Your assumption is wrong. Just by taking action you have a significant chance of getting a jump on the competition. And by taking creative action - by zigging where everyone else was zagging - you have an even better chance of grabbing the attention for yourself.

Case #1. A few years back, a friend invited me to team up on an audio project in which she was going to interview five marketers (and be interviewed herself) about implications of the law of attraction for marketing one's business. All six marketers in the project had the right to sell the 5-CD audio set. I added a related recording of my own, making it a 6-CD audio set.

Of the six collaborators, I was the first to get the product up for sale.

Six months later, only two of us had put the product up for sale. One of the other four is a best-selling author, so maybe he was just too busy with other projects to promote this one. But the other three are active marketers, each with a following, and when I just went to the web site of one of them, his site doesn't have a link for products. And the other collaborator besides me who did sell the product - her site doesn't have a link for products, either.

Lesson: Most people simply drop the ball. They do not follow through on opportunities.

Case #2. I was one of 73 marketers interviewed for Rob Toth's Future of Information Marketing audio series. Each of the marketers interviewed has rights to sell the product. As is usual for such projects, Rob provided all the participants with sales copy and other tools for selling the product.

I am not sure how many of the participants in this project have gotten their act together so far to sell the product.

However, I can tell you that I'm the only one who issued a press release for the product. If you look up "Future of Information Marketing" in Google News today, my release is the only one for the product.

Even more surprising, if you look up simply "information marketing" in Google News today, there is hardly any other publicity on the topic of information marketing showing up.

The News section of Google is where many reporters go to find recent material on various topics. Showing up there puts one in the running for media coverage as well as direct traffic from potential customers.

Google News tends to keep entries alive for about a month. Now imagine how many marketers are selling material about information marketing. This search result shows that the overwhelming majority of them are not using publicity as a marketing tool. Amazing!

Lesson: Given tools to sell something, most people won't go beyond those. You can still get international attention and visibility to the market over and above the competition.