The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

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:

Also:

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, ]]> The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

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:

1. Adapt the mindset of the best salespeople to your own personal quirks and interests.

1. 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.
2. Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills

Also:

1. 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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–> 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.

Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

The new economy is a competitive place and you’ll have to be a marketer in order not to be marginalized by the marketplace.

In brief: If you cannot market and sell your ideas to your employers and colleagues, you’ll be exploited and under-paid.

Fifty years ago, giant corporations offered a lifetime of job security and upward mobility. Today you’ll have to be more flexible in your working skills because chances are the jobs you are doing today will not be the ones you are doing in 5 or ten years.

In our current 2010 economic meltdown in the United States, we have a chorus of workers demanding the government create jobs. I’m not too astute about politics or economics, but it seems to me that the workers should be busting their buns to get new skills with more value in the new economy instead grousing about the loss of the obsolete jobs they lost.

In the news, a factory worker who for 25 years has put in his hours and spent ]]> Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

The new economy is a competitive place and you’ll have to be a marketer in order not to be marginalized by the marketplace.

In brief: If you cannot market and sell your ideas to your employers and colleagues, you’ll be exploited and under-paid.

Fifty years ago, giant corporations offered a lifetime of job security and upward mobility. Today you’ll have to be more flexible in your working skills because chances are the jobs you are doing today will not be the ones you are doing in 5 or ten years.

In our current 2010 economic meltdown in the United States, we have a chorus of workers demanding the government create jobs. I’m not too astute about politics or economics, but it seems to me that the workers should be busting their buns to get new skills with more value in the new economy instead grousing about the loss of the obsolete jobs they lost.

In the news, a factory worker who for 25 years has put in his hours and spent his off-time watching television rather than bettering himself cries angrily at the government to replace his lost job. I ask this: how many books has he read in the last year about improving his earning capacity by learning new skills?

I am not being political here.  As I see it, this  is a very practical matter. If your skills are no longer valued where you are, you have two basic options to improve your standard of living:

• 1. Go to where your skills are valued. The move may be geographical but if you are a knowledge worker and not a physical worker, you may be able to work remotely.
• 2. Learn new skills that are valued or will be valued where you are.

During the industrial revolution workers moved from farms to cities in order to do better financially. It did not always work out for workers, but consider that 19th century farming was pretty unscientific and unpredictable, the idea of stable, long-term industrial employment was attractive to poor rural folk.

In today’s shifting new economy the likelihood of you becoming very prosperous doing any form of work other than knowledge work is remote. Knowledge work can be creative work and it can involve physical activity, but the driving force behind the value a knowledge worker provided is not in his or her muscles, but between his or her ears.

Get Over Yourself

In my work as a marketing consultant I have had clients who boasted to me of their sales prowess – ie. “I can sell anything to anybody”

When I hear that I think 1. “you have a big ego” and 2. “if you are so skilled, why do you need my help?”

From personal experience hiring and managing salespeople I know they can be quite un-humble in assessing their own skills yet when it came time for them to dial for dollars (I ran a phone sales operation), very few would actually get positive results.

The closer you get to real mastery of a skill, the more you realize how hard it really is. By way of example: I thought I was a much more skilled guitar player 5 years ago than I think am today, even though today I am much more skilled in reality. The difference is now I am humble about it because I realize how much I have yet to learn to truly master the instrument.

The less you know about a topic the more likely you are to have a sophomoric (“wise fool”) view of its challenges. It is common for people to overvalue their own prowess. While I’m much too polite to tell anybody to their face they are over-valuing their own skills you would do well yourself to assess your own present skills a bit critically.

Skills in sales and marketing are the same way – when you learn a little bit about it you’ll start to think you are pretty hot stuff, when you really don’t have the goods yet. This is all part of the learning process, so observe it without judgement in yourself. Even if you must brag to compete in the marketplace, try to be humble inside yourself because humility keeps you in the learning process. If you think you know everything you stop learing and get arrogance.

Preparation Matters – So Be Prepared

The Boy Scouts of America slogan “Be Prepared” is a bit of wisdom. I was never a boy scout and I’ve learned to be prepared through numerous instances of failure to be prepared, with disastrous consequences. Skilled salesmanship is all about being prepared, and in today’s competitive marketplace it stands to reason that the people with the sharpest skills are going to be the winners.

