Guide to Wealth Generating Products by Derek Kemp

An Amazing SHORTCUT System to Creating a Cash-cow Product That You Can Sell Through The Mail or on The Internet!

There’s a FORTUNE to be made in publishing simple little books or manuals which you can sell for years to come – and clean-up BIG time. This shortcut system shows you how to do it step-by-step, even if you can’t write or won’t write!

Jeremy Gardener

For legal reasons we are obliged to state the following: Disclaimer: To the fullest extent permitted by law, the sellers are providing this written material, its subsidiary elements and its contents on an ‘as is’ basis and make no (and expressly disclaim all) representations or warranties of any kind with respect to this material or its contents including, without limitation, advice and recommendations, warranties or merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The information is given for entertainment purposes only. In addition, we do not represent or warrant that the information accessible via this material is accurate, complete or current. To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither the sellers or any of its affiliates, partners, directors, employees or other representatives will be liable for damages arising out of or in connection with the use of this material. This is a comprehensive limitation of liability that applies to all damages of any kind, including (without limitation) compensatory, direct, indirect or consequential damages, loss of data, income or profit, loss of or damage to property and claims of third parties.

This course is sold for entertainment purposes only, and the author, publishers and/or distributors are not responsible for any actions taken as a result of reading this course.

PART I

CREATING YOUR INFORMATION PROUCT Important Note Please Read: This manual was created from the distilled knowledge of seven of the USA’s top information marketers and also two UK multimillionaire information marketers. To make the manual readable I have edited and distilled the essence of these people’s wisdom. I have also changed some examples and put the entire thing into the first person (‘my’ voice) to make it an enjoyable read. For this reason, please excuse any differences between the content of this manual and what you may hear on the audios supplied with it. Some information publishers merely transcribe the audios, but I have done considerable work to make this manual far better than that. The wisdom is theirs, I am merely the editor. ‘My’ voice is really their voice.

Jeremy Gardener

elcome and a very big ‘Thank You’ for purchasing this manual. This marks you out as a winner. You are willing to invest the time and a little money in training yourself to achieve the success you deserve. Using this amazing programme you will discover how to create a cash-cow information product which could make you rich; and here’s the good news… You do NOT need to be a writer! You do NOT need to be a recognized expert! And... You do NOT need to invest much more than ‘pocket change' to get started! Study this programme carefully and discover the greatest short-cut tips, tricks, and strategies used by highly successful information publishers who have made themselves millions. Then use their secrets to get rich with your own hot-selling info products! You could be on your way to profits very soon! You will also learn some of the inside marketing secrets which will show you how to sell your products through the mail or on the Internet. This is not specifically a marketing manual though – the focus is on creating your product. Are you ready to go? Okay, let’s make a start.

What is ‘Information Publishing’? Many people are getting quietly wealthy selling simple little information products on the Internet or through the mail. You know the sort of thing I mean. Manuals, CDs reports and so on. Simple products that cost £2-£3 to produce and sell for £67, £97, £147 and more. Products exactly like the one you are reading and hopefully paid for!

Honestly… it’s got to be the best business in the whole world since… well since businesses were invented! But here’s a secret I bet you didn’t know….

Who’s making the real money? The really BIG bucks? It’s the clever players who create and then control their own product! Please read that carefully again – it could hold the key to a fortune for you. On a smaller scale, lots of people are making a ‘nice little earner’ by taking an existing product (perhaps through buying a licence) and selling it against the competition. Nothing wrong with that, and fair play to them. It’s a valid route which I will cover in this manual.

But I’m talking real money. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds a year! Who makes this kind of cash? Those who control their own product. The same people who even sell licences for their information product at £500 a time to 200+people. Work that out in hard cash! And that’s on top of the tens of thousands they make selling the product directly! Think about it. 5,000 pieces of a simple manual and CD at, say £69.95? That’s… £349,750 income for YOU! And since this would cost about £3 to produce, this is mostly profit. And it’s from just ONE product! AND you could sell licences for it and make a ton of money extra! 5,000 pieces is a very conservative estimate of what you would sell, particularly if you consider the world market. But let’s be ultracautious. Let’s say you only sold 500 pieces (a truly pitiful number) and let’s say your costs were £9.95 per item (which is way high).

That still leaves you with £30,000.00 IN YOUR HAND! Would you like that kind of money from a single product? Then be able to do it again, and again, and again…? As many times a year as you wanted to? That’s the way to make yourself very wealthy in a very short time! And the good news is…

You Don’t Have to be a ‘Writer’ or ‘Creative’ Type! I know what you might be thinking... It’s that word ‘create’ which is bugging you! Maybe you don’t consider yourself to be a very creative person? Almost certainly you don’t think of yourself as ‘a writer’. Join the club! Actually, It’s good that you’re not a creative genius. It’s great that you’re not ‘a writer’. Why? Because you’d be tempted to (perish the thought!) go and write a book, manual or whatever and take one or two years carefully crafting and perfecting it! Nice if you yearn to be a famous literary figure and win prizes. Truly hopeless if you want to make a serious amount of cash – fast!

Why Not Take the Shortcut Route? Forget two years of graft and another year waiting to see if some publisher will condescend to take you on – and pay you a lousy 5%-10%! How about creating an information product of your very own in a few days – even in 24 hours! Is it possible? Certainly. If you use the Short Cut tips and tricks I will be revealing. 6

You could easily create several unique info products a year! Each one with a £30k-£100k potential. Even if you “can’t write” or “won’t write”! And they would be YOURS – unique to you – never before sold in the world in thatparticular form. And with that lucrative licensing potential as the icing on the cake. Wouldn’t that be great?

You, a Millionaire Publisher? How about this for a lifestyle? Firstly, there would be no getting up and going to work for someone else! Bosses pay you the rock-bottom MINIMUM they can get away with, and you slave for 40+ hours. Okay, you may enjoy your job (most don’t) in which case, just do this as a lucrative sideline. Next, how about £100k+ each year instead of what you’re getting now! Imagine what you could do with that! A decent house – room to grow and spread out. A decent car. Fantastic luxury holidays, and… (this one’s important) the ability to help others who you care about. Friends, family or even your favourite charity. Having money is certainly better than having little or none – but you don’t need me to tell you that.

What’s Involved? How hard would you have to work for this? The incredible thing is you could make FIVE times more than the average salary, and work just ONE FIFTH as hard. It’s tough to put an exact figure

on it, but I’d say about five to ten hours a week for a £100k a year – that’s about right. That’s about two hours a day maximum, five days a week. So the rest of the time is yours to do with as you please. Read, relax, play golf – whatever takes your fancy. AND…. It gets even better because when you became an Information Publisher, you can run your business from anywhere in the world which has Internet access. Even a laptop on a hotel balcony! It really doesn’t get better than this. You will have HUGE mark-ups, work just a few hours a week and have truly massive income potential. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention, here are a few things you WON’T have…

Staff. Premises. Overheads (okay, maybe a little extra heat and light etc.) Expensive equipment. Face to face meetings. Interfacing with customers on ANY level if you don’t want to. Commute to work (run this from a laptop on your kitchen table!) Stock. In many cases you deliver the product electronically – so NO cost!

All from realising the secret key to publishing riches, which is…

Those who control the product, control the wealth. The Myth of the Million Pound ‘Writer’

I put ‘writer’ in inverted commas because you will be doing precious little actual writing – if any! Others will be doing most of the work. I hope that is a huge relief to you! This system is NOT about slaving away over a word-processor for a year whilst you create a ‘masterpiece’ which will rock the literary world! Look, the truth is, in general, writers are in one of two camps: 1. Those who seek adulation, fame, literary prizes and the like. They try to get published by the conventional route. If ‘lucky’ they will get a deal and receive maybe 5%-10% of the cover price of each book! The publisher keeps 90% - 95%! 2. Those who just want a lot of money, in as short a time as possible and couldn’t care less whose name was on the product! They make hundreds of thousands each year. Sure, there are a handful of famous and rich writers but they are just that – a handful. (97 out of every 100 published authors never make more than about £10k a year from their books! And only one in ten thousand would-be writers ever get a publishing deal in the first place!) Here’s the bottom-line truth. You could slave away for years writing the equivalent of War and Peace or Gone With The Wind and then only get a lousy 10% royalty on your idea – IF it sells – which is most unlikely. When they see the words ‘a writer’ this is what most people think of. Decades of toil. Inspiration in a garret. Poverty. Sacrifice for one’s ‘art’ – fame – but only when you’re dead! What I’m talking about couldn’t be further from that stereotype.

The whole deal has changed with the Internet – it’s an utterly different ball game – and fortunes are being made as you read this, by ordinary people with no special ‘writing’ abilities. Here’s what this programme will show you how to do: • Create an information product which you know in advance will sell like crazy. • Make hundreds of percent profit on each item. And you keep ALL of the profits. E.g. cost of production £3 – sell for £69.95! • Aim to do very little writing, preferably none at all. Instead, others will (gladly) do most of the work for you. • Market your product on the Internet or in the mail. • Repeat the process with product after product – and clean up BIG TIME.

People right now are desperate for information and will pay big money for it. This is not a guess. People have made tens of millions of pounds doing exactly this – using precisely these shortcut secrets. But wait! Maybe you’re thinking “Hang on. Doesn’t this work both ways? Can’t people get all this information from the Internet… for free? Why would they pay ME for it?” Answer. Yes they can. But this entirely misses the point! Time is money and people would rather pay YOU to provide a manual and CD which summarises everything they need to know in one handy volume.

People cannot, in general, be bothered to look stuff up for themselves. Heck, we have hundreds of libraries in the country, but how many people have a library card? Less than 5%!!! Right now, as you read this programme, hundreds of people are getting quietly wealthy in the information publishing business. They are enjoying dream millionaire lifestyles without having to work too hard for it. Even better, they are helping others to a more fulfilling life as well! If you want to work just a few hours a week in an incredibly exciting business with truly massive profit potential, this programme is for you. I’ve got lots of powerful and proven ways that you can make HUGE profits with your own book, manual, CD, DVD or other information products. You will discover how it’s possible to earn massive profits of up to £100,000 a year or much, much more with information products that you can quickly produce. I’ll give you my shortcut secrets that you can use to create these best-selling products super fast. Best of all, you can make money with these products year after year.

It’s much easier than you ever imagined! In fact, you don’t have to write a word if you don’t want to. You can literally have other people create the words for you! All you have to do is put them together into the format you want to sell or create – and I’ll show you how to do this. Let’s suppose for the minute, that you are a writer (of course you may be)… That’s certainly what I tried to become in the early days. I realised, very quickly, that it was supremely difficult to become published by one of the large major publishing houses.

Here is my experience… After some research, I stumbled onto some smaller publishing companies with published titles like: ‘How To Win People Over’ and ‘How To Win in Love’. At the end of their catalogue of titles there was a notice that they were looking for manuscripts on almost any topic. I could almost smell the money! Writing was one of my friend’s hobbies. He often went on creative writing holidays to France and Spain and I thought this was a great subject to write a book about. It could give the spin on the best holiday spots, which venues were good to take the family, information on the content of different creative writing courses, a host of practical ‘how to write’ writing tips etc. After discussing co-authoring the book with my friend, I ran the idea past the publishing company and they suggested we send in a sample chapter. Help! The problem was we hadn’t written anything! Even worse, my friend was frantically busy on other projects. I was so excited at the prospect of a publishing deal that we agreed I would go ahead without him just to get the project off the ground. I immediately started writing the first chapter. It took me three weeks to write that chapter and come up with a title – which I struggled with. Eventually I came up with the title: ‘Your Journey to a Published Author’. Okay, not great, but it was my first project. I received a letter straight back from the publisher saying they would publish our book, ‘Your Journey to a Published Author,’ and pay us £1,000 if we could send in the finished book immediately. Wow! I was ecstatic! Ten months later the manuscript was finished and submitted. You’ve probably guessed already. It was returned and we didn’t get our £1,000

because we were too late. The publishers explained they had already purchased their quota of manuscripts and had spent their budget. It sounds bad but I have to tell you…

It was the best thing that ever happened to me! It made me determined to find a quick route to writing and a sure-fire way of earning good money from non-fiction writing. An article in a writing magazine introduced me to the world of selfpublishing. I decided if others could do it, maybe I could self-publish as well! All of a sudden, I was able to take this product that I’d written with my friend, publish it myself (not have to go through anybody else), and start selling it myself. That started me down the road to self-publishing. It was astounding… First, by publishing the book myself, I could earn a lot more than £1,000, in fact that was peanuts! And I discovered there was no need for me to spend hours slogging to write a book – I could get other people to do it for me! I was soon creating information products sometimes in a single day, other times in a week or two weeks, instead of ten months to a year. The faster I was able to come out with these information products, the faster I was able to market them through mail order and the Internet and make money. Because I’m involved with self-publishing now, I gave up being famous! Please know this self publishing lark is not a route to fame. I didn’t give up the rich part though! One of the things I want you to focus on is that with self-publishing you can keep a large amount of the profits for yourself.

You’re not going through another publishing firm that has big overhead costs and only pays you 5% - 10% of net sales. Since you can also market it, you keep a large portion of the profits, 70% - 90%. Exciting isn’t it? Ready to see how you can do the same?

Insider Tip The money is very important, I wouldn’t do this if it didn’t pay well, but the more people you help with your product, the more your reward will be. So, instead of thinking “How can I make money?” start by asking: “How can I help the most people?” you find a bigger market that way. By asking, “How can I help this market of people in the best way possible?” you will create the highest quality product. By asking, “How can I do a fantastic job when I help these people?” you keep down your refunds, increase your follow-up orders and boost the loyalty of your customers. So, just trying to help people through teaching and providing information is a great and profitable way to make a superb living. It’s not hard labour. It’s not like driving a forklift and loading trucks, washing dishes (which I’ve done, I’ve even worked as a labourer on a building site), I’ve done a lot of stuff. Nothing is as rewarding as helping people through the information business. So if you’re ready to discover dozens of proven shortcuts to a fortune in selfpublishing, fasten your seatbelts…

Short Cut Secrets Five Red Hot and Fast Products 14

There are all kinds of different information products that you can sell but I want to concentrate on five areas in particular. You can sell these products for anything from 10 to 30 times your actual cost to produce them! The customers get excellent value, that’s important because we’re talking about giving customers so much value they’ll want to come back again and also keeping refunds low. Customers returning again and again is known as the ‘back end’. Nothing rude! It’s a very important concept which I’ll have a lot more to say about later. Meanwhile, here are five hot product areas you can exploit.

Red Hot and Fast Product 1 – Books and Manuals These really are incredible money spinners. You’re reading just such a manual right now. If you don’t want to write them yourself, I’ve used ghost-writers that have done dozens of different books for me. I simply give them the research materials, or they go out and get their own research materials. They do all the work (and as you’ll discover they consider it a privilege and want to do the work). I put my name on it. I sell it. I keep all the profits.

You can do this, too! I’ll show you how. Also, once you start to create some materials you can use the same chapters in some of your existing manuals and find new ways to use them in other manuals. It’s something for you to think about. Rewriting. You can rewrite the material a little bit, recycle it and use it again and again. If you have certain chapters that would apply for other publications, you can build a manual or book very easily by simply using past information. However …

The customer must get good value - that’s the secret! Red Hot and Fast Product 2 – Home Study Courses This is where you just package up a ton of stuff. You have videos. You have CDs, maybe some reports, back issues of newsletters and/or magazines – anything and everything you can put in to add value.

What you’re really shooting for here is when the customer gets it, they open it up and it’s like Christmas time. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that jumps out at them! You can turn £50 worth of hard cost - the printing and duplication costs easily into £500 or £800 by selling it as a home study course. This contains a lot of your different information products that are grouped together with some subject as the main theme. It’s got to be a hot subject (more on this soon!). Now, you’re instantly getting ten to twenty times your cost just by packaging it all up like this.

Red Hot and Fast Product 3 – Recorded Seminars What you do here is you hold a seminar for your customers, your prospects, or your clients. Then you sell the CDs or DVDs, or the printed transcripts of that seminar in pieces or as a whole. This is something that has a tremendous value. Seminars sell for £800 - £5,000! When you package those seminars and sell the transcripts, it has a high perceived value. “Your chance to see the DVD of this £5,000 seminar for just £947.00!” It’s a great way you can sell something for ten to thirty times what it cost you!

Red Hot and Fast Product 4 – Newsletters I like newsletters because of the commitment that it takes to do a newsletter every month. It does force me to do some writing - and continue to produce something.

What’s special about newsletters is you’re getting paid to produce each one because you have your subscribers. (Unlike my original foray into publishing with ten months of slogging and no money at the end of writing, ‘Your Journey to a Published Author’ – until I self-published the book of course.) Then, you can sell back-issues of those newsletters, all packaged in a ring binder and make even more money. There are all kinds of things you can do with newsletters to make money once they’re written. They’re a very popular product.

Red Hot and Fast Product 5 – Multi-Author Products I have put together so many products with other people, where the work that I’ve had to do is minimal. If you get together with a group of experts (in any field) and spend a couple of days recording eight 45-minute sessions, you are able to produce a 150-170 page manual. Plus, you have eight 45 minute CDs. There’s a product that can and does easily sell for £97 to £297. I have raked in a fortune just sitting at the dining room table and recording with other authors and experts. This is how simple it is to produce an information product. You literally can become a millionaire doing very little work. So, remember this…

Get other people to do the work for you! There are so many people out there with good products. There’s no reason not to get them to joint-venture with you not just for recorded interviews, but also for books, manuals and newsletters. Use other people’s talent and brains to create a product. It’s so simple. You ask questions and simply record (in your chosen format) the questions and answers.

Instant Information Product for Instant Cash Flow Here’s the absolute shortest of shortcuts…

I used to work for a magazine in the advertising section. Every day people would call and ask how much it cost to run an advert. The cost was high and many people would explain they couldn’t afford it. So to help them out I would suggest they try to get free publicity. I would explain how they could do that. When I left that job because my self-publishing efforts were making me so much money, I wrote all the advice on how to get free publicity into a small booklet.

It sold like hot cakes! £24.95 for information that saves readers thousands in advertising costs. That’s a great information product! Well, one day I got a call from one of my American readers of this booklet. And he said, “You say, find a product, write a news release, send it out, get publicity.” And he went on to say that he didn’t have a product, so how could he get started? Here’s what he did after I told him what to do. And this is an amazing instant information product idea that you could use to get started in selfpublishing today. This one idea is worth what you paid for this programme. He went to all the bookstores in his town and told them he was interested in working at home. Most of those ‘work at home’ things are just a joke, but he found a book called ‘The Work at Home Source Book’ by Lynnie Arden. It had been written up in Parenting Magazine and it was in the book clubs and had good reviews. It was one of the few real books that could list genuine ways that mothers, or whoever, could work at home. Rather than spend months writing his own book, he decided just to buy

this book wholesale at 60% or more discount, then he wrote a news release, bought stamps, and mailed the releases out to newspapers and magazines.

