The Internet Marketers Club

Promotion vs Selling

Not all of us are able to sell however all of us can promote.

So whats the difference?

It’s not that selling is bad. Developing sales skills can be very useful. But the sales process itself – learning closes, handling objections, distinguishing features, advantages and benefits – is too hard for most people.

Buying is one thing. Being sold is another. Selling tends to be manipulative and people have a built-in resistance to being pushed or pulled to do things.

People love to purchase, but hate to be sold. There’s another way to accomplish the goal of sales without the old paradigm conflict of buying and selling.

It’s called promoting.

When you’re selling, the result you’re after is to get the order.

When you’re promoting, the result is to successfully communicate value.

Do you see the difference?

When you’re promoting, your job is done once people understand the value of what you’re offering. The value of The IM Club is that we provide ongoing training, personal mentoring and a large growing resource of information to under gird the first two.

Selling is a learned technique. You’re not born a sales person, it’s something you become after studying and developing the use of the tools and techniques of the trade.

But you are a born promoter. We all are.

Think of something you’re excited about.

Did you read Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus and think it was great? Did you love the movie Forest Gump? Is there a car that turns you on?… a restaurant with great food you enjoy?

When people get excited about something, we have a natural commitment to share that with somebody else. The more valuable the product or experience, the more committed we are to telling other people about it.

The Japanese have a word for this – giri. It means obligation. The wisdom behind it is that once you’ve been given something of value and from which you get benefit, you’re obligated to return the favor, to give it away to other people.

This sharing of your enthusiasm I call promoting.

It’s not sales per se – but a lot of things get sold by people’s promoting them. In fact, it’s the way most things “get sold.”

With movies I know film companies and producers count on word of mouth to sell tickets. That’s promotion – and it’s a more powerful and effective “sales” method than advertising or previews in getting people into theaters.

When Jurassic Park came out, it was promoted for a short time with advertising. People went to see it. Those people came away from the movie jumping up and down: “You gotta’ see this! This movie is incredible! There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex that eats this lawyer who’s hiding in an outhouse…” Remember?

As a result of that initial response, the film company stopped all their advertising! Jurassic Park is the most successful movie of all time – over $750 million in sales worldwide. Over two billion people – two fifths of the world have seen it.

But when was the last time you saw it advertised? The ad budget for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero was much bigger than Jurassic Park’s, but it was a box office disaster! Why? People didn’t promote it. Well actually they did – they promoted the rest of us not going to see it.

We promote all the time.

In Affiliate Marketing, as soon as people get caught up in the process of selling, they lose their ability to promote effectively. The more people get into having to sell, trying to sell, the further they get from the natural, contagious enthusiasm of promoting.

Imagine taking a course on “How to sell people on going to see Jurassic Park.”

1. First, you’d learn how to qualify your prospects,
2. the pre-approach steps,
3. how to initiate a conversation,
4. build rapport,
5. discover their needs and wants as far as entertainment is concerned.
6. You’d get trained on how to distinguish the film’s features from it’s benefits,
7. how to lead with those benefits and weave them into an effective presentation.
8. The course teaches you how, when the prospect says something negative, you go positive; when she’s positive, you go negative with a “take away.”
9. You practice handling a series of common objections and learn how to overcome each of them.
10. You’re given a script to follow.
11. You learn the Assumptive close,
12. the Ben Franklin close,
13. the Colombo close.

Now, go sell somebody on going to that movie.

Do you see the dramatic difference between selling and promoting?

Do you like to sell?

Do you like to be thought of as a salesperson?

When people ask you what you do, do you say, “I’m in sales?”

How many men and women in your organization think of themselves as sales people?

Some people are great salesmen. Most people aren’t. But most people are great promoters. Watch children when they want something.

Which is easier to duplicate: sales or promoting?

When you’re selling, the issue is you as a salesperson.

When you’re promoting, what’s important is the value of what you’re offering.

With sales, the messenger and his or her ability to sell is the bottom line.

With promoting, it’s the message – not the messenger.

When you sell, you have to be a good sales person. When you promote, all you have to be is excited about what you’re talking about. The prospect isn’t judging your sales ability. He’s judging the value of the product you’re so enthusiastic about for himself.

When you’re selling, it’s about you. It’s personal. If they say “No,” they’re saying “No” to you personally. They’re rejecting you, because sales is about you getting them to buy what you’re selling.

When you’re promoting, it’s about them. It’s personal all right – for them. If they say “No,” they say “No” for themselves – not for you.

• In sales, you want them to give you something – the order.
• In promoting, you want to give them something – the value.

Sales is taking.

Promoting is giving.

When you want something and somebody says “No,” how do you feel?

When you give something to somebody and they refuse the gift, how do you feel? You may be disappointed, but it’s their loss isn’t it?

Next…

Promoting starts with recognizing the value for yourself. What’s the value of your product for you? What’s the real value of the opportunity for you?

Ask yourself: What has this product done for me? What benefits have I gotten from using these products? How have they contributed to me?…changed me for the better?…made a positive difference in my life?

Ask yourself about your opportunity: How has being involved made my life better, more fun, more exciting? What new things have I learned? What new skills have I developed? How has it contributed to my life…to my family and friends? What are the possibilities for my future?

