Secrets of an Information Publishing Powerhouse
- WEALTHY: Aiming for long-term success with your first product (Michael Masterson)
- HEALTHY: A little-known benefit of vitamin C (Dr. Al Sears)
- WISE: The founder of The Body Shop on running a business
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- 3 ways to reach today’s customers
- Feedback Friday: Life and death and Michael’s Thanksgiving message
- Add "mellifluous" to your vocabulary
He’d Have Called Them Crazy - Or Worse!
With the Internet, it’s now possible to spend no more than a few dollars, write a couple of very basic ads, and have instant access to millions of potential customers all in a matter of minutes.
If anyone had told Jim Sheridan he could bank thousands in just 24 hours. . . without any product of his own. . . without spending a penny on getting it or promoting it, he’d have justifiably said they were nuts.
But Jim made a decision that he would overcome his skeptical nature and give it a go. Boy, is he glad he did! That one deal alone banked him $187,296 in one day.
The great news is - you can copy Jim’s plan exactly. The program is called Instant Internet Income and I guarantee it does exactly what it says it does.
Take a look at how Jim brought in over $175,000 in a single day!
- Patrick Coffey
"You can view [running a business] as not just a job but as an honorable livelihood where you can, by using your imagination, develop the human spirit."
Anita Roddick
Secrets of an Information Publishing Powerhouse
By Michael Masterson
A few months ago, real estate magnate and multimillionaire Russ Whitney sent his private jet to bring me and several of my colleagues to meet with him and his team at his headquarters on the west coast of Florida. It is a very convenient way to travel - office to limo to jet to limo to office.
As we seated ourselves in his conference room, Russ pointed out a hidden benefit of owning your own plane. "How else could we have gotten all this high-priced talent together on such short notice?" he observed.
He was right. We’d been promising to get together for years. But with conflicting schedules and so many last-minute obligations, it’s difficult to set aside time to talk about new business. Being able to hop in a plane and be there in 20 minutes really made the difference. (The chauffeur drives right up to the plane. You step out of the limo, climb on board, and the pilot starts the engine.)
It turned out to be a very promising meeting. My main client, which I was representing, was worth about $100 million the last time Russ and I got together. Today, it’s worth a whopping $270 million. And Russ’s organization has grown even faster. Back then, it was in the $50 million range. Now, they are making a quarter-billion dollars a year
Both companies are in the business of providing information to customers, and both market investment and real estate products. But our strategies are different. My client does most of its business through direct e-mail. Whitney Inc, on the other hand, provides most of its information directly to customers via seminars, workshops, and advanced educational courses.
The differences provide opportunities. We can help them develop an e-mail-based marketing program, and they can help us provide training sessions for our best customers. Over the course of two or three years, we should be able to make some good money together by teaching one another new ways to reach our markets and enrich the lives of our customers.
I like Russ Whitney. I like his energy and his casual wit. I like the fact that the employees who were working for him five years ago are still by his side today. I like the way he’s built his business from a mid-sized operation selling only one type of product to a sophisticated, substantial business that provides a variety of programs his customers seem to love.
When Russ and I last spent time together, he was already richer than anyone needs to be, and he could have sat back and let the business be what it was. But he wasn’t satisfied. He knew it could be better, and kept making adjustments and innovations until he discovered a formula that sent revenues skyrocketing.
As well as his business is doing, it has the potential for even greater growth. Whitney Inc. is delivering some of their information products digitally, via the Internet, which is lowering their costs. But they aren’t doing much marketing online. That should be a huge opportunity for them - and we will be happy to be involved.
Russ has an interesting success story. He was 20 years old and working in a slaughterhouse when he read a book on real estate investing and decided to try it. He became a self-made millionaire at the age of 27. He wanted to teach others how to duplicate his success, so he wrote his first book. He has gone on to write several best-sellers and has built one of the world’s leading financial education companies.
Since Russ is in the information business, I asked him what advice he would give someone who was just starting out in that industry. This is what he said:
"For long-term success in the information and education industries, you need long-term relationships with your customers. That sounds simple, but it’s not easy. Anybody can sell a newsletter, a special report, or even a seminar. But will that customer want to come back to you? And if he does, will you have something for him?
"Certainly your initial product, the information that draws the customer to you, must have value. It must show your customer something that is going to make a difference in his life. But what’s more important is that it has to lead to more information.
"The best way to do that is to work backward into your program and pricing. Think about where you want your customer to be. For example, at Whitney Education Group and EduTrades, our goal is to teach people how to build wealth through real estate investing and stock trading, plus how to be financially intelligent, run a business, protect their assets, and more. That simply can’t be taught in a single weekend seminar or in a newsletter. We modeled our training after conventional post-secondary education. We teach the basics and then we build on that knowledge with advanced training taught by experienced instructors who are actively working and investing in the areas in which they teach.
