( Editor’s Note: This bonus chapter came from the notes for an unpublished book written by a business opportunity marketer who has made millions of dollars selling money-making information. I’ve included this chapter to give you a look “behind-the-scenes” at the formula used by business opportunity marketers to create their vast fortunes.)
Only 1 person in 10,000 knows anything at all about the opportunity market. This is a small marketplace of:A. People who are actively looking for methods, plans, and programs to make money.
B. Companies who are in the business of providing a wide range of products and services to fill those needs and desires.
Almost everybody says they would like to earn extra money, but very few people ever invest a dime on any type of information on how they can actually do it. This never made sense to me, until I began to realize that what people say and do are two different things. People only do the things that most interest them.
This brings me to a very important point – you can tell a lot about any person you want to know about by simply looking around at what they are spending their money on. The first time I heard somebody say this I thought little of it. But then I began looking around at people I knew well and saw this principle in action. You will, too!
There are about 3,000,000 people across the country who, at any given time, are actively looking for ways to make money. These people initially respond to some type of advertisement and get on somebody’s money-making or business opportunity mailing list. Then their name is traded, bought, or rented to other individuals and companies who are involved in selling similar types of money-making information or programs.
I am 100% sure this has been your experience. Somehow, you initially inquired or sent away for some type of money-making plan. This contact got your name placed on somebody’s mailing list, and soon, before you knew it, other similar types of offers began showing up in your mailbox from individuals and companies you never heard of! Some of the offers really sounded good, and you sent for them, which kept your name circulating on various mailing lists!
Now you know the secret! This is how you ended up becoming a customer of ours, and is the same thing that is happening to thousands of people just like you every single year!Now it is time for you to get on the other side of the cash register! Instead of getting these constant solicitations for money-making plans, methods, reports, and opportunities.
This is how my wife and I got our start. Our names were on all the mailing lists (or so it seemed), and we were constantly bombarded with all kinds of solicitations from companies we had never heard of who were promising to show us how to get rich!
Soon we discovered (as you probably have) that many of these money-making informational products on the market are complete trash! This made us angry, but also made us realize that we could probably create a good business by researching and developing moneymaking plans that work. This is what we did and ended up making millions of dollars in the process! Now we want to show you how you can do it too!
Our $1,000,000-a-year plan is quite simple and is based on these principles:A. Hundreds of thousands of people in this country are looking for money-making opportunities that really work.
B. These people can be reached through all kinds of mailing lists, magazines, and other media.
C. The majority of these people have been let down by many companies in the marketplace who are selling worthless money-making plans. This disappointment leaves them with their initial desires as strong as ever, but frustrated by the many offers they receive in the mail or see in the magazines that they do not trust.
D. This is the set of circumstances that sets the stage for you to make $1,000,000 a year or more!
All you have to do is create and develop money-making plans that are of the highest quality. Develop plans that really work, and you will win the trust of these people and their repeat business. Get enough of these people to do business with you, win their trust by converting them into repeat buyers, and you can get rich! This is how it happened to my wife and me, and can work for you, too.
It took us a long time to learn how to develop and produce quality money-making plans and programs. It was a gradual process in which we are still learning and expanding our knowledge.
We have made millions of dollars doing this, and sincerely wanted to show you how to do it too. But, the burning question was, COULD WE TEACH YOU HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS DOING THE SAME THING WE HAVE DONE?
The answer is YES! Here is our simple 7-step formula you can follow and build a business that brings in more money in one day than most people make in an entire year!1) Give you a great idea of what types of opportunity offers are on the market now and
2) The realization that many of the companies are selling junk, and you could do a much better job than they are doing.
You will build a lot of confidence by realizing that you could do a better job than the companies you bought from! The secret is to examine these plans like you would as a competitor rather than a consumer. Try to see how easy it must have been to put something like this together.
Thinking like a competitor simply takes a different mindset. You must pick the product or company apart and try to determine things that most people never begin to ask themselves. You must not only dissect it, but you must ask yourself how you can do it better!
You will be shocked by the amount of sales material you can get by spending one evening sending away for “free information” from all of the companies advertising in the moneymaking magazines or in the back of Popular Mechanics, or the supermarket tabloids.
It will not stop there. Pretty soon your name will be traded, sold, and rented to other opportunity sellers, and you will get a ton of new sales packages that you never sent away for! A consumer would call this junk mail, but a competitor calls it RESEARCH MATERIAL!
See where a little difference in your mindset can make you a lot of money?There is no faster, simpler, or easier way to get off to a powerful start than to copy what somebody else is now selling. There are always several really HOT programs in the opportunity marketplace, and discovering what they are and patterning yours after them is super-smart!
Get past the moral issue that says copying is cheating! It is not. Instead, it is very smart business, and many of the most successful companies in the world do it on a regular basis!Some of the world’s largest corporations have entire departments that do nothing but pick apart their competitor’s products to get ideas for their own! Almost all of the really good ideas in the marketplace have their origin in other areas where they were first used. Some sharp business person simply discovered and utilized them for their own concern! You can do the same thing. It is easy to do and can make you huge amounts of money.
