One of those mantras is back end sales.

I don't think high failure rate of new online businesses is due to lack of back end sales. The real problem is they aren't making sales period.

I'm guilty myself. I tell new marketers to diversify, start a newsletter, and work on getting those back- end sales.

Well I've been wrong.

The first thing any new marketer should be focusing on is making a sale. The old adage is still true, "Even journey of 1,000 miles, begins with first step."

I would stop by sometimes and watch him get pounded over and over again. The Champ was merciless: 21-2, 21-1, 21-3 were typical scores.

Being an acquaintance of Champ, I asked him once why he wasn't taking it a little easier on such a novice player. I've thought about his answer many times since then because it has come to my aid time and time again.

If you're like overwhelming majority of netrepreneurs, I'm sure you've been trying to figure out why your marketing efforts have been taking a *pounding*. In fact, it's likely you're even using many of same techniques as *Internet Guru's*, but they just don't seem to work for you.

Why? Well, if you're not attracting traffic, and if you're not converting visitors into sales, first place to look is at *the words* you use. Your *pounding* is very likely due to your own copywriting: your ad headlines, your sales page, and your ezine copy.

The one single characteristic virtually every Internet Expert has in common is ability to write like dickens. And with competition so widespread and so fierce, if your copywriting is only *average*, or worse, any marketing effort is unlikely to get off ground.

I recently used "Search Term Suggestion Tool" over at Overture for a little test. Here's what I found in a recent month. There were:

*****96,000 searches for *internet marketing* *****152,000 searches for *home business* *****162,000 searches for *marketing* *****and 108,000 searches for *advertising*

That's 518,000 searches for marketing related topics.

Now, get this. There were less than 5,000 searches for *copywriting* and less than 4,000 for *writing skills*. That's less than 2% of total … and offers a strong hint of why 95% of businesses on web fail.

Admittedly, this isn't scientific, but what it indicates is that those people who are interested in making money on web, are not very interested in learning how to write great copy … even though this is very skill that separates big money makers from everyone else.

Do you have a copywriting problem? It's easy to know. If you're short on site traffic and sales, answer is, *yes*. There's plenty of ways of getting traffic to your site. If it's not happening, your promotional copy isn't getting job done and needs to be reworked. Ditto for sales.