He was written up in magazines and newspapers all over – FREE ADVERTISING! Notably he got a terrific write-up in Working Mother. This was interesting because the book had previously been reviewed in Parenting so you may wonder why he bothered sending it to Working Mother – a very similar publication? The answer is that it proves the book is of interest to parents but somehow this magazine missed the original launch of the book, were full, or decided not to run with it just at that time. This time though, they ran it. When he talked to the author later she said, “Gee, we sent a press release and book to each of those magazines and Parenting ran it, but Working Mother didn’t and so we never bothered to send it again to them.” So this proves that’s it is important to try again. He wrote his release to mirror closely the story that was in Parenting and Working Mother picked it up. The result was he pulled in $27,000 for this book! He just bought them from the wholesaler, just like all the bookstores do. I hope you’re getting the important point I’m making here…

The book was already written, it was already in print, it was already available wholesale. He didn’t even have to buy the rights to it or any stock. It was already available to anybody who wanted to buy it wholesale. All he did was write to the publisher whose name was in the front of the book, and tell them he was in the mail order business. He requested they send him their discount rate schedule. They sent him a sheet showing when you buy 1 to 10 copies it costs this much, when you buy 50 you’ll get this discount, when you buy 100 you’ll get this discount and so on. 19

He didn’t buy any books to start with, he just had a couple on hand that he had purchased at the store. When the orders poured in he called the publishers and asked them to send him 100 or 200 or whatever by courier. 3 days later he had stock, paid for by his customers in advance. So his only up-front cost was for the stamps to send out the press releases. He decided to do it again. This time he found another book that was a similar one, called ‘Dollars at Home Directory.’ It comes with a video also. He sent out news releases and one was picked up by a syndicated columnist. A column like that goes into many newspapers, it’s not just one. Home working is an interesting topic for many people.

This one column alone brought in $34,690.00. All from one simple news release! He turned a postage stamp - one postage stamp which you can borrow from your neighbour - into $34,000.00 and change, with a product that was already written and available in bookstores. Now, you’re probably wondering why didn’t people just go down to the bookstore and buy it? The answer is, partly because they’re lazy and they see it as so easy to order through the mail. But also they don’t even think, “Maybe I should go down to the bookstore and get this.” Most people never visit book stores or libraries.

That’s the shortest of shortcuts, to find a product that is already in print (like a book). Write or call the publisher to get their discount rates and by the end of the day you could have a product! Write a news release and you could be mailing it by tomorrow. That is so fast and there’s no risk or cost except for some stamps. The effort involved is just to type up 8 lines into a news release. 20

If you can go to the bookstore and just find a book you like, it doesn’t have to be a work at home book of course, any book on any subject in the nonfiction section, you can be selling it through free publicity in just a few days.

The Short Cut Writing Method You don’t have to write. But if the only reason you don’t want to write is because you think it’s difficult, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. It’s actually very easy – once you fully understand who you’re writing for and what you’re writing about. When people ask me what I do for a living, I explain that I sell information. Then they want to know what type of information. I always reply, “It’s information that people want to buy.” I don’t worry about whether it’s in book or manual or audio or video form, newsletter, CD or whatever. It’s just information. But the information must be valuable. I’ll explain…

If I write on an old, stained cocktail napkin a secret about how you can make a thousand pounds, guaranteed, in twenty-four hours, that cocktail napkin and ink might be worth a few pence, but the information printed on it might be worth £500 or more. It’s the information that people will pay for, not how it’s presented. So, whatever format you put it in, remember, you’ve got to deliver that high quality information. And if you always remember you’re selling information, you will focus on that and not on the process of writing; making it a barrier. You won’t focus on how difficult this is going to be or “I haven’t done this before”. That’s not the focus. The focus is on the quality of information. It’s not the form that it takes. It’s how valuable that information is to your readers. It’s trying to reach out and communicate and really help people. I focus on ‘how do I teach this’ not ‘how well do I write it’ or ‘what does this package look like.’ 21

Everybody Knows Something You’ve got to remove this mystique that everybody seems to have about those mysterious people called ‘writers’. When you’re writing non-fiction, you just do a good job of teaching. Maybe you’re wondering, “What do you tell people to do – I don’t know anything”? Everybody knows something that someone else doesn’t know how to do. Or you can always interview someone, or learn something new and then teach it. This is done time and time again. A lot of ‘how-to’ authors and the authors of non-fiction don’t necessarily know a lot themselves. But they know who to call or interview! Do you think there’s no way you could possibly learn enough about something? Or that you couldn’t possibly know enough about one subject to be a teacher and do what I’m talking about here? The thing to remember is as little as it may seem like you know about a certain subject or could possibly learn about a certain subject, there are maybe millions of people that know a lot less than you do.

They want to learn the few things that you already know. So, don’t ever get caught in a trap of thinking that you don’t know enough to write about it. You do!

The Short Cut to Mega-Sales Instead of trying to find a product and then hope someone will buy it, I’m going to tell you about a huge group of people that are already saying, “I want this! I want this!” It’s like fishing. If you fish in a small pond, there’s a chance there might be one minnow in there. If you go into the ocean, there are tons of fish. You just throw out your net. Go where the customers are. Follow the consumer trend.

I suggest you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t try and create a product and then wonder who you can sell it to.

Ideally you should find buyers before you create a product! What do buyers want? Lots of things, but in particular, see the next section for examples.

Hot Topics That Make Money Here are ten topics that you can make the most money with - I know that because these topics are already making people millions. The list is not in any particular order. One is not necessarily better than any other, apart from number one on the list, which IS my favourite.

Hot Topic 1 - Money-Making Information This is a huge market place. Not only are there millions of buyers, but there are a thousand and one topics to write about. Here are a few suggestions, so you get the idea: mail order; photography; the internet; holiday property; car boot and garage sales; buying and selling; organising events and parties; wedding planners, home publishing, franchises etc. In other words, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all the different ways people can make money.

Hot Topic 2 - Money-Saving Information Remember my booklet on how to get free advertising? It was such a winner, because it explained how anyone could save thousands of pounds in advertising. People want to save money whether itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on travel, food, cars, almost everything they do. Topic ideas: cut your grocery bill in half; cheap quality holidays; cut-price travel tips; cut-price property deals; how to live a rich lifestyle on an average income; save with our monthly super-deals.

Hot Topic 3 – Any Good ‘How-To’ Information This is SO popular. Any title that begins with ‘How To’ is a sure-fire winner, so long as the topic is popular. For instance: how-to build your own house; how-to cook hamburgers 101 different ways; how to write your family history; how to teach your baby to read; how to make money; how to make wine; how to solar heat your home. The possible how-to topics list is huge. They have always been popular and they probably always will be.

Hot Topic 4 – Health Information This is becoming bigger and bigger. Millions of people are looking for alternative ways to protect their health or to overcome illness. Many people are disenchanted with the health system and are even travelling to other European countries for treatment, rather than attend a hospital in the UK. Topic ideas: directory of the best hospitals across Europe; Chinese herbal remedies; Shiatsu; the twelve health centres in your body; the book of yoga; the perfect body; think yourself 10 years younger; acupuncture; diet books.

Hot Topic 5 - Computers Anything related to the computer, obviously, is hot. That’s doubly so if it’s the Internet. There are still many people confused about broadband and wireless. With the advent of digital and hi definition TV making analogue TV’s obsolete there will be a big market for people needing help on how to link up all of their entertainment ensemble.

Topic ideas: software directory; the Internet; buying and selling on ebay; linking your home entertainment; the digital age and how to get the best from it; making money with internet products; the bite-size computer task book; earn a fortune with computer games; be a PC trouble-shooter.

Hot Topic 6 – Information For Senior Citizens The number of senior citizens is rising dramatically, mainly because people are living longer, healthier and more active lives. This is a huge and quite wealthy market place, and this can relate to health, too, because seniors are interested in health. They’re also interested in getting bargains. They’re interested in travel. They’re interested in finding vacation spots and new places to live. Topic ideas: holidays for the over-50’s young at heart; cut-price travel in style; 101 cake recipes for the grandchildren; 101 leisure activities; the top hotels in Europe; clubs and courses; bargain holidays; selling up and living abroad; investing wisely.

Hot Topic 7 - Gambling This is big! Gambling is huge in the UK with the advent of super casinos, on-line poker and so on. In America it’s not just in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, or Tahoe, but all Indian gambling sites, hundreds and hundreds of them across the nation. There is horse and dog racing. People are into gambling whether it’s good for them or not at an unprecedented number. Topic ideas: how to beat the black jack tables; how to beat roulette; how to win at the dogs; the lottery numbers system; how to run your own horse-

racing syndicate; the scratch-card winners; how to win at Texas hold ‘em poker.

Hot Topic 8 – Personal Relationships This is a very big topic because there are something like 60 million singles in the United States alone. With the Internet you have access to a worldwide audience. Topic ideas: how to have a happy marriage; how to find your soul mate; how to single out the special person in your life; how to win friends; understanding teenagers; how to keep the peace with your mother-in-law.

Hot Topic 9 – Investment Information This is always popular. People want to know how to invest money. This can include all sorts of topics related to property as well as traditional and untraditional investments. Topic ideas: manuals on stocks; mutual funds; bonds; investing in the future; how to make money on the stock market; buying and selling property; spread-betting on financial indices.

Hot Topic 10 – The Unusual This is anything that’s unusual or bizarre. This covers a wide variety of things from survival information (look at the people making a fortune scaring the daylights out of other people) to things as wild as flying saucers and alien visitations. I know of a company that is making money hand over fist with this. For a very good example of the unusual, check out www. Flea circus.com. Topic ideas: teach your dog to sing; my night with an alien; scary stories; ghosts are real; how to be totally self-sufficient; grow your own insect-spray free vegetables; organic gardening; how to eat for free; 101 uses for vinegar; how to talk to your cat; the hitch-hiker’s guide around the world etc. So, that’s my list of the top ten things.

There are many more things you can make money with, but give those some consideration because these ten topics are million pound topics. Let’s just have a quick look at the health market. A chief pollster for Lou Harris, and Associates estimated that of all the people who use the Internet, whether it’s at work, the library, or at home, almost 70% at one time, have looked up some health or medical information. Health is huge. It’s a hot topic. There’s proof. Now, some of these folks, they’re what you might call cybercondriacs (it’s kind of a funny word they’ve came up with). Every day they wonder if they’ve got some new disease! They’re the same people that buy all those health books through the mail. Nowadays, they’re going on-line and they’re searching for information. They’re just flocking by the tens of thousands to these health information sites. Here’s a health product that’s making money for the guy who dreamed it up. It’s a book called Health Secrets of the Rich and Famous. According to the author, it’s got a little bit of pizzazz, kind of a show biz angle to it. It’s just about people in Hollywood, famous politicians, folks like that and what they do. As the name suggests it’s about people who have unlimited amounts of money, who will spend anything to stay young, and who’s health directly affects their performance and the things they do to try and stay healthy. This book is selling like hot cakes. The way you can come up with a book like this is to go on-line and start searching for health sites. There are thousands of them. There’s one called ‘Medline’ (www.medline.com). Medline has tracking capability that tells them who came and who didn’t, and they said that amazingly it increased from 7 million searches a year ago to 120 million last year.

So the number of people wanting to know about a health issue, went from 7 million to 120 million!

I’d say that shows what’s called a ‘gold rush.’ About one-third of those searches were done by consumers. It wasn’t doctors. It wasn’t a nurse. It wasn’t a health care person. It was just you, me, or the next person. Out of 120 million, about 40 million of them were consumers. That’s a lot of customers looking for information that you could sell. Forty million consumers! A lot of these sites steer people to a hospital site, a pharmacy board, or something like that. You don’t want to give too much detailed information on your site because some sites have come under scrutiny from officialdom for practicing what’s called ‘virtual medicine’ without a license! So, be careful what you say on there. You know better than to give medical advice anyway. You can set up a gateway, which is like a portal or an ‘on ramp’, whatever you want to call it. There’s one called healthfinder.gov (www.healthfinder.gov). It’s a USA government site run by the Department of Health and Human Services, and has over 1,000 topics and links to government and non-profit content. They checked them for quality.

If you have a gateway site, all of a sudden you have an information product! Your information is in the links to these other sites! You are one stop shopping. They come to your site. You don’t even have anything they want, but you are the hub, as they call it. They see all these links. They can go anywhere they like according to what health topic they are interested in.

How To Make Money From Your Gateway Site

You make money by selling advertising. Even if you had 1% of this 120 million people market place, you’d still be getting 1.2 million visitors to your site and that’s very attractive to people who want to advertise. There are people that will come to you and say: “We want to put an advert on your site. We see you’re getting all these visitors. We want them to see our advert for IBM, Microsoft, or whatever it is.” You say “Great.” You get your web geek guy to put this advert on there for you (I call them that since I have no idea how it’s done). Actually, you find someone smarter than you to do it. Then, you collect money. You’re selling electrons.

You have no fulfilment, no shipping, no packaging, no printing, no writing, no recording, no nothing. There’s no cost of duplication. There’s no postage. You just sell electrons. Your product can be up in just a couple of days, by setting up a site and putting all these links on it. So, there’s just one example. Find something everybody wants to know about. Search the Internet and collect all the sites that you think are best. Put them all on one page. Call it a hub, a link site, or a gateway. Then, since you have all those links listed on your site, you’ll rise in the search engines for health related issues. You’ve got them all on one spot. You’ve got the most magnetic site. That can be on any topic, but health was one example that’s just exploding. Here’s an INSIDER TIP… Don’t panic! – no matter how many information products there are on any given subject, there’s ALWAYS room in the market place for more! And there’s always something that is making somebody tremendous amounts of money right now. This is true in mass and niche markets.

The key is to…

Track down all the ideas that are making people big money right now and ride them while they’re hot! Here are five really good ideas you can use to do this: 1. Watch the news. Look for things that are HOT! What are people chattering about right now? I know a company which cleaned up big time when the masses were chattering about bird flu. He sold several million disposable face masks at £3 a time! Who knows? They may even be needed one day. 2. Hang out in the bookstores. Get familiar with certain sections. See the reoccurring patterns in the different books. This can be a great indicator as to what’s selling the best right now. 3. Study the different adverts in the markets you want to reach. Especially study the different direct-response marketing adverts. Those are the ads that must make a profit in order for them to be re-run again and again. Look for the adverts that are running the most often right now. Ask yourself “Why are these adverts so popular?” Study the companies that are doing the best right now. 4. Check book ratings on Amazon. What’s selling right now? What subjects are hot? 5. Make friends with other people who are serving your market. Become friends with some of your competitors if possible. This network of insiders can help you find the things that are working best. You can make a FORTUNE working with your competitors, not against them by doing various joint venture deals.

Let The Public Provide The Content Here’s another amazingly simple ‘no work’ idea… A company called Reman Publications (www.mondomags.com) publish Country Magazine and Country Cooking Magazine. They’ve millions of readers. I know that because I checked up on their mailing list and it’s just a massive base of customers. (Like most big companies, their list is available, so you can rent their list and send direct-mail to it.) 30

What’s interesting is the readers supply the content. Every month people send their photographs of the country into Country Magazine. It says “this magazine is for everyone who lives in or longs for the country.” So if you live in the country or you long for the country, you read this magazine, which is filled with beautiful photos of the outdoors, kids, etc. Cute photos of their pet pig and so on. It’s kind of corny but everyone loves it. I subscribe to it. All the photos come from the readers. Get this… The readers send in the photos - then they buy the magazine to look at them! So it’s an easy job for Country Magazine. Now the cooking magazine is mostly recipes. All the people send in their favourite recipes for country biscuits, bread, the best chilli recipe that won a contest at their village or town fair and so on. They send those in with a photo and the magazine runs these recipes the readers send in. Then of course all the readers pay to read the other readers’ recipes! So these guys don’t have a lot of writing to do. It’s every month and all their material just comes to them for free in the mail.

The entire magazine content is provided for free by the general public - who then pay to read the magazine! When they’ve published a few magazine issues they put it all in a book and have a book of recipes. Then lots of people buy that collection as well. So that’s a shortcut to a great product with your public submitting the stuff that you sell back to them! First of all they’re happy to see their own photo or recipe in print. Second of all they love to read what all the other people have sent in. Try this idea: You can run an advert saying, “Have you had a successful weight loss?”

“Have you gone on a diet and taken off X amount of pounds and kept it off for over a year?” if so we want you to be included in this new book. It would be the top ten or fifty or hundred people. You’d interview them. Successful, ‘proven in the real world’ diets that worked for people to lose weight. I think that would be a big, best selling book. Something else that’s similar is GuidePosts magazine, which has come out with a new publication by the Norman Vincent Peale Foundation. They publish something called ‘Angels On Earth.’ Now whatever you think of this (personally I think it’s pure hokum!) there’s such a big interest in angels that people write in their stories and they talk about how they believe that their guardian angels saved them from a car accident, or helped them find their long lost brother. Things that can’t be explained, that they believe an angel helped them with. They send these stories in and then they also have stories about nice people who do things that would make you say, “What an Angel to do such a nice thing for other people.” They profile them also. So again, their whole publication is written by their readers. You can also do this on the Internet. One expert has a discussion board and one of his students asked him permission to take the most interesting questions and the expert’s answers and put them in a printed book. The guy said “Sure, as long as I can have the rights to it also.”

So they whipped it up, went through the discussion board and all the times people had written a question like, “How do I get a merchant account? My bank turned me down.” This guy would answer, “Easy, here’s some people you can call.” “How do I get this printed cheap?” “Where can I find a good mailing list company?” Just all these questions about marketing, the Internet, or business, he would answer them all. He took one day to put all these questions and answers together into the format of a booklet. Another idea was the guy who started a web site asking people to write their biggest secret anonymously onto a postcard and send or email it to him. Obviously they are nameless. He publishes them on his site (try www.keyfess.com) and gets millions of visitors. There are a lot of discussion boards out there on every subject imaginable. All you have to do is contact the moderator or the Web master, ask them permission, then go through it with the search feature and you could have a book or manual really quickly. I could go to ‘wine spectator’ site and ask them if I could do that. They have all these questions and answers about wine. So I could create a product with all these questions and answers about how to find a good wine under £10 or whatever. Whip up a booklet, give them a copy, and I’d have the rights.

Money From Seminars The third thing I wanted to talk about is this. Just go to a seminar and offer to speak for free if you can have the shared rights to your video and to the other speakers’ videos. At a lot of these seminars all the speakers go to it and when they go home they get a copy of all the talks and they can sell them. I’ve spoken at quite a few seminars. I have the rights to some CDs and DVDs I’ve made and I have the rights to some very wonderful CDs that other speakers have made.

In one weekend you can walk away with half a dozen to a dozen video products from all kinds of expert people. They’re all done in several days. You go home and it’s done. That’s another shortcut to making information products.

How to Use News Releases to Search Out Content Produced by Other People You can send a news release to those sites or those specialty publications most likely to have the kind of people that would respond and help you write your books and other information products.

Product Ideas Using News Releases In the world of travel, you could send releases out that you want information from people on how to travel free, or almost free. I think you would get great ideas which you then publish and send a free copy to everyone that submitted material. Everyone loves to have their name in print. I think you also could do something on the best place on earth for a holiday. I think that would be an exciting topic that a lot of people would want to know. Where are the best places to take a vacation? You send that to the appropriate Internet sites and to the travel magazines. To give you some more ideas, here’s another book, called ‘Your Ticket To Free Travel’. It talks about how you can get upgraded on airlines, get a free ticket or a reward, which hotels will give you an extra night - all kinds of free travel tricks. What about fishing? (amazingly, the UK’s #1 sport!) How about ‘My Greatest Fishing Experience’ or ‘How I Caught The Most Bass’ or ‘My Greatest Sea Fishing Adventure’? You seek out hunting and fishing publications and sites for that. Remember you are after FREE stories which others would find fascinating to read.

