What is your offline competitive advantage?

USPs and competitive advantage are not exactly mutually inclusive of one another. Your USP may be "lowest prices!" Your competitive advantage may lie in your ability to have the lowest possible customer acquisition costs.

Try to be as diff as possible... What about not actually providing the service? What about just advising / teaching / training a staffer through LiveNinja and creating supplemental reference videos?

Then you can say; "Google is punishing businesses who pay companies for a higher ranking. The last update has hit a lot of businesses hard.

We get you to the top of Google, the safe way "

See where I'm headed?

How about this?: "Mario Cimmino, the Guitar-Strumming SEO!"

No?

OK, that was a bad one.

People prefer to buy stuff they feel was made just for them. Golfers pay big $ for custom-fitted clubs when most would do fine with regular clubs off the rack.

Jason had it right. You can design a USP around what your customers really want. Possible USPs would relate to industry, size of business, level of service, price, unique services, region, etc.

Check this out:

How Unique Can an SEO Firm Really Be?

The main fear businesses have in creating a USP is they think they will lose business. (We need EVERYBODY!!!!!!! Sob, sob, sob, crying, sob, wheezing and snorting.) Without a USP you risk getting no one.

On the other hand, WITH a USP you'll get customers you might not have because they can readily understand what you are about, and they figure that's close enough.

For example, when Marc McCormack started IMG, he represented golfers like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.

When tennis players started looking for representation, there were no tennis reps. But they could see McCormack making his golf clients rich. (The tennis guys said, "Hey, look, Arnie is getting rich and he SMOKES while he plays! Wow! Think of what we could do!")

Hey, close enough. He knows about golf and tennis can't be that different, right? He subsequently signed the top tennis players of the era.

Similarly, if your USP is "The Plumber's SEO," you'll get clients from other trades. Without the brand, though, you won't have the natural attaction.

All that said, pick something and go with it. You can always change it. And you can also have multiple USPs for different markets.

- Joe USP

P.S. To get another view, there are some marketing pros that say having a USP for professional services is overrated and not necessary. Read "Professional Services Marketing" to get the reasoning behind that.

Professional Services Marketing: How the Best...

I just gave you an entire angle and plan.... Or at least a starting point. Perhaps you may consider becoming an apprentice somewhere? That way you can learn / understand marketing and most importantly whether or not you have that thing inside you your uncle does.

Everyone is not meant to get / be rich.

I would say my USP and competitive advantage when it comes to selling PPC is that I have and still am successful affiliate and have been for over 3 years and I can prove it.

The reason this is an advantage is I have years of experience risking my own money, working on much smaller margins and still making good money, this means I have a real life experience of returning a positive ROI on advertising spend.

This alone got me my first and only (thank god) high paying JOB with a big agency, despite having no degree/college education, I also beat roughly 10 other experienced people in the interview process, because I could show them active, profitable campaigns I was currently running, this resulted in me being the only person in the whole company (90+ employees) with no college degree.

The point is degrees and fancy qualifications don't mean f**k all, people want results and if you can prove you can deliver getting clients is easy.

When I go to see potential new clients now, I always mention this and explain it in this way:

I have a huge amount of experience creating and growing profitable campaigns, the way me and my competition are different is most other consultants and agencies have no real life experience running personal profitable campaigns, what this means is their approach is usually something like:

Start with a large budget > Build an unprofitable campaign > Get data > Cut the fat and remove all the unprofitable aspects (basically throw a load of shit at the wall and see what sticks)

My process goes a little more like this:

Start a focused campaign > Be profitable early on > Use data to scale and grow the campaign (basically I aim to profitable from as early on as profitable)

This is much more appealing in my experience to potential clients.

My other USP is I specialize, I only promote PPC.

Now if a client wants SEO or a new site I am happy to do it but all my marketing and focus is geared towards PPC.

The best way to find your own USP is look at what you offer extra and you can also look at what competitors are not offering and highlight this as something you do and they don't.

I still run profitable affiliate campaigns, but at the end of the day affiliate marketing is just pushing traffic anonymously to other businesses, I never really saw it as a business that I could sell in the future its just a good skill and good for extra cash flow.

The fact is affiliate marketing is tough you have tighter margins, offers get pulled and offers burn out due to competition from other affiliates, its a totally different ball game (much harder)

In terms of a degree, In my experience you don't need one, I have plenty of high ticket clients spending low to mid 5 figures a month on Adwords and they pay me every month for managing these campaigns.

Degrees help to get jobs, I don't want a job! some of the richest people in the world where college dropouts, Bill Gates is currently the richest man in the world and dropped out of Harvard.

Also considering I own my own company, I can call myself whatever I want

Correct. It offers debt. Loads and loads of debt.

There was a time when a college degree was reasonably priced and let you stick out in a crowd of applicants. That time is long past.

Now you get to go to school and walk away with a mortgage payment - long before you even get a job. Interestingly enough, the most useful part of the college experience has nothing to do with what they call an 'education'. I know more college graduates who can't fine their way out of a blanket thrown on top of them.

The TRUE value comes from the relational experiences. The late nights, the homesickness, the new experiences and the different cultures.

I went to a four year college that wanted to be upgraded to Tier 1 status. How did they do this? Well, they took the professors out of the class room and stuck them on research. Then they hired college kids to be TA's and run the class. Finally, they build a state of the art football stadium.

The way they got to be considered a top school was to give LESS value in terms of education and more value in terms of experience. Of course, this meant giant tuition increases, but who is keeping track?

You can tell how I REALLY feel about the fraud we call college (at least in the USA) and IMO the ONLY reasons to go to college have nothing to do with education. The sole exception is if you want to get a laser specific degree for a special profession (Doctor, Lawyer, Occupational Therapist, Etc)

Otherwise, save your money.

Not to mention - how the hell is a 20 year old supposed to know what he wants to do for the REST of his life? And if you don't know that, why drop 100 grand on an education? Figure out what you want to do - if it requires a degree, then take the hit and overpay for a piece of paper in a nice frame (which, they charge extra for - btw)

<end rant>