Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

There’s an interesting challenge I’ve come up against many times, which I think most professional bloggers know well.

The challenge is how to sell something without using all that horrible “hype” that Internet marketers use.

But wait a second. Hype actually works, or at least good “sales copy” works if you call convincing people to buy what you sell your desired outcome.

The challenge is figuring out what level of “sales talk” to use when trying to sell. You don’t want to be accused of over-hyping something, nor do you want to put in such a weak effort that no one buys.

The problem unfortunately cannot be solved 100% because what is hype to one person is not to another. We all have our own internal “bullshit meter” as it might be labeled, based on all kinds of things like our personality, experience with marketing, emotional state at the time of reference, etc etc.

You can’t account for everything, but you can work with what you should hopefully know quite well – you and your potential customers- and attempt to meet the needs of both.

Membership Site Mastermind Reopens Tuesday November 3rd For 24 Hours Only

Did you read that sub-heading? I hope you did.

It might seem a little out of place, but I put it there because one of the messages I want you to take away from reading this blog post is that I’m reopening Membership Site Mastermind for one last day for all the stragglers and latecomers who didn’t join during the opening last week.

I know there are stragglers because they keep emailing me asking if they can squeeze in, so I’m giving you one last chance to take the program with me during this final run for 2009.

This will definitely be the last time it’s open this year. No more one day openings, no exceptions, if you email and ask no matter how good your excuse, you won’t be allowed in. That wouldn’t be fair to the hundreds of people who took initiative and joined when the doors were open.

You can sign up here from 11 AM EST US time on Tuesday for 24 hours only -

So, back to my original thought train…

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As you likely know, Gideon and I wrapped up the opening marketing campaign for Become A Blogger Premium a couple of weeks ago. During that period we both wrote lots of emails to our various subscribers, email being the primary communication method and also the distribution channel for delivering resources like the Roadmap report.

Most of you haven’t met Gideon or myself in person, but if you did, you would see we are both down to earth and soft spoken – not your typical extroverted, in-your-face marketers. Of course what you perceive as over-the-top might be different to another person so you may not agree, but I’m pretty comfortable saying that Gideon and I are way below average when it comes to the hype-o-meter.

One interesting observation I made during our launch that you probably weren’t aware of, was Gideon’s email marketing style (his writing style when promoting), compared to how he is in his videos.

Gideon has difficulty doing any kind of “sales pitch” in his videos, he much prefers to focus on content, and if you watch the few parts at the end of his videos where he was promoting our paid course, you could tell he wasn’t pushing very hard at all.

However, when Gideon wrote emails, he wasn’t afraid to use his marketing skills. He knows the triggers, is quite comfortable pushing all the right buttons and isn’t afraid of saying whatever it takes to convince you that you need to do what he suggests.

This is important because if Gideon couldn’t sell the premium course when it came time to sell it, then our results would have been negatively impacted. At some point in business you have to be prepared to sell.

The same goes for anything else we promote through email, whether it’s to convince people to watch a free video, or download a report or read a blog post. It’s not always about eliciting a purchase, it’s any time you want people to click a link or even just open an email in the first place – any action at all is impacted by your ability to “sell” the benefits of taking that action through the words that you use.

I asked Gideon if he had studied copywriting – and he has – which explains his ability to talk in marketing speak when communicating via email when necessary, yet it doesn’t show up in other forms of communication with him. Gideon has learned skills that are vital to his success as an Internet marketer, and you can too.

Be Your Self

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I’m doing a lot of interviews lately, but this was definitely one of the best. Ray Edwards has embraced blogging wholeheartedly and is making serious changes to his business model to focus on his blog as the linchpin of his operation.

Ray’s core skill is copywriting and he has a lot of students who learn from him how to use words to their advantage. We’re talking authors, freelancer writers, copywriters, speakers and general small business folk who use words to sell (pretty much all of us who have an online business!).

I jumped at the chance to present to Ray’s audience through an interview and offer my thoughts on how blogs could be used to help authors, speakers and writers who want to translate their words into an income stream through blogging.

You can download the podcast here – Blogging For Six Figures? Writers Take Note!

It’s worth listening to this podcast to hear Ray speak too. As a copywriter he knows how to speak good copy as well, so listen how Ray leads this interview and you can learn a lot about good podcast technique.

With my new Macbook Pro I have some sophisticated video tools available and I’m not afraid to use them – so be warned!

As many of you know, I’m reopening Blog Mastermind hopefully in just a couple of weeks time. What this means is a ton of work for me to get things ready.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has always been about sharing the behind-the-scenes details of my business with you, so I’m going to do a series of video posts talking about exactly what I am working on for the relaunch of Blog Mastermind. I prefer to teach through what I am doing rather than talking about theories and observations without practical experience.

This is a real live case study of a real live product launch, so if launching a product of your own using your blog (or not) is something that interests you, stay tuned, you will enjoy my upcoming videos. You might want to subscribe to my RSS feed if you haven’t already to make sure you don’t miss any.

Note since this is a case study you will get the good with the bad. My launches are far from perfect and there is room for improvement. Also since my video skills are still underdeveloped I apologize for any production issues – I’d rather get something out to you than kill myself trying to make it perfect. No doubt I’ll get better with practice too .

Case Study Video 1: Talking About The Sales Page

Here’s the first video of the case study talking about what I’m working on right now – the sales page – Enjoy!

I should have the next video out to you tomorrow.

Yaro Starak
Playing with iMovie