How about ‘Secrets to a Happy Marriage’, where you ask people who’ve been married 40 years or more and still haven’t killed each other, how they did it! How could you possibly do it too? They’ve been married 40 years or more and they submit material that you can publish to make a great information product. You go to the senior publications and any senior sites you find. You could do something on unusual money making hobbies. Then, of course, you find hobby publications and also any hobby sites on the Internet and ask for submissions. Here’s an idea that started a couple on their journey to making over 10 million dollars in sales. They had tried a whole lot of different things – nine different marketing company ideas and a carpet cleaning business. They tried all kinds of different ways to make money and were constantly buying ‘get rich quick’ books. They finally found something that worked. They wrote a booklet about it, and that was their first project.

It was only a small booklet but it helped people make money – which is why it became a best-seller! Another self-published booklet from someone else that sold well was not much more than a report. This was titled, ‘Mail Order Rackets Exposed’. It told people what to be aware of, for example, not to get involved with chain letters. To continue with other ideas for you, what about a book on personal relationships? For instance, ‘The Very Best Way to Meet Single Women’. How many millions of guys would buy that book or that manual? And you go to the men’s publications with that. The reverse of course is. ‘The Very Best Way to Meet Single Men’, and you go to the women’s publications or any women’s sites.

Here’s another one. I personally know a guy who made half a million pounds from a simple paperback book in which he detailed how to buy and sell used cars for pleasure and profit. It was called ‘Four Wheels To A Fortune’ – you may even remember it. I even thought about the Christian market which is a very huge market. You could ask for submissions on “Why I Know There’s a God”. You’d be surprised, I think, the amount of submissions you’d receive from Christian sites and Christian publications. How about ‘Returning from Eternity’, where you go to metaphysical sites and publications and ask people for their near death experiences? There’s a vast market place for spiritual subjects because there have been books on the subject that have sold millions and millions of copies. Look at TV programmes as well for proof, there’s a huge following for the programme ‘Haunted’. If you haven’t seen it, cameramen follow a wellknown ‘medium’ as he or she investigates supposedly haunted sites. Total hokum in my view, but the viewers lap it up. In a recent survey, 65% of adults claimed to believe in ghosts! An alarming statistic, but there you go, that’s what people are like. I hope those few ideas have given you some inspiration. The universe of ideas is almost endless and can be super profitable!

Create Your Own Big Selling Product From a Poor Seller There are about fifty thousand books published each year, with only two or three hundred of them actually being big sellers.

This is a tremendous opportunity for people to find some poor selling books and turn them into good selling products by marketing to the right niche market! Go to the bookstore, look for books that are sitting on the ‘75% off’ sale. Maybe they’ve been out a few months, maybe even just a few weeks but

they aren’t selling well enough. So the publisher says, “Mark them down and get them out of here!” Remember, MOST books don’t even break-even for the publisher, which is why they have to take 90%+ of the money for books that do sell well. Find a book that’s on a topic which interests you or that you know there’s a niche market for because a lot of people are interested. Go ahead and buy it. If you like it after reading it and can see some potential, then call the publisher or write to them (it’s probably better to write tothe publisher and make a deal with them). You’ll be surprised, a lot of publishing houses focus on the one or two books a year they publish that are the big winners, usually by the big non-fiction writers. Explain you’re not interested in selling the book(s) you’ve chosen in bookstores, you don’t want those rights. You only want the non-exclusive rights to sell it by mail and on the Internet. Maybe they’ll charge you nothing, a few hundred, or a couple of thousand, but if you have the right title you can go ahead and sell thousands of copies of it to a niche market on the Internet or through mail-order. Of course you can also just buy the books at 75% discount from the warehouse and not bother trying to get rights.

Powerful Internet Techniques When you’re going to sell a product on the Internet, you can find the information on the Internet, so it seems to be a ‘Catch 22.’ If you can go and find all this information on the Internet, why would people go onto the Internet and buy it from you? Why don’t they just go and collect it for free? Well, it’s the same reason that only 5% of people have a library card!

The library is completely filled with books, magazines and newspapers from all over the world all accessible free of charge. You can check them out and take them home. You can read them there. You can go on the computer on the Internet at the library. You can go up to the reference desk and get answers to almost any question you could dream up. I have a friend, who’s sister has a master’s degree in library science. If you have a question, I guarantee you she has the answer. It’s sure helpful in my own research. But still only five out of one hundred people ever go the library. When they get a sales letter in the mail from me that says “I’d be happy to share this information with you all collected in one place, it’s very painless. All you do is give me your credit card number and I give you it all.” They say, “You bet!”

Time is money. Most people don’t have the time or they won’t make the time to trawl the net for hours or travel to the library. They want the information NOW in an easily digestible form. They are home watching television instead of going to the library. They don’t see any adventure in it like I do. I love to research and find out new things. Like antique shoppers who can’t pass an antique shop without going in and looking at them all. I can’t walk past a bookstore, a library, or go on the Internet without spending time browsing there. I just love information. I’m an information junkie!

So, you can go on the Internet and find the information, collect it all in one place, edit it, and you have a product!

And…you can do it in a very brief period of time.

Get Top Experts to Write For You For Free Everyone wants to know how they can make money on the Internet. So, my suggestion is to get the most successful, most visible people on the Internet to write the product for you. You can profit from their work in two ways. First of all, if they’re going to write the book or manual for you, you need to know what’s going to be in it. So, you need to sit down and make a list of the topic areas you want to cover. For example, many people want to know how to create a successful web site, what the key ingredients are etc. So go right down the list of the things that any successful website that makes money would have. Those will be your chapters or sections. Next, you look for someone in each of those areas that are likely to write a section for you. So, you begin at your computer with your search engines. If you want your first section to be on (say) ‘hosting companies’ you look up the different hosting companies and pick three that you think are good prospects. Contact the first one. If that doesn’t work, go down your list.

Basically, you’ve got to make these suppliers an offer they can’t refuse! You’re going to offer them credibility, visibility, and you’re going to help them build traffic to their website – and all at no cost to them! That’s a pretty strong and powerful offer. What they’re going to do for you in return is give you ten to twenty pages on the topic area that you assign them. That will, of course, be the area of their expertise. In other words, you’re going to contact a hosting company (say) and ask them to write ten to twenty pages about how to find a host, what a host does for you and explaining the terms and fundamentals of a host for your website. Now, in return for that ten or twenty pages, they become an expert

author. That gives them credibility. You’re going to sell a lot of copies of your book, manual or whatever. That gives them visibility. You go down each of your chapter headings (and you can find ten to fifteen topics very easily) and then locate a ‘supplier’ who can do your writing for you. E.g. graphic design, copywriting, ad words, search engine expert etc. That gives you a manual of maybe 120 pages or more, a nice solid product that can sell at a good price with experts who are writing from their experience. The reason they’re probably going to agree to do this is because most of them already have some of this material prepared. So, it’s a win-win situation. They can let you have the material with very little writing. All you’re left to do is write an introduction that ties the pieces together.

How to Build Traffic to Their Website First of all, each person who participates is asked to do one other task. That is, to post a checklist on their website. For instance, this will be a list that gives ‘the ten steps to finding a host that meets your needs’, or ‘the ten pitfalls to finding a host or website designer’. Or it can be ‘the ten mistakes that are commonly made in selecting a host or web designer’. Now, in each section that they’ve written, they give their website address and offer the checklist free. (E.g. “Go to www.acmehosting.com and find out the ten questions you MUST ask before choosing a web host for your site.” Etc. etc.) This is what it does…

It brings people to their site! It brings the reader to the site to get the checklist which they can print out. It keeps the material current, and the writer of each section can also make a special offer to get new customers. I mean, the hosting service can

say, for instance, “We’ll give you thirty days hosting at no cost” or the web designer can say; “35% off your first web design with us.” So you give them traffic and a chance to make an offer to a customer. You give them credibility and visibility - it’s a combination that you just can’t lose on. And all they have to do is give you a few pages of writing which they’ve probably got anyway. And YOU didn’t have to write anything except maybe the introduction or the sales material.

Make Even MORE Money! There’s a second way you could profit. The way to do that is you sell the reprint rights to this product. Let’s say you sell the none-exclusive rights to reprint and sell as many of your publications as they would like. For this you charge, say, £500 as a one-off fee. So you find maybe 50 people who would like to buy that licence.

That’s an extra twenty-five thousand pounds - all from writing done for you by other people! With the advent of the Internet it’s amazingly inexpensive to go out and reach people who are experts and may be willing to write some content for your manual – particularly if there’s something in it for them. It’s so easy for other people to share their experiences, their strengths, their ideas – and they enjoy this, so everyone wins. Ten consultants can get together and each write an article that becomes a manual that they then all own the rights to sell. There are so many opportunities to share information now. The Internet really helps to connect us all together at such an inexpensive price.

A lot of these authors you can contact on-line, you can e-mail them instantly, and get a response back quickly. You can do some research on-line, you can find articles online. You could take some of these shortcut ideas and create a product within a week, or two weeks, or a month. With access to the Internet it makes it even more shortcut. Now you’re creating a product in a couple of days. So I think tying in these short cut ideas with the Internet is the perfect marriage.

Making a Fortune on The Internet From Jokes The man behind Joke-of-the-day.com, sends out a joke every day and in the process makes money. This is how… He sells advertising that goes along with this joke that comes to you by e-mail. He has hundreds of thousands of people around the world that read it and they send him jokes. So again, the content is free. After every joke it gives the person’s name who submitted it, e.g. “This joke was submitted by Mary Weaver in Oxford”. The jokes come in from around the world and he sends them out to thousands of people. Why?

He runs an advertisement with every joke! He’s making a fortune and he doesn’t even have to come up with any of the material himself! It’s what I’ve heard called the Tom Sawyer principle, because in the book ‘Tom Sawyer,’ if I remember right, he got everybody to paint the fence for him while he sat back and relaxed and got paid for it.

Products Can Be a Compilation of Real Life Examples 42

One of the shortcuts that I’ve found that works best is when I don’t have to write anything and everything is done for me. One of the best self-published products that I can think of where that is the case is products where they’re just a compilation of actual real-life examples. Let me give you an example to explain what I’m talking about. A couple of years ago when my wife wanted to create a CV to get a job as a librarian, we went to the bookstore and there were literally dozens and dozens of books on how to write a CV. These things were huge. I mean a hundred pages, two hundred pages - you had to wade through the whole thing just to figure out how to write a CV. Then we came upon a book which was 100-150 pages, but instead of teaching you how to write a CV, it was a whole book of actual CVs. They were each in different categories depending on the type of job you were trying to get, whether you were trying to be an airline pilot, a tax agent, or a vet, inside was a real-life CV that you could use as a template to create your own. Of course, we bought that one, and it made the process very simple. I’ve noticed that a lot of companies do the exact same thing. There’s a company that has a book that is full of actual business letters. If you need to write a certain type of letter, maybe a debt-collection letter or something like that, you can flip to page 243 to see how someone else wrote a collection letter, and write yours along those same lines. You could create a compilation of all sorts of different types of business forms and sell that to businesses. Another idea is that there are a lot of marketing companies and they’re always looking at how somebody else sold a particular product - what type of guarantee they used, or what type of pricing. So that’s a good product, a

manual full of examples of sales letters from other companies, especially if they’re successful sales letters. That’s an idea for a manual that really helps people. Those products sell very well.

Tapping into a Huge Desire Here’s another little known secret. It’s why the book, ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ is a best seller. The book is a runaway success because…

It taps into this huge desire that most people have for recognition, attention, wanting to be heard, wanting to be published and to see their name in print! Isn’t that just such an incredible desire that most people have? They fall over themselves to share their stories. You watch a football game, a cricket game and just when the camera pans across the crowd, they go crazy. They just want to be seen for one second. Forget about the fifteen seconds of fame. They want one second of fame! When they write an article, or a report, or they submit material for a book, they get to see their name in print, their stories in print and they get excited. Take any hobby. For example if you like golf, go and get hundreds and hundreds of stories, golf stories from people that have a favourite golf story to tell. You can publish a book about that. 44

If you like arts and crafts, favourite flea market stories; there are just tons of things and anybody that does anything or has any kind of hobby could find stories from people in that particular hobby market and create this book that they didn’t have to do any writing for. There is a magician I know. He publishes magic books. It’s a hobby area. When you get into a hobby area that people have a passion about, like people who are magicians are passionate about that hobby, they want to be in print and they want people to know that they are an ‘expert’.

He’s published maybe 45 to 50 books of magic tricks and illusions with each book selling anywhere from £10 to some of them well over £100! Not in a single case has the author of the trick asked for payment! This includes the books he sells for over £100! What he does is he publishes them, makes them very attractive, does a very high quality job. He gives the contributors a quantity of books free. I mean it’s just like a dozen. Each contributor is so thrilled to see the beautiful job and their name in print. The author has more manuscripts then he can handle.

What I find most fascinating about this is that people are putting together information products very quickly without any real work! The people who buy those products perceive that as getting tremendous value. That’s also the real secret to recycling old information, or putting information together in a day or so. But remember, you always have to give people tremendous value the same way you do with new products. 45

Now, let’s go on to some more shortcut strategies for getting rich with your own information products.

Press Releases Provide Free Product This is a secret that’s been held tightly by editors and publishers for decades. Everybody who discovers this little secret will realise immediately how easy it is to publish your own information products. It’s the secret of press releases. Press releases are everywhere. Every company known to man is producing press releases packed with information, facts and late breaking news about new products, new services, and new information. Guess what?

The neat thing about a press release is that it’s for release. It’s for you to use word for word, if you want to! This is the one way that you can literally pick out whole chunks or entire documents and reuse them at will – and they’ll pat you on the back for doing so! You will appear to be very knowledgeable. You’re bringing this information to the reader. They’re happy to have it. The wonderful news is, on the Internet, there are hundreds of press releases being posted every day. I want to tell you right now, one of the best products to put together using free press releases is a product directory. If you want to put together something like this quickly just go to any search engine on the Internet and type in the keyword of the subject you want to write about. For example, if you’re interested in horse racing, auto racing, cameras, or bird keeping, you enter in whatever keyword you want - and bingo! You’ll have hundreds of websites from companies that supply these types of products and services.

You can go to each of these companies. You will generally find that most every company website that’s of any value at all has a press release area or an area for the press to go to. There you will find their latest press releases which you can grab and use at will. There’s also almost always a place where you can leave your e-mail address or mailing address and get on their press release list which means you don’t have to ever go back to these people to get the latest news that they’re releasing. You can start receiving tons of information in your e-mail box or your mail box and start putting together either newsletters or product directories as I mentioned.

Press Release Websites Another great place to go is some of the sites that are press release websites. Surprise, surprise! They have a place where you can register to start receiving their press releases and pick categories that you want to hear about. You can also pluck press releases from lists of today’s news or last week’s news releases. One such site is prweb, which is the press release database at www.prweb.com. They have lists of press releases that you can find. You can sign up to receive the new ones as they are released. Another company is E-releases, which is found at www.ereleases.com. Interestingly enough, each of these websites are anxious to get the press releases to you. They want people to send in press releases as well because where they make their money is charging these companies to distribute these press releases and get them into as many hands as possible. So, for you, it’s free to sign-up to receive this information. They’re charging the company to distribute these press releases. 47

I have used this technique to publish trade journals that have made me a very good living in the on-line industry. I have published computer news magazines for video gamers using this technique. I have published countless other products and services and made a good living just being the editor. I achieve this by finding news I think my readers would be interested in and editing it down into a shorter form. It’s a little more being the publisher, and never having to really write a word.

So without writing anything, you can produce valuable documents! The neat thing about a product directory is you can use this technique to create a directory that goes into facts and figures about the product. For instance, you can explain why one product is better than another product. Press releases will detail how the product was developed and why it’s so valuable or why it stands above the competitors. You can put all of that information into your directory. If you provide more information than just a list of products, their prices, and who to get hold of, product directories get outdated. This is good. Now, you’ve got a product that your customers need to come back and buy an updated version once a year, twice a year, or quarterly. Now you’ve got a product that you can re-release and use those press releases that are now pouring into your mailbox to update your directory. It’s an incredibly simple way to get into an industry. At some point, you become an expert. Now you can write your own products when you want to in this market. You can establish a niche.

Government Sites Can be Sources of FREE Information Another great source of information that is yours for the picking, almost always absolutely free, to be used anyway that you want is the Consumer Information Centre out of Pueblo, Colorado.

They run an advert for little consumer information booklets, pamphlets, and what have you that you can order for fifty cents or a dollar. They’ve got thousands of them and a lot are free. What they are is basically the publishing outlet or sales outlet arm for the USA federal government’s publication service. They have a website at http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov. (Although this is a USA government site, there’s just a ton of useful, free information there most of which is applicable to UK projects too!) What’s neat is you’ll find a web-site here with categories: cars, children, education, employment, housing, health, food, money, small business, travel, and more. There’s actually a button called ‘and more’. In each category, there are dozens of their pamphlets that you can order online. You don’t have to pay for a thing. What’s really wonderful is they are now making these pamphlets and the information in them available to you to read right on-line by clicking on the pamphlets. Many of them come in Adobe Acrobat format. This means they’re already typeset and look really good. Now here’s the secret… The federal government, when it produces one of these booklets, cannot copyright that material because it was produced with taxpayer’s money. Now I want to caution you: there are some pamphlets and information on this site that are produced and copyrighted by various companies for the government. They may place a restriction that it’s free to use only for educational purposes. Most, however, are yours free of charge. There’s one drawback to this information - most of it is deadly, dry and boring. It’s filled with the facts, figures and the information you need from federal government agencies.

But you can take these ‘dry’ facts and then wrap them into your own information products very easily! Some of these pamphlets are designed as websites that stand on their own. You can literally put together links on your web-site that jump to these pages and offer the information on your website. It looks as if it was from your website but jumps people over to that page and then back to your site. You would not even have to take the information - just push people over to it. Now the secret to improving this dry content is to understand what it’s missing.

People Power As you already know, the one thing people most want to know about is other people. They want information but one of the key secrets is that the real power of punchy readable information is when other people are telling the story. It’s people that make the difference. You’ve got more then one person involved in that product, people telling stories, war stories and what have you about how they’ve survived this or that or come up with this or that new technique or new idea. It’s the dry information being imparted through people which makes it interesting. So put it in the form of a story, anecdote or “Here’s how one woman made this work for her…” That sort of thing. Using the government material, it’s still a win-win situation. Don’t look at it as if you’re stealing material. You’re helping the government accomplish their goal! The goal of publishing that material is circulation. The government wants to get it in the hands of as many people as they can.

That’s the purpose of publishing. The government doesn’t do a very good job of distribution – you’re helping them out! Many a mail-order company has done more to promote circulation of government publications than the government ever has on their own. So if you can use any of those government publications, and there are some great ones, don’t have any reservations about doing so because you’re promoting the goals of those publishing it in the first place. That’s getting it into the hands of as many people as possible.

Set Up a Contest For Product Information This is another short-cut secret for creating information products that you can sell for many years. It’s a creative technique that’s been used by publishers large and small. It’s used by every kind of publisher in every kind of industry or every speciality out there. The publishers of ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ even used contests to create millions of dollars worth of information and entertainment products.

