Is Selling on Your Blog Sleazy?

I just wrote recently about how we’re all salespeople, whether we think so or not. This begs the question: if embracing the fact that we need to sell things in order to really make money online is necessary, why are so many of us wary of asking for money from our readers?

This is an essential issue to address, for the simple fact that if you DON’T ask for what you want, you will not likely get what you want. We all understand this concept, but many of us are still bashful about asking for people to buy things from us. Asking someone for money is tough, it feels to us as if we’re violating or somehow cheapening the relationship we have with our readers.

Are You Ashamed to Ask for Money?

Sometimes we feel ashamed of asking for money, because deep down we feel that salesmen are sleazy. Is selling on your blog sleazy? I hope to answer this in this post, but ultimately this is going to be a personal decision. But know this: if you don’t sell stuff, you’re not likely to ever make much money in anything you do. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing…money isn’t everything. Believe me, I understand this. I’ve turned down several high paying jobs that would have required way too much of my time.

Turning down a job that pays well over a hundred thousand a year is not something a young me would have done. But you learn eventually that money isn’t everything…so I get it.

But this doesn’t mean selling is sleazy! Being sleazy is sleazy. But to say that all salesmanship is sleazy is a blanket statement that we all know is not true. Not if we’re being honest. So, that’s the answer I have for you:

Is selling on your blog sleazy? Yes, if you’re a sleaze. For the rest of us, it’s an honest and absolutely essential business practice.

How to Get What You Want

What does this mean for those of us who really want to make money online? How do we take our business and really promote it effectively through internet marketing, social networking and blogging? Here’s how:

We have to know with absolute clarity what we want. Then we need to ask our readers to give it to us.

This is all there is. Blogging is simple! It’s just work. If we create a LOT of value for our readers, we have every right to ask for money. Not all will. It’s cool. You’ll never have a 100% closing ratio, but you don’t need one. Many internet marketers make good money from a closing ratio hovering around 5%. Personally, I think you should expect way better results than that. But I digress…the point is that you don’t need EVERYONE to give you money, you just need some people to give you money. But if you don’t ask you don’t get.

Lesson from the Trenches

How to create huge value for your readers? This is a great topic for future posts, but let me give you a quick story from my direct sales years for now. I used to sell Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. You learn a lot about building value by selling door to door. I’m asking people who haven’t met me 15 minutes ago to spend $1500 on a vacuum cleaner that didn’t think they needed before I walked in.

After my demonstration, I always asked people what they thought the price tag was, and most of them told me they were expecting a price tag of over $3000. So when I told them it was $1500, they were visibly relieved. You could actually seem them relax into their seat when I gave them the order form.

How do you do this? I will get into the fine details as I continue to develop this blog, but for now I just wanted to give you the basic concept…if you want to ask someone for $1500, you better give them $3000 in value. If you want to have someone buy your ebook for $47, you better be able to show them definitively, in terms they understand, why it’s worth a lot more…that’s the concept.

Give people a deal. It’s more work for you, but it’s a better deal for your customers, and that’s how you make money. You make money by creating value for others.