Question time…

What do these 5 alleged millionaire marketers have in common?

Edmund Baker
Jeremy Gardener
Jeremy Taylor
Michael Milligan
Raymond Whittaker

No need for answers on a postcard but I’d be interested to hear your answers in the comments section below.

If there’s one thing that stops a lot of marketers from selling a lot of product – it’s the fact they don’t have a good sales letter.

Even if they have a superb product – a huge seminar package on DVD for example – it’s very hard to make any sales without a good sales letter.

So, up step Dan Lok and Ewen Chia.

They have put together a superb resource containing loads of extremely successful sales letters.

A ‘private collection of winning ads and salesletters‘

So, instead of sitting there struggling for words to use, you adapt proven copy from these successful adverts.

It’s the missing link for people who are struggling with their sales copy!

Until Sunday it’s available for a knock-down price in the Weekend Super Deal:

http://www.WeekendSuperDeal.com

BUT, don’t purchase without using the following code:

A4SPS9

That particular code will give you an even bigger discount so make sure you use it!

Have a great weekend,

Ben

In one post on this blog (Advertising Offline to Drive Traffic to a Website) I moaned that an advert in the Exchange and Mart didn’t perform for me.

However, this past week I received some advice from an expert in driving sales from classified advertising, Tim Lowe.

He said that I could publish the advice so here it is:

“Hi Ben

I saw you were doing this and wondered how it would turn out.

For what it is worth I have, occasionally, made out OK with Exchange & Mart but not for a couple of years.

The major nationals are my favourites.

Just picking up on your comments about visitor numbers, I wouldn’t dismiss 50 or so visitors as not enough to do well. My experience, with a good offer, has been sometimes over 20% conversion ‘visitors to sales’ so it is possible to make a decent profit from small numbers of visits. In fact if I get 300 – 400 visitors each week in total I can make a nice living.

Of course, the key is a good ad and sales letter – what may pass muster with SEO traffic, just through weight of numbers, may not do well with offline ads.

A key point that you may not have noticed is the need for hard copy follow ups. I have always offered people a few links to order an “information pack” in the post, which is essentially just the website in printed format. This is surprisingly popular as people dislike reading screens for very long and it also gives people a hard copy which they seem to like, maybe to read in bed or on the train. Whatever the reaons, I know that this brings in a huge amount of extra sales. Just recently I have been having trouble with the data capture service that I use and have not been able to send out these follow up packs, sales are literally half the normal volume as a result.

I do feel for the people that you describe who all tried selling the same products with the same sales letter. There is no question that having what looks like a unique offer will always outsell a “me too” product. Common sense tells us that 3 people selling the same thing with the same advertising will only get one third of the potential sales each. One of the things that I have been teaching people at workhops is how to make yourself stand out from the crowd with unique offers and approaches to selling similar products. It is essential to give potential customers reasons to choose your offer over other people’s, otherwise you cannot expect to sell much at all, but this is such a simple point that it is often overlooked.

I hope this is helpful, if so then please feel free to publish it.

Kind regards

Tim Lowe”

Some interesting and helpful advice there – thanks for taking the time to email me!

Here’s an interesting offer I got from Streetwise the other day (well, it was actually the second mailing – they must be testing as it was a different sales pack to the first).

It’s called the Information Entrepreneurs Circle and is offered by somebody calling himself “Michael Milligan” although I am pretty sure I known who is really behind it – a very big info publisher who “retired” a few years ago.

This opportunity is one which the market has been calling out for for a long time.

Once a month you get resale rights to a complete course that you can sell as you wish. The rights are quoted as having a value of at least “£1,000 to £20,000 PER LICENCE” so £197 per month seems like a great deal.

Oh, and you also have to give Streetwise 10% of everything you sell (not profits, 10% of your actual sales amount).

However, if the sales letter is to be believed, this is an excellent bargain and you should grab it immediately.

My doubts would be the usual – how on earth do you sell this stuff?

Each month you could get the rights to a great course including CDs, DVDs, manuals etc but if you don’t have a tip-top sales letter and good advertising then you’re not going to get anywhere.

Also, you’ve got to worry about the idiots who put each package up on eBay for pennies.

