We’ve added an article on ways business owner’s can use the popular classified ad site, Craig’s List, for free business promotion. You’ll find it in the article library of our parent website, Savvy Business Promotion and Advertising.
You can view the article by clicking on Using Craig’s List for Free Advertising and Business Promotion.
We’ve recently posted a new article to one of our sister websites on public relations on how to use Twitter as a means of advertising your business at low cost or no cost.
Even though Twitter us generally considered a personal social networking vehicle, there are a number of ways it can be used creatively for business promotion, publicity and public relations.
To read the article, click on Using Twitter for Public Relations and Business Promotion.
When you visit the Business Advertising & Promotion Article Library, you’ll find two new articles on using social media for advertising and public relations, see these two articles:
Facebook Advertising and Creating a Facebook Business Page For Online Branding by Joe Fanning
Using MySpace Links For Commercial Advertising And Promotion by Tino Buntic
More articles will be added soon.
Part 13 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
Alex: Offline tactic #6. This is something that as far as I know is unique to me. I’ve taught it for about a year and I still don’t see anyone using it, and it’s called the bonus gift cover letter. Bonus gift cover letter. And this is how to cross sell without package inserts. When you get a product, typically you’ll get all the bonus gifts in the product. You’ll get maybe a prop package insert in the product as well. And there’s no isolation factor. You know why infomercials work? Because there’s no prime time shows next to it. It’s irritating when you want to watch a show and you get a commercial. But at 2 o’clock in the morning when your resistance is low, it’s isolated. And a guy by the name of Alvin Eicoff proved it. Non-primetime are the best direct response TV and radio times. Not primetime. And best of all, they’re cheaper. The isolation factor also works with bonus gifts and with offers. So we talked about the package insert. What I do is I give $650 in bonus gifts. I use a brick and mortar tactic. What I do is I have them fax back the bonus gift reply form that’s in my course. It’s on the inside cover of my course. I tell them to take it out, fax it back to me. They have to do something and work for that bonus. I’m not giving it away as garbage. It’s meaningful, and I make them do that for two reasons. To read the course, or at least to open the box so it doesn’t collect dust, because it does have a lifetime guarantee. And number 2, so I can certify and hand sign the gifts. And they get an envelope that looks like a FedEx envelope. There’s a cover letter in there along with their certificates and bonus gifts. I give numerous bonus gifts, but the P.S., the P.S. is what’s really interesting about it. Aside from giving the bonus gifts separately, in my P.S. it says, “If you want to increase the pulling power of all your marketing communications and become a world class copywriter for less than $80, take a moment to visit www.copywritingcoach.com . Now, George, every single person here just purchased ‘Marketing with Postcards.” And what does postcard marketing involve? Copywriting! And I have a copywriting package at copywritingcoach.com and I’m urging them to do that. Number 1, to save fees with me. I mean, I don’t come cheap at $350 an hour. Secondly, for them to learn from the books that I learned from. But I’m putting it in a very isolationist place. That’s a P.S. with the bonus gifts. This is not satisfaction, George. This is delight. We’re delighting the customer. It’s satisfaction when you put the bonus gifts with the package and they’re opening the box and there are all the packages there. However, if you tell them that you’ve got to fax this back to me, I get the bonus gift sheet, and it’s more work. I mail out the bonus gifts, and it costs me an extra 65 cents, but the cover letter is my driver for the upsell. I’m delighting them because their bonuses are separate, and I’m not overwhelming them. And my offer in the P.S. is isolated and I’m telling them, “Hey, you want to be a copywriter for less than 80 bucks, go to copywritingcoach.com.” No one that I know of so far has ever used that tactic. Everyone I know can use that tactic if they’re an information publisher. Does that make sense?
George: Yes, it does, and we promised a lot of folks that tonight you would be sharing information that they can’t get anywhere else and they’ve never even heard before from you. So we’re really pleased to be able to get some of this information tonight, Alex, and thank you very much for it.
