"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door".
Thoreau said that.
Unfortunately, he knew nothing about marketing-which may be why he had to spend a New England winter alone in a shack next to a pond.
In business, marketing is much more important than the quality of the product.
I'm not saying you should sell shoddy products.
If you're smart you'll always over deliver, so that your customer is delighted and stays with you for life-buying more and more expensive products from you.
What I am saying is in the final analysis, the thought you put into marketing had better be greater than or equal to the thought you put into your product.
The internet is littered with great products that aren't selling.
Selling anything on the Internet is a matter of getting a lot of people to take a look at a website or an email featuring your product.
You need to either get traffic to that website, or drive traffic to something else you can use to build a list.
So, step number one is always creating traffic.
But you can have thousands of visitors to your site, and if the content on your site doesn't convert them into buyers all your work is for naught! Given you have traffic, converting your traffic to buyers is the job of a well-written sales letter.
Unless you can afford to hire a copywriter (which you might want to consider, if you have the money) you're going to need to write your sales letters yourself.
I'm not going to lie to you and tell you this is easy to do.
Writing the sales letter for a product can take a significant amount of the total time it takes to create something and get it to market.
But a good sales letter is worth your time.
In marketing, the sales letter is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.
To write a good sales letter you have to train yourself to think about everything from the point of view of your customer.
What prospective buyers are interested in is the benefits of your product.
What your product is going to do for them.
People buy things because they have an itch that needs scratching.
With that in mind, let me give you a quick outline for a basic sales letter.
Headline (You've got to grab their attention) Sub headline (to explain further, if needed) Quick description of what you're selling-an ebook, a video course, whatever.
An explanation of benefits the buyer will receive from this product.
A list of all the possible reasons a buyer might decided not to buy your product, with counters to those objections.
(Here's where all those testimonials come in.
) Finally, a call to action.
Actually tell your reader to pull out their credit card, click here, and buy the product.
I've oversimplified all of this quite a bit, but if your sales letter addresses all of these issues, then you've got a good start at converting your hard earned traffic into paying customers.