Written By Loren Woirhaye, August 29th, 2011
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 
Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 27th, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
(part 4 of 5)
If you’re looking for a way to make a lot of money without the pressure of making sales calls, direct response marketing is the most low-pressure form of selling there is. No sale will actually happen without pressure. Direct response is so low-pressure in fact, you have to elicit the sales pressure within your prospect, which is the selling skill that trumps all others and all master marketers have it.
Apple computer actually uses direct response marketing methods like perceived scarcity and elitism, which is an emotional hot-button in some people. Apple claims they cannot meet demand for their latest products, Ipads or whatever, which causes people to be desperate to be the first person they know to get one. It’s a bit of reverse psychology really and also very well integrated with the intentional elitism embedded in all of Apple’s branding and advertising.
When you buy the pressure you feel is your own desire to get an advantage for yourself or meet some basic need. Without pressure coming from either outside of you (your spouse pressuring you, for example), or inside of you (need to keep up with the Joneses, perhaps), you aren’t
Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 27th, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
(part 5 of 5)
Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling. The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort. The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks. The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.
The problem is the internet has matured a bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.
Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition. With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.
Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship. We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself.
If
Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 15th, 2010
Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes
JMUMM7FSB8X5
Sooner or later, you may come to the conclusion that I am not a safe-n-sane online marketing-expert dude, but really some sort of crazy freak. That’s ok – because from my point of view non-freaky people are a bit dull. If you were to become a client or friend of mine you’d find out sooner or later, so I might as well admit it.
While not in the class of freaky, the truth is I prefer playing guitar and reading fiction to the fussy business of how you make money with all this crazy website stuff, but we all have to make a living, don’t we?
Photo by Lululemon Athletica
Before 4 or 5 years years ago making a lot of money was not high on my priority list at all. Even though I’d been selling on Ebay since 1999, I treated it mostly as a hobby, not a career. It wasn’t that I saw making money as being un-spiritual or bad – I was just involved in stuff where money wasn’t the big criteria.
I was involved in yoga, music, shamanistic “healing work” between the ages of 23 and 35. In fact, I lived in Malibu,
Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 13th, 2010
Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes
Good old Google has unleashed some new whackness into our lives with it’s new “instant auto-complete” feature. I’m not sure what it’s really called, but whatever it is, if it sticks around the roll of search marketing optimization as a traffic source will be changed.
In brief, the auto-complete suggests key-phrases based on what you type in for your first word. Google has had something like this before but it was vulnerable to manipulation. Phrases like “why won’t my parakeet eat my diarrhea” would pop up in Google’s older auto-complete feature—which may just be a slower version of Google’s new suggestion tool.
Aside from the parakeet thing being gross, it’s hard to believe that more than one person ever typed in that search phrase sincerely looking for an answer to such a question. Two theories about why the phrase showed up in Google’s trends are that either somebody at Google put it there as a joke, or a bunch of people got together and conspired to search Google with that phrase or create content and links containing it. Either way, it’s not really the kind of content Google wants to be serving up in general.
Now you
