Thursday, September 6, 2007
In my previous article How To Be 100% Sure That Your New Product Is A Winner We have discussed dropping losers.
I hope I have given you the message strongly enough. But the same principle applies to milking winners. When you get
a winner in-demand product, it is a license temporarily to print money.
You will have so much of the folding stuff pouring through your letterbox or credit card numbers blocking up your email account... that you will hardly know what to do with it.
HOWEVER: Every product has a strictly limited life-span. It doesn't matter how well the product performed in the early weeks, the response will gradually tail-off over a couple of months - year to a point where the product starts losing money. There are two big factors which cause this:
1. Everyone has seen your marketing material (emails, web-pages, direct mail letters, postcards, newspaper ads etc) a hundred times, and those that are going to buy the product, have, in the main, bought it already.
2. You 'lucked-into' a mood of the moment. For example, everyone's suddenly worried about car security at exactly the moment you advertise your steering-wheel lock. This mood will rapidly pass as the population (driven by the media) move on to the next area of worry or concern. (What a terrible cynic I am.).
I have seen people make lots of money on a product, and then hand up to 50% of it back to the newspapers as they attempt to breathe life into a dying market. I have seen a single advert in The Sun take one thousand orders for a £49.95 product. Then, six weeks later (after the product has been heavily advertised), I have seen the identical advert pull in only eighty or so replies (and of course, lose big money). You must listen when the market says it has had enough of your product. Getting out early is a sure-fire way of keeping most of the money you have made.
It's the same with the stock market. Everyone aims to sell at exactly the peak of the market, and buy at exactly the trough. But, of course in reality, these peaks and troughs are impossible to predict accurately. The stock-market winners sell early, and buy early. The losers sell too late and buy too late - they stay on the roller-coaster too long. They hang on to a rising market out of greed, thinking the market will rise forever.
The same is true of product development and direct marketing. When you get a winner, it is tremendously exciting. But your greed can make you hang onto the product
long after it should have been dead and buried.
Want to know a sure-fire indicator of when to pull out?
Quite simply, you should pull out when all the other developers and marketer boys (and gals) start piling in after your initial campaign. This takes tremendous
self-discipline, but pays enormous dividends. The strong temptation is to hang on, and hang on. If an advert fails, you attribute it to something funny about that particular
issue of the paper, or day of the week. You advertise again and again, spurred on by the glint of gold.
Also, another factor comes into play here (and I'm telling you 100% solid truth); it is the distraction factor. You see, you don't run this huge mail-order organisation, do you? There is no 'packing and shipping' department; that's YOU in the shed/garage, late at night. So when you get a winner, the chances are that you will be overwhelmed trying to keep up with sourcing and shipping the product. This will take 100% of your time. Meanwhile, every newspaper from Golden Labrador Weekly, to Clay Pigeon Shooting Times will be on the phone pestering you for an advert. The danger is that you will just say 'Yes, yes, yes' to all these people, and end up spending tens of thousands of pounds on a dying product.
The solution is to keep your eye firmly on the ball. Retain your policy of only taking adverts in the mainstream press I advised. Don't go too crazy with the adverts, as this will alert all the other mail-order boys, and push the rates up. As soon as the papers see that you have a winner, suddenly the rates go up, and adverts become hard to get away. You must play a double-double bluff game here. Above all, never let on to anyone how well your advert is doing. If asked by someone trying to sell you space, you tell them that the response was lousy, but that you are going to give it one more go. Could they offer a cheaper rate? When you have a mail-order winner, beware the fatal combination of:
1. A falling market - and it's nearly always falling after your first few adverts.
2. A diminishing market share due to everyone else
piling-in.
3. Rising advertising rates (sometimes steeply) due to the
papers 'locking-on' to the fact that you have a winner.
Most direct marketing successes are quick 'in and out' jobs. You know this is true, because you rarely see exactly the same product advertised week after week, month after month and year after year. You want to be in there, and out within a few weeks. Then you can sit back and smile as everyone else piles-in and tries to emulate your success in a falling market against stiff competition. Sure, you'll lose a few orders, sure, you might have been able to milk it a little bit more before diving out, but at least you creamed off the most profitable share of the market, and kept all of it. This is what it's all about. Don't learn these lessons the hard way.
There is nothing more heartbreaking than making £100,000 clear profit in the first two months of a campaign, and then handing £50,000 of it back to the media over the next six months of hard slog. In other words, you work hard for two months and make £100,000, then you slog for a further SIX months and LOSE £50,000. I have seen this happen time after time after time. To get rich in this business, you must develop a sense of timing. Knowing when to get in, and more importantly, knowing when to get out.
For this reason, I advise against trying to follow the crowd into a product idea. If the papers are full of adverts for steering-wheel locks, the naive player thinks: "Great. This must be the thing to get into." So they rush around like crazy trying to source a product - often at too high a price because they are desperate to get into the market. They then advertise this product in a falling market which is fiercely competitive and at extortionate advertising rates (because the papers have 'locked-on' to the 'success' of this product). The result is that they lose big money.
My favourite strategy for mail-order is as follows:
1. Come up with your own, unique product idea. I don't mean 'invent' a product and have it tooled and manufactured. I mean source a product which YOU believe will sell, and that you can't recall seeing in a newspaper or magazine as a mail-order item.
2. Test the product in a suitable cheap advert. If it flops, drop it.
3. If it looks good, then buy a single insertion in a big-league paper like the Mirror, or the Sun.
4. If this works, then plan a campaign which ramps up quickly over (say) three weeks, holds steady for (about) four weeks, then ramps down over (say) three weeks. Aim to be out of the product in three months maximum.
