Truth be told, there’s a little more to success in internet marketing than what you might have read. In fact, there’s a lot more. The reality of it may sting a little. Be patient, it does get better.

The Dreaded Day Job

If Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth) is accurate in his description of the typical entrepreneur then your aspirations toward success in business may indicate that you are already a highly skilled technician. While Gerber sets his sights on helping you achieve your dream of entrepreneurship, today I’m going to attempt to build a bridge between that dream and the reality of your rent (which is probably due tomorrow and you’re devoting your valuable time to reading my blog…).

What’s the bridge? Well, it’s a Day Job. And they aren’t as easy to come by today as they have been in days past. At least that’s what the media suggests.

I actually think it’s a sellers market, if you know how to sell yourself. What’s that? Did I just drift back into IM land when I’m supposed to be talking about getting a “real” job? Nope. Not exactly. Well, maybe there’s more overlap than you originally thought.

Make Money Today

I’m really excited about your ambition to be wildly successful. I really am. However, if you realize that you just need to fall back to plan B for a while and catch up on some bills, there is ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME in getting a day job to get you there. You might find that it actually propels you forward!

This video of a presentation I did should shed some light on it. Depending on interest I may do an in depth series on each point I cover in this presentation. Please leave comments below telling me what you think.

If you pay close attention to what some of the more public copywriters of our era have to say about high quality sales copy, you’ll hear phrases like ‘mint your own money‘ and ‘grab them by the throat and force them to buy‘ or ‘2013% increase in conversions‘.

Of course those phrases are typically part of their sales pitch for a copy writing course and they’re practicing what they preach. For someone interested in writing better copy, those phrases are so tantilizing that they’re hard to pass by.

Books, methods and formulas

I’ve actually read a number of books on the subject of writing sales copy and most of them are really good. Some of them outline methods that you can follow. Others provide formulas. The best books (in my opinion) are those that give more far reaching perspective on life and the human experience. After all, it’s the human experience that really helps us connect with other people and talk to them about benefits.

One of those ‘human experience’ constants seems to be a play on our own weakness. That might be why the elevator pitch works so well. It boils down to this basic format:

Elevator Pitch

I help Name your ideal prospect
… do Some benefit to them/their business
… even if Play on their biggest weakness

An example elevator pitch would go something like this:

“I help entrepreneurs and start ups build profit generating websites with instant ROI even if they have a small budget and are clueless about where to start.”

This won’t get the attention of big businesses and it plays on the almost universal feelings of budget constraint and “where do I start” that most entrepreneurs feel.

Product Launches (or the sideways sales letter as Jeff Walker calls it) can be another effective method for selling to prospects because it incorporates relationship and authority into the sales process in a way that’s natural to many people.

One of the most helpful revelations about writing good sales copy came as I learned to differentiate Benefits from Features. This is especially true for technical products where the proprietor of the product tends to be excited about all the little features he’s built in and forgets to tell the consumer what emotional benefits those features bring.

But this article isn’t really about how to write good sales copy, is it? There’s one crucial component that even the best copy writing books just miss. I think it might be due to the fact that a seasoned copywriter just does it without thinking. Maybe they imagine that it’s a common sense part of the research phase. Maybe they have said it and I missed it for sooooo long. Whatever the case, it’s a real learning experience when the light finally turns on. What am I talking about?

Here’s the embarrasing part

I’m talking about writing the best sales copy in the world for a non-market and wondering what went wrong. It might be more accurate to say writing sales copy, videos and other materials over and over and over for a market that just won’t buy or doesn’t exist.

About 10 years ago I created a website for my running: Maintain Fit Exercise Log. The more time (and money)I invested in the site, the more convinced I was that it was going to be the next big thing. I spent hours of my life (days, weeks and months really) on that “product” confident that the next change would excite the masses and bring in the traffic (and the revenue).

When I finally realized that it was a non-market, I felt both cheated and liberated at the same time. At last I was free to let this beast die and divert my time and attention to new markets for testing. But I’m sure some will ask me to clarify what I mean by a non-market.

