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May 21, 2007
 Most of us are taught to work hard and do a good job. We are taught from a young age that if we work hard enough we'll be successful. While this philosophy has valid merit from a moralistic point of view, when it comes to making money and the accumulation of wealth, it simply does not apply.
I know a lot of very smart people who are living paycheck to paycheck or even worse. I personally know a lot of people who have tried and tried to make money with various Internet or software based products and/or businesses. Thousands of hours of work have been poured into creating products that have never made one penny of profit. These people have lost years of their life, time with their spouses and time with their children, in some cases they've divorced because of it. They ask me why. They want to know why they can't seem to sell anything they create. They want to know why they can't make any money on the internet while they see others raking in the cash.
The answer is simple yet complicated at the same time. This is my story; I'm the techno geek who couldn't sell a soft drink to a kid on a hot summer day. I've created, either on my own, or with other techno geeks, several products that were complete flops. I've been part of struggling startups with cool products that were never fully funded and whose management relied too much on smart people like me holding things together with duct tape - until we were bought by larger companies and subsequently laid off. That's the down side. On the positive side, I'm a much better programmer now than before I did all that coding and network engineering stuff! So what happened? What changed me? What forbidden secrets did I uncover to selling and what have I learned as to why so many people fail?
Let's go back in time several years. I used to work with a man who had grown several brick and mortar business and sold them. Now he wasn't rich, but he was doing OK. Actually, he may have been rich and just didn't brag, which to me is the preferable way to be. I was managing a computer store at the time, selling PC clones. He was brought in as a consultant to help increase sales. I knew a lot about PCs, but nothing about the retail environment. He on the other hand, new absolutely nothing about computers but could sell anything to anyone. I would ask him how he managed to make a certain sale, or how he sold his office supply store twice, or some other question, and he would always answer: "Because I was too dumb to know that I couldn't". Now the man was not dumb by any stretch of the imagination! He was more what I'd call "Street Smart". I think he was also the person that taught me "Act like you're supposed to be there and most likely no one will ask you to leave". Years later I would realize that those two things are very important to a person's success or failure, especially when it comes to selling something. That something could be a car, a business, a job interview (selling yourself), trying to get a date (again, selling yourself), talking your way out of a mugging or a traffic ticket, or anything else you can think of.
So why do smart people sometimes fail at making money? Smart people think. Sometimes they think too much. Sometimes people who are book smart think themselves into failure when a street smart person would just plow ahead and get the job done. It's like jumping into a cold lake or swimming pool - if you stand there thinking about it, you'll never jump. You just have to take the plunge. Then once you're wet you realize that all your worrying was silly and a waste of time. I've learned that it's the same with making money. Action is the only path to success. You can't just sit around at lunch talking to your buddies about it. You have to actually get or create a product. Put a sales page online. Sign up for a Paypal or Clickbank account. Write and submit some articles, and make some sales. Sitting around and thinking about it won't do it. Taking action is the only way to make money, or accomplish anything.
What I've also learned, and I've learned this the hard way, is that there is very little relationship between the amount of work you put into something and the amount of profit or income you stand to make from it. This goes for a regular job as well as someone with their own business. Some have amassed millions selling products they've never touched, didn't create, never warehoused, haven't used, or necessarily even seen. They've done this from web sites that look awful and that were built in a few short hours. They may spend a few hours each week working on their mailing list and generating traffic, and the cash just pours in. Meanwhile the studious and smart programmer type keeps adding features and fixing bugs and wondering "when is this thing going to take off and make some money". There's also the blue collar worker with two jobs trying to feed his family, killing himself working long hours, and working hard, wondering when and if things are going to get better. Or two white collar workers, both doing the same job in the same company, one making considerably less than the other simply because he didn't ask for as high of a salary. The list can go on and on.
You may have developed the best application or product in the world, a product everyone will want to buy, but how do you get it to sell? The answer is marketing. It's powerful stuff... A lot of technical people completely miss just how powerful marketing can be. They're the people who are frustrated that the hundreds of hours they've put into creating something have been in vain, with little or no sales to show for it. They're the people scratching their heads saying "As smart as we are, we should be rich." The problem is hard work does not necessarily lead to financial success. In fact, it often leads to the opposite.
If you're in this position, you have to stop product development. You have to take off your propeller beanie, put on your white loafers, and learn how to write some killer sales copy. OK, I was just kidding about the white loafers. You have to learn the various steps and processes that can be used to successfully market a product or service (or yourself). If you have the funds available, you could hire a really good copywriter to create your sales letters, email, web-site, etc. However, this is probably out of the reach of someone with just an idea and a PC. Even if you only want to sell your invention or product to a large company, and not market it to the public yourself, you still need to have the marketing ability to sell the idea to the large company.
Two of the small companies I've worked for were bought by huge international corporations. If you have ever worked in a technical position in a large company and were part of a team developing a product, it's always interesting to read the marketing materials, packaging, etc. that the sales and marketing department creates for your product. It's common to hear things like "does it do that?" as we would stand there scratching our heads, or "what were they thinking when they wrote this?" Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's not, but what it does show is how different the thinking process is between the group that develops or creates the product and the group that has the responsibility to sell it (and therefore make money from it). If you're trying to create and sell your own products, you need to learn to wear, and appreciate, both hats.
Wearing both of those hats is not always a natural thing, but it can be learned. Marketing and salesmanship are skill sets in and of themselves. Unfortunately, a lot of technically oriented people possess zero sales and marketing skills. Some even look down on the Sales and Marketing types. That is, until they realize that without sales, no one makes any money!
This is a two part article. Please sign up with the form below and I'll notify you when I post the second installment titled: 13 Tips to Supercharge Sales and Become Marketing Savvy.
Take Care,
Fred
About the Author
Fred Black is an experienced programmer, web site developer, online business operator, systems integrator, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.
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