To a lot of people, there are only two ways to make money. One, agree to sell your soul to the 9 to 5 prison of a “real” job in exchange for a paycheck. Two, break the law in some way and receive your money illegally.
Don’t believe me? Ask some of your friends. If they have a degree, ask them why they got it. At least 75% of the time, you will get an answer along the lines of “to get a well- paying job.” For that matter, ask yourself. I did. And in a period of honesty, I answered, “So that I would have a piece of paper that would tell employers that I know what I am doing so that they can enslave me and I can be numbed, by the 50% higher pay, into believing that I was happy taking orders from people who trampled my own ideas and replaced them with their own bureaucratic ones.” Sorry! My monologues to myself don’t have many periods.
What am I getting to here and what in the heck does it have to do with Internet Marketing? It comes down to this. A lot of your potential customers have no idea what you are talking about when you suggest that they can make money from home. Sometimes you have to lead them, as if they were blind. Sometimes you have to smack them over the head, as if they were hypnotized, which they are. By a system that tells them that the only way to make money is by becoming a cog in a machine fueled with such words as salary, procedure, policy, politics, pension, retirement, and 401k.
Maybe an example would help you. I got my start selling on eBay and I still do. I sell mainly information and software now because hard products just took too much of my time. There are goldmines waiting at thrift stores and garage sales if you are into collectibles and antiques, but I had no idea where to start. On the other hand, my parents have shopped this way since I was young. Every Saturday, my Mom would make out a list of garage sales to hit and then systematically follow her shopping plan.
Recently, on a trip back home, I got to look at some of their purchases from the weekend. I have gradually developed a profit radar and it was going off. They had spent $100 buying anything from an old Montgomery Ward coffee table with a turntable built in to a few toys from the seventies. I told them that they were naturals. Just five hours of shopping and they had come back with a ton of booty. They had no idea what I was talking about. They just knew what they liked and if the price was good, they bought it.
So I went to the net and brought back some prices. I asked them how they would like to make $50,000 a year and never have to say the word “boss” again, by doing what they already did and learning a little about eBay. They still had no notion of what I was proposing and thought it required a business degree, an office, a company name. You know, all those good things they teach us about in school for twelve or more years.
I felt like a missionary in some hidden region of the world, preaching in a language that my audience did not understand. And guess what, they are still not among the converted. But it is my goal to bring them to the light and I will.
It got me thinking. That your best potential customers may not be ignoring you. They just have no idea what you are talking about. And why are they the “best?” Everyone has that dream to be free, no matter how much they hide it. And who is the best convert? The one who never thought their dream could be reality and you give them a taste. There is no going back then.
Stephan Miller
http://www.stephanmiller.com
