Value of a Click

Some time ago, I joined a guru course on copywriting. It cost a lot of money, but after reviewing the materials, I returned them and requested a refund.

The contents of the course were simply a bad copy of a seminar. Poorly produced and full of ads and plugs for other guru courses and software packages.

Esentially, these guys were promoting the idea of reproducing royalty free materials and repackaging it as your own work via electronic download, or ebook.

I thought I was buying into something professional, afterall, there were loads of testimonials to read on the web site and it seemed that people were making tens of thousands of dollars for little or no effort.

In reality, the course was promoting the idea of creating loads of web sites, filling them with Google Adsense ads and watching an automated income appear as if by magic.

Life is rarely that simple, but as a person who has a ton of Adsense sites, I can't completely rubbish the theory :)

Anyway, it got me thinking.

Last month one of my web sites brought in a genuine commercial sales enquiry for services that I quoted £625,000 for - that is more than $1million.

That means that my sales copy convinced a corporate buyer.

As it happens, I was a tad too expensive with the quote. That's life - you can't win them all.

Do these leads come along every day?

YES!! Almost.

This week, I have been invited to tender for two jobs. The first is to conduct more than 450 asbestos surveys on behalf of a government. If the bid is successful, I'll get a load of free holidays as well as a nice wad of cash in the bank.
Just think a GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT came to the Internet to find what they were looking for.

Then just today, a national, household name PLC company invited me to tender for a large number of surveys too.

Not only that, but on the basis of the information on the web site, my company is already classed as an approved supplier!

The question I asked myself was simple:

"What on earth possessed me to think that a so-called "guru" on copywriting who uses what I consider to be less than honest means to make a few bucks at a time by selling worthless info products, could teach me ANYTHING about writing, when I can pull in ONE sales lead worth hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit all on my own"?

Make you think doesn't it?

I haven't been on any fancy courses. I write how I speak. I give away as much of my knowledge as possible for free, because I know that's the way to get more business.

If you are tempted to spend $1000 on a set of crap quality DVD's from self-appointed gurus (by their own admission by the way), then you would do well to focus instead on what talents already lie at your disposal.

If you can write in the same way that you speak when doing business, then you have all of the tools you need to make a fortune online.

By the way, I have very little in the way of formal qualifications - so you abslutely don't need an education to do well online.