Issue #2264
- WEALTHY: You could be getting out too soon (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: No time for cardio? (Jon Benson)
- WISE: Lee Iacocca on marketing
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- What has the greatest effect on your sales? (Bob Bl)
- When small business meets big corporation (Michael Masterson)
- It’s Fun to Know… about the biggest telescope ever
- Add "chimerical" to your vocabulary
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From Good to Great Money
Getting out of a good stock is hard. What profit should you be content with? 10 percent? 20 percent? 50 percent? 100 percent? How about none of the above?
You never know how high a stock can fly. So why be satisfied with good returns when you could be getting great returns?
Even if you’ve doubled your investment, don’t just take your money and run. Had I done that last year, I would have missed out on gains of 308 percent from one company and 153 percent from another.
Instead, wait for your stock investment to top out and start falling. When it’s fallen 25 percent from its peak, sell.
This takes the guesswork and emotion out of the decision.
[Ed. Note: ETR's Investment Director, Andrew Gordon, is the editor of INCOME, a monthly financial advisory service that uncovers income-generating stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much-higher-than-average profit potential.]
"When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great marketer."
Lee Iacocca
The Most Important Part of Marketing
By Bob Bly
There are endless debates – and numerous formulas – designed to tell us which parts of marketing are most important. By "most important," I mean which parts have the greatest effect on sales.
I have my own opinion about the most important part of marketing, and it may surprise you.
To begin with, it’s not the list of names you mail to, as so many experts claim.
The list is vitally important. But there are plenty of lists you can rent – and through testing, you can determine which will work for you.
Having your own list – your house file – is also crucial. But with patience, money, and effort, you can build a respectable house list – especially online, where it costs less than offline.
Lots of people say the most important part of marketing is the offer.
The offer can make a huge difference in response rates. But, like lists, there are a finite number of offer options. And once you test them, you know which offer works best for you.
As you’ve probably guessed, copy is important – but not the most important element in marketing.
Unlike lists and offers, which are finite, the copy variations that can be written for a promotion are virtually limitless. However, copy’s ability to lift response is somewhat limited. New copy can beat the control by 25 percent… 50 percent… even 100 percent. But rarely much more than that.
Changes in graphics can lift response even less than copy can, in most cases, so design is clearly not the most important part of marketing.
So what’s left?
Price is pretty important, but it’s not the #1 factor determining marketing success. Price is really part of the offer. And, like the list and the offer, the optimal price can quickly be determined through testing.
Is distribution the missing key? For 80 percent of businesses, distribution is fairly straightforward: Get an order, ship it out. Or invite people to your store or showroom. In some product categories (e.g., those sold through dealers, reps, or agents), distribution channels are trickier. But those situations are the exception, not the rule.
So what’s the most important part of marketing?
It’s the product.
By that, I don’t mean the physical product. I mean what the product can do for the customer. The benefits it delivers… the functions it performs… the problems it solves… the needs it fills.
Are you offering your customers something they truly want or need? And is it an urgently felt need, rather than one that isn’t very important or immediate?
Do the people in your market niche desire or require what you are selling?
Will buying it make a huge improvement in the quality of their lives?
If the answer is yes, your marketing will be fairly successful – even if the price, offer, list, copy, and graphics are not perfect.
On the other hand, what if you have not found a great product that meets your prospect’s urgent needs or solves her most pressing problems? Then she will not buy, no matter how persuasive the copy, eye-catching the graphics, appealing the offer, or reasonable the price.
There is an old saying in marketing: A great product will sell even if the promotion is poor, but a great promotion cannot sell a bad product. It isn’t always true, but the fact remains that the most important factor in marketing is whether your product is a good fit with the needs, concerns, and desires of your customers.
How do you know what those customers really want?
Madison Avenue advertising agencies and packaged goods marketers would answer: market research.
Direct marketers would answer: testing.
Still, no matter how much research you do – or how well you know your target market – deciding what products to offer them largely comes down to guesswork. When you guess correctly, the promotions for those products are a smash success, with the orders – and money – flying like snow.
That happens a lot, thank goodness.
But when you guess wrong, you end up offering your customers something they don’t want or need – and have little interest in. Your marketing campaign, no matter how brilliant, does not move them to buy. And that week, the phones don’t ring and your online shopping cart software reports few orders.
So what should you do?
My best advice is for you to continually plan and test new products. Spend a lot of time thinking about and talking to your customers. Ask them what they want, need, hope, dream, fear, and desire. Then find or create products that address those wants, needs, hopes, dreams, fears, and desires.
Offer these new products to your customers in limited marketing tests conducted at reasonable cost. Then analyze the results. Keep promoting your winners – and cut your losses on the losers early.
By the way, one of the biggest marketing mistakes is to do the opposite: Pour good money after bad in a desperate attempt to get your prospects to buy a product you think they should want.
