There's loads of material about making money available on the Internet. Most of it is called "How you can make money on the Internet by selling products called How to make money on the Internet".

If it's not that title, it's about how to write "killer" advertising copy or how to write adverts that draw people to your product like bees to the honey jar.

There's never anything about sales, selling or the sales process. Why?

Has selling become a dirty word?

Let's take a look at the processes of selling and advertising and look at the links.

Advertising is simply salesmanship in print (salespersonship just didn't sound right - sorry!). Advertising has one purpose: to generate sales. It serves no other purpose. If you disagree, read "Tested advertising Methods" by John Caples or Claude Hopkins books "My life in Advertising" and "Scientific advertising". You'll be left with no doubt.

Like salespeople, there's good and bad advertising. Good advertising draws buyers to you. Its effectiveness can be measured and the results identified.

As with sales, the goal is profitable revenue. Bad advertising is just that. It doesn't get the phone ringing or the Clickbank account swelling.

When you buy books about copywriting, they give you a formula to follow. Essentially, that formula is to record your sales presentation, and then write it down. What you write forms the basis of your advert, website or direct mail piece. That's all well and good, but what if you don't understand the sales process?

If you can't sell, you can't use the formula. So the fundamental lesson is to understand the sales process.

Unlike sales people, direct marketers rely on high volumes of visitors or readers (traffic). Success in selling relies on high quality prospects, not volume. There's only a certain number of people you can see to sell to in any given week. Depending on what you sell, that may be as few as five people or as many as 30.

Unlike an advert selling is interactive. The days of making a pitch disappeared along with the snake oil salesman. There has to be two-way dialog. From the two-way dialog comes an understanding of the process. You learn to read the buyer's response from their body language, for the questions they ask and the answers they give to your questions.

With that understanding, you can start to write copy. You build the copy around the framework of your presentation, including the questions and your replies along the way.

The process of the sale, like a good website, has a structure. A beginning, middle and an end. Even the best Internet marketers will tell you that a 5% conversion rate from your site is good. If you as a salesperson on

[1] [2] NextPage