Issue #2029

• WEALTHY: How handling losses can help you get higher returns (Rick Pendergraft)
• HEALTHY: Why cough syrup is a waste of money (Jon Herring)
• WISE: John Ilhan on attracting customers

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• What’s your top marketing responsibility? (Michael Masterson)
• News, weather, sports… a phone call away (Will Newman)
• It’s Good to Know… about honesty in the workplace
• Add "parlance" to your vocabulary

== Highly Recommended ==

Hello Bob,

I finished The Billionaire Way about 10 days ago. Now I promise you I did not cheat on this so hear me out.

I started the first two or three days I think and there was a transaction I was involved in that I was not comfortable with but had an emotional attachment to. I sat down one night and crunched the numbers and made some tough decisions, all emotion aside.

Then about two weeks into the program there was the day when we had to exclude our emotions and cut off dead baggage. Wow, I felt like yeah, OK I’m getting this because I just did that.

OK so now I’m tearing along the program, accepting things that I am already doing and working on the things I am not comfortable with. Vigilantly every day, watching the DVD after the kids were in bed and working my work book.

Two days after I finished the program I saw an opportunity which I could assess very well given my clarity of vision, my assessments of my talents and the work I had accomplished.

It is my joy to tell you that I am founding executive of a new international network marketing company, the likes of which have never been seen and I have already built my team Australia wide within 10 days, using the Billionaire Way techniques.

I lost my fear, opened my mind and listened and I cannot believe the result. Thank you so much…

Regards,
Kathy

Learn more about The Billionaire Way program today…

The 3 Components of Making Money in the Market

By Rick Pendergraft

In the last two months, I spoke at two investment conferences… and I noticed a frustrating trend: Hardly any of the other speakers at those conferences said anything about how they deal with losses. That’s a problem. Because knowing how to deal with losses is as big a factor in being a successful investor as knowing how to deal with winners.

There are three components that determine an investor’s level of success: his average win, his average loss, and his winning percentage. You need to take all three into consideration in order to make an informed decision about whether or not to follow a recommended system.

Take a look at these three scenarios and you will see what I am talking about.

The above table is based on 10 trades with equal dollar amounts going into each trade. As you can see, to get good returns on your investment, it isn’t necessary to win all the time … nor is it necessary to have huge wins all the time.

You know that any investment service has losses once in a while. If someone tells you their service never has any, they’re lying. And if you believe them, you could be headed for potentially huge losses yourself.

So next time you attend an investment conference and the speaker goes on and on about his winning trades, ask him about his losing trades and how he handles them. You will learn a lot more about him and his methodology that way.

[Ed. Note: Find out how Rick Pendergraft can help you make money - no matter what the market's doing - as the editor of ETR's new investment service, the ETF Options Trader.]

 "This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back."

John Ilhan

The Optimum Strategy for Acquiring New Customers: How to Discover and Implement It

By Michael Masterson

I believe that for every business, at any given time, there is an optimum strategy for acquiring new customers – and that the primary marketing obligation of the company’s CEO is to make sure that strategy is discovered and implemented.

What do I mean by an optimum strategy for acquiring new customers?

I mean a marketing and sales strategy that will produce the greatest long-term benefit to the company. Usually, that means finding and converting the greatest number of high-lifetime-value customers, i.e., customers who will continue to buy products from the company for years into the future.

Here’s an example…

Since its inception, EarlytoRise.com has recruited almost all its customers through Internet advertising. Of the many conversion strategies we have tested, two have so far proven effective:

1. Selling informational reports on other websites and then giving buyers a free subscription to our daily e-zine, which then sells them all sorts of "back-end" products
2. Targeting search engine users on a pay-per-click basis with a free special report, and then giving them a free subscription to the e-zine with its back-end selling

What we found – over and over again – is that those who had purchased our informational reports were worth considerably more over the long-term than those who had responded to our free report offers.

We tested three levels of pricing for the informational reports: $20, $50, and $100. By tracking the spending habits of each group, we found that the $20 spenders were each worth about $6 extra per year, while those who spent $50 were worth about $50 extra per year. Interestingly, those who spent $100 were no more valuable, in terms of back-end buying, then those who spent $50.

Based on those findings, we concluded that our best strategy was to sell as many $50 reports as possible.

I should mention that the strategy of converting pay-per-click responses brought in (and still brings in) many more names. But when we add up the net dollars we make through pay-per-click versus product buying, there is no contest. The product buyers contribute much more to our bottom line. That’s why we consider the first method, selling informational reports, to be our primary customer-acquisition strategy – and that’s why we devote more resources (time, intellect, and money) to it.

Because this is our primary strategy for attracting the kind of customers we are looking for, ETR’s marketing and editorial teams spend a good deal of time developing new information products to sell on the Internet. Most of their ideas come from the content of our daily e-zine – by carefully reading it and asking themselves, "Can any of these ideas be converted into exciting new information products?"

Coming up with new products to sell is critical, but it’s also important to figure out how we want to "offer" them to the marketplace. In traditional direct-marketing parlance, an offer consists of five things:

• The product you are selling
• The premiums that come with it
• The price you are charging for it
• The payment terms
• A guarantee

We have learned from experience that the high-lifetime-value customers who come from ETR’s readership have typically responded to an offer for a product that will make them wealthier, healthier, or happier… so long as that product doesn’t cost more than $50 and comes with a strong, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee. So that’s the kind of offer we construct when we test a new product in the marketplace.

But just because this kind of offer has worked in the past doesn’t mean it will always be the best offer. So we test different price points, payment terms, and guarantees on a regular basis.

