What is the difference between marketing and selling (sales)?

Marketing is the process of attracting attention, raising the interest of your target market, and influencing their decision-making process. It is the tool that educates and prepares your prospects and then compels them to respond. Your marketing gives your sales team the opportunity to close sales rather than chasing them down.

Marketing includes identifying unmet needs; producing products and services to meet those needs: and pricing, distributing, and promoting those products and services to produce a profit. For more information, see our “Marketing In The New Millennium” page.

Selling is the process of closing (selling and getting the order) prospects that you have “pre-conditioned” with your marketing messages to contact you and purchase your product. The critical element of sales is having prospects contact you who want to talk to you, and want to hear how you can benefit them. For more information, see our “Sales Systems” page.

Webmasters believe that a lot of money can be made off of discussion forums for several reasons. The main reason people see a lot of money in them is because they have an enormous amount of page views and return visitors. It is very difficult for a normal website to get those two things and very easy for discussion forums to get them. People focus on that and rush to start up a discussion forum only to give up and let it die after a short period of time. The reason is because many people do not take into consideration how important actual signups are. A lot of people will go to a forum everyday and read through things but never sign up. If people do not sign up the forums are worthless.

Something that can be done to entice people to sign up are offer rewards for those that sign up. You can also have a posting contest by giving away something to the first person to reach a certain number of posts. Another thing is to start a controversial thread that will force people to sign up and participate in the discussions. No matter what you decide to do to get people to sign up try and make sure that it is planned out before starting the forum. If you think about that after the forums have been started it may be too late.