I know the title is kind of absurd. I came up with it with Headline Creator Pro. What can I say? But it did give me the idea for this article and that was enough. It also contains a little bit of truth. But I will get to that later.
Why don’t you have your own web site? Because you haven’t learned HTML yet, maybe you need to brush up on your CGI. I mean, you have to have everything perfect right? Wrong. When I wrote Hotbid, I didn’t know how to program. I just knew I needed a program that would help me narrow down the best selling items on Ebay and figure out how they got that way. So I picked up a book on Visual Basic and wrote the program. Looking back at the source code a year later, I am embarrassed at some of the code I wrote. I could have cut it in half. Did I have time to go the conventional way and take a course in programming? Ask the five or more competitors I have now. Rule #1: Learn as you go. There is no better time.
What about that great marketing idea you have? Why haven’t you tried it? No one else has done it. It has proven to be ineffective. When I found autosurf and start page exchanges, I thought that they were the greatest thing since superlong domain names. I started using my Ebay auction urls to send the traffic to. Then I found out from some gurus that autosurfs were really ineffective and were gimmicks. If only I had known that before, I could have prevented myself from increasing the sales on some of my auctions 200% for free. Rule #2: Use beginners luck. It’s the only time you will have it and it is nothing more than breaking the rules before you know they exist. And proving them wrong.
Why aren’t you selling that product that you have been working on for months now? You don’t have time. You can’t compete against marketers that have been out there for years and know a lot more than you do. I thought like this. My first month on Ebay I actually lost money. The next month I made less than $100. A year later, I am doing pretty good. I haven’t quit my day job yet, but it has only been a year. I have had ups and downs but every month gets better. Rule #3: Start now because you won’t gain experience by thinking about it.
Back to the title. Yes, you can use software to write your headlines. You can set up sales machines. You can follow a marketers program step by step and make some money. But I would rather buy from a human being. Rule #4….Oh, I forgot, there were only three rules. Okay, what the hell. Rule #4: There are no rules.
Stephan Miller
http://www.stephanmiller.com