Whatever topic you’re covering (whatever subject matter interests you), you can set up a contest seeking the best of, for example, stories, tips, tricks and ‘how-to’ secrets! One idea I came up with was for relationships. You could create a product ‘How I Met My Wife and Got Her To Say Yes’. Then, just seek people’s best tips, tricks, how-to, or true personal stories relating to that. With contests, you always think of prizes. You can offer a cash prize for the number one tip or trick if you have cash. There are some people out there that offer prizes for the best writing quality or best style. A good idea but you have to be qualified to judge that kind of thing. For the selling and marketing, crafts, or relationships, especially non-fiction (information) topics, you really only have to pick the tip, trick, how-to, or personal story you liked the best.

Make it clear that you’re going to “pick the one that I like the best”, as editor, and give that the first prize. The next five get runner-up prizes or whatever. Then, you don’t have to really be a qualified person to judge the quality of the writing and get into any arguments about what is ‘good’ writing and what is ‘bad’. If you don’t have cash for prizes, you can call related companies. For example, in arts and crafts, if it’s glass making, you could call companies that sell supplies or glass for people who do stained glass work and ask them to donate a prize. If you’re doing a book on that and seeking the best tips, get companies to put up products or services as prizes in return for a sponsorship position in the books. Maybe give them a page in the book for an advert, a four page catalogue, or whatever it takes to trade for free prizes for your top five people. Of course, you would also be mentioning them as sponsors that have made this contest possible in all of your promotional materials. And in anything you do to promote and attract people to send you these materials.

When it comes to announcing to the world that you’ve got this contest, use Internet news groups! It’s the best way I can imagine for low cost to really attract people who will give you their stories and ideas right on-line or by e-mail, so you don’t even have to retype them to make the book. You could just post a message on any of the news groups that relate to the interest area that you’re covering - crafts, relationships, what-have-you. There are news groups out there for almost every subject. You could leave a message like: “I’m writing a book and need your help.” I would suggest you state it that way rather than as a strict contest because this makes it a little more of a “Gosh, neat. He’s a writer and I want to help him out.”

For example: “I’m looking for true stories of outdoor survival, detailing how you got through the experience step by step, 100-250 words. The best five will get survival gear free from XYZ company.” If you don’t have any money or sponsors, offer the book itself free to the top five or to everyone that you publish. If you offered one book free to everyone you published, you’d still sell a bunch more of those books to the people buying them for their friends, family, and etc. One of the neatest things about this technique for building an information product is you develop a ready market for the book.

Everybody who submits, whether they get accepted or not, is a potential buyer of the book! If you make them a special discount offer because they submitted to you, they’ll buy quantities of the book. You’ve got a ready market, and it’s a great way to put together top-flight products with interesting stories and information you couldn’t possibly dig up yourself.

Reproduction Rights – How to Get a Product in 24 Hours Within twenty four hours you can have a complete product, already put together, typeset, cover designed, CD or DVD masters – the works. And not only a complete product but one that has been proven and that sometimes even comes with sales material to sell it. The whole kit and caboodle within twenty four hours, done, completed, finished and you know it’s a proven seller. How do you do that? You buy the reprint/reproduction rights. There are so many companies out there right now that have sold their information product and made £100,000, a half million, a million pounds with the product, and now they’re ready to sell you the reprint rights.

That’s a way you can very quickly have a proven product that’s already been tested complete with sales materials and immediately start promoting it and making money. Now, you don’t have to promote it exactly the way you buy it. And there is an advantage in not doing so since it’s probably been ‘done to death’ in that mode already. But in many cases, you can go back into that product. You can change it around. Change the format, the cover, the title, make a few editorial changes so it actually stands out a little bit and doesn’t sound like the same old information. Really, those are a few easy things you can do very quickly to make the product your own and separate it from what’s been sold previously. It seems like a brand new product! Plus, you can also take some reports from other authors, some CDs and videos you might have either created yourself or bought reprint rights to, bundle that all together thereby creating a bigger product that maybe you can sell for £500, £1,000, or £2,000. So, there are a lot of different ways where you can go out there and find a product that’s already been written and sell it yourself. In many cases, I actually prefer doing this compared with having a ghost-writer create a product.

Ghost Writers A ghost writer is someone who writes your product for you and you either add your name as the author or a fictitious name if you don’t want the exposure. Many famous people’s autobiographies are, unsurprisingly, written by professional writers.

You know, some people say, “If I want a product written, I’m going to have it ghost-written by somebody and I’ll pay them to do it”. Well, that’s fantastic. That, of course, is a shortcut. You can find a ghost-writer in some of the writing magazines, like ‘Writer’s Digest’, there are a lot of them out there. You give them the topic, and maybe some research materials and they’ll write the information for you. You can also go to www.elance.com and there are just hundreds of writers there (some in India are very cheap). They will bid for your project. That really is a great site for artistic projects such as graphic design of covers. The challenge of doing it that way is two-fold. You’ve got to pay them a pretty good amount per page. It can be anywhere from £15 or more per double spaced page. If you want a hundred or two hundred page product where it’s single spaced and small type, you might have to request 350 or 400 pages from your ghost-writer. If you’re paying £15 a page, that adds up pretty quickly. Plus, you’re getting a product with no sales material and one that hasn’t been a proven seller. I’m not saying that’s a bad way to go. It certainly is a shortcut, letting someone else do that and leveraging your time. But…

If you want a product that is proven to work, you might think about looking at some of these reprint-right offers that are available. There’s quite a few of them out there. More are coming out all the time, so if you just keep your eyes open, you should be able to find something to suit you. You don’t have to sell what everybody else is selling. You can just make a few changes, very easy changes, to a reprint right package you purchase, and instantly, you have something that is your own.

It’s not brand new, but it’s new to your customers!

You can go out there, sell it, and make another £100,000, half million, or million pounds with that self-same product. It’s very fast, very simple and it’s very effective. It’s a way I’ve used and it can be very profitable. WARNING! Be careful when buying reprint rights to information products as it is a bit of a shark-infested water out there. A lot of unscrupulous people are selling licences to out of date, tired products which are not worth the paper they are written on. Ideally buy from the original author, or a reputable largish company. Watch out for the ‘one man band’ middle men.

Instalment Publications How To Get paid NOW Without a Finished Product When we make purchases today, some of us like to buy on the instalment plan. We get what we want now, and we delay the pain by delaying the payment. We spread that out and make it as painless as possible. We do that whether we’re buying cars, televisions, or computers. We get the fun part now, and we spread the pain out over as long a period of time as they’ll allow us. Well, I’m going to share with you a way to create a product that reverses that process. I’m going to tell you a way to create a manual or product that you can sell over the Internet that’s the reverse of the instalment purchase.

You get paid now, and you spread the writing out over time! It’s called ‘instalment writing’. Here’s how it works. First of all, decide on the product that you want to create, the subject and the price. Then, create your adverts or your sales letter. Very important, create a sales letter with a lot of bullet points. Now, I’m sure you know what a bullet point is, but it gets its name from those little

dots in front of those sales points, really strong features that are brief and succinct. They tease you and make you want to know, challenge you, and make you guess whether you know the answer or not. • This is what a Bullet Point look like.

You create a sales letter that is filled with bullet points, price your product and then offer your customer the chance to read over your shoulder as you create this new product. Everyone wants information before anyone else gets it. Everyone likes to be on the inside. This gives them a chance to do that because what they’re going to do is buy your publication now and get the publication in instalments over the next few months as you create it. They get a ‘sneak peek’. They’re invited to make their comments and feedback as you create this project. It makes them an insider. Now, you establish the price of your product. Let’s say your product was going to sell or £99. You can go two ways or a combination of both... You offer the product to these sneak peek customers at £99 with a very exciting bonus attached, or you discount the price, offer a £99 product to them for £59 on the sneak peek plan. You can still include your bonus if you want to. Remember, it’s just information. It’s not going to cost you any more money to do it this way. You write your first chapter or your first section of your product. Now, it doesn’t have to be more than maybe ten or twelve pages, but you want to make certain that you pack it with information.

Take your time in creating it, as much time as you need! Do it on a leisurely basis, but make it good. Read it out loud. Make certain it reads well with a lot of information in it. Don’t make it like an introduction to a book or a manual that tells you the history of the product and what you’re going to talk about. 57

Give them a lot of information because this is the first piece of material your sneak peek customer is going to receive.

You want them to be impressed by it! As soon as your customer decides to buy your publication and become a sneak peek customer, he can download (if you’re doing the web) the product directly from your website. He now has the first section of the product. Then, each month you will create one more section of your product (or six weeks, whatever time schedule you set up in the beginning), and you’ll email it to that customer. You invite them to make their comments on the product as you go. Some will, some won’t, but it’s amazing the people who will give you feedback. You now have all the money up front. You have their money in your bank. You are now writing on a leisurely basis. You have a direction to go. You have all the bullet points to follow. You have feedback coming from your customers to make the process easier. Some will e-mail you suggestions or stories that you can use. Some will be doing free research for you. They’ll tell you something that you didn’t know. You’l1 also have an editorial staff because if you make any mistakes, grammatical or proofreading, someone will call it to your attention. There’s always some people like that! They’re doing that work for you for free. If you have ten chapters, it may be ten months - whatever the time period you establish - you will periodically e-mail this material to your customers. Doing this e-mail is not costing you a penny.

There’s no invoicing. There’s no packing. There’s no wrapping. There’s no printing. There’s no postage. It’s not adding to your cost of this product at all. Then, when you finish the final section and send it out, you can print your hard copies or duplicate your hard copies and send each customer a final copy of the product. 58

If you’re doing this electronically, you allow them to download the complete product and the revised copy off the web. It creates a very loyal customer because they’re involved in the process. It makes your writing very painless. You’re writing a very little amount each month over a period of months, and you had all the money up front while you were being paid to write the product. It’s a great way to go. It’s instant profit, and that makes writing a financial pleasure.

Multiple Streams of Income – Your Key to Riches The best way to make money in the information business and self publishing is to think about multiple streams of income. You write an article, or buy an article then you turn it into a report. Get enough reports together and you can turn it into a book, a newsletter, CD-ROMS, DVDs - all with the same products in different forms. A lot of people out there are writing articles. Thousands of articles are appearing on the Internet and in various magazines. So let’s say you want to do a book on home business (making money from home). There are hundreds of articles in print and on the Internet about home business. Get in touch with the writer-publisher - they’re usually the same person. Explain you want to do a book on home business and let them know you loved their article in ‘Leisure magazine’, or on their website or wherever. Ask their permission to publish that article in your product. In return you send them a copy of the book when it comes out plus give them a deep, discounted super price on bulk copies. Why? So they can buy the books and sell them as well! A lot of authors of these articles on-line and off-line are going to agree. The next step is to take a selection of these articles (or you can take the book/manual that you put together) and go back to the people and say you now want to create a CD- ROM.

They’ll get the rights to sell the CD at a super price! When you think about it, this is great for the author. They’re busy and probably don’t have time to create their own CD or manual. You’re doing all that work for them and they can buy from you in bulk, sell to their existing loyal customers and make great money. So this is the way to think outside the box and start thinking about all the printed products that are out there or the audio products that are out there that no one has ever done much with in a different format. You can do this in reverse too. Take a DVD of (say) ‘Greatest Magic Tricks’ and turn it into a manual – or a monthly course! You can approach a lot of people for little or no money, get them to agree to give you the rights to a different market and/or the product in a different format. They then get the rights to sell the printed product or sell the CD or whatever.

This is an excellent way to get product at very little cost and with someone else doing all the main creative work! A lot of people have printed matter that they could take and turn into an audio CD. So you can do that also. If you have a book or manual all you have to do is take the highlights of it and turn it into an audio programme. Just record yourself basically giving the same information that you would print in your book by putting it on a CD. Don’t have a great speaking voice? Go to elance (www.elance.com) and type ‘voice over artists’ – or do that under Google. You’ll be inundated! A pretty simple idea, but it definitely works really well. It is something that has been proven before. You can also record someone else giving advice.

For example, some marketing gurus charge as much as £5,000 for a weekend course. You could pay a ‘guru’ and spend a weekend exclusively with him. Then hammer him with questions and spend the whole weekend, several hours a day, picking his brain asking him every kind of question related to making money that you could think of. If you produced an audio program called the ‘£5,000 Weekend Package’ and charged £500 you would only need 10 customers to break even, assuming you paid the expert £5000 for his time and knowledge. Sounds far fetched?

It’s already been done and it sold thousands of copies! The subject was mail order. It is something you might like to consider. Initially it’s a great idea even done simply, by getting someone in your field to sit down and talk. You don’t even have to have them come out and spend a weekend with you. You can do it over the telephone, just interview them and record it, ask them all kinds of questions that you can think of. The most important thing to remember is to ask them questions that you know your customers are interested in finding the answers to. You can create a one hour CD, or a two hour programme, three, four, eight, it doesn’t matter how much. The important thing is to keep it interesting. You can even interview a dozen experts in your field and have a big, giant home study package that maybe you can sell for £495 or even higher. It will depend on you providing lots of information in a field that’s interesting, something your customers would be interested in.

In summary, you can do audio CDs of other people (‘experts’) talking and sharing their secrets. That’s a real quick way to create a shortcut product that doesn’t take a lot of time. Now here’s another tip…

Study The Successful! Study the lives of all the people who have made it big, you will find that these are people who have made a habit of taking action. A lot of people have great ideas in the shower, but by the time they dry off and get dressed, the idea is gone. And a lot of people have great ideas, but how many people take action? Use all the techniques I’ve shared with you, to constantly develop product every single day. Here’s the principle: all you do is invest a very small amount of time into developing new products every single day. It’s really that simple. But you must put it into your schedule. It won’t ‘just happen’. Do it at the same time every day, like when you first get up in the morning and are drinking coffee.

If you just produced one page every day, that’s over 300 pages a year! How long is it going to take you to write one page - or if you don’t like writing, to find one page on the Internet? That just depends. It’s slow going at first but you build up speed with practice. Some people can write a page in 10 minutes, some people take 45 minutes. On average 30 to 45 minutes a day and you’ve got a decent, interesting page written. Every year you’ve added 300 pages to your product portfolio.

Or, if you like to record - because it’s so easy to record information - spend 15-30 minutes a day recording. It may take you 20 minutes to come up with the notes that you’re going to write down to come up with your 15-30 minutes of recording, but you do that for 5 days a week.

Spend 30 minutes in front of a microphone 5 days a week, and every month you’re going to produce 8 x 45-minute CDs which you can profit from! You put it into your schedule, and you’re developing products that you know your customers will want to buy. Not only are you creating 8 CDs, once you have them transcribed you have 150 to 175 pages of new printed material as well. You can recycle all of that information and use it again and again. So think of this almost as a hobby. Do it every single day. You’ll get good at it and it starts becoming fun. And always remember - what you’re selling is information.

Nobody expects you to be a great writer or a great communicator! What they do expect you to do is give value for money, and it helps if you really have an interest or better still, a passion in what you’re writing about or communicating about, because your customers can sense that. Enthusiasm is infectious. I think that is one of the most important things. It will make up for all of the negatives. A little enthusiasm and interest in what you’re trying to communicate makes up for a lot of other bad qualities - and I ought to know! Anyway, one of my heroes, Dan Kennedy, is a guy who produces many different information products. He’s got about 7 or 8 books in the bookstores and he’s always coming up with new things. Here’s how he does it…

He gets up every morning at five and by 5:05 a.m. he’s writing. Every day he does this for 45 minutes. He doesn’t care whether he’s feeling great or sick or he stayed up until 3 in the morning the day before and he’s dead tired. He simply does it every single day - and it builds up. It’s a simple concept. Just a little bit each day can add up. No matter what technique you choose from all of these great methods and strategies if you use them a little bit every day, you’re going to build something that’s going to be worth a tremendous amount of money. Now onto a different, but no less important, subject…

Repeat Business Can Make You Rich! Find Out Exactly How You Can Get It! When you have customers that continually buy from you, you’ve built yourself a profit base which can keep generating cash for years to come. This way your repeat business or ‘back-end’ sales is where the REAL money is - and your ‘front end’ sales are there to replenish the customer list. Few newcomers realise that the ‘back end’ is where it’s really at, and the front end is often a loss-leader. If done correctly, your back-end profits will grow and grow. You’ll keep adding more customers from whom you will eventually gain repeat sales and you keep making more and more money. How do you gain repeat customers and keep them buying from you? Remember, you want to offer them quality products. Then you can build a relationship with those customers. They’re more willing to come to you because they have bought your items before and they know they’re great. If you’ve scammed them just once with something trashy, they won’t come back again. In the end, keeping your customers happy is how to keep the most customers buying from you.

Writing Can Be Easy! How to produce a 16-page booklet in 3 hours Using The ‘Step’ Method

When you write non-fiction, ‘how-to’, money making, or money saving (whatever the topic is) product you do not have to be a great storyteller. You just have to know something about the subject you’re writing about. The ‘step’ method is the ABC approach to writing. You do it cookbook fashion. If someone said to me, “How do you make a great chocolate cake? I sure would like to eat one, but I’m not too good at making one.” Well the answer is that it’s pretty simple when they do things 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 by following a recipe. That’s the formula I’m going to give you. That’s the challenge people have. That’s the block they have in their mind because most people don’t realise that there are shortcut secrets to creating information products. Most people believe writing is all about that TV or movie type of idea of the writer. He cranks that blank page into the typewriter. Then, he sits there, cigarette dangling from mouth and he’s got writer’s block for five hours. He types out maybe a sentence, and then he leaves it. He comes back the next day, throws away what he did the previous day in disgust and does another sentence. People believe it’s an agonizing process that’s so hard. It takes so 1ong. You’ve got to be perfect. People have that belief. Now you know about the shortcut ideas, you realise how simple it can be (remember we’re NOT talking about writing the next great novel) you

change your mind about how easy it really can be. You go from believing it’s difficult, to thinking, “Wow! Now there are so many opportunities and so many ideas. Let’s get started immediately!” That’s what I hope this product has done for you. This is exactly how it happened for me. As I researched and more of these techniques were revealed to me I began to get excited and believed that I could be a writer quite easily. More to the point, since I didn’t actually want to be ‘a writer’ – I began to realise I could make great money from ‘writing’. Here are some more insights I discovered that drove me towards the breakthrough into this amazing highly profitable business…

The Secret to Writing Fast and Profitably A fear of writing begins in school because for most of us, that’s the only experience that we’ve had in writing - writing essays in school. As a child, you couldn’t wait to learn to write. You were writing on paper and having someone show you how to print your name. You wanted to write and you wanted to create. You went to school and it was fun until someone said you did it wrong. It was fun until someone said, “Wait a minute. The grammar is wrong,” or “This is the incorrect spelling.” They put those red marks on the paper and now the process of writing became punishment for you.

What was fun, what was an exciting idea as a child, is that you could create something on pape but it then became a way for you to be wrong! No one likes to be wrong. None of us like to be judged or criticized.

