
Marketing: The Trick to Making Money
As we're on the theme of generating an income, let's talk about marketing. The trick to making money is knowing your custom-base and how to sell to them.
Knowing what to sell them will depend on knowing what they need, but you can get that information by literally asking them!
You'll no doubt hear from any number of experts in the field of money making that knowing how to sell is the best way to go about it.
That's true, because if you can sell things to people who want to buy them, you will naturally make some money. The actual amount will depend on the profit margin or, in the case of affiliate marketing, the commission structure.
Marketing is just a fancy way of saying "selling" by the way. What you're doing is following the two main steps of how to sell, which are:
- Find out what people need
- Fill that need
The "finding out" stage is a major part of the marketing stage. This is where you do whatever is necessary to know what your potential customers want or need. The actual strategy is:
Find a problem | Provide the solution
If you can't find a problem that people have, you're looking in the wrong place.
Find the Problem
People always have problems and it's your job as a marketer to figure out what they are, then offer a solution to sell them that makes you money.
Some of the more underhanded marketers will go a step further and if they can't find a problem for which they already have a solution, they create the problem!
A great example I heard recently involves a fictional door to door salesman who sold fire alarms:
After knocking on many doors in a neighborhood without selling a single fire alarm, the salesman was getting disillusioned with the job. Then he came up with an idea.
That night, he went to an empty house in the neighborhood and started a fire in it. He called the fire service right away, so no great damage was done, but now he had what he needed.
Next day, with the fire having already aired on the local news stations, he went knocking on doors around the same neighborhood. This time, as you can imagine, he sold plenty of fire alarms to highly motivated customers!
While that's not a particularly ethical example of creating a problem that you already have the solution to, it graphically fires up the imagination to what's possible.
The salesman needed to sell fire alarms, but he also needed people to see they would have a problem if they didn't have one. A fire starting in a neighboring house created the problem.
Offer a Solution
When you look around you at the way the world works, it become rather obvious that many large corporations make use of a very similar tactic to sell their products.
For example, in order to sell electric cars, manufacturers need people to fear running out of gasoline, or worry about the air pollution problem caused by gas-fueled cars. So they run media campaigns to make people acutely aware of the devastating health problems caused by so much air pollution, while wars on the other side of the world are threatening fuel supplies.
Often, nature comes to the rescue of certain manufacturers, such as climate change helping along the sales of sun cream, air conditioning and swimming pools for example!
There are plenty of solutions to existing problems that most people encounter every day.
How many people suffer from skin problems that a visit to the dermatologist fixes for a while until it comes back?
What about air conditioners that always seem to go wrong just as a heatwave is about to strike? Or central heating systems that stop working just as winter approaches?
A common solution to a very common problem is probably staring right at you right now as you read this. Does your computer have an anti-virus program running to keep you safe from evil hackers?
The trick to selling is in knowing what problems your customers have and to pitch a solution in a certain way that is difficult for them to refuse.
Market Surveys
One very powerful tool that marketers use to discover what people want is to get them to fill in surveys.
These are basically a list of simple questions about certain subjects that they can easily answer. Their answers give the marketer what they need to offer products or services that they have already revealed they need.
A great use of websites or blogs is to run competitions with a real prize at the end. The entrants just need to answer some simple questions to be in with a chance of winning in a final draw to take place in the near future.
The answers to those questions can help the website owner to tailor their promotional material to best suit the needs of the competition entrants to sell them stuff down the line.
Knowing what your customers want is a powerful thing, because it tells you what you have the best chance of selling that they'll buy.
Summary
Making money from selling products or services when you work on a home business is what makes the world go around, rather than just the money itself.
As long as there is a need that needs to be filled, you can be sure there will be a product/service that will fill it.
As a marketer, your job is to discover what that need is and have something ready to offer for profit or commission for you.
Last Updated: December 8, 2024
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