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Ideas/Section-1
Businesses to make money with fall under
one of these two categories: (1) Service, or (2) Product.
A service business is more specialized
to a specific, target-marketed group of people who need the service
performed. A product can normally be sold to a wider market and
you can span the mail order as well as the consumer market (John
Q Public.)
The item I sold was Colloidal Silver, so
it fell under the category of product. But the MLM company that
manufactured this product kept instructing me to build a downline
and sign up as many distributors as possible. Since everyone was
given this same advice, I decided to do something different and
more exciting.
I learned from a colleague that the consumer
market is the most overlooked market for smaller homebased businesses.
Big companies market to the consumer, but the little guy is never
told to do it. They are led to believe that it's too expensive,
which is a lie. In fact, running classified ads all over the country
is less expensive per 1,000 than mail order publications.
Now I knew from experience that if I even
mentioned the word distributorship to a consumer they will immediately
envision door-to-door selling. This, of course, would turn them
off. Because of this I knew that marketing with this method would
not get me anywhere.
So I used another angle. Why not just sell
the product itself with no strings attached? Don't most consumers
buy products at the store because they want to use them? When you
purchased your living room sofa for instance, did you purchase it
so you could re-sell them and make money? Of course not. You bought
it, brought it home and used it!
So I wrote 5 different classified ads selling
Colloidal Silver for $30 a bottle. I told about the benefits of
Colloidal Silver and asked the reader to call my toll-free number
to learn more about its health benefits. My toll-free number was
a recording that sold the product (not the opportunity.)
I invested $850 to get my 5 different classified
ads in newspapers across the country. My cost per 1,000 circulation
was 23¢ much lower than mail order and my ad appeared within
2 weeks.
From the $850 investment, I made only $300
of my money back but the idea worked! I analyzed which of the 5
different ads pulled the most response (they were coded), eliminated
3 that didn't and invested another $500 ($200 of my own money and
$300 from the first sales) the next week in classified advertising
again. This time I made $750 in sales.
The next month I narrowed down the papers
that pulled the most orders, added on some more and repeated the
procedure. I made another $500 the first week in sales and $1,200
the second week. After processing the paperwork to get these orders
filled, I ended up with 100 customers who had purchased the Colloidal
Silver and 2 who wanted to join the distributorship in my downline.
Now granted 2 out of 100 is not a lot.
But 2 people who REALLY want to work the program is much better
than 2,000 that don't want to work or don't even want to learn how
to. Besides, I had the potential of 100 REPEAT customers and the
opportunity to sell them more products. I made a great deal of money
using this method and you can too!!