"We tell our students from the very beginning that we want a long-term relationship with them. When they enroll in our courses, we are on their team for life. After they have taken their initial training, we guide them into the specific advanced courses that will help them accomplish their own individual goals. That adds tremendous value to what we do and allows us to price our training accordingly.
"When your product has this kind of value, and when you are willing to make a long-term commitment to your customer, you will be able to charge more and see greater revenue from existing customers. One of the reasons we keep adding courses is that our students ask for them. They take all the training we have to offer and want more. That’s because they know we are committed to them and to their success.
"If someone just starting out in the information business (or any business, for that matter) makes the same commitment to their customers that we make to our students, they will have the foundation for success."
While Russ and I don’t agree on everything (he’s tougher than I am when it comes to some things), in this case, I think his recommendations are correct. You must start by providing good, solid, basic information that you can build on if you are going to develop an information business that will be profitable long term.
As I’ve said before - both in ETR and at this year’s Info Marketing Bootcamp, it is crucial to start out with a fantastic front-end product that proves you have a lot to offer your customers. It should be something that showcases your company’s talents, grabs your prospect’s attention, and makes it impossible for him not to buy it. And once he has it in his hands, it should provide him with such top-notch information that it entices him to want to know even more. Then you can continue to upsell this customer with bigger, more expensive, and better products and services for years to come.
[Ed. Note: You can find out more about Whitney Information Network by going to their website.]
Why Are Most Real Estate ‘Investors’ Still Going to Work Every Morning?
If you want to collect an automatic monthly income of $10,000 or more - without having to get up every morning and "go to work" - most real estate experts are giving you the wrong advice. They rave about buying and selling single family homes. But… they don’t admit that single family homes are difficult investments for instant passive income… for attaining real financial freedom by not having to get up and go to work every morning.
Dave Lindahl makes $27,000+ in passive income month after month… and can easily show you how to reap huge positive cash flows from real estate - with less risk and less money down than single family homes.
-Kam Weiler
Contributing Editor, Main Street Millionaire
Worth Quoting: Marketing in the 21st Century
"These days, marketers first need to think about targeting and personalizing their messages. … Marketing is now about relevance. We can target consumers by using context, time of day, past customer interactions, broadband connection vs. dial-up, and many other variables. Second, marketers need to integrate their messages across all digital channels - display advertising, search, the website, and e-mail marketing. And finally, they need to experiment with new media. Today’s emerging media - podcasting, viral, video on demand, mobile, etc. - will be tomorrow’s commonplace marketing vehicle."
(Source: Brian McAndrews, president and CEO of aQuantive, in Business 2.0)
Prevent Heart Disease With Vitamin C
By Al Sears, MD
I was out getting groceries when a woman I had never seen before called out to me, "Dr. Sears, can I ask you a question?" Turns out, she had read a couple of my books and recognized me from my picture. Whenever this happens, I feel a bit embarrassed, but try to be helpful. After all, I have worked hard to get my message out … and here’s a person who’s paying attention.
Her question? "My mother had three strokes. Can you tell me how to prevent that from happening to me?"
When I asked her how much vitamin C she takes, she said, "I don’t have a cold. I’m worried about heart disease." Yet, vitamin C plays a primary role in preventing heart attacks and strokes.
You can use vitamin C therapy to break open existing clogged arteries and repair lifelong damage to artery, vein, and capillary walls. Vitamin C increases the production of collagen, elastin, and other "reinforcement molecules" that support your blood vessels in the same way that iron rods support tall buildings. More collagen means more stability for your 60,000-mile-long circulatory system.
When you lack Vitamin C, cracks and lesions form in the walls of your blood vessels. When blood vessels break down, arterial plaques fortify the weakness and "repair" the damage. But when these arterial plaques become too thick, they block the flow of blood. A lack of blood to the heart triggers a heart attack - and a lack of blood to the brain causes a stroke.
The government’s recommended daily intake of 75 to 120 mg of vitamin C is clearly not enough. To reverse heart disease, I recommend increasing your daily intake to 3,000 mg. Pregnant women should get at least 6,000 mg per day, and in times of stress or sickness, you can take up to 20,000 mg. A powdered form may be more convenient for larger doses. Just dissolve it in water and drink it down.
[Ed. Note: Dr. Sears, a practicing physician and the author of The Doctor’s Heart Cure and 12 Secrets to Virility, is a leading authority on longevity, physical fitness, and heart health.]