In this strategy, the 'me too' brigade will only start piling-in as you are ramping down your campaign. This is perfect. If your product is 'paper and ink', then it will take much, much longer for the competition to copy you. It takes quite a while to write a book or a course. Also, the general mail-order chaps aren't very keen on this type of product. They prefer plastic gizmos and 'real' products. A book or a course can have a much longer life - often years if you are subtle about it. Also, if you have a great 'back-end' product and are buying advertising at low, low rates, then you can go on for years and be untouchable. People will try and copy you (periodically, I see 'Midas' type adverts coming and going), but they soon die because they are paying twice the money you are paying, and they are not exploiting the 'back-end' - where most of the money is made.
They retire broke, puzzled and confused. They wonder at how you can possibly keep advertising when they know that the product only takes half of advert cost. You know the secret. You are buying distressed-rate space, and you have a great follow-up product which makes more than the original sale of the book.
No Marketing, No Promoting, Huge Potentional
Internet business opportunities come in many flavors and
varieties. Most of them require some form of promotion in order to generate any income.
This is where many website owners seem to falter, and many
never recover.
This article is not about marketing for websites, it is about
ways to avoid having to market your website. This requires a
carefully thought out plan, one that is a much outside the box
thinking as anything else.
To start, we select a basic opportunity that runs itself.
There are such opportunities out there, and they can be
characterized by a complete internal system of marketing and
promotion. One such example is Empowerism. It features a
built-in autoresponder and opt-in email lead program, and
provides basic marketing of your website without any help from
you.
This program can be allowed to run, with your only requirement
being to feed it $19.95 every month. However, the thing that
makes Empowerism a great opportunity is the RSVP and MVP
programs it offers. These programs allow you to make money
without doing anything except feeding them some seed money.
The Empowerism website does a good job of explaining these
programs, so I won't attempt to do that here. My point is that
to build the perfect web business without marketing, you have
to start with an automated component.
Empowerism will allow you to build a fortune slowly. In our
perfect business plan, we will use it to generate seed capital
for the second part of our business. You may have another
Internet business that can be used to generate this capital -
it does not matter where it comes from, although having the
ability to regenerate income again and again is an advantage
that we can use in the second part of our business to help it
grow.
The second part of our plan is where we can experience massive
income growth in a relatively short time. Rather than spill the
entire plan here and now, I will just give you an example of
what we will do in this perfect business plan.
Everybody is aware of the energy markets, like unleaded
gasoline, crude oil, and natural gas. All of these markets are
very volatile on a day to day basis, but they all exhibit
strong seasonal price movement tendencies every year. If you
could participate somehow in these moves, you would stand to
make lots of money.
The same thing happens with the grain markets - corn, wheat,
and the soybean products. They exhibit strong seasonal price
changes that can be followed with relative safety using our
systems, and in the process, can generate huge profits along
the way.
We have figured out a way to harness these markets in a way
that limits our risk to a very acceptable level, while giving
us an opportunity to participate in the huge price changes that
occur every year in these markets. This is what makes up the
base of the second half of our perfect Internet business.
By using an Internet based opportunity to generate cash, then
using that cash in another business segment that can be
Internet based, we can have a business that does not require
marketing of any kind, yet offers rewards greater than many
Internet businesses can ever achieve.
Present Your Product On A TV Show
Would you like to get your new or existing Internet business moving nearly at the speed of light? Do you know what is required to get your business noticed and how to build your personal credibility fast, making clients secure enough to purchase from you over the Internet?
The Simple Answer
The primary answer is putting potential clients in a comfort zone relative to your product quality and your reputation as an authority in your marketing niche.
One Solution
Market it on television. There are many ways to do this, such as Infomercials, guest appearances on talk shows like Oprah, short form (1 minute and under) TV commercials, long form (2 minutes up to 30 minute infomercials), and etc. Most online businesses can't afford the expense of these types of advertising or have products that target a specific niche that just doesn't fit in the above media methods.
The secret is to find a JV (Joint Venture) partner who is marketing on TV, targeting your product niche, and interested in your product offering. One example is the national cable television show "The Screen Savers," (now called "Attack of The Show"). If you have a new or dynamic computer related product, such as hardware, software, or training materials (like the "Little Professor" series), you could get tremendous exposure by presenting your product on their show. Again, the cost is often an obstacle for many. There are ways around this problem.
Find a media that will work with you for a percentage of the profit and provide ALL the production and airtime costs. Who offers these types of shows? Local Indie (current term meaning Independent) producers that provide programming on your local cable lease access stations. This is NOT the Public Access non-commercial stations, but programming on a legitimate commercial station. Local cable TV networks usually have at least one station enabling them to sell low cost quality airtime to Indie producers. Call your cable network and ask them for referrals of local producers and to list any locally produced shows.
Often, there are local business, music, talk, and variety shows that could feature your products. The producer would make the interview or TV commercial and insert it into his TV show, for a percentage of any sales, at no upfront cost to you. You receive double benefit from this approach. The first is possible sales. The second is instant credibility, providing you material to use for future promotion as a video presentation on your website and on CDs and DVDs for direct mail. You can even beef up your personal online BIO (Biography) adding to your credibility as an authority in your chosen niche. Once you accomplish this successfully, you may locate other Indie producers nationwide, producing similar TV shows and offering them the same concept. Possibly, you can use the original interview or commercial from your first show to eliminate any additional production costs.
Are these ideas really attainable or just theoretical? The answer is, it's being done everyday, across the nation. What is a great way to locate Indie producers across the nation? Visit http://www.indieclub.com and http://www.mindy.com becoming a member for free. This will give you access to considerable free related information and thousands of Indie producers. Contact them with your offer. Also, new online television stations and networks are springing up with instant video presentation capabilities that may represent your product as an affiliate or feature your product. You can locate these through major search engines. A little creative thinking on your part can give you a competitive edge in the Internet marketplace.