Your customers know far better than you what they are interested in – and what they are indifferent to. Just listen to them, and you’ll make a handsome living. If you argue with them… and offer them what you think they should buy, instead of what they want to buy… you’ll soon be out of business.
[Ed Note: Bob Bly is a contributor to ETR's Internet Money Club, where we'll help build you an online business within the next 12 months. The club's memberships were 100% filled up last month - but we've just opened up a small handful of slots for a very limited time. To check on availability, click here.
Sign up for Bob's free monthly e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and get more than $100 in free bonuses.]
Imagine Knowing of a Casino Where the Dealer Tipped His Hand Before You Made Your Move and Didn’t Care How Many Times You Beat Him.
When Would You Stop Going There?
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Such powerful knowledge could make YOU very rich indeed… Click to learn more…
When to Bring in the Corporate Types
I have spent my entire career in small business. The largest business I have ever been associated with has revenues of less than $500 million a year. I have all the typical entrepreneurial aversions to corporate culture. I don’t like people telling me what to do, and that’s especially true when I’ve hired those people.
But I’ve learned that when a business I’m growing reaches a certain level, I make much better decisions when I work with corporate types. The corporate executive is always wondering what can go wrong with a good idea. I don’t want to spend any time thinking that way. It’s much easier and better to have someone else do that for me, to listen to what they say, and then to move ahead.
Making your business more organized will not slow it down as long as you develop your communication skills so you can convey your vision to everyone in the business, including all those people you will never get to speak to except at holiday parties.
Corporate executives are good at solving problems. But they are bad at creating growth. Give them the latitude and support they need to do their jobs. But make sure they understand that your job as the company’s CEO is to keep them busy by creating new problems.
Don’t allow your professional managers to dictate policy to you. Ask them to help you achieve your goals. If you see that they are bent on implementing foolish, counterproductive ideas, fire them – but don’t put "yes" people or marketing mavens in their place. They are called managers for a reason. Let them do the managing.
[Ed. Note: The above is an excerpt from Michael Masterson's brand-new book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, published with permission of John Wiley & Sons. In the book - which has already hit #1 on Amazon's list of best-selling books - Michael shows how veteran and rookie entrepreneurs alike can take their businesses to the next level. You'll learn how to identify and solve the problems that crop up during each stage of a company's growth... and how to take advantage of profit opportunities along the way. Order your copy of Ready, Fire, Aim now.]
Try This in-the-Gym Time-Saver… and Double Your Results
By Jon Benson
Honestly, I do not look forward to my time on the elliptical glider or exercise bike. Some folks love the idea of gliding to nowhere for 30 minutes at a shot. But weight training has always been more appealing to me. As Dr. Sears and Craig Ballantyne have mentioned before in ETR, weight training is more effective at fat-burning than traditional cardiovascular exercise. But by combining the two, you’ll get the ultimate weight-loss and body-shaping workout.
Here’s a way to work both into the same workout while improving your performance in the gym. Create mini-circuits that feature at least one weight-training exercise. Then follow up with one to two minutes of cardio. You might think that one to two minutes wouldn’t do much. But by performing cardio exercises between sets of weights, you are keeping your heart rate elevated throughout your entire workout. Your body receives more oxygen, you will have more energy, and you will burn more fat.
If those benefits aren’t enough for you, your cardio time will seem to fly by! Doing two minutes on the glider at 80 percent of my maximum perceived exertion is a snap. (Mentally, not physically.) By the time my workout is finished, I have completed 10 to 15 "sets" of cardio. This, along with the elevated-heart-rate weight training, puts me in fat-burning mode during my entire session.
[Ed. Note: Jon Benson, a lifecoach and nutrition counselor who specializes in helping individuals discover a life-altering mind/body connection, is a contributing writer for ETR 's free natural health e-letter. His work in the field of post-40 fitness and mental empowerment has helped countless thousands. Learn how you can do the same at www.fitover40.com or www.mpowerfitness.com.]
It’s Fun to Know: The Biggest Telescope Ever
When completed in 2017, the $1.2 billion European Extremely Large Telescope will be the biggest optical telescope ever built: half the size of a football field and 21 stories tall. Designed to search for planets outside our solar system, it uses a complex system of mirrors to collect light and capture images of distant galaxies. According to its designers, the EELT is much more powerful than any existing technology.
The European Southern Observatory, the intergovernmental research organization overseeing the telescope, is considering sites in South Africa, Chile, Morocco, Argentina, and Antarctica.
(Source: Popular Science )
How I Went from Working in the Sub- Sub-Basement of a Bank in Minneapolis … to Living on a Small Island in Maine in the House of My Dreams!
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Can you still achieve it?
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- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Chimerical
Something that’s "chimerical" (ky-MER-ih-kul) is fantastic, improbable, or unrealistic. The word is derived from the chimera, a monster in Greek mythology that had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon.
Example (as used by Margaret Wertheim in Omni magazine): " In the chimerical atmosphere of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, it is far from clear where fact ends and fiction begins – or vice versa."
[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, 2008
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