Feedback Friday: Michael’s Thanksgiving Article
Every year, Michael Masterson sends out his annual Thanksgiving Day message. This year, he asked you to accept the fact of your own mortality as a necessary first step toward embracing life and all its blessings. Our readers had a lot to say in response to his thoughts. Here are just a few of the e-mails we received …
"I have a great respect for your marketing knowledge and general ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, but I must say I was greatly disappointed after reading your Thanksgiving Day article.
"There’s no question that your ‘6 ways to be thankful’ are valid as far as they go and should be followed year round. However, your ideas about death are only just that, YOUR ideas. In a very practical sense, they aren’t very helpful for getting the most out of life. I believe Wayne Dyer has a much better paradigm to live by. He tells us that we are NOT humans who, if we’re lucky, may have an occasional spiritual experience. On the contrary, we’re eternal begins who, on occasion, have a human experience.
"Thinking of oneself as an eternal being gives each of us an assumed awareness to seek spiritual guidance when mundane answers just aren’t good enough. It also encourages us to seek the moral high road by putting others first, and, above all else, to sit still and listen to the silence. For it is within the silence that your inner voice will guide you to the truth.
"Try it. You may discover many things, including the wonders that await the return from your human experience."
-Dr. Roger Altman
Ellisburg, NY
"We have been readers of ETR for many years. Much has been learned and discussed, but until today we have never communicated with you. Your Thanksgiving Day issue really brought home the message. Our sincere compliments for an excellent piece in practical, non-sectarian life advice. Your inspiration, Ben Franklin, was a bona fide pragmatic genius, and his ‘way’ is just as valid today as it was in his time.
"Please pass on our kudos to Brian Tracy and Robert Ringer, too, for their practical, commonsense approach to our unnecessarily complex lives."
-Alvaro Estaba
Columbia, SC
"Michael, I greatly respect your talent, business acumen, discipline, and generosity of spirit in being willing to share with your readers the many valuable things you’ve learned in life. But I have to tell you that your belief that continuity of consciousness is an empty religious concoction just doesn’t ring true.
"One has to ignore not just the spiritual aspirations of humans but also the innumerable accounts that have been told of life of a different sort after the death of the body. Can you explain why one should believe consciousness, by necessity, must be wed to a physical vehicle? Is it not possible that consciousness uses a body of one kind or another in order for it to work in a manifested state? Why would nature lavish energy on our species, developing an awareness or at least a yearning for a condition that allows consciousness to continue if it weren’t true? What purpose would it serve? Humans would be infinitely better adjusted to our environment if we didn’t have this existential drive to continue.
"So much fear, so much energy spent in assuring ourselves we will continue. What purpose would this serve in nature if it were just empty wishes?
"Is life, then, purposeless, and consciousness nothing more than a random efflorescence of some subtle faculty peculiar to our species but really of no lasting individual significance? Why learn lessons or build character? Why not be the biggest gorilla on the block and kill everyone who gets in our way? Why altruism, why love? For the species, for those that come after me? Why should I care about them if I am obliterated and gone without a trace after I die?
"Sorry, Michael, you would have to have a much more compelling case than what you have offered to begin to seriously dent a thoughtful and well-reasoned belief in the continuity of consciousness. Our materialistic culture is the unfortunate offspring of the Age of Enlightenment’s healthy revolt against superstition and repression of our humanhood. But the pendulum swung well beyond the midpoint and left many with the idea all is empty phenomenon. I think the evidence is overwhelming that we are more, much more than just what we see with our eyes.
"Thanks for ETR. It is always thought provoking."
-Wayne D Holt
Houston, Texas
Start Making Money Today
Interested in getting a nice little side-business going on the Internet? Or maybe even from your living-room table?
But you don’t have too much money, you don’t have too much time, and you’re not exactly Bill Gates when it comes to technology. Sound familiar?
A lot of people are in the same boat. The good news is that ETR has heard you. And now we’ve done something about it…
We’ve asked our colleague Marc Charles to be on the lookout for profit opportunities that can be run from a kitchen table, your desktop or out on the road.
Criteria? They’ve got to be inexpensive, easy to start, and still have great income potential, but without a lot of red tape.
They say when you’re first getting your feet wet with a side-business, the most important dollar to make is the first one. Well, Marc is an expert at taking beginning entrepreneurs and showing you how to make that first buck. He knows, because he’s done it dozens of times for himself, his family and his friends.
If you’ve been dreaming about starting your own business … now you can get started for about the price of 2 lattes.
And get this - you could be making money literally just hours from now. Imagine the feeling of finally getting a side business launched -TODAY!
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Mellifluous
Something that’s "mellifluous" (muh-LIF-loo-us) flows sweetly or smoothly.
Example (as used by Ken Gormley in Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation: "The tones were high-sounding, mellifluous, as if the speaker was reading from a book of old English verse while holding back any trace of sentiment or emotion."
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2006