You say people don’t act on your offer.
Yes, but they act as they are.
You say you shouldn’t have to appeal to human emotion.
Yes, but otherwise nothing gets done.
You say you want to change the world.
Yes, but you seek change through reality, not in spite of it.
So, how’s the economic meltdown treating you? Excited about the opportunities, or sick to your stomach worrying about how your bills will get paid?
Exhilarated or freaked out?
Maybe a little of both?
If you’re trying to sell products and services online, you’re probably looking for that one magic key to make your business work.
You buy CDs and DVDs that will tell you the secret.
You subscribe to sites like Copyblogger to study the secret.
You look at mega-successful sites in your market and try to reverse engineer the secret.
After all of this searching, you may be tempted to believe there is no secret. But the secret is real.
The best book I’ve ever read about marketing isn’t about marketing. It’s about baseball.
The book’s called Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
The premise is that baseball insiders are guilty of a herd mentality that’s focused on the wrong things and reaches the wrong conclusions. If you know nothing at all about baseball you’ll still learn very valuable lessons about business.
The book is centered on Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s.
Beane ignores all the conventional wisdom (i.e., baloney) that permeates the sport. He and his staff developed their own principles about what makes a ballplayer valuable. And they follow these principles regardless of what the herd thinks.
The opportunities to build a business with online marketing are huge and growing every day. In fact, there’s so much opportunity out there some people become overwhelmed by all the possibilities.
When you can do anything, often you end up doing nothing. People get so dazzled by dollar signs and freedom from bosses and geography that it’s easy to forget that what you do for money is often more important than how much money you make.
Do you want to know the real secret of success?
Okay, I’ll tell you. But first I want you to meet my grandparents. They lived in the heart of West Virginia. As a child, I spent many long summer days at their home, running in the wide green yard and splashing through the creek looking for crawdads. I’d play until my grandmother called me in for dinner.
The meals were never fancy but always fresh because my grandparents raised a lot of their own food, including corn, potatoes, green beans, strawberries, grapes, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and a few chickens.