All of us in the Direct Response Marketing business are constantly displaying our “secrets” to anyone who knows how to recognize and take advantage of them. We do this every time we run an ad or send a sales letter to a targeted prospect!
All you have to do is become a customer of the best companies in the marketplace, buy from them regularly, study their sales solicitations, products and services, and then map out a plan to duplicate them.
The time to experiment with your own ideas for successful money-making plans or programs is after you are already off to a powerful start with one that stands the best chance of working!
In truth most of your new ideas for a money-making plan or program you want to sell WILL NOT WORK. Most of the people who are very successful in this marketplace have been doing this for years, and you must follow their examples as closely as possible in the beginning.
Getting off to a good start will give you a couple of things you really need: Experience and momentum. Both of these are vital to your success. Many people who get off to a bad start tend to lose the drive necessary to build the momentum needed.
Informational products have made my wife and me and thousands of other people rich! You should follow in our footsteps and get good at developing and selling your own! It is well known, that informational products:
• Have a high perceived value.
• Are easy and cheap to produce.
• Can be produced as you sell them with no need for large inventories.
• Are easy to produce and sell.
Add up these benefits and you will see that information is the perfect product! A book that costs around $1 to print can easily sell for up to $20 or more. The best part is the fact that the people who bought it will feel they got their money’s worth if the book gives them what they wanted!
Markups from 500% to 3000% are common for those of us who sell information for a living. Customers buy our products because they want the benefits from the information. Spending $500 on a set of cassette tapes and a few reports that cost $20 to actually produce is a small price to pay if those products can show people how to make $2,000 a week for the rest of their life. Do customers really care if we make a 2,400% markup if the product does what we say it does?
The secret to selling information products is simple, once you get the hang of it.A. Write your advertisement before you create your product.
B. Sell the end benefits of what your informational product will give to or do for the buyer.
C. Develop your informational products around these benefits!
Writing your ad before you develop the product is smart because your enthusiasm is higher when something is new, and you can make promises of specific benefits in your ad and then carry those benefits into the product itself. For example, an ad for a super weight loss product could say, “How To Lose 7 Pounds In Your First 3 Days Without Dieting! See Page 23!” On page 23 of the book you write a section called “How to Lose 7 Pounds Your First 3 Days Without Dieting,” and your product delivers. This is the secret to writing powerful ads and then giving the reader what you promise.
This is the secret way some of the biggest and richest publishers who sell by Direct Marketing develop all of their products. First, they decide what people want, write the benefits, and then develop the product that shows how to get the benefits the advertisement (which was already written) tells them how to get.
There is an art and science to developing fast-selling informational products. It takes a bit of conceptual thinking to visualize the advertisement first, then the product - but all this will be second nature to you after you do a few of them!
You will need all the markup you can get with these products to offset the high cost of printing, postage, and Direct Response Advertising which can be phenomenally high!Step 4
Many first time opportunity publishers never think past product number one. This is a crucial mistake that costs them thousands of dollars in lost revenue. You will never have a business without additional products to sell. All you will have is a promotion. This gives you no staying power or any real strength.
The safest thing to do is insure that you’ll always make money is to constantly develop new informational products. Develop and test each one to your customer base. The more targeted they are to this group, the greater your chances are of success.
You must develop back-end products from the very beginning. Do it while you are developing your initial front end product. Think of logical related items to sell that give them MORE of what they purchased from you the first time.
A good percentage of the people who buy your first product will automatically purchase your second one, too. All you have to do is ask them by developing a great offer to sell it, and then presenting this offer to them while they are at the peak of their interest (within a couple of weeks from the time they first do business with you).
The people who buy your initial product have shown they are different than the rest of the prospects who did not respond. Something made them take a chance on you and send you their money instead of sending it to all of the other individuals and companies selling the same type of opportunity products. These people need to be rewarded for their business.
You reward these people by doing everything you can to show them they made a good decision to do business with you. Make your initial package as good as you can. Try to make a statement with it. The better it is, the more you will draw attention to yourself in the minds of each new customer, and the more open and responsive they will be to all of the additional offers you will develop for them in the future.
Developing additional products and services for your established customer base is where all of the profits are in this business. You will have a wide variety of many different products that can be developed as long as you are selling informational items.
When most people think of selling information, they only think of written materials such as books and reports. But these are just the beginning. The truth is there are dozens of different info-products you can develop and sell, and most of these are easy to produce.
Here are the top ten informational products that have made our company millions of dollars. You can do it, too.1. Small reports that are 1 to 8 pages in length and written to cover very specialized topics.
2. A newsletter that gives the customer more of your knowledge a little at a time!
3. Continuity products, such as a booklet a month, or a tape a month. Get enough customers on this regular service, and the profits can be staggering!
4. Seminar or speech transcripts that have been edited for clarity. Many people love publishing these because they can see the same information in several different forms.
