Marketing vs. Selling

The biggest resistance I hear from booklet authors has to do with marketing. What they really mean is selling, asking for the sale in some way. Marketing deals with creating a presence for your product or service, letting people know what it is you've got and how they can get it. Selling is asking for the sale. In a perfect world, marketing automatically rolls effortlessly into selling.

Back to marketing for a moment. It's easy for me to be reminded about the many ways I choose to market my business when I look at where my ezine subscribers and my clients hear about the business from what they say on the subscriber sign-up form and the product order form. (Yes, I ask where they heard about us.). It's a wide range of mechanisms -- in-person speaking, teleclasses, books that others have written in which I've been included, someone else's website, an article I wrote, a friend or colleague's referral, radio interview, an online search, a party, the schedule of a conference they didn't attend, an article in a local paper, a post I placed on someone's discussion board or blog, and on and on. Does this take a lot of time? Nah, it's all bits and pieces, spread out over time. It's a rare week that I don't do something that is defined as marketing. It merely becomes cumulative. Yes, I make a lot of sales directly from these activities. And that's before I email or phone someone to specifically suggest I believe it to be in their best interest for us to exchange their currency for some product or service I've got. That last part is sales.

Until next time,
Paulette - finding new ways to have fun marketing
www.tipsbooklets.com