If there is one set of skills that are frequently promoted as the ONE key to making money by almost everyone online, it's either copywriting, sales or marketing. According to these people, if you learn this skill, you can PRINT your checkbook - and it can be whatever you set it to be. And it sounds obvious - no business exists without sales, and you make money when you make sales. Therefore, the most important thing is to make sales, and the most important skill is the one that helps you make sales. If you're running an online business, that is copywriting, if you're running a brick and mortar business that is sales & marketing.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_O9yEOo4g
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM401lk1794
Well, I hate to break it to you but, if that was the key, then the richest people in the world would all be copywriters. They would all be trained salesmen. But fact is that most billionaires out there are not salesmen, and they are not copywriters. That is not the factor that separated them from the rest of the pack at least. Some, like Dane Maxwell above, like to make the claim that copywriting and sales also enable you to identify needs, and then you can just create a solution, and boom - billionaire. But this is wrong, and you will soon understand why if you read to the end.
This is not to say that copywriting, sales and marketing are not important. They are. They do make a big difference, especially at the lower levels of wealth. It's not hard to make 100K-1M with these skills alone. You can even get to 10M. The problem comes when you try to scale higher and reach 100M+ or keep the results consistent over time.
Why am I making this post?
To dispel a lot of misunderstandings, on both the entrepreneur and the client-side, about what marketing and copywriting can and cannot do. And this matters because (1) you can have the wrong expectations about it as an entrepreneur and then invest a ton of time only to be disappointed, and (2) as a client, you may think that if you only get this right, then your product or service would finally take off and succeed - this can cause you to waste a lot of resources and still fail big.
First - what can copywriting, sales and marketing do?
It can help open up an already existing market and help you fulfill already existing demand. It can even help you increase demand given an already existing demand for the product/service.
This means that once you have a product or service for which there is demand, provided that your product or service is competitive, copywriting, sales and marketing can help you scale and gain a positioning edge over the competition. How much can you scale? As much as the market size, and level of competition permits you.
Second - what can copywriting, sales and marketing NOT do?
Most importantly, they cannot create desire or demand. They may increase desire or demand, or move it to take action, but they cannot create it. What this means is that if your product or service does not have a sufficiently INTENSE appeal or the appeal is not BROAD enough, then you will fail. And better sales, marketing and copywriting will not save you, they will just "help" you fail faster.
What creates desire and demand is the market. And the market is formed of millions of individuals with their own specific needs and desires. The number of people who have the needs and desires your product can satisfy is the breadth of your market. And the average intensity of those desires represents the inherent appeal of your product - how easy it is to convince someone that they need it. Then the level of competition determines your initial probability of being the go-to choice for a customer.
Broad market + intense desire + low competition = big profits
Copywriting, sales and marketing will not help you get any of these determining factors though. Copywriting won't give you a broad market, it will not help your product have an inherently intense appeal, and it will not lower your competition. What copywriting can do is help you scale once you have that foundation right. Often we call that foundation product-market fit.
I've worked with more than 100+ businesses to grow their sales. And here's what I noticed: products and businesses with a broad market, high intensity desire, and low competition can grow quite a lot even with BAD & MEDIOCRE copywriting. With great copywriting, they scale like crazy. On the other hand, BAD businesses, with a small market, low intensity desire, and high competition require Gary Halbert level copywriting JUST TO COMPETE & STAY AFLOAT. So it's important to get the right foundation. Getting the right foundation is MORE important for an entrepreneur than sales and marketing if you want to become really really really rich - not just 1M rich.
Now, I said earlier that copywriting, sales and marketing skills cannot help you get the above foundation right. And here's why - the approach many people suggest for identifying a niche, pain-point or problem, based on the consultative selling approach, is NOT effective at determining the BREADTH of the potential market, NOR for that matter the AVERAGE inherent appeal of a solution to the problem. What very often ends up happening is that you identify a unique need which is common to just a few market players, and with a high individual appeal, but low average appeal.
Our brains are not good at thinking in statistics. We're prone to be emotionally influenced by one conversation, the needs of one person, and we're prone to overgeneralize, and focus on what is ultimately small stuff in the big picture. Even talking with 100 people in your niche does not give you sufficient statistical depth to be able to draw conclusions with much accuracy.
That's why those courses and similar, while increasing your chances of success, still don't take them above 10-20% max.
So, if you're not making sufficient sales, or your costs of advertising are too high, better copywriting or marketing may not be able to save you. It may be time to look at the fundamentals of your business and your product-market fit and decide if it's worth persisting.
