by Robert Imbriale, The Motivational Marketer
For me, selling online began in 1989 with my very first sale. Back then, few people even knew there was an online world.
Today, people come from all walks of life to try their hand at creating successful Internet businesses. The sad fact is that the vast, vast majority will fail to even make their first sale. Most will be out of business inside of 6 months.
So why is selling on the Internet so complex? Why do so many who come to the Internet expecting to become instant millionaires only to find that they can’t make a single sale?
The issue at hand is two-fold. First, most people who come to the Internet to make money lack any knowledge of the sales process. In other words, they don’t know what it takes to make a sale in the real world, but somehow they expect to be able to suddenly make millions selling online.
What they miss is that behind all the technology there are people who think, feel, and act, just like you and me. To sell to them online, you use the same selling strategies as if they were standing right there in front of you.
If you hate selling, getting on the Internet is not going to make it any more appealing. You’ve got to know how to sell in order to make money on the Internet, even if you’re promoting other people’s products using affiliate links.
The second thing that keeps people from making it on the Internet is the technical side of things. Many technologies can be very intimidating and often confusing and that simply stops people from moving forward. There is a simple solution to this issue and that’s hiring somebody else to handle the technical side of things.
There is no point in taking time to learn HTML if all you need is one web site. There is no need to learn how to set up a shopping cart and a merchant account if you’ll only need to do it once. Hire these things out instead. A person who does this kind of work on a daily basis will always be better equipped to get the job done faster and better anyway.
Finally, there is one other area where people often get sidetracked and that comes from the vast amount of misinformation on the market today.
There are thousands of seminars, webcasts, training programs, and classes that all have some measure of contradiction between them. A person who chooses the learn from multiple sources can often end up more confused than they do educated.
Most training programs make the mistake of being focused only on one specific part of the online sales process. While this is great if that’s the are where you are looking for additional knowledge, it often fails to serve the newcomer
When I began teaching people how to market and sell online in 1995, and I was always keenly aware that people need to know how all the pieces interact with one another before they can grab onto any one of them in a meaningful way.
With this basic understanding, you stand a much better chance of making money online than if you just had a piece here and there of how it all works together.
The best advice I would offer to a newcomer, is to choose one mentor and follow their instruction as closely as possible. Choose a person with at least a decade or more experience selling online and with a proven track record of helping other people become successful at building online businesses.
Robert Imbriale is a leading trainer in the area of Internet marketing. He has been online since 1984, started making money online in 1989, and is responsible for more than a quarter of a billion dollars in sales since 1995. His best-selling book, Motivational Marketing is a literal marketing course in a book and much sought after resource from business owners around the globe. To learn more about Robert Imbriale, go to http://www.RobertImbriale.com