Secret of Success is Sales . . . Yeeuck!

The great promise of the web was that vast worldwide market where you could reach millions without doing traditional sales. Put up a killer web site and reel in the big fish! Or simply scoop up millions of tiny fish in that big "net". Voila! No sales necessary! Now it's only spammers that fall for that as the rest of us realize we must sell to succeed. How many ideas have succeeded on their own merits - without promotion, marketing and sales? What products have taken the world by storm when no one knew about them? Why do authors go on book-signing tours, actors make the rounds of the talk show circuit, and major companies spend millions on trade shows? They launch monstrous public relations campaigns and give away tchotchke's with their logo emblazoned on them. Public awareness does not come cheap or easy. The sales process is a necessary evil that many small business people abhor (and then they die) or embrace (and then they prosper.) Innovators and inventors must seek venture capital and sell their concept to investors. Why do we recoil from the sales process if the task falls to us as independent business owners? We look to gurus of marketing, P.R. and promotion to rescue us from this task and throw money at advertising to avoid doing sales ourselves. Riches are reaped from multi-level marketers recruiting vast hoards of amateur sales people through pep-rally conventions offering "residual sales" without further effort by building a "downline", another name for sales staff. Then you can ease off, live on the sales efforts of hundreds of new "recruits". The product is secondary and the business opportunity is key to building that sales staff, so you can reach the top of the pyramid and sip tropical drinks on the beach while "they" sell. MLM seeks salespersons whose goal is to avoid selling by recruiting others to do it for them. Affiliate programs have proliferated on the web, recruiting others to sell for them. But in the end the key is sales, sales and more sales, no matter whether the business model is direct sales or through selling the idea to others of selling for you. Sales is key. Try search engine optimization. Is this another approach of seeking sales without effort or expense? No, you must still do the sales while "it" delivers the targeted traffic. SEO brings you folks interested in what you sell by helping your web site communicate effectively with search engine spiders. You must still give each of those visitors your best sales pitch by communicating why they should consider buying your product after SEO helps them to find your site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) delivers potential buyers for your product or service. Eyeballs for your sales pitch are its specialty. You create a needed product or service and SEO brings you people interested in what you sell so you can sell to them. You still do the selling, but now you have visitors to offer your sales pitch to. Convince them after SEO brings them to you and you will make sales, make lots of sales and you will be successful. SEO delivers prospects for your sale.