Or more specifically, how can you know if you’ve got a non-market? My introduction to this idea of a non-market came when I watched The Magnificent Symphony of Four Parts in 2008. Ed Dale effectively convinced me that I had taken the wrong approach on just about every business I had ever started. Here are two summary points that serve as a good indicator that you’ve got a non-market.

• No competition
• No mature companies/no commercial options

Unfortunately, most people skip this initial research phase when they have a new idea. Instead of figuring out whether there’s a market, whether they can get traffic and whether that traffic will convert, they hole themselves up in the basement and frantically work on developing a product. That’s what I did with Maintain Fit.

The sales copy surprise

When I finally stopped working on any project for which there wasn’t a definite market, I started to see some really worthwhile progress. The traffic was easier to get. The relationships I was forming were more meaningful. The deal flow increased.

What surprised me most of all is that Even Bad Copy Will Sell, if there’s a market. As I tested more and more things, I became exhausted trying to follow the sales copy methods, formulas and models. I finally stopped trying to write sales copy and instead I just wrote what came to me. Was it good sales copy. No, not particularly. But to my surprise it resonated with people and I made sales!

Hopefully, if I’ve motivated you to do anything, it is to Stop tweaking your sales copy for non-markets! If you’ve got a project/business/idea that just isn’t getting traction and you’ve “tried everything”, maybe your idea isn’t really that good after all. Go back to Ed Dale’s advice from 2008 (he covers this every year in The Challenge) and reverse your process.

Research -> Traffic -> Conversions -> Product!

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

Leadership defecit

I’m not sure that he had in mind to point out that there’s a significant leadership deficit right now in America (both business and politics). Some people blame this on our academic system or use of standardized tests where an artificial bar of excellence has been established and everyone is taught from age five to measure themselves against it (and nothing higher). Others argue that TV and movies and other popular media discourage us from reading classic books, which is how character and values have been taught for centuries.

Whatever the true cause of the deficit, there’s little doubt that it exists. Rather than making difficult choices, like sacrifice, discipline and hard work, we seem to be a generation of entitlement. Everyone wants “their fair share”. No wonder Ed Dale and Frank Kern have been heard to lament that the one thing they can’t sell is the “do” part of what they teach.

Leadership vs. Management

One comparison that he uses throughout the book, which I think highlights the leadership deficit, is manager vs. leader. A manager’s job, he suggests, is to maintain the status quo. He isn’t there to innovate or to change. He has the sole purpose of ensuring that production of X goes on according to specifications. Leaders, on the other hand, define specifications.

While I don’t care for his use of the word heretic throughout the book, I think I see what he’s getting at. In this book I think a heretic is someone who challenges the status quo. The reason I say that I don’t like his use of the word is that I doubt most leaders would self identify as a heretic and by choosing a recalcitrant word, they might discount some of the strength of his arguments.

I believe that many leaders rise to their position not because they want to oppose established authority, but instead because they find their backs against the wall. For example, I think that many people would agree that the founders of the United States constitution were effective leaders.

Amid the din of patriotic praise for what they did, we might think that the government they established was heretical for it’s time. That’s not true. In fact, many of them tried (for many years) to reconcile their differences with Britain. They tried as hard to resolve the conflict beforehand as they did to establish independence afterward. They were also very well educated in matters of politics and familiar with the forms of government that have existed throughout the ages.

A leader doesn’t have to fly in the face of established patterns in order to lead. Sometimes to lead means to confront mutiny and maintain order according to specification (or the status quo).

How to identify your tribe

One significant question that the book doesn’t answer is “how do I identify my tribe”. This might have been his intention. After all, how do you teach someone where to go to look for people that might be interested in what you do? The fact is, you just have to make some noise and see who raises their hand in interest. In many cases, the people that compose your tribe may surprise you.

One aspect of identifying your tribe, that I think he understood to be implicit, is that you need to have a deep, burning passion for what your doing. Someone that lacks that all consuming drive for change will rarely be generous, selfless and enduring enough to inspire allegiance from their tribe (all qualities he attributes to leadership).

Noteworthy quotes

Here are a few quotes that I really enjoyed. By the way, I bought my copy on Amazon.

“great leaders don’t try to please everyone”

“the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin”

“Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry”

“It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash.”

And of course, he has a blog: Seth Godin. Go subscribe now.