[jwwest]

Is there a decent resource for learning how to sell a product? Most of us can code and implement the technical parts of a business, but what we need is a Codeacademy for marketing. Something that's not run by slimy "internet marketers" or contains vague advice full of handwaving "use Google's Adwords tool lalala~"

[danhodgins]

Forget learning how to 'sell' a product. You can't just 'sell' a bad product.

WHAT YOU WANT

What you really want is to learn how to research, develop and market a product 'that sells'. To learn this, I suggest you do two things that might surprise you.

DO THIS First, write a 2 minute infomercial script for your product. Practice being the presenter. This is a surprisingly informative exercise. Make sure to address any questions or objections people would have about the product, support or refunds in your script.

THEN DO THIS Second, write out a one page direct response magazine advertisement for your product. Anticipate any and all questions, objections and concerns in your ad. For examples, see old-school direct response ads by Joe Sugarman for products such as the Pocket CV from the 70's.

IT"S THE PROCESS By going through the process of writing a 2 minute infomercial script, and also writing a 1 page direct response magazine advertisement you will be forced to understand and echo features, benefits and emotional benefits and also anticipate and answer questions and objections. These are the two most valuable selling skills whether in person, online or in print.

SELLING IN PRINT Being able to sell in print is really valuable, because your ads and advertising can scale to billions of pages.

There's a lot to know about selling, marketing and developing products that sell. I've been studying it for 10 years, and it's going to take a lifetime of learning to do my best work.

I would be glad to share some things I have learned with you. Reach out and let's connect - dan [at] tinylever [dot] com.

[mladenkovacevic]

I think what you might actually be looking for is a course on storytelling. Ability to sell largely depends on your ability to convey a compelling, relate-able narrative. Everything else is more or less about finding ways to fit digestible pieces of that narrative into various formats (ads, blog posts, sales calls, landing pages.. whatever)

[lesterbuck]

There are a bunch of resources on marketing a product. Rob Walling's book Start Small, Stay Small, is mostly about marketing and picking a market. The Micropreneur Academy (micropreneur.com) is a collection of material that greatly expands on the book, plus a private forum. They host Microconf yearly (already sold out this year). Dane Maxwell teaches similar skills in TheFoundation.io. Mixergy interviews are filled with case studies, and Mixergy Premium has dozens of courses on marketing and selling for tech startups.

[jwwest]

Rob's book and the Micropreneur Academy is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned "hand waving" I've read the book twice, and subscribed for several months.

I found that their advice consisted of two things:

1) Find a niche using Google Adwords.

2) Rank #1 with SEO.

And that's about it. It's incredibly vague and frustrating, especially when most niches are oversaturated these days. I reached out to Rob about this, and he replied "yeah, it's hard to find an untapped niche". The entire premise of building a product in his materials is based around finding a nice that's underserved and that you can rank easily in Google for. Anytime someone tells me to solve marketing issues with "just use SEO", they're immediately discredited in my mind.

That being said, the rest of the book was solid. The problem I have is that there is very little actionable information on selling a product outside of Magic SEO-land, which everyone knows is a myth.

[lesterbuck]

Maybe we read a different book. On page 148 of Start Small, Stay Small, traffic is broken into two quality tiers. The top shelf traffic is (1) a mailing list, (2) a blog, podcast, or video blog, and (3) organic search. Second tier includes a longer list including PPC, social media, etc. So the book itself doesn't even list SEO as the first item in the top tier.

And Rob's book is a small part of the universe of startup marketing. Mixergy has plenty of stories of businesses starting without SEO as their primary driver. One amazing case study is Sam Ovens, who was so successful at marketing first before building anything that he not only extracted money from the people he had interviewed, he took the same virtual product (not yet built) and extracted cash from new customers who hadn't been helping him design it. Then he built it. And his niche is hardly unique; there are obviously many more areas like that to mine. How did he choose a niche? He didn't do keyword research. He studied the employment ads and looked into business categories that were hiring a lot, to see if he could help them automate with software:

http://thefoundation.io/sam-ovens-case/

Has anyone offered to pay for your niche product before you build it? That would be a nice filter to see if you are building something people want.

The cruel reality is that building the product should occupy about 15% of your effort. The sales and marketing, including idea extraction, market research, etc., will be 85% of the work. There is an ocean of marketing tactics and information out there, and it is a lot more detailed than your two step summary above. Sometimes marketing gurus want to reach a broad audience, and they package up a ton of their best information into a regular book. Perry Marshall did it with his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords (much, much more than an Adwords book). And you can buy the Kindle version for the low, low price of only $3.99, which is an incredible price/performance.