We also test our marketing copy. We test headlines. We test leads. We test hard approaches against soft approaches, benefit-oriented pitches against idea-oriented ones. We test just about anything, so long as we think the element we are testing has a reasonable chance of increasing the response rate by a substantial margin.

Right now, in this market, ETR’s optimum customer-acquisition strategy is to create and market as many $50 information reports (with strong promises, guarantees, etc.) as we can on the Internet. But this may change. We might, for example, discover that we can bring in more names by taking the same lead-conversion strategy and testing it in the mail.

It would be foolish for us to believe that the customer-acquisition strategy that is working optimally now will always be the best one for us. Markets change because culture does. Some of the fundamental psychological principles will remain the same, but the individual elements of any marketing campaign will change over time.

Good marketers understand this. And that’s why they are always testing. The first thing you should do after you have discovered a great way to sell your product is to start working on another way that will one day beat it.

Take a moment, right now, to identify your company’s optimum customer-acquisition strategy:

What’s Your Primary Advertising Medium?

• direct mail
• direct e-mail
• direct space (magazines & newspapers)
• direct e-space (websites and e-zines)
• telephone
• radio
• television

What’s Your Primary Lead-Conversion Strategy?

• direct space to direct mail
• direct e-space to direct e-mail
• direct mail to direct mail
• telephone to telephone
• telephone to direct mail
• radio to telephone
• radio to direct mail
• television to telephone
• television to direct mail

Describe Your Offer

• the price
• the product
• the guarantee

Describe Your Sales Copy

• the big or overarching idea
• the promise of benefit
• the specific claims
• proof of those claims

Once you have identified exactly what you are doing, you can start to think about how you can "test away from it." Spend some time brainstorming with your best people. Ask key questions, like:

• What other products can we sell?
• How can we make the offer more enticing?
• How can we make the copy more compelling?
• What other media should we test?

There are hundreds of ways a business can go bad, but only one sure way to make it better: Increase the number of good and profitable customers.

New customers bring new cash, and that cash that can be spent on anything your business needs, including better products, customer service, fulfillment, etc. You name it, cash and a little time will make it happen.

That’s why, at the beginning of this article, I said that discovering and implementing the company’s optimum customer-acquisition strategy should be the CEO’s top marketing responsibility. It’s that important.

[Ed. Note: Over two dozen smart entrepreneurs learned how to take their business profits to a much higher level at Michael Masterson's exclusive Business-Building Retreat this week. The fee was high but it’s going to be well worth it for them. If you missed your chance for a personal consultation with Michael, you can see him at this year’s Early to Rise Fall Bootcamp where you’ll get proven strategies for dramatically powering up your marketing… growing your business to tens of millions and beyond… and breaking into one of the most profitable industries around...Sign up for Bootcamp TODAY (last year we completely sold out) and get $200 off]

== Highly Recommended ==

The Options Myth Every Sore Loser Wants You to Believe

The biggest myth about options is that they are very high risk. But if you trade them properly – with expert guidance – it can be less risky and more profitable than virtually any other investment strategy!

You can invest a fraction that you normally would… for even greater returns. You can leverage small moves into large gains. Your risk is strictly limited. And you can make money whether the markets are rising or falling.

And with options on ETFs you can get all the diversification of a mutual fund with the amazing leverage of options. Click here to see some recent examples of the eye-popping profit potential and pennies-on-the-dollar risk you get with options on ETFs.

Ahem! Ahem!

By Jon Herring

Every year, we spend billions of dollars on over-the-counter cough medicines. But according to guidelines published by the American College of Chest Physicians, "There is no clinical evidence that over-the-counter cough expectorants or suppressants actually relieve cough."

A study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests the same thing. One hundred children with upper-respiratory infections were given either dextromethorphan (DH) or diphenhydramine (DPH) – the two most common ingredients in cough syrup – or a sugar-water-based placebo. No matter which of the three treatments the children used, the researchers found absolutely no difference in their recovery.

If you have a persistent cough that won’t go away, consult with a physician. But most coughs that are not related to a chronic lung condition or something in the environment will resolve on their own… and cough medicine is not likely to help.

Based on my own experience, what does help is moderate exercise, lots of fluids, sunlight, and hot herbal tea to soothe the throat.

Quick Travel Tip: A Valuable Phone Resource

By Will Newman

When you’re on the road – on a business trip or on vacation – check out 1-800-555-TELL (8355). This free, toll-free service provides a wealth of useful on-the-go information.

The call opens with the main menu – News Center, Sports, Travel (airline info, hotels, weather, directions), Stock Quotes, Entertainment. Then you simply say which option you want to hear.

[Ed. Note: Will Newman is the editor of AWAI's The Golden Thread online newsletter - a free weekly alert loaded with writing and marketing secrets, tips, and insights.]

It’s Good to Know: About Honesty in the Workplace

Even if you’re honest 100 percent of the time, chances are some of your coworkers aren’t. According to a CareerBuilder.com survey of 2,050 workers and 1,000 hiring managers, 19 percent of workers admit to telling a lie once a week at work. But those lies don’t all go undetected. Nearly 25 percent of hiring managers reported firing an employee for being dishonest.

The most common lies you’ll hear on the job:

• "I don’t know how that happened."
• "I have another call to take" or "I’ll call you right back."
• "I’ve been out of town/out sick."
• "I like your outfit" or "You look great."
• "I didn’t get your e-mail/voicemail/fax."

== Highly Recommended ==

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!

Why not go for it?

- Patrick Coffey

Word to the Wise: Parlance

"Parlance" (PAR-luns) – from the French – is a particular manner of speaking.

Example (as I used it today): "In traditional direct-marketing parlance, an offer consists of five things."

[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]

Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 5:30 am and is filed under Daily Issues .