Today’s marketplace is a very sensitive environment because consumers have virtually endless choices of who they do business with. You’ll want to pay attention to subtle details and part of preparation to market yourself or your product is learnng what to look for. It’s honing your instincts, if you want to think of it that way.

In order to market your products or self competitively you’ll need to have a plan to communicate to the marketplace. Without one you’ll be just like all the other poor sops without a clue who are forced to take what they can get, which usually isn’t much.

Writing is communication and any planned communication involves writing. All effective salesmanship and marketing must be planned to succeed and sell the product. That’s because our brains work in a somewhat mysterious but fairly predictable way. The old sales gurus figured out a lot of stuff intuitively by observing people. Now we have mounting research into consumer behavior.

What is indisputable is that some people seem to have a “knack” for selling. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. Selling does not come naturally or easily to me. Everything I’ve learned about how to sell has come from hard work and diligent study and I suggest to you that selling and marketing are very learnable skills.

If you’re selling face to face or on the phone, you may not really be a marketer. A salesman relies a great deal on his ears for listening and his voice for talking. A marketer uses a pen instead of the voice. This allows the marketer to have leverage, but it also means if you want to be a really skilled and successful marketer, you need to hone your writing skills.

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.

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

There are a bunch of lists out there of the best books on writing copy.  I’ve read a whole bunch of books on copywriting, many several times.  My opinion is that different books may help you at different stages of skill development.

For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it.  It is a watershed work.

I recommend starting with the easy stuff.  Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.

THE CORE TRIO

The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.

1.  “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times.  It’s short but very potent.  Everybody who writes advertising should ]]> Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

There are a bunch of lists out there of the best books on writing copy.  I’ve read a whole bunch of books on copywriting, many several times.  My opinion is that different books may help you at different stages of skill development.

For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it.  It is a watershed work.

I recommend starting with the easy stuff.  Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.

THE CORE TRIO

The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.

1.  “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times.  It’s short but very potent.  Everybody who writes advertising should internalize Claude Hopkins’s stuff.

2. “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab.  Subtitled “A Short Course in Copywriting” it is just that.  It walks you through Schwab’s 5-step sequence of what every ad needs to accomplish in the first half, and in the second half are observations about direct mail, ad layout and so forth.  If you advertise online only you’ll find the first half valuable, since the second half of the book pertains largely to the problems of print advertising.

3. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John C. Caples.   I have the fifth edition, but some folks say the 4th is superior.  All I can say is the book is packed with good information and insight, but I find reading it front to back a little dry.  The book has examples from catalogs and brands we are familiar with today.  Allegedly the 4th and earlier editions are more fun to read, but  less contemporary.

Do get these books as soon as possible, and read them.  If you just read internet ebooks you are missing-out on the proven fundamentals of advertising.  Between the 3 of them, the authors of the above books had over 120 years experience when they wrote their books.  That’s a lot of wisdom.

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.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat? How To Reach Today’s Overstimulated Consumers is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Writers have to write A LOT to get good.  Talent and intelligence may play a roll in writing skill, but I believe effective writing is a learned skill like any other.  You have to practice a lot to be at the pro level.

Today’s consumers are over-communicated to, pressed  for time, and perhaps a little lazy. They want to  know what it’s about fast and they don’t want to  read your languid prose.

It’s  frustrating, but we have to accept that the longer and more detailed our writing gets, the less likely we are to seduce readers into accepting our ideas.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat?

At worst, readers  take one look at your long salesletter, bloated video run-times, sprawling blog posts and articles… roll their eyes (or yawn) and move on (I’ll tell you why in a bit).

At best your readers are fans who have decided they like your  writing. Don’t count on getting too many of these rare birds on your lists though.

Writing To The Common Denominator

People want clarity and brevity. ]]> Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat? How To Reach Today’s Overstimulated Consumers is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Writers have to write A LOT to get good.  Talent and intelligence may play a roll in writing skill, but I believe effective writing is a learned skill like any other.  You have to practice a lot to be at the pro level.

Today’s consumers are over-communicated to, pressed  for time, and perhaps a little lazy. They want to  know what it’s about fast and they don’t want to  read your languid prose.