Wayne Dyer is a famous author. He filled Carnegie Hall, just him standing up there talking. I think Robin Williams is the only other person who’s ever done that, and he’s a comedian. Wayne Dyer’s books have all been best-selling books and yet he said that one guy wrote to him saying, “I bought your book for twenty-five cents at a garage sale and I hated it. I think you personally should send me my twentyfive cents back with an apology”. Apparently, he wrote back, “I’m in the smallest room of my house. I have your letter in front of me, and soon it will be behind me”. Let’s face it, you and I both know that the only way to avoid criticism is to be nothing, do nothing and say nothing. So you just can’t let it bother you. You can’t make it harder than it really is. A lot of time, our perception is that it’s so hard. John Burrows has a quote that I have up on a wall. It says: “The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is right where you are.” So, instead of right in front of our face, something we could do quick and easy like a CD, we think we’ve got to write the great novel or the most authoritative one thousand page text on the subject - when we don’t.

People want information and they want it quick and easy! The Simple Way - Get started Complicated things don’t make you any money. The things that make you money are these shortcut methods that I’m sharing in this programme. They make it easy to get a product out there very quickly and then develop a series of similar products. You keep making money from all of the products that you did previously. That’s about as simple as you can get. Forget about the hard way. Forget about looking at blank paper and saying, “Oh, what can I do? I’m not creative. I’m not a writer.” I’m showing you how to get started quickly. What I’ve noticed about all the hundreds of projects that I’ve worked on, is that once you start, you’re half done! 67

I think about things… sometimes I anguish about them, even now. Even though I know it’s simple, sometimes I try to make it difficult for myself. I don’t know why I do that. I guess it’s just human nature. But as soon as I force myself, and I do, to write the first page, I’m half done. From then on, it just starts to flow. When I get through with this programme, you are going to know the easy way to produce information products. It’s very exciting! You don’t have to be a writer at all. You don’t have to be a recognized expert. Best of all, you don’t need a lot of money to invest. You can get started with pocket change. This is the world’s greatest way to make money.

How to Write a Full Length Book Now, very briefly, here’s how to write a full length book or manual. If you can do that, you can do anything! You can do CDs, reports, or whatever. First, here’s how to pick the topic that’s going to be a good one. Make sure you do your research and know there’s a market for it first.

Always find the markets before you pick your topic! Then, write your advert or sales letter, or both, and also the table of contents. Fill it with benefits (more on this later). Even before you start writing this book, manual, or whatever, you want to know what you’re going to put in it. You want to fill it with benefits. It will help you write it. So, when you have the advertising material, you then have to put into the book or manual every benefit that you mentioned in your advert. Next, start gathering material. You go to the library. You’ll find so many things on almost any topic. If you go to the Internet, you’ll find ten times

more. I don’t care what the topic is, you can go to the search engines and you can find more about that topic than you ever wanted to know. So, between the library and the search engines, you’re going to have all the reference material you absolutely could ever want. Next, decide on the chapters. You decide on the headings of the chapters, whether it’s nine, ten, twelve chapters or whatever. Then, get an A4 folder and label each with a chapter heading. For every chapter heading, start putting the reference material that you’ve gathered from the Internet, the library, or both into the proper folder, ten folders or whatever you have. Continue to do that for a while. You’ll be amazed. They’ll be getting thicker and thicker. Once you’ve done that, then you have the advert, the sales letter and you’ve done the table of contents. You’ve got ten folders full of the chapter material. Now it’s going to be very simple for you to write that book or anything else you want to do. It almost writes itself. If you don’t want to create a product yourself, go find an expert and let them write the words for you. Now, I’m not talking about having them write a book, or having a ghost-writer write a book for you. What I’m talking about is find a public speaker, someone who speaks on a topic that you’re interested in or a topic that you believe that there are a lot of people interested in. Get permission from them to transcribe and turn their speech into a manual. They may say, “Sure. I have no interest in writing and I’ll let you do it for free”. Maybe they’ll want a cut of the profits. You can work out some kind of arrangement. Many speakers would be flattered that you would even be interested in their speech. And especially that you thought their speech good enough to turn into a manual.

The American, Mark Nolan, turned his speech into a manual called “Instant Cash Flow” and made 3 million dollars! 69

So, obviously, it’s a very powerful technique. If you do it right, it can work wonders for you. Again, this is very simple. All you have to do is find a public speaker and get permission from them to transcribe their speech and turn it into a manual. There is dictation equipment out there that lets you just use a foot pedal and stop and pause it as you need. I wouldn’t even mess with that. There are people who will transcribe audio very cheaply, who can transcribe a speech for you and put it into manual form. (Go on the Internet and type ‘transcription services’.) Then you just need to clean it up and have a typesetter make it look nice. That’s easy to do and is not very expensive. You can do this yourself of course if you can use WORD or a similar. Here’s another take on this that you might try to do. Maybe a half hour speech wouldn’t turn into that much transcription and wouldn’t be a very big manual. So you could find four or five speakers. You could compile them all into a manual that might be 200 or 300 pages, maybe even a book, where you had three or four different chapters or sections. Each section could be on a different speaker all related to the same topic. You could just have a big reference guide or a big book that contained all the speeches from all of these experts.

Find an Expert to Interview Another thing you could do, if you couldn’t find an expert that was actually giving speeches, is to find an expert and interview them. Write down lots of questions that you know your customers would be interested in and love to know the answers to. Then, just interview your expert. You can transcribe that interview. You can even do CDs of that interview and sell them that way. It’s an excellent way to create products without having to write a single word. You never have to stare at a blank page. Have someone transcribe the speech. Turn it into a book or manual and you’re ready to go. 70

Some More Tips on Actually Doing The Writing Process I’ve already given you some tips. But I also know that writing is something most of us – me included – will do almost anything to avoid. But at some point almost no matter what you’re going to create you’re going to have to do a little writing, whether it’s an introduction, a summary, a cover, whatever it is. And yes I know for many people that is a point of tremendous fear. Sitting down with that paper and pen, or that blank screen in front of you and getting the first words on paper. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an experienced writer or beginner you still have the same fear. The most prolific writer in modern history was Walter B. Gibson. Walter wrote all the ‘Shadow’ novels and a lot of ‘how to’ information. His house had rooms with bookcases from floor to ceiling with books that Walter had written. Walter was always writing books. Guess what? Walter had trouble getting started, so the way he got started writing was… he never stopped! He just kept going from page to page to page. He had several typewriters throughout his house and he still wrote on a manual typewriter until his the day he died. He would have several books going at the same time. He would walk by one typewriter and he would work there for a half-hour or so then he’d move to another typewriter and work on a different book. Most of us are not going to write that way, but Walter didn’t like to get started – so he never stopped! We face the same problem. So, how do you get started?

Getting Started By making an agreement with yourself that you’re not going to write a perfect page! Decide right now that you’re not going to write a perfect opening and nothing you put on this first piece of paper is going to be seen by anyone but you. You’re not going to correct it, it’s not going to get graded, it’s not going to get printed, just sit down and say: “I’m just going to write the introduction, first paragraph, or the first page to this introduction or manual or whatever it is that I need to write”. Sit down and just play with that first paragraph or page. Don’t check the grammar, don’t check the spelling - and don’t polish it. It’s much easier to write when you give yourself permission to do it that way. Then when you finish that first page, take time and read it, look at it very carefully but don’t look at the grammar, don’t look at the spelling and don’t judge it. Look for the good idea, or the nice thought, or the clever introduction, or look for the content, something buried in the middle that you like.

A Neat Trick Then when you see something that you like, congratulate yourself, saying, “Hey, that’s pretty good!” Then screw-up the paper and throw it away. Now, put a new sheet in the typewriter, or clear the PC screen, and start over. Write that first page again building on the good part of the content you liked in your first try. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a shortcut, but believe me it is. What you’ve done is get over the hurdle, you’ve got started, you’ve blown out all

the crud that was in the pipes and you’ve acted just like an athlete preparing for contest. You’ve stretched your muscles - you’re warmed up and you’re ready to write. You might think that the next thing to do is to write the second paragraph or the second page, but no, here’s what you do next… Write the conclusion to your publication. Sit down and write how this publication is going to end. The last paragraph or the last two or three paragraphs, whatever is comfortable for you. Take as much time as you need; again don’t judge. When you’ve finished, polish and make it as good as you possibly can. Now you have a beginning and you have an end. You’ve got a start that you’re happy with. You’ve got a conclusion that you’re proud of. Now something goes to work here that I can’t explain.

Your mind then makes that whole writing process easier, because it knows where it’s going and how it’s going to end up. There’s something about our minds that will give you the information you need to connect the dots in the middle. You’ve got an outline, or a plan, or notes, it’ll just flow into place. I know it sounds silly. I know it sounds goofy. The truth is that this can reduce the pain of writing and improve your writing at the same time. Another tip is: don’t correct your writing as you proceed, don’t reread your writing at all as you go along. Let’s say you’re writing a chapter or a section. Don’t evaluate as you go. Most of us type a word and we see it’s incorrect and we change it, or we say: “No, no, I need to change my grammar here”. Don’t do that. Concentrate on content and not on the form. Write as rapidly as you can. Make an agreement with yourself that you won’t make any corrections until you finish.

The Sound Psychological Reason Behind This Technique Our mind is divided into two hemispheres, the right mainly controls the creative section and creative processes, the left handles our more analytical processes. Those are overlapped somewhat but basically for discussion it’s the right side which controls the creative process and that’s the part which is doing the writing. The left side is the judgement side. If you were writing and absorbed in your creative thought and you suddenly say: “Oh, that word is wrong”, you’ve now switched hemispheres. You’re now thinking critically. The critical side of you is the side of you that is already telling you that you ‘can’t write’, that ‘this is hard, this is difficult’. The creative side may be enjoying the process. So make an agreement with yourself and promise you will honour it. You will not do any criticisms, evaluations, reread, or change grammar until you’ve finished the section you’re working on. Do this and you’ll find that your writing will flow much faster, much easier and you can find it almost fun. Almost! There’s a lot of information about how to write written by famous authors that are making millions of pounds and they tell you exactly how they do it. You can go through their different process, figure out what’s best for you, what works for you, then start using those processes yourself in your own writing.

It’s Easy to Have Ideas! Before I started, I never could think of anything to sell. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to do the work, it was just like, “What can I sell? What can I sell?” Most of the people I talk with are asking, “What can I create? What can I come up with?” My impression is that they never take the time to sit down and develop an idea. What they 74

really mean is that nothing has interrupted their consciousness to say, “This is what you should do. This is what you should be creating”. They equate getting an idea with the light bulb we see in cartoons. The light goes on and they say, “Aha, that’s it!” But the truth is that ideas come because I sit down and say, “Okay, I have to work at an idea.” So I devote some time, so I sit down and I work on an idea for this or a product for that. Several ideas usually come up. Some are better than others. If you do that frequently, you’ll have more products and it gets easier and easier. But when I first started I spent my time worrying that I needed a product. After I’d developed this mental approach of spending some time to think about it, my problem became the opposite.

I found that there are more ideas for products than I can create in a lifetime! My problem is how to pick the best ones and choose the ones to pursue. If you have a book full of ideas, it’s going to make it so much easier to get started. I want to point out that it is common knowledge among most writers that it is really rather easy to write.

Summary Points First you just have to write. You have to start. Half the people in the world who want to write for a living or produce products, never get past that obstacle. So the moment you start, when you’ve got those first pages rolling, you’ve just beaten 50% of the people out there who wish they could. The other goal is to write every day. It’s one of those things I’ve always done. You write every day, even it’s just half a page, or whatever you can make that time for.

You’ll find that even 20 minutes a day can turn into a book in a year. The third step is always to finish what you write. Half the people that actually get over that hurdle and start writing never finish what they write. So if you can finish a work, you now know that you are head and shoulders above 90%+ of the people who wish they could write in the first place. The beauty of all this is if you’re writing a page or two every day, all you then have to come up with is the introduction and some tying together pieces. For example all of these stories from different people or governmental sources of information - all of these vast resources I’ve given you to get the facts, get the information and get material for your book - all you’re doing is tying it together.

That way you can make 20 minutes a day turn into five books or manuals a year! The Man Who Writes and Sells Tricks to Professional Magicians Let me tell you a success story of a professional magician turned author. Most of the big illusions you see on the television specials like the ‘vanishing Statue of Liberty’ are really his idea. He’s made a very good income from selling those ideas to other professional magicians. But he sits down every day for an hour and takes notebooks and just sits there and brainstorms ideas and writes things down. Most of them are not really developed ideas. Most of them are not even good ideas, but he just does this every day. 76

When there’s a need for something, somebody comes to him and says, “I really need an idea for this” and describes what they’re looking for, he simply goes back to his notebooks and reviews those ideas and evaluates them to see if he has the germ of an idea for an illusion. He goes back and finds the pieces, and then he has an idea that he refines and gives to them. The secret is that his mind is trained to think of some new things every day. He doesn’t worry whether it is good or not at the time. He evaluates it when it’s time to use it.

How You Can Do The Same With Product Ideas Just jot down some ideas every day. In the beginning it’s probably going to be very difficult. At least it was for me. Over time you exercise that muscle and it’s not a matter of life and death where you’re forced to come up with an idea immediately, so the ideas just flow. Isaac Asimov is one of the most prolific writers in the history of authorship. He’s written hundreds of books. In fact, he was credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as writing a 500 page book in 3 days. But someone asked him once, “I’d love to be a writer. What’s the best advice you can give me?” Isaac replied, “Write! If you’re going to be a writer, write.” You’re not creating the great American novel. You’re not writing Gone With The Wind. You’re putting simple information on paper, you’re writing the way you speak, and that’s all it takes to get the job done and to make a lot of money.

Self-publishers are making more money than almost anyone! There are maybe a few hundred authors that are millionaires and their books sell well. There are a few thousand other authors of books that are making steady money. 77

But millions of people who want to be authors are not getting published, and thousands of people who are getting published are not making serious money. That’s because the publishers keep the lion’s share and most books don’t sell that well. So self-publishing is a great, great way to go.

Recycle Old Information Product is power, so do whatever you can to build your product. The number of products that you have - that is the potential income in your pocket. The idea that I would like to share is this. I call it a wealth building shortcut. It’s the real lazy person’s secret for creating information products. Here’s what it is. You recycle your old information. First of all, it’s easier to recycle old material than to create something new from scratch. You can create a whole bunch of different information products by using bits and pieces of your old information products.

You can write or record something one time and you get paid for it dozens and dozens of times! If you think about it, this really gives you the same kind of leverage that many of the world’s richest people have.

The world’s richest people do something one time and then they get paid for it over and over. People such as famous authors, write a book and get paid for many years for that book. Movie stars, producers, singers, songwriters, or other types of investors, they do something one time and then they are able to earn a stream of income from it for many years – sometimes a lifetime. The singer/songwriter Cliff Richards became very upset when some of his early

hits such as ‘Summer Holiday’ dropped out of copyright and became public domain. He had recorded them fifty years previously! Now the information publishing business, of course, lets you do this, too. If you recycle your old information you’re able to get even more leverage. You can get paid many times for each page that you write or each CD that you produce. The customers don’t care. Maybe you’re thinking that recycling old information products is ripping-off your customers because you’re charging them twice for something you did once. First of all many customers don’t buy every single product that you produce and second, if you’re just taking a few pages out of one book and putting it in another, they’re not going to notice. What they are going to notice (and this is all the customers really want) is value. They’re not going to notice that you took pages 90 through to 100 out of one book or manual and put it in another. Any that would complain, of course, you could do something to make it right. I’ve been doing this for years and I’m doing more and more of it all the time and I’ve yet to receive any complaints whatsoever.

Different Ways to Recycle All you have to do is find as many ways as possible to recycle your old material. A chapter from one book could be a chapter in another book. Excerpts from one CD can be used in other CDs. The printed transcript from one CD could be used in any manual that you do. Small reports could be added together to create new material. Single CDs can easily be grouped together into an entirely new programme by simply extracting excerpts plus maybe you have to do some re-recording to link those sound bits together. CD programmes that you’ve already done can 79

be transcribed, mixing some new material in there, and in a fraction of the time it would take to produce a product from scratch you will have a brand new product. You build products up over the years and soon you can have about a thousand pages of material. If you then go back and take a few pages here a few pages there you can re-mix it all to create a brand new product. When you create new products that are integrated, they offer great value. Not only does the customer not feel cheated but the customer is ecstatic. They are extremely happy because you’ve taken the bits and the pieces from the best of the best of other materials and joined it together to create these new materials. It’s always easier to recycle something than to come up with something from scratch. Until you have a backlog of products, you can go out and get all these other people to share their products with you. You can produce them, make CDs, and turn them into manuals. If you already have product, you want to continually make more streams of income from the products you have by repackaging them. Authors have been doing this for years and years.

The most successful authors and publishers continually bring out re-issues of older volumes or combine together the best. Look at the ‘best of’ albums that are released by every major recording artist. They put out five albums and then they release a ‘best of’ album by pulling songs from the previous releases and creating a ‘new’ product.

The Chat Book The best example of re-cycling old information that I can think of was a limited edition mini book series featuring famous science fiction authors. There was an original story for each little mini book. 80

One of the creators of this idea wrote to Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction author, and offered him $200 if he’d write an original short story and agree to sign 500 of these little books. He agreed! This was one of the biggest names in science fiction! So, why did he agree to write a story for (what to him must have been a paltry sum) $200? This is why… The first thing he did was re-sell it to Isaac Asimov science fiction magazine for a LOT more money. Then he used it in at least four other books! The point is he had his marketing all figured out for that story way in advance. He just thought that the little mini book was a neat way to launch it.

The Power of Planning Ahead When I created my first product someone asked me, “Will each chapter stand alone as a separate product?” I said, “What? I never even considered that fact.” He told me to look at it this way. “Write your book, but make sure you get at least eight or nine separate products out of it, even just printed products. “Can you take chapters out of that publication, re-title them and will they stand alone? “If you can’t then go back and look at what you plan to do because you should get another six or eight products out of that.” That was my first exposure to this idea. It had never even crossed my mind that it would have that multi use.

A Chapter Can Become an Article That Creates Sales

If you do ten chapters and they stand alone, then in addition to getting ten products you can also take those ten chapters and turn them into ten articles in magazines. Then you tell the magazine publishers that at the end of the article you want a resource box that explains this is a chapter from your book. And if they send £29.95 (or whatever) you’ll send them the complete book. One chapter equals one article equals more sales!

Another Great Idea For a Book One magazine, I think it was Family Circle, I read once that their most popular column over all the years was this column ‘Can this marriage be saved?’ Women love to read that, because they read how someone overcame their relationship problems, every month. Collate all of those articles on marital trouble and you have a book. Even the title is there - just call it ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ Here’s another neat idea…

Changing The Niche Take a product that you have and if you can, change it in such a way that you can sell it to an entirely new group of people. Really, you’re not doing a whole lot of new writing to create your new product. Maybe you’ll have to write a new introduction. Now you’re selling it to an entirely new group of people - people who’ve never seen that product before. I’ll give you some examples so you can see exactly how this would work. For example, let’s say you’ve written a book about travel and how to save money on vacations.

There’s a large senior market out there. So, let’s say that you’ve written this book and it’s called ‘The Senior’s Guide to Discount Travel’, and you’re selling tons of these. Maybe your sales are slacking off a bit. Now you can make a small change and breathe new life into it. Let’s say you change the introduction, but you keep most of the information. 75% of the information in there stays the same because it’s all about getting discount travel. Now you can re-title it and call it ‘The Business Person’s Guide to Discount Travel’ and sell it in business magazines. Maybe you can change the introduction again and call it ‘The Adventurer’s Guide to Discount Travel’ and advertise it in maybe cycling magazines or sky diving magazines. You take basically the same 75% of the information and maybe change the introduction and a few words around and sell it to a different niche market instead of the same niche you’re selling it in right now.

