What are you selling? Who are you trying to persuade to do what?
Healthy food to your children? Ideas to work colleagues? The benefits of a summer holiday in Barbados to your wife? Yourself in job interviews?
I’m selling books, (& mindful writing e-courses, & psychotherapy). Sometimes this weighs heavily on me.
Sometimes I feel like all I ever do is find a million ways of saying ‘look, this is wonderful! buy it!‘. Book launches, networking, setting up tweets, crafting blogs like this one… Sometimes I want to just concentrate on writing the books instead, or drinking earl grey redbush and reading books about taxidermy (research for the work in progress).
This morning, reading another book on marketing, I was prompted to remember the good news about selling stuff.
I sell stuff because I want people to be happy. I want them to read my books and be transformed by them, even just a teensy bit. I want them to fall in love with my characters as much as I do, and to allow them to shed some light on their own lives. Let me say it again – I sell stuff because I want people to be happy.
From this starting point, it all just becomes about getting what you have to sell in front of the right people. The ones who will not just happily swap what you have for their money, but feel that they owe you at the end of the transaction. I also get to pay my mortgage, which the mortgage company is pleased about, and buy other stuff like yoga and chocolate brownie ingredients.
The best examples of selling stuff or buying stuff are where both parties end up feeling warm and squishy. Now, onto the tweets : )