Then, share that. That’s your Jurassic Park.

Instead of counting how many retail sales you’ve made this week, count the number of people you’ve told about your products. Instead of counting how many prospects you’ve signed up, count the number of times you’ve enthusiastically shared your opportunity.

That’s what really counts.

Today I was reading through my rss files and came acrosss this article from the Wall Street Journal.

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

Read the rest of the story

Comparing Job Numbers in America

Lawyers 555,770
Bloggers 452,000
Computer Programmers 394,710
CEOs 299,160
Firefighters 289,710
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Technorati Profile

Firefox is a great browser for a few reasons.

1. It is not fully integrated with my OS system like IE
2. I can add all sorts og extensions to it making it more useful

So in this post lets have a look at some of the most popular extensions and how to load them. First a video showing you how to do it.

Screengrab – is a really neat extension that will let you do a screen capture on the fly. It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.

NoDoFollow – Just a simple extension to highlight links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status. The reason this is good is when looking for blogs to comment on it will tell you if you get a credit for the link. You want to be looking for do follow.

AutoCopy – We like it because we’re bloggers, having to quote and copy links and code every day, but anyone who does a fair amount of copying to and from the web will dig AutoCopy.

The basic use: It copies anyt text you select on the web as soon as you select it-no Ctrl+C necessary. For pasting into text forms, you simply hit the middle mouse button rather than Control+V. If that’s all it did, hey, we’d recommend it to anyone who writes, copies, or pastes a lot, but we also have to point out that it fixes really long, wrap-broken URLs automatically. Three cheers for fewer pinky-finger stretches!

Google Toolbar – Take the power of Google with you anywhere on the Web

Cooliris 1.10 – Full-Screen, 3D — Cooliris is simply the fastest and most stunning way to browse photos and videos from the Web or your desktop. Effortlessly scroll a “3D Wall” of your content from Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, and hundreds more.

Now there are a lot more but these are the main ones we use. Do not clog up your browser with too many extensions butif you use them keep them if not delete.

Below is a presentation that I found very interesting and put life in a whole different perspective. I started my own online buisiness not just to look after my family but so I could do good works and help others.

Our program in Thailand where we teach orphans and young people is the same as we will teach you and has made a big difference to their lives. 

After you have watched that presentation I hope you get a feel and realize that starting your own internet business is not just going to be for your own prosperity but that you can also start to make a difference in so many other areas.

Quentin

In todays economy lots of people are looking for a small business to buy with the aim of supplementimg their current job or even to replace it, should the worst happen.

On the other side there are also lots of people exiting the small business arena because of the high overheads and drop in sales.

It can be a real land mine trying to evaluate the true value of a traditional business as there are so many pitfalls.

I bought a business a number of years ago and all the figures seemed to be good, I did all my homework  however what I did not find out was that interest rates were going to skyrocket. I borrowed a lot of money at 11% but2 years later it was 24% in 1989. It pretty well killed me.

My Internet business has virtually no overheads and was in profit in the first 6 months and has no limit on the income that can be achieved.

If your looking to set up or buy a small business let us help you consider setting up a small Online business. Join our 6 month course and gain all the skills you need to be profitable online.

Lets face it even if you buy a traditional business you will need a website and this is the most cost effective to get one.

Join The Internet Marketers Club Today.

Jeff Alderson is the man! He’s created exactly what the market needs again.

I’ve been following Jeff’s incredible tools and products since the good old Traffic Equalizer days (that software basically paid for my first house!). That was almost 5 years ago I think.

You’ll find great support, videos and training to help you along the way as Jeff stands behind all of his products.

It’s vitally important that you increase the number of websites that link to your website.”

Doing this helps you steadily increase traffic and generate more sales. However, if you are to be successful, you must be sure that your website is good enough for someone to link to you.

So, how do you do that?

There is an old cliche that always rings true in the Internet world – “Content is king”. And this is absolutely spot on.

You may be wondering how your content is related to our current topic of building link building, but there is a perfectly sound connection…

It is important that you have quality content on your website or other webmasters will most likely not want to trade links. Your website also needs to be informative and interesting, as this will increase the chance of getting a link from someone else.

Remember, links to your website are the building blocks to success, so it’s worth the effort to acquire them.

Now, let’s go over a small checklist of websites that would be good candidates for good link building:

* Websites with quality, related content.

* Websites that have higher PageRank than you currently have.

* Online directories like Yahoo and other business directories.

* Web 2.0 websites like Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com.

It’s no secret that Google (and other search engines) will list you higher in the search results for having a lot of quality inbound links. So, you should really concentrate on building quality links, which will do more for you than tinkering with Alt tags or any other onsite optimization.

The only downside is that building link popularity is not always easy to do. It tends to be a bit boring and tedious. Plus, it usually takes a big chunk of your time, which is probably why most people don’t like to do it.

Luckily for you, there is a solution!

A brand new search engine optimization tool just came out called SEO Equalizer. Not only is this software super easy to use, but it is also extremely affordable. I do suggest you pop over to the website and read all about it…

You can do so by going here