Alex: Our time is up, should we keep going? I’ve got maybe another 20 minutes.
Joel: I promised my listeners and you promised me 60 minutes, but we’re still not done. Do you mind going?
Alex: I say let’s keep going.
George: Just consider the rest of the time a P.S.
Part 12 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
George: Let’s move on to tactic # 5.
Alex: Offline tactic # 5. This is probably one of the most overlooked venues, but it’s one the oldest venues I think on earth, or at least in this country, and that is direct mail. It’s really cool to use direct mail. We talked about postcards. This requires an envelope and sometimes if you put something of value or something personal – if someone in foreclosure or you’re trying to collect money, you can’t put it in a postcard. It’s public information. You clothe it in an envelope. Direct mail is how to sneak in more clicks via the snail mailbox, just like postcards. Now what I’m about to give you, case study number 11, this is written by a colleague and dear friend of mine. His name is Trevor Levine. He’s done a lot of copywriting for Cory Rudl, who’s one of the richer online marketers at marketinttips.com. I don’t think there’s anyone online today who hasn’t heard of Cory Rudl. Trevor did a lot of copywriting for him, and he also knows a lot of copywriters and folks who refer business to him. So look at this concept. You can’t see it, so I’ll read it to you. You want a referral. Let’s say you’re a copywriter, or a website designer, or an html programmer, database builder, you have a professional service. I’m trying to put in tactics that appeal to everybody in every location. Here’s what Trevor did. This is March 11, 2002. It says, “Dear Alex. Why are you receiving this check?” And I’m thinking to myself, “What check?” And I look and it says Heritage House, that’s my company. $150.00. And it’s signed by Trevor Levine. It says, “Why are you receiving this check?” And the check is stapled to the cover letter. “It’s just to show you how easy it is to collect referral fees from us, with virtually no work on your part. Why $150.00? Because that’s the referral fee you’ll earn on a thousand dollar copywriting job.” Obviously he’s paying 15%, right? “In fact, for each referral you send you’ll receive 15% of the gross for the first 6 months your referral works with us. Since I know I trust you, I’m sending you this check on the honor system.” Isn’t that beautiful? “Please don’t cash it yet. Instead keep it on your desk in good faith, in advance and use it for the next job you send us.” So in other words, just like a bartender does, he’s salting the tipping jar. He’s giving me $150 to motivate me to send him referrals. He’s an offline copywriter. He does virtual copy. And he has marketingexperts.com. But he’s sending me a letter with a check. Believe me, do you think I send business to him? How motivating is that? He did that to a bunch of folks. And they had the same reaction. It’s a brilliant, brilliant example. Do either of you have any comments on that?
Joel: That’s an excellent model. In fact, the word tip means to ensure promptness. In the olden days they used to give the helpers advance payment as a tip to ensure promptness. And this is exactly doing it in the Internet age. That’s an excellent, Alex. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Alex: You bring up an excellent point. When I go to a hotel I always tip the concierge first. People say, “Why do you do that?” Well, when you tip afterwards, it’s almost like you’re tipping for services rendered, but the best way to get better services, whether it’s a referral or any type of service, I like to pre-tip. And it works like a charm. If anything, there’s pressure or guilt, and they remember your name. So that’s what Trevor is really doing, and it dovetails nicely with what you just said. He’s tipping in advance to get a commission. On the honor system, I’m not going to cash that check. I know him; he’s a friend of mine. So you don’t do that with strangers, but what a great way to get referrals from people who know, like and trust you. Onward: Case study #12. We have 19, and this is #12. Tactic #5 was going through direct mail. This is to wine.com. Now wine.com is a pure online player. They sell wine online. You save money buy purchasing through them. And they’re sending me a letter. It’s a cover letter. It’s hand signed by their regional sales manager. And it says, “Don’t’ wait until the last minute to get your corporate holiday gift-giving done. Let us help you become a hero this holiday.” It has a few testimonials, talks about the mission of wine.com, and most important, if you use the code on the letter you get a 10% discount. The code is CORPHOLIDAY. So you see there’s always some type of offer and then they’re giving you something of value, just like we give a pin code and a phone number to everyone listening tonight. Only it’s on the letter, and then they’re taking the letter, they’re going to the desk, and they’re typing it into the browser. Everyone listening, folks, this is the future of the Internet. Start thinking offline. Faxes are the least expensive, then postcards, then direct mail. Actually, phone is up there and we’ll talk about that in a minute. So that is tactic #5, direct mail, sneaking in more clicks via the snail mailbox.