A Real Life Example A marketing company is doing this and making it very simple. They had quite a bit of information on mail-order marketing and then the Internet popped up. As you know soon it was big and so many people wanted to learn how to do Internet marketing. So, what did this company do? They took all their existing mail-order marketing information, deleted all the references to mail-order and popped in the word Internet in its place! The principles are pretty much the same for both vehicles.

Immediately they had an Internet Marketing Course that doubled their profits!

It was a very good course on Internet marketing because marketing for the Internet and mail-order (and other types of areas as well) are very similar. They did a great job of that. Instead of having to write an entirely new course on Internet marketing they were able to make a few very simple changes and immediately they had a brand-new course that they could sell to people interested in Internet marketing. There’s also a company that created books on How to Get Freebies. They did the exact same thing. Instead of just creating a book on freebies, they had 95% of the information on how to get free things and then they titled each book differently so they could sell it to a different niche. They have the senior’s guide to freebies, the teacher’s guide to freebies, the kid’s guide to freebies, the student’s guide to freebies, the parent’s guide to freebies, and they would sell it to different niches, but with basically the same information. In summary, by taking a core block of information and just changing maybe the introduction and a few things inside the package, you can actually sell it to different niches and make a lot more money with the same product. Are you beginning to see how this business works? Now let’s have a look about how to market your information product. As I said at the outset, this is not an ‘A-Z of marketing’ manual – you can get that stuff elsewhere. But I do just want to share some very important things with you in this next section.

PART II

MARKETING YOUR INFORMATION PROUCT

Advertising Eventually you will want to advertise your information product with a view to selling it. So why not try the FREE way first of all?

Press Releases are FREE Advertising! One of the best ways to learn how to write press releases is to actually look at real life press releases that have helped people get free advertising. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another product idea - a compilation of great press releases! Some specific magazines out there could potentially make you millions of pounds if you advertise in them! Pay attention to the people who read magazines. The key is in the market, not with the product. You have to place your product advert in the right magazines that cater to the market your product is developed for. This makes choosing the magazines that you advertise in simple. There are magazines for nearly every interest that you can think of. So the key is finding the ones that fit your product. This allows you to zero-in on that specific group â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the group most likely to want what you have to offer - the group that is most likely to spend their money on your product. This is very useful in specialised markets, like hobbies, because you can key-in on the people that are interested in certain hobbies by advertising in hobby magazines. Look for a specific target! If you are trying to reach a certain type of interest group, key-in on their magazines.

Here's a way newspapers could help you make a small fortune! Make your advert look ‘newsy’. Why? Because people read the paper to get the news! If you can make your advert look like an editorial, you have achieved something very valuable. Keep in mind that people read advertising in a very passive way. They know that you are asking them for their money, and they aren't going to give it to just anyone. But if you can make your advertisement look like an article with some interesting content, chances are good that they will take the time to read through it. It is important to make it look like any other article in the publication that you are using. Test it out – and always remember that people feel more comfortable about giving their money to something that looks professional. A newspaper story is not seen as an advertisement - it's seen as journalism. This can be a big help in gaining credibility. The more credibility you have, the higher the profit potential.

How you could test expensive adverts in national magazines - FOR DIRT CHEAP PRICES! Many national magazines also offer regional editions, which can mean reduced advert rates for you. Business magazines generally do not offer regional editions. A full-page advert in a major national may cost you £15,000 or more, but only £1,500 in a local edition. This is how you can test adverts in national magazines for dirt cheap prices. It’s also how to make people think you’re a

very big advertiser - even when you’re not! You will not be taking out full page adverts of course. Go ahead and try it out in that local edition. Most readers don’t even realise that there are different editions, so it makes them take a second look at you if they see you in a big name magazine or newspaper. You can see if your advert is going to do well for a lot less. If the advert doesn’t do well in the local edition, you can bet that the national will be no different. It will make you feel a lot better to know that you didn’t spend a small fortune on an ineffective advert!

How To Keep Making Money With Adverts You Ran Years and Years Ago! If you can get your advert in a major magazine or newspaper, you are well on your way to taking advantage of something that has the potential of being a great moneymaking opportunity. Once you have your advert in a major magazine, you can make copies of that advert and include them in your mailings and sales correspondence as ‘tear sheets’ (that’s an A4 sheet of paper that looks as though it’s been torn from a magazine or paper.) This is how to make thousands of pounds with an advert you ran several years ago! These magazine reprints can give you instant credibility. The better your credibility, the more money you can make. And all you have to do is add these four words: “As seen in (your magazine).” E.g. “As seen in TIME Magazine”, etc. You then can use those reprints in mailers, signs, envelopes, other media, blow-ups, framed easel or window displays, or anything else you can think of that will further promote your business. This added credibility can help to overcome your prospects' scepticism..

The one thing that will make people absolutely want to do business with you instead of your competitors is . . . . . .offering them something unique. What does unique really mean? Let’s see what our dictionary has to say: Unique: Not typical or unusual or having no equal. In other words, it’s something that no one else but you has in exactly that form. A selling proposition is the thing about your product or service that makes people want it. Therefore, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the thing about your product or service that makes people want it - because no one else has it. A great USP will enable you to rise above your competitors, and you will be able to gain the customers who would normally buy from your competition. In short, it will make people want to do business with you, not your competitors! A well thought-out advantage obviously differs depending on the market you are catering for, but it’s always something no one else is offering in that exact form. Hopefully, it will be exciting to the prospects who see your sales messages. If you were to ask most business people, “What are you giving your customers that no other company in your market is giving to them?” they will say something along the lines of, “We give them the best prices, the best quality and the best service.” Price, Quality and Service. Yawn. These are not distinct or specific enough to call a unique selling proposition, particularly that over-used word ‘quality’. Which company doesn’t claim to offer ‘quality’? Almost every business out there thinks or says exactly the same thing. How can it be unique if all of these other businesses make the same claims?

When putting your offers out to your prospects, be it through direct mail, Internet or advertising, try to have a unique advantage. Having a unique advantage will set you apart from all of the other companies in your market. You will stand out, and it will create more attention . . . and potentially more sales!

Make A FORTUNE - With A BIG USP! Isolating that one big Unique Selling Proposition can set you apart from all other competitors in your field. Coming up with a big USP is how to completely separate yourself from the competition - and get richer faster! What is big? Remember we’re talking about it being big in the eyes of the prospects, not in yours. A big USP is tailored for those in the market. Very little of the USP, if any of it, has to do with you. People don’t care about you – not in the slightest. They care about what you can do for them. A big USP deals with the topics that are the most important to those prospects. If you can come up with a big USP that is able to hit a nerve in your market and really grab the attention of the prospects, you can separate yourself from your competition that has no such USP. Since the USP deals with such a ‘hot’ topic, you can reap bigger rewards. This is how normal, average people are getting rich in business because things that are new and different really grasp people’s attention.

You could get rich quickly simply by knowing what your chosen market wants and needs and why they buy the kinds of products and services they do. Then come up with a new, unique, different way to give them more of what they want!

Giving people more of the same is a much overlooked method of getting wealthy. Of course, by ‘the same’ I mean the same broad class of things they have been purchasing, but with your USP added on top. Filling the needs and fulfilling the desires of those in your market like no other company is the secret to get more people to spend more of their money with you – and it works every time! People buy with their emotions - and desire is an emotion. A desire is an unfilled want. In the best markets you have a group of customers that really desire the benefits of your products or services. They want the end results the product or service promises them. And, if your end results and benefits are better than your competitor’s, you can potentially make a HUGE amount of money.

Find out what your market wants the most – give it to them slightly better than the competition and make yourself a FORTUNE! The secret to getting thousands of new customers every year is providing them with a benefit that no one else has to offer. Benefits are crucial. Prospects and customers only really care about what they’ll get out of accepting your offer. The better and more unique your benefits are, the more prospects you’ll be able to attract and the more repeat buyers you’ll be able to keep. You have to study and find out what the people in your market really want, who they really are, what their frustrations and challenges are, the problems they have, and the main reasons they want to buy the types of products and services that are available in the market. Having this intimate knowledge of your market is crucial. Using this knowledge to your advantage is one almost certain way to steal customers from your competition!

Why? Because with this information you can develop and provide products and services that no other companies in the marketplace are providing. You have POWER. You know what it is that the people in your market want, and you can find ways to give them more of what they want – only better! People will compare you with your competition. See that you offer them more, and they will come to you. This is how to easily break into a new marketplace with a BIG BANG! You have the potential to send ripples throughout your marketplace - and affect everyone in it. You can pull business away from your competitors and create your own success. Here’s one type of advertising that will always lose you money! Many marketers try to create ‘cutesy’ type institutional adverts that tell readers how great and wonderful they are, but do nothing to sell products. These are usually produced by fancy advertising agencies who delight in taking huge fees from their clients and then bamboozling them with smoke and mirrors. If you want people to know your company name and logo, maybe that is the way to go. But, if you want to sell products via the mail, then ‘corporate’ advertising is a total waste of time and money. Remember, people do not care about how great, wonderful, or successful you are personally or how wonderful you think your company is. They don’t care about nebulous, catch-all terms like ‘reliability’, ‘service’, ‘quality’ and so on. Of course they care about these things – they just don’t believe you any more when you say your company delivers them! What they do care about is what unique benefit, advantage, service, or personal enhancement you can offer to their self-interest that the ‘other guy’ does not. They want to know how you are going to improve their life in some credible, tangible way.

So you must go the extra mile to gain that prospect’s attention and interest! In a solid mail-order market that is dominated by many successful competitors, you may have to shake people up. Your advert has to be different, unique, and you may try some wild things to gain the attention you need. Sometimes, in order to gain people’s attention, you may have to shock them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you offend them in any way. Instead, I’m saying you should focus on their pains, and find dramatic ways of showing that you have what it takes to relieve them. Remember, you should always create unique, different advertisements. Do your best to grab that reader’s attention. This is how to make a new customer read and respond to your advert instead of someone else’s advert! One of the best formulas to remember is Headache – Aspirin. Not literal headaches of course! (Although that’s how they sell Aspirin!!) Just state the problem you believe your market has – and then offer the ‘magic pill’ which will make their problem go away. The topic can be anything. There’s a guy in El Paso, Texas that puts out books and videos and CDs about alien visitations. I noticed when I saw the catalogue of his offers, he had a whole bunch of offers submitted by readers, “Strange encounters of the third kind,” where he would just ask his readers to submit their articles, or their story regarding alien visitation. Now I didn’t know it was that common! Maybe some of them make up the story, or maybe some of them believed they were true, who knows? He was creating all kinds of books and information products from what his readers submitted. But whatever ‘headache’ you come up with, you must…

…make sure you answer these four questions…clearly, concisely and dramatically, and you could make thousands 93

of pounds! Your prospects will be confused by not knowing what you really represent. The answer to these four questions can make you very wealthy… 1. Who are you? 2. What are you selling? 3. What makes your offer better than the competition? 4. Why should I buy it from you? Remember it may take you some serious time and thought to develop your really great Unique Selling Proposition. At first you are going to have only superficial answers to these questions. You should not ask yourself these questions once and then forget about them. You must keep asking yourself these things over and over again, always looking for a better answer. This is how you make your fortune from these marketing principles. The process of asking yourself deeper and deeper questions as you gain more and more knowledge and experience is how you develop the intimate knowledge you can use to get rich. As you know, a lot of your marketing will be done by direct mail, therefore it’s really important that we spend a little while on the subject of mailing lists.

Mailing Lists Gradually as you sell products, you will build up a customer list (called a ‘mailing list’) of people who have purchased from you. This is a highly valuable asset. Your mailing list can be a list of street names and addresses or an email list.

Keep Your Mailing List Current and Accurate - This Way, it Will Keep Bringing You More Money! Not only will these people buy more from you, you can also rent out your names and addresses to companies who want to sell similar, but noncompetitive products. They will pay you so much per name each time they mail to your list. (An example would be if you sell golf clubs and accessories and have ten thousand buyers, then a hotel offering golfing weekend breaks would love to mail that list with their offer and will pay you handsomely to do so – and it does not affect your sales in the slightest.) Many companies want good mailing lists. The people who are renting your list want to be able to trust it and know where those names originated from. They want to be confident in their use of your list. There are a lot of duff mailing lists around – billed as ‘brand new, top-responding names’ they often contain old, outdated names and addresses which give poor response. When you work with a good list manager who knows the origins of the names on your list, that’s going to make the others feel good about your company’s list. Soon you and your lists will have a sparkling reputation. And the better your list, the more it’s worth. As a ‘mailing-list supplier,’ you can supply mail-order dealers - including your competitors - with the least expensive way of increasing their direct mail sales. When you supply them with good names, they make money. Then they help you make money through their continual business with you – by renting your names again and again. You also rent their names. It’s a win-win situation. It’s how to make money by helping your competitors to make money! And by the way, if you have a decent sized list of say 50,000 buyers, you would expect to make about £100,000 a year just in list rentals! The amount of work you would do for that would be… NADA! Here’s a top tip… 95

Make Sure That the List You Select is Profitable - Test With Nth Selection! What do I mean by this? When a mailing test is done, the person renting the mailing list will usually request an “Nth name selection”. This ensures that the test will assess the effectiveness of the entire list, as opposed to segments (such as the most recent names). “Nth name Selection” refers to a number of names that are selected by a computer from across an entire list. Example: Let’s say you are looking at a list of 50,000 parrot owners and you are thinking of mailing them with your £97 CD and manual called How To Talk To Your Parrot – And Have It Talk To You! Now, obviously you would not mail all 50,000 in one go! The list may be old, useless, non responsive; or your offer may be too expensive, or not what the parrot owners want. So you do a nice gentle test of (say) 1,000 names. Ah, but which 1,000 out of the 50,000? Not the first 1,000 – those will be the oldest and least responsive names. Not the last 1,000 – those will be the most recent and hopefully give you a red-hot response - great, but what will that tell you about the other 49,000? Not a lot. So you would ask the list broker for “1,000 on an Nth Name Selection”. They will give you the first name on the list, skip 50, give you the next name, skip 50, give you the next name, and so on – right through the entire list of 50,000 until you had 1,000 names and addresses for your test. 96

That way you can be confident that whatever results you get for your test (say 2%) that will be the result to the whole list – barring foul-ups! If you are unsure about your list selection, test an Nth name sample of the list. That way, even though you may lose some money if it doesn’t work, that amount is minuscule compared with the amount you would have lost if you had mailed to the whole list. Testing a small portion before sending your mailing to the whole list is how to make 100% sure that you never, ever get cheated when you rent a mailing list! A user should always use Nth selection because it prevents a broker or list owner from including ‘filler’ names. What do I mean by this? A user might get great results the first time around. But follow-up rentals might be padded-out with names that will not respond anything like as well. Unscrupulous list owners will use this and other tricks. Keep Your Mailing List at the Peak of its profitability – by Regularly Updating it! You have to constantly replenish your mailing list by adding new names as you attract new customers and removing the names of those who are inactive, undeliverable, have asked to be removed and/or don’t buy anymore. This is how maintaining your list can really increase your income. This way you can keep adding new prospects to your list and not waste money on the prospects who don’t buy, have moved, have asked to be taken off the list, or are problem customers. Your customer list is like a bucket with little holes in the bottom. As you’re constantly filling that bucket with new customers, there are always people leaking out of the bottom. Why do they leak out? Simple, they die, get older,

move house, change their interests, are already satisfied and any one of 101 other reasons. You may have a person who purchased your manual and DVD of model train layouts five years ago – but is this still a hot customer? Most unlikely. As a general rule of thumb, the older the name (by that I mean the longer ago they purchased), the worse it will perform. The newer the name, the better it will perform. Someone who has just bought a super-extendable dog lead from you yesterday is highly likely to buy your dog identity disk or dog treats next week. But in three year’s time? Five years? Ten years? Forget it! They have moved house or they have everything they need for their dog, or the dog has died, etc. You get the idea. Remember, the more accurate your mailing list, the more money it will make – so always keep it updated!

Little Tiny Mail-order Companies Across The Country Can Make You Rich. There are many little mail-order companies that don’t know what to do with the names and addresses of their customers. They are in the business, making sales, filling orders, and building their list, but they don’t know what to do with it apart from mail them with new offers now and then.

This is how to make a fortune by targeting certain groups of people, namely the small mail-order companies. You can often buy lists from these little companies and work out deals with them. They have the gold mine, but they don’t know how to mine it. Then, you can turn around and rent these lists out on the market to make money. This is how to make a fortune by compiling mailing lists! Not many companies out there are doing this. It is a very unique way and you can really cash in.

Let’s say you can identify ten small (usually one-man/woman) operations with a list of 30,000 customers each. That’s a small list, but put together it comes to 30,000 which is a sensible size. You offer to buy their 3,000 mailing list for 30p-50p per name (e.g. you would give them £900 - £1500 for their list. They could still use it of course!) Then, you would rent these names out onto the market and easily make £1 per name per year – no question. ‘Your’ list of 3,000 names would easily return you £3,000.00 a year for which you would have to do absolutely nothing. I really do mean this – nothing. The list broker does all the work and just sends you a cheque each month. 30,000 names? That’s £30,000.00 a year for you – from other people’s mailing lists!

One Way to Let the Experts Help You Make Money No expert will help you if he/she thinks you are serious competition. That’s the way it is in any business. If you need help, do not expect the competition to help you, unless there is an incentive. Firms will help you if they feel there is something in it for them. So, you have to convince them that you will help them if they are willing to help you. If you call some of the bigger names in the mailing-list business, tell them that you are interested in having your list of names managed by them. Tell them your list contains many buyers of mail-order books. They will be more than happy to answer your questions, if they are interested in managing your list. You might say that this method is unethical. But if it is the only way to get knowledge of the mailing-list business, either you use it or get out of the business. When it comes to experts, remember that a good list broker is an expert on the lists he or she offers. They will tell you everything you want to know, because as long as that list makes money for you it is making money for them. Also, list owners will tell you about their lists. After all, it is free publicity.

They want you to know they have something to offer you. This is how to get the insiders in the business to tell you everything you want to know! Occasionally, you might even find someone who will be willing to give you some free advice just because he/she knows you are sincere and need it. It never hurts to try.

Three Proven Ways to Make Money With Your Mailing List Two types of arrangements can be made when you are renting a list of names, although variations of these arrangements exist. They have been used again and again by many companies, and they’ve worked over and over, proving their worth. Now, make them work for you! The ‘Net Name Arrangement’ is becoming one of the most used forms of compensating a mailer for non-mailed names. This arrangement is a guarantee of payment to the list owner for a certain portion of names. Typically it works like this. Say you rent a list of 10,000 people who have purchased books and manuals on playing on-line poker. You want to sell them your “How to Win at Texas Hold ‘Em Poker” home-study poker course, but… some of those 10,000 (let’s say 1,000) are on your list already. They’ve already bought your course. So it doesn’t seem fair that you should have to pay the list owner for these 1,000 as you have them already. Really, in fairness, you should only pay for the 9,000 you didn’t have. That’s what a ‘Net Names’ arrangement allows you to do. Such an arrangement would also allow you to rent 10,000 names, mail 5,000, only pay for 5,000 and hold the other 5,000 back for use if/when the first 5,000 worked. Obviously you’d then pay for the second 5,000, but only if you used them, otherwise you wouldn’t pay. The net name arrangement would have to be negotiated with the list owner.

