Marketing 101 – what’s old is new again

I was sorting through some of my older books a couple days ago, and came across what must have been one of my earlier aquisitions of Kirt’s products.  Internet Marketing Mastermind Summit Transcripts.  It’s a printout of a discussion between Kirt, Terry Dean, Fred Gleek, Armand Morin, Michael Buck, Randy Charach and Christian Kinglsey.  I don’t know if it is even being sold anymore.

It is primarily a transcript of the conversation that took up 10 tapes. About 250 pages.  Yeah, it is that old… it was delivered on cassette.  One of the most interesting and most useful things about it is that Terry Dean wrote a 19 page summary of what it contained and placed it in the beginning.  He listed out 205 different points to note, divided by which tape it was on and the page number of the transcript.

The 19 page summary is incredibly valuable, and I don’t remember anyone else doing this.    This set was chock full of tips that most of us had forgotten, many of which are just now coming back into focus with internet marketers.  Basically, what’s old is new again.

Here are a few takeaways that I’ve seen noted as ‘revelations’ among the gurus within the last year or so…

You must have a physical book… page 8
Send out direct mailings to customers… page 19
Sell your stuff on Amazon… page 32 (this was a big one for me that I had forgotten to do)
Use tleconference calls to sell products… page 50.
Article marketing is the most powerful thing you can do… page 54
Creating membership sites… pages 62-74

That’s just a few of the tips from the first 25% of the summary.  Any of it sound familiar as being promoted as the big new thing lately?

I just sent a note to Kirt telling him he should make sure this stuff is available.

Just goes to show how much value you probably already have lying around on your bookshelves or hard drives long forgotten.  Before going out and buying the ‘next big thing,’ look at what you already have and use it.  If you don’t have anything, go out and find some of the older things that are no longer in fashion.  You can get them either free or for just a few dollars.

The basics of business and marketing don’t really change that much.  Get the basics down before you go out and spend a fortune on the latest and greatest new super duper sure to kick butt tricks.  The tricks are just the icing on the cake.  Make sure the cake is edible before you throw the icing on it.

Bill Shor

Doubling sales doesn’t double profits

I was listening to an interview today. An ‘expert’ on making sales letters convert better was claiming that by doing a couple things you can double your sales. OK, I’ll agree. He was trying to show people that this is a good thing, and easy to do. That is possible, even likely in many cases. He then went on to state that doubling your sales would double your profits. Huh? This guy is supposed to be an expert. Doubling sales without adding much cost just about never doubles your profit. Let’s take a look.

Say you are selling an ebook on how great massages are. You’ve got a website, a merchant account, an office to work from, insurance and other overhead expenses. And, you are doing some kind of advertising. Maybe running pay per click ads, banner ads, a listing in the yellow pages or local classified. Let’s say that overall, your monthly expenses are about $2,000. And that is pretty cheap. And, your gross sales are $5,000. Delivery is included in your hosting fees, so you basically have no per item cost for manufacturing and shipping. So your proft is roughly $3,000.

Now, let’s double sales just based on better copywriting and conversion techniques. You aren’t buying more ads, your rent, insurance and other overhead costs are going to remain about the same. You’ll have a tiny bit of added costs for the transaction fees, and maybe a tiny bit of customer support, but that’s about it. So, doubling your sales brings you another $5,000 in profit.

Total of the original profit plus the added profit of doubling sales: $8,000 profit.

As I recall my math lessons, a profit of $3,000 doubled (increasing by 100%) is $6,000. Going from $3,000 to $8,000 in profit is a 167% increase. That’s a heck of a lot better than doubling profits from doubling sales. Keep this in mind when you are doing things to improve your conversions. A small increase can make a much bigger difference to your bottom line than you may think at first glance. In order to double sales in this case, you would only need to increase sales by 60%, not 100%. If your conversions are low to begin with, it isn’t really that hard to do.

Here’s to your profits!

Bill Shor