George: I’m looking forward to the part about the phone, too, because that’s one thing Joel is really, really good at. And one of the reasons he’s been able to build his reputation as a person who can sell big ticket items. But we have other things to cover before we get to that, so why don’t you go ahead and continue, Alex.
Alex: To go along with what you just said, I can’t go on without mentioning that Joel is known for humanizing the virtual enterprise and the phone does that better than anything. Right now, if I wrote this to everyone listening, it would be nowhere near as compelling as hearing my enthusiasm, or hearing all of us share these ideas, because it’s in real time, it’s now, and I’m sure it’s spawned a lot more questions than reading it with maybe the kids crawling on our back, or the boss looking over our shoulder, and all the other distractions. The phone is a very powerful medium and Joel knows how to use that very, very well, as I’m sure you do.
George: Before you move alone, if I can just interrupt a minute. We’re learning that really right now, because as you know, Alex, Joel and Frank Gerrin and I just started putting together an Internet radio show, which at this point has no name, but that’s another story. And the feedback we’re getting from people is “well, I’ve been reading your newsletters and I’ve seen your picture on the website, but I really didn’t know much about your personality. When we listen to these radio broadcasts you do, we see what you guys are really like, and we can tell what you’re like as people.” And we keep hearing that. We’ve been doing this radio show now, and by the way here comes the shameless plug. It’s at www.frankgeorgejoel.com . It’s our first names, we were really creative with this. It’s our first names and there are no hyphens in between, frankgeorgejoel.com.
Alex: I’m sure no one owns that domain name but you, right?
George: Well, it was an easy one to get, let’s put it that way. There was no competition for it. The feedback we’re hearing from people, over and over again is, “yeah, we read your newsletters, but actually hearing your voices and the sound of your voices, the inflection and the tone you use, and the enthusiasm you have, and especially the way you needle each other…” We really get after Joel a lot. But that goes back to your point about humanizing. When people hear your voice on the phone it makes all the difference in the world. They feel like looking into your eyes and that’s a way they can judge your character. And they have a better idea of whether they can trust you or not.
Alex: And, George, it goes even beyond that. People, like myself, are naturally lazy. Gravity is automatic. I have to exert myself to walk and get up. If I’m reading something there’s a lot involved there. I’m working at it. If I’m watching something, I’m working at it. But when I’m talking to you, you could be reclined in your chair, you could be half asleep and you could still get that message injected into your ear because it takes no effort. It’s a reception medium, versus reading, which requires exertion on your part, perception and reception. It’s two-way. Audio is one-way. It’s coming from me to you, or you to me. That’s all it takes and it’s a heck of a lot easier to learn and to remember via audio because of reasons I’m not going to get into now, because of certain structures in the brain, but just purely on the lazy factor, we can just sit back, relax, and not even concentrate on our website and hear our message, whether it’s broadcast on the Internet, or through the radio, and get a message that’s crystal clear and memorable. Reading is a heck of a lot more difficult, certainly email is, wouldn’t you agree?
George: Yes, and I can also validate that point because I’ve made most of my living during my adult life on TV, as a local newscaster or sportscaster, and when you talk about people being passive and just wanting to have the information fed to them, that’s one of the reasons TV was so popular. Because you could sit there and it would come to you. Then when, we called it the zap gun – Alex, you had another name for the remote, what was that again?