Example: I got the rights to a great home study course recently which had a suggested minimum price of $97. Two days after I took delivery, somebody has it on eBay for just $4.97 – you can’t predict how the lazy morons will use their licences…

But don’t let that put you off if you are serious about giving this a good go. There are lots of info publishers in the UK who have made a fortune from licencing so it can be done.

For the right person, and providing these products are good, this could be a real goldmine of an opportunity.

Unfortunately, Streetwise do not give you any details about the type of course you will get which is disappointing.

All they say is that each month you will get “‘How To’ products, usually with a money-making spin”

It’s a mystery package that you get every month and could be anything (including stuff that didn’t sell well).

Why do I say that?

Well, I recognised the product licence offered as an example (even though they have tried to obscure the title of it) and it was one which I received a sales letter for just once. If they only mailed once, is that because it bombed?

In conclusion, I think this could be a great offer but that depends on how good the products are.

There’s no guarantee with this opportunity so you will have to pay for at least the first month but Streetwise are reputable and if you cancel, that will be it, you won’t get charged again.

Be aware though that “Michael Milligan” is probably a pen name and you may well need to sort out sales letters etc yourself.

If you do go for it, please do let me know how you get on.

For more information about business opportunities like the Information Entrepreneurs Circle, check out the free biz opps email newsletter today.

Got home today to find a mound of mail in the front porch. As per usual there were several biz opps sales letters in there.

The one that stuck out though was an offer I haven’t seen before from Streetwise which they have called “The Profit Portal”.

At £497 + VAT it isn’t cheap but these courses always seem to sell well and Streetwise are known for offering a robust guarantee…

I was reading through the sales letter and trying to work out what exactly it is all about.

For a change there isn’t a lift letter from John Harrison – just a “Reservation Certificate” (order form), the letter itself and an envelope (not pre-paid).

Seeing that there isn’t an introduction letter with this sales pack I am assuming that this is probably one of the first mailings that they have done for this one.

I have been monitoring Streetwise’s mailings and they do seem to test different aspects of the sales process so if this is a good seller I would expect to see further offers of this product but with a different, improved sales approach.

Anyway, I went off on a tangent there.

Reading through this offer, it seems to be about “domaining” and making money from virtual real estate.

Bob Ryan, the person who is offering this particular package, writes a good story. He asks:

“How Rich Would YOU be if Property was
FREE and Tenants were GUARANTEED?”

Immediately you find yourself imagining that this is another property investing course i.e. buying and selling bricks and mortar but it turns out that it isn’t.

He talks about an “Underground Elite” who use a secret method to make “Fast Cash and Lump Sum Pay-Outs”

What it turns out to be is an opportunity to learn how to setup a business buying and selling domain names and also “parking” these domains for a monthly income.

Parking means that you put up an advertising page on your site and earn money each time someone visits your site and clicks on an advert.

It’s nothing new or particularly secret but it’s true that it is a business that is largely run by a small number of investors. Probably because not many people understand exactly what domaining involves or how it works.

What seems to be overlooked by a lot of people is that some domain names have been sold for amazing amounts of money.

Take “dictionary.com” – this sold for $100million just a few days ago. Of course, there was a whole business behind it but it started with the purchase of one little domain name – and domain names are currently available for about $8 (4 pounds) a year.

You won’t get a domain name like “poker.com” by just visiting GoDaddy. All dictionary words with a dot com extention were registered some time ago. However, you can still find gems by doing some research, for example a domain name with three keywords. You will simply have to take the time to research what keywords are likely to attract visitors.

The package on offer here is some software that Bob Ryan has developed that will make “income-generating websites” for you at the push of a button.

That would probably be a “parking page” – which you can get for free at http://www.sedo.com

There may be more to it but there may not.

Seems like this could just be a “newbie” package to tell you how to buy a domain name and put up adverts on it. You get traffic from people typing in your domain name by mistake whilst looking for related information.

It’ll be very interesting to hear more about this one but I’m not going to bite.

The product I recommend on the subject of “domaining” is Paul Gunter’s Domain Profit Guide: http://www.DomainProfitGuide.com which is ever-so-slightly cheaper.

However, if you do buy the Profit Portal opportunity please do let me know what you think…