5. Home study courses which contain a wide variety of informational products relating to one subject that are simply grouped together into one large package.
6. Books or manuals written to give your customers more knowledge and to strengthen your authority in their minds.
7. Recorded seminars, workshops, speeches, or consultations that you or one of your staff members does for your customer base. These are easy to put together since they are a by-product of some type of event and are a great way to sell the information you do one time over and over again!
8. How-to cassette tapes which are instructional. These are easy to develop, once you gain the experience by producing a few dozen of them.
9. Cassette tapes of interviews, conversations, or roundtable discussions that contain valuable information to share with your customers. These audio products are so quick, easy, and simple to produce, and the surprising thing is they give the person who buys them tremendous value!
10. Video tapes shot of seminars and discussions that give how-to information on a subject that interests customers.
All of these products are fairly easy to develop. It takes a little experience and discipline to develop these products on a regular basis, but you can do it as long as you do a little at a time!
These are only ten of many different types of informational products you can develop. About a dozen are just as profitable: tip sheets, computer software, posters, membership kits, 900 numbers, back issues of newsletters, and sets of books. Marketing expert Dan Kennedy has defined 39 different ways you can sell informational products and freely admits there are probably many different variations on these.
You have many different choices available of all different types of info-products you can create. Plus, you will have established customers to develop these products for. These two factors together could make you rich in just a few short years!
Step 5These steps must be continually worked. It’s a process you must do over and over. The best part is the fact that it becomes a great way of life, and the more you are involved in it, the better you will get. I think of all the time, work, and effort we put into some of our first informational products and compare it to the same amount of effort we expend today. The contrast is shocking! Our first products took about 100 times more effort than the ones we produce today! The job just keeps getting easier and easier! The same thing can happen to you, too.
This is a fun, challenging and rewarding way of life! It does take continual work, but the rewards can be so fantastic!It feels good to get ideas for products or services you think will sell, produce them in a simple info-product, test them through the ranks of your established customers, and then make millions of dollars in the process! You will get a feeling of power and control over your life like nothing you have ever experienced.
But nothing will replace the two key elements you need:1. Get started with these five steps.
2. Do a little concentrated effort every single day.
Doing these things will help you build a tremendous momentum that will keep you going strong through any and all of the obstacles that are bound to get in your way every now and then.
• You gain knowledge through your constant efforts.
• Every days worth of experience adds up synergistically with the previous day!
• Your knowledge grows.
• You learn while earning!
• Your confidence expands!
• You begin to gain new ideas of possibilities you have never thought of before!
• The ideas, methods, and strategies you develop for making more money in this exciting business get better over accumulated days, weeks, and months of steady, directed effort.
• Before long, you are a much different person than you are now! You will feel better about yourself, confident about your future, and passionate about the work you do!
How can I promise you all of these things? Simple. These are the things that have happened to my wife and me as a result of working these four steps. They will happen to you too!
There is no really mystery to success . The actions that produced riches for us can do the same thing for you, too. It is our sincerest wish that you follow in our footsteps and use the ideas we have just shared with you. They will work, if you work them!
1. There are hundreds of thousands of potential customers you can do business with.
2. Sale of your front end and back end products can easily add up to millions of dollars in revenue every year!
• All you have to do is make 40 - $500.00 sales a week!
• Or 80 - $250.00 sales a week!
• Or 160 - $125.00 sales a week!
1. Develop an on-going front-end offer that draws new customers to your company on a small initial purchase. (this can bring in large numbers of qualified customers.)
2. Create a large back-end product made up of a collection of small informational products you simply group together into one BIG PACKAGE! This product can sell for $149.50 – $295.00 or even $495. Keep building it up, so it has a higher perceived value and can be sold for more money!
This is the same formula our company has been using for a number of years. It is surprisingly simple when you stop and think about it, and yet it has made us millions of dollars. This formula works incredibly well because the product we sell on the front-end helps to sell the large back-end package! It acts as a BIG SALES LETTER!
The initial sale we make helps new customers trust us. We try to do everything to impress them with the fact that we are different than the other companies they have done business with.
Asking somebody who has never done business with you to spend $30.00 is a whole different ballgame than asking them to spend $300. The way to get the larger amount is to first make the smaller sale.
A nice percentage of new customers who buy our inexpensive product for $10 to $50 can be convinced to spend an extra $100 to $500 if you show them how they can get much more of what they initially bought at the lower price.
The time to think of making the BIG sale to your new customers is BEFORE you begin marketing your front-end item. The secret is in trying to give them only enough information to make them want to immediately send for more.
The ad for your bigger back-end package should make customers feel they are really missing out on something if they do no send for it. The idea is to make them want it badly by creating this vacuum that must be filled. The best marketers know how to make it almost HURT not to send your money in for their offer!
Study everything you can from the people that are making millions of dollars in Direct Response Marketing. Don’t envy these people, join them! Follow the simple principles laid out here for you and start making over $1,000,000 a year with these methods now!