« The Single Most Important Secret in Business Success | Main | Driving Your Business Success »
Two Big Eternal Information Marketing “Big Things.” Big ideas, big issues.
By Robert Skrob | March 3, 2010
For 6 years, select information marketers have been “by-invitation-only” subscribers to Dan Kennedy’s Information Marketing Special Reports and Info-Marketing Letters. Now, for a limited time, Dan has opened his vault to make these available to you.
If you’d like to find out more about the archives, visit www.DKArchive.com. Here is an excerpt from Volume V, Number 1 of the archives. I’m sure you’ll find it valuable and enlightening.
*******************************
The list of present, evolving and potential “problematic changes” confronting info-marketers is far too long for this space. It includes rising front end sale costs, rising difficulty and cost of filling seminars, rising dropout numbers in continuity, clutter and competition, intellectual property theft, aforementioned regulatory interference and threats, changing consumer/client demands with emphasis on services vs. education, and many, many more. Too many of these things are a plague upon us—for which fear and loathing are the only responses. For others, these very same things are golden opportunities to reinvent, to erect enormous barriers to entry or competition, to thin the competitive herd, to build iron cages around customers. No man has the exclusive right to building an ark this time around. Every info-marketer has the same opportunities and choices.
Anyway, in this issue, I decided to focus on “Big Things.” Big ideas, big issues. Hope you find them valuable.
BIG THING #1: CONSTANCY, Hard to believe I’m entering the 5th year with this newsletter. I was working on it the morning of my 53rd birthday and stopped to give a little thought to the role newsletters have played in my life. In 1973, I got my first (and only) job as an in-field ‘traveling salesman’ covering an impossibly sized five-state territory for a book publisher, to call on every bookstore, college bookstore, gift shop, toy store, supermarket chain, drugstore and drugstore chain. The first thing I did was create and mail a monthly newsletter to all the accounts. While I never visited half of them and never once set foot in one of the five states, I got mail orders from old and new accounts via my little newsletter. And it made me more welcome where I did physically appear. At the time, I not only had to write it but prepare its body copy on IBM typewriters, set its headlines manually with peel and stick type and an X-Acto knife, paste it up on art boards at a drawing board and take it to a print shop for production. My first business newsletter was ‘Marketing Your Services’ (for a niche market, speakers), starting in 1978. Since 1978, I’ve never been without the task of preparing at least one monthly newsletter. Never. There’s never been a Christmas season when I haven’t been working on my January issue or issues. It got easier when computers came along and Carla took over the prep. It’s even easier now that Bill produces and mails them——all I now do is pull together content and write. It strikes me that the info-marketers I’ve studied or been fortunate enough to get to know or work with, who have not only been phenomenally successful and wealthy, but sustained themselves over multiple decades, all have had one thing in common: consistency. By that I mean, there has been one thing they’ve always done, never stopped doing, stuck with. A different thing for different ones. But something they’ve had as their work that they never interrupted, set aside, got lazy about, became inconsistent about. In Melvin Powers’ case, it was a set number of 1” display and classified ads in a myriad of magazines every single month. In Napoleon Hill’s case, it was a new book every year——an example I’ve also nearly emulated. In Earl Nightingale’s case, a daily radio broadcast——today’s comparable might be the daily email. In many, the newsletter has, specifically, been a constant. It seems to me you need a constant of your own.
BIG THING #2: STEP UP. On our year-end conference call for my Platinum Members, one, Michael Gravette, told of a $900,000.00 increase in sales in 2007 vs. 2006, against best prior year increases of $200,000.00 or so. The biggest contributor: his stepping up from small, fractional ads in the back of the magazines reaching his prospects to consistently running full-page, copy intensive ads. Pleased to say I had some influence on the ad itself, so you may find the copy interesting and instructive. Of more interest to me, there are a number of opportunity marketers who have been running the very same, small, fractional ads in these same magazines for 20, 30, 40 years——who have never stepped up. I’m convinced, from experience, that I could take any one of them and produce more growth (and NET PROFIT) in just 12 months than they’ve had in the prior 12 years by getting them to step up to big ads, aggressive direct-mail, effective online marketing, comprehensive follow-up. Did it with ‘Gold by The Inch.’ Of course, there’s nothing wrong with staying small and somewhat invisible and just chugging along, making a nice income, and playing a lot of golf or indulging in whatever non-business interests you have, if that’s what you truly want. I got there once myself, and am headed there again. But should you want more, it’s actually pretty simple: you can’t be big being small. Joe Sugarman built his original direct marketing giant JS&A (the forerunner to The Sharper Image) by dominating the media he advertised in … full-page ads when others ran tiny little ads even in one magazine, going from one to two to eight to twelve.
*******************************
If you enjoyed this excerpt, you may want to review the entire Dan Kennedy archive. It is available for a limited time at www.DKArchive.com. Every one of the 72 issues is packed with advanced, specialized, experience-tested insights into what it takes to succeed within the info-marketing business. Visit www.DKArchive.com to reserve your copy.
Topics: Information Marketing | 1 Comment »
March 3rd, 2010 at 3:44 PM
A couple of problems. The first is quoting a gross sales not profit figure. The other is that if everyone does full page ads you’d end up with magazines that are mostly ads.