can focus on the very specific results we want. We want people with dogs who work during the day to be our clients. Now we will only go after those people.

This reminds me of the Shock and Awe campaign of the second Gulf War. Did that actually succeed or fail? I am not really sure. But anyway, it does truly shock me at how quickly we could transform a whole country with a few high-powered explosives. In the marketing world, that shock and awe would be a keynote speech by Steve Jobs of Apple.

Apple seems to have the ability to keep the lid on upcoming projects so well that when projects are launched, people are blown away by what is unveiled (pardon the pun).

But is it sustainable to keep shocking the same audience over and over again? Or do they come to expect it and grow numb to the antics.

Ultimately, I think that being original and interesting is far better. Yesterday, I wrote a post about something that I discombobulated with. Discombobulated is a word I always look forward to using in a sentence. That post was probably a lot more interesting to read than the normal mumble jumble I usually publish.

Could it be that I have been going against my own advice and writing to the middle ground, the boring area? Did I start writing to the middle where the majority is, and not to the fridge that I so often recommend? Why on earth would I do THIS!? Mediocrity is to blame. It took over, and the blog became dull. Maybe it was never exciting to begin with. AHA! Insert theme music from 2001 Space Odyssey here.

So with that in mind. I will try my best not to run a shock and awe campaign but to write the way I would for myself. I hope you all can be entertained and learn something at the same time. Because marketing should be fun, where else can you tell a story and get paid this well?

A large percentage of new bloggers want to make it big, to have a blog that tons of people visit and money pouring in. The truth is this rarely happens, and if your goal is to make money online, getting tons of people to your site is the wrong way to go about it.

I will probably get booed off the blogosphere for stating the obvious and so many people are ready to defend social media successes, but rarely do any of those defending it actually make money from the traffic that sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon deliver.

I won’t lie to you and say that if you make the front page of Digg you won’t get a ton of traffic, because you will. But did you know that most of Digg’s front page stories are generated by just a handful of people? The rest of the stories are generated by everyone else who is using the site. (Grip time) The traffic from these sites rarely comment, subscribe, buy, share or hang around.

When I first started blogging I used to think that social traffic was the end all and be all of blogging and that having good stats was better than anything. But if your goal is to make money, go where the money is and where you need to go in order to get paid. Provide for or target the people who are looking for a solution to their problems. Digg users aren’t looking for something in particular, they are looking for something random or weird that they can entertain themselves with for a few minutes while they kill time at work. They aren’t going to sign up for an affiliate program or buy a book. They are simply wasting time and floating from one thing to the next.

Making money online more often than not requires you to do and talk about the things that social traffic sites shy away from. This would be the niche blog or abstract art dealer site. By catering to the people who are looking for specific things like a service or collectibles you will find there is money to be made.

Before you persecute me saying you can convert that massive social media traffic, I will admit that many people can convert that traffic and have perfected the monetization of mass traffic flow. In the end, for me, if comes down to the amount of time spent achieving that goal and if that can sustain itself. If you stop for one week pressing, shouting, friending, digging, stumbling and so on, your business will wither. But if you set up a site that generates nice and consistent traffic and money you now have a business model. Don’t forget that a lead in the hand is worth more than a thousand fly by.

*For the record I have obtained mass traffic including having a number of posts hit the Buzz page on StumbleUpon, netting upwards of 35,000 page views per article. So it is possible, but simply unsustainable in the long run.

*Inspired by Vic and Grizz