Sell Yourself, Not Your Products or Services
Copyright © 2002-2004, Bill Platt
Sell yourself, not your products or services. The point we
need to make is that your products and services will change
over time as your business adapts to the realities of the
marketplace.
If you spend your time promoting Product A and then you
discontinue the sale of Product A, you will suddenly find
yourself starting over from scratch with nothing to show
for all of your previous work!
For as long as you remain on this planet, you will always be.
No matter the course of your product or service line, selling
yourself first and then your products will give you the
leverage to remain flexible in your business journeys.
If your primary products are affiliate programs, you should
be able to see this quite well.
How many times have you been involved with an affiliate
program that either changed their rules for operation to
your disadvantage or simply went out of business? How many
times have you seen your hard work go down the drain by no
fault of your own?
Selling yourself may seem a challenge, but it really is not
that difficult.
In the matter of selling yourself, your goal is to create name
recognition in the market place. You need for name recognition
for your website, your own name or both.
There are five methods that work very well for promoting your
online business. Those five methods are:
1. Submitting your website to Search Engines
2. Developing your own Ezine
3. Ezine Advertising
4. Using Free-Reprint Articles
5. Direct Email
You might note that four of these five methods incorporate
email in one fashion or another. That is not by mistake. Of
course, direct email is the weakest of the four methods
employing email. The reason for this weakness is the fear
of spam by the recipient of the email. I generally avoid
direct email for this very reason. Better safe than sorry
I say.
What I am outlining here is a blueprint that all online
business persons should strive to accomplish.
First, we must build our website. Our website should serve
as a direct sales letter to the buying public. While the
website should exist for anyone looking to do business
online, it is not the end all for your online business
presence. Once the website is ready for the public, it
should be submitted to the search engines. Keep in mind,
search engines are interested in the words on your site...
pictures don't mean a thing to the search engines.
We should then develop an ezine to accompany our website. We
should invite all site visitors to subscribe to our ezine as
this enables us to create an ongoing conversation with our
potential customers. Do not let the ezine become more than
a tool to keep contact with your customers. I publish my
ezine only once a month so that I may have more time for
growing my businesses.
Many folks agree that ezine advertising is one of, if not the
most effective way to build your business. You should never
simply put an advertisement out there in the market without
testing the effectiveness of that ad first. You should also
always be sure of the target audience of the ezines you are
looking to are the same as your target market if that is
possible.
The truth is that you can burn through thousands of dollars
in ezine advertising without ever turning a single sale. To
be sure of the effectiveness of your ads before spending money
for the advertisement, you might want to consider using a ad
tracking service to determine the worth of your ads before
plunking down the money for your advertising.
An interesting and effective technique for tapping into the
value of ezine advertising without blowing the bank is to use
Free-Reprint Articles to open the door to ezines.
The truth is that most publishers do not have the time or
energy to create all of their own content. As a result, most
of them turn to article lists and sites to find the content
they feel would be attractive to their readers. Free-Reprint
Rights is the key here. Most online publishers are running on
a very tight budget and cannot afford to buy the content they
publish.
In the Free-Reprint market, there are a number of large lists
that provide an excellent assortment of articles that carry
the Free-Reprint rights. One example is called *Free Ezine
Content* and can be subscribed to by sending a blank email
to: mailto:FreeEzineContent-subscribe@topica.com . Another
group is *Free Reprint Articles* at YahooGroups. Send an email
to: mailto:Free-Reprint-Articles-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
for your free subscription.
Tapping into the Free-Reprint market is easy. The trick to
getting your articles published is being able to teach your
readers something of value and being able to do so in an
easygoing article style that folks will read and enjoy.
Providing your are successful in teaching the readers
something of value in an interesting manner, then you will
find your articles getting published regularly, even in the
larger ezines.
Through the use of articles to promote your business, you
will be selling yourself first and then your business. The
resource box that follows every article is like a small
classified ad that tells who you are, what you do, and where
to be able to reach you or your business. The resource box
is best kept to under 6 lines of 65 characters in length.
Your resource box is your advertisement in the ezine.
Ironically, readers will read an article and visit the
website of an author well before they read an advertisement
posted in the same ezine.
As your articles get reprinted again and again, you will
begin to see for yourself the promise of Free-Reprint Articles
coming to life for you and your business. Your site traffic
and sales will continue to grow as you continue to build your
all-important name recognition in the market place.
Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to
helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote
their businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles and
Press Releases. Articles are distributed to 6,000+ publishers
& webmasters as part of the package.
http://thePhantomWriters.com
Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.
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