Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
Selling something is the only way to make moolah in the marketing game. Duh, right?
I’d like to take a couple minutes (well, maybe 3) of your time to give you a few tips – stuff that took me years to figure out, distilled to a drinkable, yet buzz-inducing brew.
Here’s how you can:
- Adapt the mindset of the best salespeople to your own personal quirks and interests.
- Discover how to stop wasting energy marketing what you want to sell and start selling what people want to buy. There’s a subtle, but meaningful difference.
- Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills
Also:
- The simple daily way I grow my writing skills, market my services, and blunder into good ideas – all simultaneously – and easily expand them into articles and sellable information products.
Sound good?
Let’s start then.
Writing Is The Core Skill
Marketing is a writer’s game. Even if you market by cold-calling, you still work from a script. All writing is just expression of clear thinking, and effective writing wins the dollars in marketing.
Mindset
I prefer to write mostly about the nuts-and-bolts marketing stuff I know best, but I do believe your beliefs and mindset have a lot to do with the results you get in business.
Nowhere is the quality of your mindset more apparent then when you try to sell something, like your services, in person or on the phone. If your price is cheap enough you can shuffle your feet, look at the ground and do the “awww shucks” routine” and you’ll still make sales because you’re giving away your product.
However – When you want to command market-parity prices or prices higher than the competition, salesmanship matters.
Salesmanship skill is complex. There is no simple secret to winning at sales. But be diligent about refining your game, and persistent about working the market and you’ll always win.
The correct mindset is “never quit”.
Some people think that “never quit” means you should be stubborn and always follow your own internal counsel, as if success in business is a matter of a mentoring dialog between you and yourself.
I don’t agree with this at all. Often to succeed at selling you’ll need to get real about the marketplace. That means selling what people want to buy. Finding out what people want to buy can be a trial and error process that costs you a lot of time and money, or it can be a methodical, research-oriented process.
Both methods have merit. With trial and error you may blunder into ideal opportunities where your interests and skills intersect with market demands. You can find some real sweet spots this way so always be on the lookout for good ideas.
I get a lot of ideas for good stuff to sell by browsing and commenting in online forums. The WarriorForum is my favorite for marketing info. If somebody likes something I wrote and thanks me for it I often copy and paste my own forum comment and expand it into an article or blog post. String a few articles together and you’ve got the beginning of an ebook product you can sell – and this sort of thing evolves in a gradual and fun way.
The thing about the serendipity approach I enjoy most is the thinking and writing happens naturally (it’s unforced) and often my own ideas are nicely expressed. Clear writing beats rambling volume in today’s marketplace, so when my own rambling habits go well, I hold onto those ideas and try to expand on them.
The other approach to finding profitable niches and ideas for your own products is niche research. I have to confess I don’t like the keyword research part of internet marketing at all. I find it tedious, finicky, boring – a necessary evil.
If you’re at all like I am, you’ll want a system to make the time you invest in market research as effective as possible.
That’s why I’ve put together a comprehensive course on niche market research.
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For the next 24 hours only you can get the entire 129 page course at a steep discount off the already very reasonable launch price. With this 25% discount the “Niche Sleuth” method is just $27.75. No bonuses – just the book, but it’s a dandy method you’ll use again and again to save time and find profitable niches for yourself.
–> To get the discount:
1. Just go to http://zerodollarmarketer.com/nichesleuth
2. Read the letter to make sure it’s the right product for your needs, then click on the order button.
3. Enter your email on the order page, click through and enter this coupon code on the next page: NICHE
4. Click on the “Update form” button and the price will go down from $37 to $27.75.
That’s it! You’ll get instant download of the whole 116 page course. It’s breezy reading, yet rich in detail so you’ll find it very useful. If you don’t, there’s a 60 day money-back guarantee so you’ve got nothing to lose.
Cheers,
_Loren Woirhaye
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