It’s  frustrating, but we have to accept that the longer and more detailed our writing gets, the less likely we are to seduce readers into accepting our ideas.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat?

At worst, readers  take one look at your long salesletter, bloated video run-times, sprawling blog posts and articles… roll their eyes (or yawn) and move on (I’ll tell you why in a bit).

At best your readers are fans who have decided they like your  writing. Don’t count on getting too many of these rare birds on your lists though.

Writing To The Common Denominator

People want clarity and brevity. They aren’t stupid -  they just prefer easy.

It’s not just about selling products, it’s about  selling people the idea they should be paying attention to what you want to tell them.

At regular intervals in your written communication -  perhaps once or twice every page - you should be placing markers of some sort that help your readers to scan and interpret the shape and meaning of what you’re trying to get across.

Making Better Markup

These markers can be bolded text emphasizing some relevant concept, cross-headings and section headings, bullet lists, Johnson boxes, callouts, sidebars, colored or italicized text, different type faces and font sizes…

Of course if you throw all those together in one  web-page it starts to look like it came from  HTML Hell.

We’re in an era of Visual Communication

… and the young people now are accustomed to, and expect, a style of communication that is frankly  “dumbed down”. Print-era writers are probably  more skilled readers than many many of today’s smart young folks – and it will probably hurt our ability to reach them if we don’t bring our writing to  the level they prefer.

In short – just because today’s buyers prefer short, dumbed-down, visual communication doesn’t make them stupid – but it is foolish for us professional  communicators not to adapt to their preferences.

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.

Is Copywriting the Most Valuable Skill in Online Marketing? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I have what you might call a flair for writing copy – I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest by any measure but some of it comes more easily to me than it might come to you.

The ability to write and communicate well is a fine thing, however it is trumped by the king of all marketing skills: Conversion.

Copywriting of course plays a big roll in conversion but it is far from the whole enchilada – there’s the skill of getting traffic in a cost-effective way, there’s knowing how to structure a back-end offer, or two, or three.

Then there is coming up with the angle that gets people to act immediately. Sometimes it’s making the price so low compared to the value on offer that the decision is a “no-brainer”, but often it’s a matter of creating scarcity of some kind: threatening to run-out of the item or close the doors on the offer when all seats are filled.

I once bought a ticket to 1000-seat seminar… and then when I got there I saw were 2500 seats ]]> Is Copywriting the Most Valuable Skill in Online Marketing? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I have what you might call a flair for writing copy – I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest by any measure but some of it comes more easily to me than it might come to you.

The ability to write and communicate well is a fine thing, however it is trumped by the king of all marketing skills: Conversion.

Copywriting of course plays a big roll in conversion but it is far from the whole enchilada – there’s the skill of getting traffic in a cost-effective way, there’s knowing how to structure a back-end offer, or two, or three.

Then there is coming up with the angle that gets people to act immediately. Sometimes it’s making the price so low compared to the value on offer that the decision is a “no-brainer”, but often it’s a matter of creating scarcity of some kind: threatening to run-out of the item or close the doors on the offer when all seats are filled.

I once bought a ticket to 1000-seat seminar… and then when I got there I saw were 2500 seats in the house. I felt mildly gyped but still got a lot of value – and it was the fear of not getting a seat that goaded me to make a decision and buy the ticket – and honestly I can say that seminar changed my life for the better.

While devices like these are communicated in the copy, or the sales pitch, the idea of the offer is not in the copywriter’s hands in many cases. It is the direct-response marketer who structures the offer that gets folks to whip out their wallets – the copywriter is merely the messenger.

A skilled copywriter (like moi) can boost response by turning-out the kind of copy the marketer may have no time, nor the skill to create – by no means do I want to denigrate the copywriter’s skill. Merely I want to point-out that your willingness and ability to create and structure the irresistible offer is the vehicle of your success in direct response marketing.

Want a massive increase in sales?

Massively increase the value of your offer.

Assuming you had an offer in the first place people wanted and bought, increasing the perceived value by adding high-value bonuses can be a great way to increase response by 100% or more – in fact the sky is pretty much the limit.

Of course you have to back-up your claims, and that, my friend, has to do with the quality of your product and customer service – if you botch this part of the equation you may rake in some cash but you’ll also get a lot of grief from unhappy customers. Don’t promise more that you can deliver.

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.