Carrie Wilkerson amassed a following of over 55,000 listeners, viewers and subscribers in her first year of working online because she believes in personalization.

Rob Toth interviewed Carrie as part of Dan Kennedy’s Info Riches interview series called “Future Of Information Marketing”. Carrie is considered to be one of the top information marketers in the world.

She is a work at home mom raising four young children. Before she started her online business she had been running businesses from home for over ten years.

Very few people are able to reach the success levels that Carrie has been able to achieve in such a short period of time. This is especially true of someone working part-time in her very first venture online. According to Carrie there are people at the top who are making millions and people at the bottom who are not making much at all. She says the middle ground is where the big opportunity is. This is where the competition is heating up and people will need to set themselves apart by building relationships.

In the beginning, web pages were personalized with pictures. Then audio was the big thing. Recently, video is considered the essential media to make the user experience more real for the consumer. But Carrie says “I still think people want more. They want more personalization.” She says that people don’t want to do business with someone who is “faceless and flat behind a screen”.

Marketers wait for people to come to them instead of going out and serving their customers. Carrie says “I don’t want to be that impersonal, don’t want to be unapproachable… don’t want to be unreachable or set apart”. “I want to be right in the trenches…” “I think it makes me more real. I think it makes me more touchable.”

When Carrie used to teach high school she learned that people have different learning styles. She says that she “learned that some people are readers, some people are listeners. Some people are watchers and some people are touchers and doers.” You have to connect with people at their level, the way that’s most comfortable for them. “Unless you are touching all of the respective styles of people you are missing 25% of the population.”

If a person only sends out emails they will only be appealing to readers. If your strategy is exclusively audio, you will only get the listeners as your audience. With this in mind Carrie has developed 50 training videos. She is very happy to see that the people who watch her videos have a realistic sense of who she is. “It’s a rapport builder”.

If Carrie runs into someone who has seen her on the videos, they feel comfortable with her like they know her personally. When her viewers come across her on Twitter they treat her like a well-liked friend. People feel like they have talked to her personally after they watch the videos.

Carrie tries to touch all learning styles in her marketing. She says it “has been great for lowering trust barriers and creating a following”. If a marketer can lower the trust barriers in people, they will be willing to buy from them again and again. These people will be willing to stay on the mailing list and will continue to interact with you to deepen the relationship.

That’s your goal as a marketer. You want to have a mutually trusting relationship with your customers. If you can achieve that, your customers will stay with you despite any attempts by your competititon to lure them away. You will have a successful business ongoingly.