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When applied appropriately, however, it can substantially lower the cost of your mailing, and benefit both the mailer and the list owner. Since they save those who make them work so much money, this is how “net name arrangements” are saving some people a fortune. In contrast, the ‘Gross Names Arrangement’ is generally used when testing or renting a small quantity of names or if you’re the new kid on the block. This arrangement specifies that the mailer will pay for exactly what he/she orders, no matter how many names he/she actually mails or how many duplicates there are already.

Why Pay For Great Lists - When You Could TRADE For Them? Trading lists with others is how to get the extremely valuable names of people who have bought from your competitors - WITHOUT PAYING A PENNY! Each party has something the other can use – a valuable and targeted mailing list. Instead of pitting themselves against each other, they trade lists so that they can add more names to their own lists and make even more money. This way, both parties can profit. Trading lists is how to get high profit-making lists at absolutely no charge!

How to Make The Most Money Possible Selling Mailing Lists. What can you do to make your mailing list worth a ton of money? The rental price for your list, as well as any other list, depends upon how well the list works for those who rent it. The better the list works, the more money it’s worth. This is why some mailing lists are worth 10 times more money than others. Imagine a mailing list of 3,000 millionaire Rolls Royce buyers – what would that be worth to someone trying to sell heated swimming pools or luxury holidays?

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Therefore, it is very important to offer the best list you possibly can in order to make the most money. Good mailing lists are a valuable commodity, and the profit margin is huge. The better the names work, the more money the list will make. There are many ways to reach prospective buyers of your lists. Here are some of the most widely-used methods. 1. Place classified adverts in magazines. Many advertisers use this method because it is inexpensive and reaches a very large audience. Hint: Never try to sell directly from a classified advert (e.g. don’t say “Please send me £10 per 1,000 names for this HOT list…”). This type of advert should be used only to generate enquiries (e.g. “Superb new mailing list of 37,000 golf accessory buyers. For details, please send an SAE to…”). When you receive the prospective buyer’s inquiry, you then send all the information about your list: price, quantity of names, recency, etc. 2. You could advertise in various trade and business publications. There are magazines, like Direct Marketing Magazine, that list dozens of mailing lists in each issue. These adverts are usually placed by the list broker, list manager, or the list owner. This can be the best method to use if you are going after big results. It may cost a little, but the rewards can make it well worth the investment. 3. Another profitable method used by list sellers is to rent a list of prospective list buyers from another seller. Once you get your list, you then mail out your list information to those prospects. 4. Many firms advertise their lists in business opportunity magazines and periodicals. They develop relationships with customers and get the word out about the lists that they have available. There are many publications available for you to choose from. By testing, you will learn which ones will work best.

Direct Mail - The Key to Truly Getting Rich! Despite the Internet, it is still easy to get rich in direct mail. With direct mail you can reach more people than you can through advertising in newspapers and magazines (called ‘space advertising’), which raises the profit potential higher.

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You can sell higher quality and hence more expensive products through the mail than you can on the Internet – particularly if your product is downloadable as most people expect it for free these days. Getting into direct mail is still one of the best ways to make millions. Many companies have made a fortune with direct mail - and many of the limitations that are present in space advertising and the Internet are eliminated. They say “the more you tell, the more you sell.” In direct mail you are not limited by space and you can give your prospects your whole sales pitch. 8-page up to 24-page sales letters are common. Also, you can be more personal in direct mail. Your advert isn’t going to get just glanced at by people. Instead, it goes out to the customers individually, giving you the added advantage of a personable, one-on-one communication. The following section shows how to get your fair share of the millions that are being made in direct mail.

12 Ways YOU Could Get Rich With Direct Marketing. Here are 12 proven ways to get rich in direct response marketing… 1. You must know who you are trying to reach with your unique selling proposition. Use the highest quality names available. 2. ‘Target marketing’ means getting your offer to the right people. Remember, it is not the quantity of names you send out, it is the quality that is important. 3. Choose the right market for your sales message. 4. Make certain your service or product meets the interest and expectations of your target group. Do not try to sell lawn mowers to an apartment dweller, for example. 5. Make certain your proposition is targeting the right people. Make certain your offer is compatible with the list you are using. Mailings aimed at a targeted audience have the best chance for success. E.g. Selling printer supplies to a list of people who have recently bought a computer. 6. Make your mailing package hard to refuse. What you offer must fit the interests of the receiver. Fill your offer with self-interest benefits. Be clear and direct in your sales copy. Do not ramble on with trivial

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information. Let the receiver know what your unique selling proposition is, and how it will benefit him/her. Using these techniques will make your mailing package nearly impossible to refuse! Make your offer sincere and believable. It may take hard-hitting copy and a unique selling proposition to get a reader’s attention, but your overall sales pitch must be sincere, honest and believable. Many people are sceptical when they receive a direct mailing, especially if they have never done business with you before. Sincere and believable copy will eliminate doubts and mistrust. It will motivate a reader into placing an order. 7. Make sure your graphics (if any) fit your copy. The right illustrations can enhance a mailing piece, but too many graphics will simply cause a distraction. If you get too ‘graphic crazy,’ the graphics may be looked at with great interest, but your unique selling proposition may not be read. Composition, copy and illustrations must be integrated and blend well together. 8. Coordinate your time. Often, people work against the clock instead of with it. Allow enough time to do your job well. Plan ahead. If you want to start a mailing campaign on July 1, do not start writing sales copy the week before. It takes a minimum of 3 weeks to organise a mailing assuming the sales letter has been written. 9. Check every detail before you begin. To get the most from your mailing program, you must check every detail for any flaws. Have you checked your printing to make certain the quality is sharp throughout and the pages are in the right order? Is the order form complicated, too small, too hard to read? Does your form have the right return address, post code, telephone number, price, etc.? Those small details are crucial. Is your fulfilment department organized and ready to go? Getting orders is exciting - but there is someone on the other end who is excited also - the customer! Service means being prepared and organized to get an order out now! If you do not, your customers will be anxiously waiting for their order. 10. Always include ‘back-end’ offers when you send out a product. The most successful direct-response marketers know they must depend on backend sales to make maximum profits. The back-end offer is usually a higher price than the front-end. If the buyers are pleased with the original offer they purchased, they will be willing to purchase something else that appeals to them. Get your money’s worth from your mailings. With it will come extra profits. 11. Here are four ways to get ten times more money from your customer base: i) Establish a long-term relationship with your customers. Once you start 104

accumulating your own customer list, do not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;allow any dust to settle.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Customers represent your greatest potential source of repeat business. Your own list can out-pull new, untried lists by a three-to-one margin at least. ii) Continually develop new offers, even if you have to deal through other supply sources. iii) Send new mailings to your customers at least every three to four months and preferably monthly. Many serious players claim they can mail their list fortnightly, without detriment. iv) Let them know that you value them as customers and as a convenience to them, you will make them aware of new products and services continually. 12. Is your marketing strategy set up for maximum results? This is how to develop your marketing strategy for maximum results! Do these seven things and you can make mega-profits! A. Are you in close contact with your mailing list broker? B. Do you work closely with your printer and suppliers? C. Are you selling, renting, or trading your own list to obtain full financial benefits? D. Is your fulfilment department operating smoothly? E. Are you looking for new ideas you can incorporate into your mailings? F. Is every aspect of your marketing strategy working smoothly? G. Keep moving forward!

The Power of the USP - One of The Most Important Elements in Making Your Fortune! Your Unique Selling Proposition is the one thing that completely separates you from every other business in your market. It brings people to you instead of to your competition. I spoke earlier about the importance of having a great USP. To find your USP ask yourself: What can YOU give people that no other businesses can give them? Every year many businesses simply don't make it. They fail because they have no distinguishing angle or value that the prospects and customers cannot get from other companies. There is no trickery to this. It really comes down to having a good knowledge of who your customers are, what they want and what the most important things are to them.

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It's all about providing the kind of value that they cannot get elsewhere. It comes down to always serving the customer and serving them better than any other business in your market. This is the one reason people do business with you instead of with anyone else. The best USP's come when you are dealing with a niche market in which your customers have very specific, narrow interests. For a mail order business to reach its optimum potential, it has to cater to a very targeted customer group. Over time, you find out through a process of working with these customers what they like the best, and you gain an intimate knowledge of them. With that intimate knowledge - knowing their problems, frustrations, what they want more than anything else, and what the competitors in your market are (and are not) giving them – you gain the information to develop your USP. Once you have done all of this and you have come up with a really great, effective USP, it can make you very wealthy in a short period of time!

The Real Purpose of Business The goal of every business is - or should be - to bring in the most profits that it possibly can in the shortest space of time. You generate those enormous profits by having a large group of customers that come back and buy from you repeatedly. Each time a customer purchases again from you, the profits can potentially be bigger because the acquisition costs you put out to bring the customer in have all been paid off a long time ago, so if you have a large enough group of customers who do a large amount of repeat business with you at a large enough profit, you can become rich. In case you’re thinking: “I could never find a niche market.” Help is at hand. One of the best articles ever written on the subject of USP was by top UK information marketer Stuart Goldsmith (www.stuartgoldsmith.com). I reproduce it here with his kind permission.

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Niche Marketing and USP By Stuart Goldsmith At a recent direct marketing seminar I attended in Bermuda I picked up the following unbeatable advantage and want to share it with you: “Work your niche”. What the heck does that mean? Well, 77 people were at that seminar, all in non-competing niche markets, each with the potential of a hundred million pounds apiece. That’s 7.7 billion pounds. It could have been seven hundred and seventy people, and still you would not have had two in the same niche. There is a vast array of possible niche markets - almost one for every person on the planet - each of which can be worked like a gold seam to a huge depth. I’ll explain more in a moment, but first I want you to avoid making this mistake: Don’t work a niche to a shallow depth and then abandon that rich gold seam for another, unrelated niche. The trick is to find your niche; work the niche to its full depth and to concentrate your efforts only on that one rich seam. Only when it is totally exhausted should you consider moving on to another niche. Here is an example of such a niche. There was a guy at the seminar glorying in the name of Dr Batman. True. This man is amassing a huge personal fortune from his books, CDs, DVDs and seminars - all neatly packaged and well marketed. What is his outstanding new message requiring hours of video and hundreds of thousands of words to explain? It is simply this: “Drink More Water”. Yep. That’s it. Nothing more complex.

Drink Water! (For Chrissakes!) Dr Batman reckons we don’t drink enough water and he would like us all to drink some more of the stuff. He’s probably right. But the clever part is that 107

he looks to clear ten million out of this, rising to possibly 100 million if he gets his act together. And WOW, what a really original idea this is, right? I mean, you have to be a genius to figure out this one. You must need, oh, at least five university degrees to come up with an idea like this! Drink water. Rocket science, right? Dr Batman is working his niche and has been for years. He is not writing a new book called ‘Vitamins For Health’ or recording a CD series on ‘Aerobic Exercises’ or even worse, writing a new book on ‘Cost Reduction Techniques For The Small Business’. These would be other niche markets and Dr Batman would be diluting his efforts (if you’ll pardon the joke) if he were to abandon his own gold mine and go wandering the hills in search of another. I hope you see this. He should stick to telling people to swill back more H2O. The good doctor’s book is called ‘Your Body’s Many Cries For Water’ and is a good read. I don’t know if he is working on another book, but if he is I feel sure the title would be ‘Water. The Miracle Cure?’ or a new audio programme called ‘Washing The Toxins Away’ or some such title. In other words, Dr Batman is setting himself up as the acknowledged expert on....how to drink water, gawd help us! And why not? Good luck to him. Thinks.... is there a market for....nah, surely not? Breathing air??? ‘Your Body’s Many Cries For Oxygen?’ Well, it sounds stupid, but surely just as obvious as ‘drink water’ and we know our air is polluted and almost unbreathable.... Is there a Dr Robin in the house??? Now I personally wouldn’t do that ‘breathe air’ idea because it’s not my niche. In fact it’s way, way off to one side of what I do. I will explain my niche in a moment, but I want you to start thinking about what YOUR niche

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could possibly be. If you find it then you will have a golden doorway to riches which will open before you. You are a unique person with a unique set of skills and experience. Really. This is not some ‘make you feel good’ stuff. No other human being has been where you have, experienced your life and gained your particular slice of wisdom. Let me tell you, if Dr Batman can make ten million out of the message ‘drink water’, then start getting your brain into gear to think what YOU could do. I mean, you’ve GOT to come up with something with more substance than that, right? [Aside: Isn’t that ‘drink water’ idea really neat? For example, the ‘challenge’ with the whole health industry is that people are queuing up to sue you because they claim your product harmed them or didn’t help them. But who would sue because they drank an extra glass of water a day? Also, the product is FREE and that’s a benefit for the customer. In other words, his message isn’t “go out and spend a fortune on Dr Batman’s special water at £10 a bottle”. In fact Dr Batman advocates tap water, not bottled water! Also, we all kind of know we should drink more water, so it makes sense. We all want a ‘miracle cure’ and there’s something simple and appealing to this one. A strong idea and I wish I’d thought of it first, damn his eyes!] Each one of the 77 attendees had a niche just as interesting and just as deep.

Work That Niche, Baby! Next example. One “go get ‘em” lady of the sort who evangelise at MLM meetings had made a fortune selling a book. This was a thin paperback with the title “Everything Men Know About Women” or something similar. She had two very neat angles. She sold the book in lingerie and fashion shops - a pile of them would be on the check-out counter. This way her book was not lost amongst ten thousand other titles at a book shop. (I have always maintained that if you want to sell cameras, advertise in a golfing magazine and if you want to sell golf clubs advertise in a camera magazine, and she was applying this technique.) Women going to the checkout to pay for their clothes would see the book on the counter, pick it up and glance inside.

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The second neat thing was the product. The title is very catchy and few women could resist picking it up to have a flick-through. On the back of the book there are the usual quotes from The Times, etc., saying things like: “This book really does expose for the first time ever the shocking truth about men’s knowledge of women.” You pick up the book....open it....and... what’s this? Blank pages??? Every page is blank! “What the... Oh, I get it! Bwahahahah. ‘Everything Men Know About Women!’ Blank pages! Nothing! Men know nothing about women... Ahhahahahahahahahahh! What a laugh. I MUST get a copy of this for Margerie, Jane, Tracy, Sharon, Susie and...let me see.. oh yeah, Dawn’s gonna LOVE this.... So... er..., that’s one pair of size 18 knickers please (we guys have got to get our own back somehow! I’m going to do a blank book like her and call it ‘The Complete Directory of Non-Manipulative Women!’ Sorry, did that sound bitter??? ) and, lemme see...yeah I’ll take eleven copies of this great book for all my chums...” Cost to produce such a book? Well, there’s no printing on the pages, no collation....hmm... about 30p in bulk? Cost of the book? £2.95. I LOVE those markups. Of course, you couldn’t possibly come up with such an original idea as this, could you? I mean this is real genius stuff. She must have gone to marketing school for a decade to dream up this complex little gem! Sorry, but she was a secretary before she decided to stop playing around and make some money instead. Also, the idea is not even new. It’s been around for years in the form of ‘The Complete Book of Italian War Heroes' and suchlike. The novelty was in the way she applied the idea and the way she marketed the book. Note the huge market - every woman on the planet. This title would have sunk without trace in the ‘feminist issues and gender sociology’ section of the average book shop, but it was marketed perfectly. Another niche, worked to perfection. This one title alone could easily make 5 million pounds. She could then expand her niche into novelty books if she wanted to, but NOT into books on drinking water, or into pre-packaged lingerie. There is almost infinite 110

depth in her niche with this one title! Think of the world market. Think of the cost of translating a normal book into a hundred languages. Now consider the cost of translating this one... A niche market does not necessarily mean a small market. What is the potential for Dr Batman’s product? Every person on the planet is a potential customer. The niche aspect comes from the tiny sliver you decide to select from the vast array of products and services available. There are millions upon million upon millions of products and services and each one is a niche. Some people are making decorative plastic clothes pegs, others are writing machine code for telecommunications routers. One person is ‘the expert’ in Holistic Elbow Massage Therapy, another makes a fortune out of telling business people obvious marketing truths. Your key to a fortune is to find a good niche market and work it to death! To help you to discover and define your niche, I want to remind you of the concept called your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP.

The Unbeatable Advantage of Having a USP Each human being is unique. There really are no two the same. Every one of six billion people has their own story to tell, their experiences to share; their own ‘slant’ on this crazy world. And each one is able to help his fellow humans in some way.

The key to becoming wealthy is to help others to achieve their dreams. People will PAY you good money to have problems solved or their desires fulfilled. It’s that simple. Every penny of your own personal money goes on dream fulfillment or problem solving. The money goes to a huge queue of traders, all jostling for your attention, hoping you will fling the cash their way. In order to be noticed, the good traders stand out from the faceless crowd of also-rans. They try to be different. They try to be unique.

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Everyone should have a unique selling proposition. Why? Because everyone is in sales. And since the term ‘everyone’ clearly encompasses all human beings alive today, then this means YOU. If you run a business or are self-employed it is obvious that you’re in sales because if you don’t sell yourself and your products continually, every minute of every day, then your business is dead. But what about everyone else? Is the employed person in sales? You bet! Think back to your last interview. Wasn’t that a sales pitch? It certainly was! You were pitching as hard and as well as you knew how in order to sell your talents, enthusiasm and knowledge to someone willing to pay you by the hour for them. Do you think your selling job finished the moment you received an employment offer? No. You are selling yourself hour by hour to the company you work for, saying in effect: “Look at me! I’m a GREAT product! Remember the benefits of buying me? Keep buying - it’s a super product at a give-away price.” If you doubt this for one second, then you are either currently unemployed (not through choice) or are on your way to becoming so. Fact. What about personal relationships? If you are married or have a partner of any sort, think back to when you ‘wooed and won’ them. Was that a sales job or what?? If ever there was a case for calling in Consumer Protection it must surely be concerning that pitch you made to your current partner (!) Do you think your sales job stopped the moment he/she said “I do” (in whatever form)? No. You are continually selling your talents, human qualities, ambitions and personality to your partner - that means hour by hour, minute by minute. Keeping the deal alive. This is not a ‘one time buy’. These goods can be returned at any time if they don’t measure up to the brochure... Did your selling process stop when you had them hooked? If so you are either single (not intentionally) or heading that way rapidly. Fact. 112

What’s that? You live alone on a desert island with only a keg of Cap’n Morgan’s Rum and a parrot named ‘Dead-eye’ for company? Bad news is you’re still in sales! In our quiet moments with no other pesky humans around, we are selling - to ourselves. You know the phrase ‘to sell yourself short’? That means doing something which doesn’t come up to the standards you sold yourself on some time ago. You can’t escape it. You are in sales. If you earn a living (no matter how) you are in sales. If you have a boyfriend, girlfriend, wife or husband you are in sales. If you interact with any human beings at any time, then you are in sales. If you are a recluse, you are in sales (selling to yourself). I hope this is clear. Get rid of any stereotyped notion you might have of a ‘salesman’ or ‘sales woman’. You ARE that person. Start believing it. So what are you selling? Tip: You are always selling YOU first and any ‘product’ second. People buy people first, product and services second. (By the way, when I give you a ‘tip’, this is not some margin note in a cookery book telling you the best way of avoiding pastry sticking to your rolling pin. When I use the word ‘tip’, I mean a life-changing, absolutely essential piece of information. Such ‘tips’ are to be implemented urgently if you want to become a wealthy man or woman and have a wonderful, funfilled life. So here’s my next ‘little tip’...) Tip: You had better not be selling the same trash that is being sold by ten thousand other losers around the country. Why not? Because this would make you a faceless nonentity, scrabbling for attention in a teaming crowd of bland third-raters. And you don’t want that. What would it do for your chances of: 1. Hooking and keeping a dream partner? 2. Hooking and retaining a top, well-paid job?