Likewise, if you want to be an entrepreneur, and you want to create a product/service, you may want to invest more in product/service development until you get a solid product-market fit, and less in copywriting/sales/marketing. Invest more in creating new capacities that can help a big market rather than sales.
TL;DR: Sales is essential to make money fast, but getting the right product-market fit is the key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs in the long run.
Well, I hate to break it to you but, if that was the key, then the richest people in the world would all be copywriters. They would all be trained salesmen. But fact is that most billionaires out there are not salesmen, and they are not copywriters. That is not the factor that separated them from the rest of the pack at least. Some, like Dane Maxwell above, like to make the claim that copywriting and sales also enable you to identify needs, and then you can just create a solution, and boom - billionaire. But this is wrong, and you will soon understand why if you read to the end.
This is not to say that copywriting, sales and marketing are not important. They are. They do make a big difference, especially at the lower levels of wealth. It's not hard to make 100K-1M with these skills alone. You can even get to 10M. The problem comes when you try to scale higher and reach 100M+ or keep the results consistent over time.
Why am I making this post?
To dispel a lot of misunderstandings, on both the entrepreneur and the client-side, about what marketing and copywriting can and cannot do. And this matters because (1) you can have the wrong expectations about it as an entrepreneur and then invest a ton of time only to be disappointed, and (2) as a client, you may think that if you only get this right, then your product or service would finally take off and succeed - this can cause you to waste a lot of resources and still fail big.
First - what can copywriting, sales and marketing do?
It can help open up an already existing market and help you fulfill already existing demand. It can even help you increase demand given an already existing demand for the product/service.
This means that once you have a product or service for which there is demand, provided that your product or service is competitive, copywriting, sales and marketing can help you scale and gain a positioning edge over the competition. How much can you scale? As much as the market size, and level of competition permits you.
Second - what can copywriting, sales and marketing NOT do?
Most importantly, they cannot create desire or demand. They may increase desire or demand, or move it to take action, but they cannot create it. What this means is that if your product or service does not have a sufficiently INTENSE appeal or the appeal is not BROAD enough, then you will fail. And better sales, marketing and copywriting will not save you, they will just "help" you fail faster.
What creates desire and demand is the market. And the market is formed of millions of individuals with their own specific needs and desires. The number of people who have the needs and desires your product can satisfy is the breadth of your market. And the average intensity of those desires represents the inherent appeal of your product - how easy it is to convince someone that they need it. Then the level of competition determines your initial probability of being the go-to choice for a customer.
Broad market + intense desire + low competition = big profits
Copywriting, sales and marketing will not help you get any of these determining factors though. Copywriting won't give you a broad market, it will not help your product have an inherently intense appeal, and it will not lower your competition. What copywriting can do is help you scale once you have that foundation right. Often we call that foundation product-market fit.
I've worked with more than 100+ businesses to grow their sales. And here's what I noticed: products and businesses with a broad market, high intensity desire, and low competition can grow quite a lot even with BAD & MEDIOCRE copywriting. With great copywriting, they scale like crazy. On the other hand, BAD businesses, with a small market, low intensity desire, and high competition require Gary Halbert level copywriting JUST TO COMPETE & STAY AFLOAT. So it's important to get the right foundation. Getting the right foundation is MORE important for an entrepreneur than sales and marketing if you want to become really really really rich - not just 1M rich.
Now, I said earlier that copywriting, sales and marketing skills cannot help you get the above foundation right. And here's why - the approach many people suggest for identifying a niche, pain-point or problem, based on the consultative selling approach, is NOT effective at determining the BREADTH of the potential market, NOR for that matter the AVERAGE inherent appeal of a solution to the problem. What very often ends up happening is that you identify a unique need which is common to just a few market players, and with a high individual appeal, but low average appeal.
Our brains are not good at thinking in statistics. We're prone to be emotionally influenced by one conversation, the needs of one person, and we're prone to overgeneralize, and focus on what is ultimately small stuff in the big picture. Even talking with 100 people in your niche does not give you sufficient statistical depth to be able to draw conclusions with much accuracy.
That's why those courses and similar, while increasing your chances of success, still don't take them above 10-20% max.
So, if you're not making sufficient sales, or your costs of advertising are too high, better copywriting or marketing may not be able to save you. It may be time to look at the fundamentals of your business and your product-market fit and decide if it's worth persisting.
Likewise, if you want to be an entrepreneur, and you want to create a product/service, you may want to invest more in product/service development until you get a solid product-market fit, and less in copywriting/sales/marketing. Invest more in creating new capacities that can help a big market rather than sales.
TL;DR: Sales is essential to make money fast, but getting the right product-market fit is the key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs in the long run.
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