24-Hour Recorded Message
See what I mean? Look at the copy on this card carefully and you can see why it works. It talks about making money, it shows how to do it (by sending out postcards), it takes out the dreaded ‘sales’ and ‘cold calling’ features commonly associated with having a home business... plus it says it’s easy & you give your 800 Sizzle Message or your Website so your prospect can easily access more information.
In other words, it says a lot with very few words. If you had a graphic on your postcard such as money falling from the sky or a fancy sports car, your core message would be diluted and your response rate would be less. Get the picture?
I know this all may be new to you and I don’t want to race ahead, but I want you to know there are people who are making quiet little fortunes just mailing Cheap, Ugly Postcards… when I say “fortunes” I’m taking about $5,000 to $25,000 a week. Yes, you read that correctly – a week!
Now they didn’t get there overnight and they branched out to market additional products. The point is that postcard marketing is not some little rinky-dink thing. It’s a bonafide industry segment within the larger direct mail industry and it has a huge potential for the person who’s serious about generating consistent serious cash flow.
The beauty of postcards — which is also the beauty of direct mail and direct marketing — is that once you test a postcard and a product and find a winner, you’ll get the same response with 100 postcards as you’ll with 100,000 postcards. It’s a numbers game… specifically a percent of response numbers game.
Now in terms of making money with a home-base business or direct sales opportunity, I’ve already included some copy ideas that are proven to work, so you don’t really need to “test” your postcard campaigns.
When I say “test” I’m talking about down the road when you’re looking for something new to market with postcards. I’ll show you how to find niches for postcards, but for now stick with what you have. If you’re in a money-making program and you like it and it works for you, by all means use postcards to market that program. Again, stick with what you have.
On the other hand, if you’re in a money-making program you don’t like or if the website looks awful, search around and start looking for another program to market. You must have a dynamic website.
It’s needs have lots of sizzle, great graphics, easy to understand, hopefully a professionally-made movie or two, a link to the compensation plan and your name and phone number clearly visible from multiple places on the site. If you’ve got that, you’re golden. If you don’t have that, you may be using an outdated website and you should go looking for another opportunity to join. Makes basic sense, doesn’t it?
Another technique I like and use more than just directing my postcards prospects to a website is first sending them to an (800) Sizzle Message. I like to set the stage in an audio message, pre-sell my enthusiasm for what I’m doing, then direct my prospects to my website by giving my web address at the end of my 2 to 3 minute sizzle message. This has proven to double and triple my enrollment rates over the years.
Now, you can also market more than one money-making opportunity. Many people in the home business arena (myself included) are in multiple programs. You can also go searching for niche products to market and I’ll tell you exactly how to do this because after all, we’re in the postcard empire section, right?
In terms of building a postcard empire spread out over numerous products, services or opportunities, you may discover for yourself, it’s all about finding what people are buying right now and matching that with a similar product they may be interested in.
For example, let’s take golfers. What do all serious golfers have in common? Their passion… their passion about getting better at the game. As such, they buy all sorts of informational products on how to improve their game in addition to the obvious equipment they buy.
They buy DVDs, manuals… anything and everything that can help them. Well guess what? There are countless lists of people you can mail postcards to who spend money right now buying informational-type training programs to improve their golf game (the list broker who sells these lists is in the Resource Guide towards the end of this course).
The same is true for people who buy specialty pet products, pet snacks, pet training. You can get scores of lists of these kinds of people – and they’re people who aren’t just interested in their pets’ welfare (and some people are obsessed with their pets)…
They’re people who actively and frequently buy things for their pets from direct mail, infomercials, etc. You can get access to those lists. You can mail postcards to those lists. The world is your oyster here. Maybe you have a hobby and it’s something you know a lot about. Well, guess what… others have an interest in the same hobby!
What you don’t want to do, let me re-phrase that… what you DO NOT WANT TO DO is create a product or take a product out of the mothballs you once created or invented years ago and look for people to buy it.
NO! The goal with postcards is to make money and the way you do that is to find a market first, then find a product to match the market. Market to people what they’ve already proven they like to buy. By “finding a market” I mean, find a large group of people who buy a certain type of product or service often.
If they’re obsessed like some pet owners are and most golfers are, that’s what you want.
You do that by spending time on the website in the “Resource Guide” and looking for markets… look for really great lists of people… look at the list description… when you see a list or a category of lists that gets you all lit up, then go looking for something they might be apt to buy to satisfy their “obsession”.
So this is what I mean by building a postcard empire. When you branch out into building your empire, this is when you test your postcard offer and the responsiveness of the list.
By the way, the website in the Resource Guide with these lists has over 62,000 lists to choose from and its own search engine to help you find the categories you’re looking for. This one site could end up being worth 100 times, maybe even 1000 times what you paid for this course!
But like I said before, start with what you have right now… don’t get carried away… just focus on the task at hand first and that’s to start making money with the program you want to market.
In postcard design, the simpler the better. Cool graphics with fancy cars are out. A direct compelling message is in. Remember, you only have 10 seconds to make an impact on someone who’s standing there looking at your postcard. Why waste any of those valuable seconds by having the person get sucked into staring at a graphic.
Years ago, fancy graphics on postcards were effective. That was in the 1980s and 1990s. Remember back then? No internet or in the case of the late 1990s, sporadic internet (remember the nightmare called dial-up?).
Because dial-up was the primary internet connection, color graphics were rare. People weren’t inundated with color and graphics at the push of a button like they are now. In those days, fancy postcards were more readily accepted because they were different. Nowadays, there’s so much color and images and graphics online, it’s better to send cheap, ugly, simple cards because they stand out.
I’ll give you several postcard design samples in this section but first let me just say that by design I’m also talking “copy” which is the word for “text” on the postcard. In our case here, design and copy are the same thing. The design IS the copy or sales message on your card. You’ll be using your sales message to grab their attention and cause them to respond to you. Nothing else matters in terms of what goes on the card… nothing!
If you’ll be using postcards to market a money-making opportunity such as a homebase business, internet home business, mlm, network marketing, or a direct sales opportunity, you want to “sell” (2) concepts at the same time on your postcard: 1) making money and 2) making money mailing out Cheap, Ugly Postcards.
The reason this is important is because the biggest problem people have with buying into an opportunity is knowing how to market it. Some people, actually many people don’t know this at first, and others never learn this.
They think that by joining an opportunity they’ll just sort of somehow magically get customers to buy from them. This is a delusion which I and many others have found out the hard and expensive way. In fact, I know many in the direct sales home business arena who still haven’t figured this out after years of buying into one program after another.
No matter how great your business may be, you still need qualified prospects looking at it… and postcards are one of the quickest and easiest ways to find these folks. So when people see on your card that they can make money mailing out postcards, your sales message becomes much more compelling for obvious reasons.
Here’s some design ideas that work. I would suggest you do NOT dramatically alter any of them. You may change them in minor ways but keep the basic message the same, in the same format and fitted onto the postcard in the same overall design.
And remember we only have 10 seconds to grab their attention… the text samples on these postcards are designed to do exactly that.