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3. Hooking-in customers and clients who will stay with you for a lifetime and make you wealthy beyond your dreams? Ask yourself the following question: “What is it that dream partners, top employers and fee paying customers all want?” If this is hard to answer, ask it of yourself: “What do I want from an ideal partner, and people I pay money to?” Do you want mediocrity? Do you think a top employer wants ‘any old bloke with a pair of hands’ or ‘anything in a dress, preferably female’? And what about customers if you run any kind of business? You’re a customer. You buy stuff all the time. You ‘buy’ people all the time as well. So ask yourself the question. Do you want to buy from a company which is just like a thousand others: no better, no worse? A company which is uniformly mediocre in everything it touches? Mediocre goods, average delivery, indifferent service? Or do you like to deal with a business which has something unique to offer. A business which continually sells itself to you by trying harder, doing better, going the extra mile? Guess which businesses thrive and which wither? It’s the same deal with relationships. Do you honestly think a brilliant, sexy, rich, warm and humorous man or woman is seeking a dull, ordinary, featureless, drab ‘man down the pub’ or a woman indistinguishable from a million other dreary specimens? Do you like to associate with plain, ordinary people? Men and women who are, let’s face it, simply dull and uninspiring? Do you like to ‘hang out’ with people who are full of gloom and “ain’t it awful” stories, who moan all the time and only talk about themselves? Men and women who are interchangeable units, indistinguishable from twenty million other nearly identical people the length and breadth of the country? Or do you like people who make you feel special? People who seem unique, interesting and who are upbeat, positive, full of the joy of life? Men and women who stand out from the crowd? Guess which people are in big demand socially?

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I am now going to give you a major key to business success. If you can take this on board and understand its implications, the effect on your life will be dramatic. You might have heard it before, but you cannot hear it too often. You must sell something unique - something not offered by

anyone else in your exact way. You must have what is called a ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ or USP. Why? I hope the answer is obvious. One seller (you), many buyers, means huge profits for you. Now that’s something worth having. In contrast: a thousand sellers all trying to dispose of the same identical trash (this means a product and/or THEMSELVES) leading to...guess what? A lacklustre, motley collection of tyre-kicking punters who care nothing for quality and just want to poke around in the junk you are trying to off-load in the hope of picking up some cutprice scrap. Any sales you make will be opportunistic and accidental. Customers will never return. In human relationships, this means the ‘customers’ will be blokes who want anything in a skirt as long as it goes like a bunny, and women who will accept anything in trousers as long as it doesn’t get drunk too often, is in employment and has a car newer than fifteen years old with all the panels the same colour. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “I would never marry a woman stupid enough to have me as a husband.” So what is a Unique Selling Proposition? Let me say straight away that by ‘unique’ I don’t mean ‘never before dreamed of by mankind’. I ‘unique’ burger can simply be one which is cheaper or faster than the competition. A ‘unique’ manual can be some basically old (but still useful, of course) information packaged in a new way with a new title and a new cover. Your USP is a short statement of the benefits your customer will receive through dealing with you instead of the competition. Your ‘customer’ can be

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someone buying your goods or services, or a current or prospective partner (they are ‘buying’ your goods and services too). I have highlighted the words ‘the benefits’ for a very good reason. You must be able to distinguish between a feature and a benefit and learn to talk in terms of benefits. What is the difference? It is a feature of the car you are trying to sell that it has a sixteen valve, overhead cam, ultra-torque dyno power cryo engine. Who cares? What is the benefit to the customer? The benefit is that it makes him feel like James Bond because it does 0-60 in five seconds. It also pulls the chicks because of its great looks and sexappeal. He hopes… It is a feature that you are a Cordon Bleu cook. So what? What is the benefit to your partner? The benefit is that she or he will feel pampered, special and loved because of the time and care you take in preparing meals. It is a feature that you can word process at 80 wpm accurately. Big deal. We don’t care. The benefit is that the boss can get urgent, last minute letters in the post and/or that employing you saves her an extra half a person in wages. If you learn nothing else, remember this:

“Everyone’s favourite radio station is WIIFM. Also known as What’s In It For Me?” Believe it! People are interested in themselves morning, noon and evening. Here’s a snappy little rhyme I invented to help you remember this home truth: “For Breakfast, lunch and tea it’s me, me, ME!” Fully 95% of your thoughts concern you, you, you. Other people are an irritation at best, a bloody nuisance at worse. We are all utterly selfobsessed. I am definitely the most important person on the planet; no question. Trouble is, you think that YOU are too (you’re wrong, of course! It’s me, me, ME). I do not see this as ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’; it is simply an observable fact concerning that quirky, strange ape-like creature called a human being.

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To continue... It is a feature that you have been to ‘Chantelle’s Joy of Love Finishing School’ and studied the Karma Sutra from cover to cover. Whoopee! Have a certificate. The benefit is that you will make your partner feel like the most special person alive when you hit the sack running. To make this even clearer, check out this bad feature-driven headline:

The Snap-O Pizza Way Our staff are trained to make pizzas quickly and efficiently using only the finest ingredients. Our ovens are computer controlled to give a constant 280F temperature. Try our quality, reliable and cost-effective service. We deliver. Feature, feature, feature. What’s in it for me? Why should I buy from Snap-O and not from a hundred other identical outfits? What do ‘costeffective’, ‘quality’ and ‘reliability’ mean? Everyone says that stuff. It’s meaningless garbage. Where’s the Unique Selling Proposition? Compare with this benefit-driven headline:

The Snap-O Pizza Promise A Sizzling Hot, Fresh Pizza Delivered To Your Door In Twenty Minutes - Or It’s Free! Now THAT’S a benefit. When do I want a pizza? Right now! I’m hungry now, not in forty minutes. Ideally I would have that pizza stuffed through my letterbox before I managed to put the telephone down. But Snap-O seem to be offering the next best thing, so I’ll buy from them. If you want to be in business, you must have a USP otherwise you relegate yourself to the mass of near-identical businesses all scrabbling for the same tiny slice of the pie. If you want to excel as an employee, you must have a USP otherwise you relegate yourself to the third tier of ‘mass employees’ who are little more

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than worker-drones to be hired or fired as conditions change. If you are in any kind of relationship, or aspire to be in one, you must have a USP otherwise you relegate yourself to the well populated bottom of the heap with only a dog’s chance of success and a choice of specimens as fine as you – which isn’t saying a lot!

Tip: Phrase your USP in benefits, not features. That is, benefits to the customer, not to you!

Tip: Don’t sell on price only, if you can possibly avoid it. This last point is important. Although customers the world over seek a keen price, you should not make this your USP. In other words ‘we are the cheapest’ is not a recommended USP. It is dangerous in the same way that calling yourself the ‘fastest gun in the west’ is dangerous - you are begging for someone to come and outdraw you, and one day soon, some gun-slinging punk will shoot you in the back. Any fool can lower the price. This is not a marketing strategy, this is a route to going bust. If price is all you have to sell on, then you are not really in the game. The next guy will knock a few pennies off HIS price, forcing you to shave even more off yours. Next you will be selling at a loss, and still someone will be cheaper. A keen price is important, but a strong USP is far more so. In our pizza example, a headline ‘Cheapest Pizza in Town’ is, in my opinion, a very bad headline. Who wants a ‘cheap’ pizza? Not me. If I had a straight choice between two, I’d prefer “The Most EXPENSIVE Pizza in Town.” A far better headline would be:

‘We Aren’t The Cheapest Pizza But We Are The Tastiest AND The Fastest’. Here, the USP is flavour and speed. Speed is an important USP in the fast food market (note this would be a negative factor in, say, the oak-matured sherry business). Also, the ‘not the cheapest’ tag gives the pizza a classy feel, so you are getting good pizza AND fast delivery. Knowing your exact niche and USP allows you to do two things:

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1. Avoid distracting side-markets - other gold mines on distant hills which look tempting. 2. Focus on your niche because you have defined it. Consider my own USP. Now I could make a start and say that I was in the “Information Business”. But so is half the planet, so I need to narrow it down. (I’m doing this to help you with your own refinement process, not to boast.) Okay, so Stuart Goldsmith is in the human potential information business niche. Now already, that’s a very small niche compared to all the other goods and services offered by people around the globe (e.g. pre-stressed concrete lintels for biohazardous installations...). But I have hardly started! What the heck is the ‘human potential’ movement? It covers every sort of flake from wacky religions like Scientology through to dubious cure-alls masquerading as ‘alternative’ health. It encompasses all major world religions, all cults, mysticism, occultism and UFO watchers. It embraces every one of a hundred thousand self-styled, starry-eyed gurus. It also includes positive thinking, evangelist Christians, goal-setting, business gurus, crystal therapy, angel channelling, aura-watching, marketing experts, management advisors, NLP, memory courses, time management, wealth building materials, mindmapping, contacting dead American-Indian chiefs (excluding that guy from The Village People because he’s still alive last time I heard…) etc. etc. Not forgetting all correspondence schools with subjects ranging from accountancy to bat breeding; night schools, evening classes in flower arranging, etc., etc. I think you get the idea of the size of this so-called niche! So let me narrow it down to a sub-niche. I am in the business of helping people to achieve wealth and happiness. Better. Okay, scratch all religions (they specialise in poverty and misery!) and most flaky stuff (they eschew wealth as too far beneath their refined spiritual dignity), but that still leaves a huge number of people and businesses. What makes me stand out from them? Why do people buy from me and not from them? 119

Within my own sub-niche, there are dozens of players (possibly hundreds), all working their own sub-sub niches to infinite depths. To name a few people just off the top of my head you have on the circuit: Anthony Robbins, Jay Abraham, Peter Thomson, Ted Nicholas, Dan Peña, Randy Gage, Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy. Each of these people (and hundreds of others) are in the same business as me; that is, using spoken and written words to train people to cut a better deal for themselves. Okay, we’re getting close to a USP here, but you still can’t distinguish me from a hundred other players. If you know all or even some of these people you will realise that their ‘gold mines’ are far apart from each other. They are as different as different could be. Loyal fans of Dan Peña would not be seen dead at an Anthony Robbins gig, and vice versa. Jim Rohn isn’t Brian Tracy, and Brian Tracy isn’t Randy Gage. Peter Thomson isn’t me. Yet all are excellent in their niche. All have a huge following. They have infinite-niche potential. Hmm.... I’m hanging on to that one; I like the cut of its jib. Infinite Niche Potential. INP... Hmmm.....

“Experience the Awesome POWER of INP - Infinite Niche Potential. Master motivator, Stuart Goldsmith, helps you unleash the force of INP in your life. Yes, Infinite Niche Potential really is THE key to undreamed of wealth, yahdiyahdiyah....” Now THAT came right off the top of my head as I was writing, and there is a whole sub-sub-sub niche there with INP tapes, INP videos, and INP seminars. (It’s MY idea, so keep your thieving hands off. Think up your own buzzy acronym!). Heck, if Michael Gerber (E-myth) can do it with the message: “Entrepreneurs work too hard and ought to consider an exit strategy” then I can do it with INP, right?? You bet! Where was I? Oh yeah, right.... Still narrowing it down...

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So if I’m not Brian Tracy or Jim Rohn then what IS my USP? What is the difference between them and me? Well I’ll give you an example of my guess at some of these USPs. I hope they won’t mind if I have a go. These USPs did not come from them: Dan Peña: “I show serious business people how to achieve Quantum Leap growth in their businesses by expanding through aggressive corporate acquisition.” Is that me? Nah. No confusion there. Dan is Dan. His followers worship him. Anthony Robbins: “I show people how to unleash the infinite power within each human being so that they can achieve their full potential and ultimate spiritual destiny.” (Not quite right, but I’d have to ask Tony to improve it. It’s close though.) You’d never hear me talking about spiritual destiny, infinite energy, power of the cosmos, unlimited life force flowing through people, or getting in touch with the infinite part of creation? Not in this lifetime! I’d rather flog bibles for a living. Tony is ‘touchy-feely’ – group hug stuff. No confusing him with Dan, right? No confusing him with me. Tony is Tony. His followers adore him. Jay Abraham: “I teach business owners the dynamic marketing tools they need to unlock the overlooked potential within their business.” No group hugs there. No infinite human potential stuff. No ray-channeling from the seventh plane of Thoth. Nothing about take-overs. Nothing about rational philosophy. No mistaking Jay. He has a USP - in spades. This man wrote the goddamned BOOK on USP, so it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that he has one! He has a fanatical following. I have made a small fortune by just listening to the ‘obvious’ stuff he says and DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Are you getting the idea? Even within the sub-sub-sub niche which I inhabit, there is almost infinite variety. In each case you need a simple, easy to understand sentence which encapsulates the uniqueness. Obviously each one of those USPs can be expanded to fill a page, or a book.

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Which brings me on to humble, self-effacing little ol’ moi... It is quite hard to reduce everything you do, say and believe into one succinct, snappy phrase, but I’ll give it a try. Here goes: Stuart Goldsmith: “I show you how the correct use of your rational mind can lead you to wealth, freedom and true happiness. I expose the mystical illusions which keep you poor, trapped and powerless.” I could add: “I demonstrate that a rational and coherent philosophy of life is the basis for achieving ultimate human happiness.” Who else says stuff like that? Nobody I can think of. Does any of that sound like Jim Rohn, Dan Peña, Ted Nicholas, Jay Abraham? Does it sound like anyone you know apart from Stuart Goldsmith (assuming you’ve ever heard of me or them, of course)? Can you get that blend anywhere else? No, you cannot. I am unique - the only seller; and this is why I make a fortune. One supplier, many buyers. Of course I got all the philosophy from Ayn Rand, mixed it in with Wayne Dyer, added a smattering of Jim Rohn and Jay Abraham, stirred in a sprig of Gary Halbert (rest his soul), a touch of Ted Nicholas, a sousing of Joe Karbo, and spiced it with Dan Peña; cooked for twenty years and voila! Le Goldsmith Special. But this is exactly what makes me (or you) able to have a USP in the first place our own absolutely unique life experience and exposure to the ideas of others. If you think Jim Rohn or Brian Tracy invented their unique style out of thin air you’re dreaming! Ask any of these guys and they will list their mentors and people who influenced them early on. To conclude this very important discussion. To make your fortune and/or be admired, loved and sought out you must have a USP. Of course your business USP does not have to be your personal relationship USP.

To make loadsamoney, find a niche market in line with your USP 122

Niche doesn’t mean a small number of potential customers, it means the benefits you are offering to the customer base are as unique as possible. Ideally your customers should not be able to find these benefits anywhere else in this exact form. This applies to human relationships too. Ideally your potential partner should not be able to find the benefits you offer in anyone else because you are unique. You are a special person. Nobody has quite your combination of talents and abilities, coupled with your experience. Stop thinking you have to be a rocket scientist to make the big bucks. A blank book and ‘Drink Water’ aren’t exactly Einstein level are they? Consider these simple but fortune-building ideas: E-Myth “Entrepreneurs often have their noses so firmly to the grindstone that they don't know where they are heading.” NLP “Visualise stuff and it will help you to achieve it.” Mind Mapping “Use pretty pictures instead of acres of written notes.” MacDonalds “People want food when they’re hungry, not in an hour and a half.” INP Infinite Niche Potential (just getting a plug in...) “Find a small niche and work it deep.” You too can come up with ideas like this if you understand what I’ve been telling you about niche marketing. Find your niche. Work your niche. Work it deep and don’t go wandering the hills for a better gold mine. I’m reminded of Earl Nightingale’s ‘Acres Of Diamonds’ story where the man sold his farm to go looking for diamonds, only to realise years later that the farm he had sold contained a huge diamond field. He had never thought of looking on his own farm.

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Find out more about Stuart Goldsmith’s work on www.stuartgoldsmith.com

Finally I hope that you have enjoyed this programme. I’ve done my absolute best to give you an overview and much of the detail of this exciting business called information publishing. Of course I could have gone on and on as the questions you may have are unlimited. How do you start a company? What business names are the best? Do you need to register for VAT? Wahat about Internet marketing? and so on. But I wanted this manual to be a sensible size, not a telephone directory! And the truth is, once you’re fired up about making this happen in YOUR life, you’ll find the answers you need to fill in any gaps I may have left. The truth is that as a home information publisher you really CAN make a fortune without working too hard. This is not one of those ridiculous pie-inthe-sky ideas which is totally impractical. It does work! For me and dozens of others out there right now. We’re enjoying comfortable, millionaire lifestyles with plenty of free time and (more importantly) plenty of money to enjoy it with. One thing I really do know is that YOU could do this too. If I were an English professor or an intellectual whiz then maybe you would think you couldn’t do it. But I really do believe that if you use the short cut secrets I have shown you here, you can start to turn out quality information products – even if you can’t write or won’t write. Isn’t it about time YOU enjoyed a millionaire lifestyle instead of slaving away as you probably are at the moment? YOU could take what I have shared with you here and carve a brilliant new life for yourself and the family. It’s YOU who could be living in the 6-bedroom house in a leafy suburb and with one or two tasty top-of-the-range cars on the drive. 124

You could be helping out your family and friends if you want to, or taking five-star holidays in the world’s top locations (the sort of places the celebs stay at). You could have a wardrobe full of designer clothes and a classy watch on your wrist. And I guess the most important thing of all is that YOU could be the one who NEVER HAS TO WORK AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU LIVE! This really is possible if you take what I have disclosed in this manual and build upon it with your own researches and effort. Above all, please don’t just put this manual to one side and think something like: “That was great. I’m really going to do that… one day.” Instead, grab a piece of paper and pen and write down the ONE THING that you can do, right now, today to get yourself started on the road to a successful career as a Home Information Publisher. Don’t put this off until tomorrow. Do it now! The great thing about this business is that you need hardly do any of the work yourself! Other people write your sales materials. Other people put your product together (write it up). Other people design the covers, CD printing and so on. Other people produce your product after you’ve done the first small run at home. Other people do the mailing for you. 125

Other people (fulfilment houses) handle all the order taking, shipping and customer queries – if that’s the route you want to go. All you do is bank the money (you can even have that done for you if it’s too much of a chore!) It really is the most amazingly simple and super-profitable idea I have ever come across and there’s as much potential now as there ever was – maybe more with the Internet. Don’t be put off by the detail in this manual. It took me a while to ‘get it’ so be prepared to read it a couple more times to let the ideas really sink in. After all, we’re talking about your total financial freedom – FOREVER! That’s worth a little effort, don’t you think? So come on in! The water’s warm and the beach is almost deserted. It’s about time you cut yourself a better break and aimed for a more fulfilling, wealthy life. That’s what I did. That’s what you can do too. My very best wishes for your future success.

Jeremy Gardener

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