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Nothing beats the joy of your first sale. You can plot, plan, market and dream all you want, but until you get that first sale, you’re not sure that you’re a “real” writer. It’s 26 years since I sold my first book to an international publisher. I walked on air for days. To my mind, because real writers wrote books, I was real writer at last.

Your first sale legitimizes what you’re doing to others, and not least to yourself. When you’ve got that sale, you get a lot more than money: you get confidence, feedback, and ideas on how you can make the next sale and the next.

How do you make that first sale? Here’s how:

=> One: Give yourself a deadline

Although I’d made writing sales I didn’t sell a book until I gave myself a deadline. I gave myself a long deadline, ten years. I didn’t need that long, it took a year. However setting a deadline turned selling a book from a dream into a goal. If I hadn’t given myself a deadline, I would have fudged for years: making outlines, doing research, writing a chapter here and there, and convincing myself that I was trying to sell a book, when I wasn’t doing anything of the sort.

Give yourself a deadline to make your first sale. You’ll know how long the deadline should be. Don’t make it ten years unless it’s something where you need to learn a lot of skills first before you can produce a product.

Your deadline must be serious. The ten years I gave myself was the absolute cut-off date. If I hadn’t sold a book by then, I intended giving up writing book-length material forever.

=> Two: Ask for the sale!

Once I’d set the ten-year deadline, I knew I had to ask for the sale. This meant submitting partials to publishers. A partial is a fiction proposal. It consists of a synopsis, a chapter outline, and the first chapters: around 50 to 100 pages of the novel. I wrote a partial every two months, and sent them out.

How will you ask for the sale? If you’re selling your writing, then send out novel and non-fiction proposals, or proposals for magazine articles.

Keep in mind that “Ask for the sale” means ask the person who can buy your product to buy it. I approached editors at publishing houses who could buy my work. I didn’t approach agents. As handy as literary agents are, an agent can’t buy.

No matter what product you’re selling, from apricots to zebras, you must ask the person and/ or company with the cash to buy your product.

It’s worth mentioning here that you don’t need to follow any particular rules when you’re asking for the sale. For example, most writing books will tell you that to sell a novel you must write the complete novel, then write the partial, then get an agent and then wait while the agent sells the book. You can follow someone else’s rules if you want to. Or you can choose your own route. Do what you intuitively feel is right for you.

=> Three: If it’s not working, get feedback from others

You’ve set your deadline, you’ve asked for the sale repeatedly, but no one’s buying.

At this point, I need to tell you that everyone who’s ever followed this process for selling their writing has sold their writing before the deadline. So from long experience I know that this process works. If this process hasn’t worked for you it means that somewhere you’ve bumped into a wall, but don’t see that is a wall.

You need feedback. Find someone’s who’s doing what you want to do, and ask them for help. You may need to pay for it, but it will be money well spent, because they’ll be able to put you on the right track. Don’t ask for help from people who have never done what you want to do. If they haven’t done it, they may think they know how it’s done, but they don’t.

After you get your feedback, set yourself another deadline, and then ask for the sale until you make the sale. Try this simple process: it works.

Author of many books, including Making the Internet Work for Your Business,
copywriter and journalist Angela Booth also writes copy for businesses large and
small, and consults on search engine marketing. Angela has written copy for
companies in many industries, ranging from technology and real estate to the
jewellery trade. Her clients include major corporations like hp (Hewlett Packard),
WestPac Bank, and Acer Computer. For copywriting services and marketing
advice contact Angela at angelabooth.com.

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SEMPO recently published a study which shows that a only 11% of all search engine marketing advertising is spent on search engine optimization, with the vast majority, a full 83%, is spent on pay-per-click advertising.

While pay-per click (PPC) advertising has enormous benefits, I’m a bit surprised by how much advertising dollars consumed on PPC when search engine optimization (SEO) can produce a significantly higher return on investment for the same marketing dollars. In fact, considering the number of phone calls my company routinely gets from people looking for optimization because they are spending “too much” on their PPC campaigns, I think that many businesses understand that SEO is more cost effective.

I know I have previously said that SEO is Dead, which some have taken out of context. Yeah, that headline is meant to grab attention, but the point of that post was that SEO-only providers need to adapt their optimization strategies into more marketing oriented SEO services such as usability, conversion tracking, etc., in order to continue to be effective at SEO.

While four out of five respondents to the study said they are engaging in organic SEO, the big money still goes to PPC. This means that either organic SEO is considerably less expensive than it should be, or advertisers are more comfortable with sponsored advertising which they can often manage themselves with little outside help and ROI can be tracked more easily and instantly. Further study into this would prove interesting.

I’m willing to bet that a significant chunk of those spending money on PPC but not SEO are doing so because they find few SEO firms that understand how to incorporate sales, marketing and usability into their client’s sites. Many such companies simply don’t want to change their sites in order to accommodate optimization which they fear inhibits their site’s ability to sell. These site’s are unwilling to re-design for usability issues and/or incorporate any textual changes for the benefit of the search engines. We’ve run across our share of these companies ourselves. Unless they are willing to make some changes, SEO will largely be ineffective.

Some of these companies spend a great deal of money on their websites, going through layer after layer of corporate bureaucracy just to get approvals. Part of this bureaucracy is often a marketing department that is unwilling to make any changes to the site they worked so hard at getting “just right”.

Good SEO, however, is also good marketing. Many of our clients who manage their own PPC campaigns find that their PPC conversions often increase in conjunction with the optimization of a site. This is how it should be.

While future trends will undoubtedly show optimization marketing spend increasing in share vs. pay-per-click advertising, it will probably never overtake PPC simply because PPC is easy to set up, produces immediate results, and changes can be made online and effective almost immediately. Optimization is a long-term process that requires patience for results to be achieved, and continuous maintenance to stay “on top”. PPC simply requires more money to stay on top.

What surprised me the most about this study was that paid inclusion accounted for 1/3 of the total spending on SEO. It’s unclear on whether paid inclusion also includes directory submissions, but as Yahoo is currently the only paid inclusion provider AND one of the most popular web directories, this means they are getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $15-23M via their paid inclusion services. While directories are important, I have found that paid inclusion submissions generally are not important, except for some short-run campaign exceptions. That’s a large chunk of money that would undoubtedly be better spent elsewhere.

Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing, a search optimization marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance marketing blog.

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Ranking high is search engine results is one of the most rewarding web marketing strategies available. But how is it actually done?

1. Unique Title Tags - The title tag of a web page should describe what is on the page. Why? Because search engines use that copy to determine what the web page is about, and it’s what search engines display as blue hyperlinked text in their search results. People tend to click on the search results that are aligned with that they searched for. Make it easy for search engines to understand what your site is about by using appropriate title tags.

2. Use Search Terms in Body of Page - It’s amazing how many people would like to rank competively for a given search term, but haven’t actually used that search term on their web site. Search engines are amazing but they’re not mind readers. Throw them a bone by actually using the terms you’d like to rank competitively for within your site’s copy.

3. Link Popularity - Assuming you’ve covered steps #1 and #2, search engines should now understand what your web pages are trying to communicate. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll consider your site to be the most important site on the internet for those terms. When it comes to determining importance, nothing is more important than having links to your site from other web sites. The more links you have compared to other sites trying to rank high for the same terms, the higher your site will rank in search results.

That’s it. Cover those three steps, and you’ll capture a ton of free and relevant traffic through search engines.

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