Alex: The scanner, and when you can’t find it, we call it scanning panic.
George: Scanning panic, right. The remote control device made that even more popular, because then you didn’t even have to get up from the sofa or the reclining chair. But, before we belabor that point too much and think you made it beautifully, why don’t we move on more of the tactics we promised to give folks tonight.
Part 11 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
Alex: Offline tactic number 4. The Catalogue Booklet. Now let’s say you sell a bunch of products, this is how to get thousands of clicks with one mailing. I like to use this as a little co-op. No one in my opinion has done this well, except for American Express. Any giant Internet marketer, anyone listening right now, who has more than twenty friends online right now and have products to sell – Joel, if you have 100,000 on your list you could do this tomorrow. Here’s what it looks like. It’s a book. It’s not a postcard, like those postcard packets. It’s not one of those. It’s an actual book, and when I’m looking at the book it says point, click, save. And the URL is www.americanexpress.com/offerzone . Do you remember the postcard we just talked about? This is the booklet, and when I open the booklet I see offers from Time-Life; save 20% on your first purchase of $75.00 or more. I see offers from Viking Press; free deluxe travel bag with purchase of Viking travel products. Now, what’s different about this? There’s not one phone number, gentlemen. Not one. You go to www.vikingoffice.com and the promo code – that’s key – the promo code is AMEX. That’s the affiliate code. See how that works? That’s the same thing for Time-Life. You go to www.timelife.com/amex and the promo code is AMEXDS and that’s how you’re getting the discount. Anybody who knows 20 marketers can put this together and get their offer in the book for free. Because I’m sure you can get 19 people to pay for the cost of the book and the mailing. This thing is physical. Just make it a very compelling offer and again, this is web pages by mail.
Joel: How many pages is it, Alex?
Alex: This one is American Express so there’s about 50 pages. You can easily send a perfectly bound book like this to a host of customers. In fact, the best place to send it is to everybody’s database. Let’s say you have 20 marketers who are participating, there are 19 databases that we’re going to purge and make sure we’re not sending to the same person. Those are people outside. It’s a co-op mailing. That’s like a co-reg, only it’s by mail. So that’s a brick and mortar concept. American Express, a very savvy clicks and bricks marketer, they’re using all their vendors, and putting it in a book, and sending it to me near Christmastime. What do I look for during Christmastime? I look for savings. And I love the cover of the book. Point – click – save. And listen to this: many offers, one address. They’re building a brand, americanexpress.com/offerzone. Awesome, awesome technique. That’s tactic # 4.
Part 10 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
George: And you have more case studies for us.
Alex: This is one for fax broadcast. This is for anyone who has versions of a product. Anyone listening use this. Now I’m giving this out because I think it’s a darned good technique. I have a colleague, Jonathan Mizel, I call him the pope or the godfather of Internet marketing. He was there in the early days, 1993. He has one of the few online marketing newsletters I read at cyberwave.com. What we did together was something called the marketing brain dump. We got on for two 2 and a half hour sessions. We asked a bunch of questions and we got a bunch of - actually we asked one question: what’s the single most important question you have about Internet marketing for the year 2002? And we got back 180 questions. Out of those we took 52. They didn’t overlap, they were relevant, they were specific, and we answered them. It took us 5 and a half hours. So we called it the marketing brain dump and we founded marketingbraindump.com. But we did three versions. The bronze version is free. All we have is an email address and name, and they get all five hours of streaming audio, but you can’t download it. Does that make sense? It’s free, it’s the lowest level, so it’s a nuisance. You have to be at your computer and they’re getting 5 hours of this content, and there were some very, very high-end marketers during this call, so the content is very rich and meaty. Anyone listening right now can go to marketingbraindump.com and just click on the bronze version and he ticket to admission is an email address and your first name. You’ll end up getting the link. You’ve got to give us the right address or otherwise you won’t get the link. And once you go to it you can listen to it to your heart’s desire. If you have five and a half hours, we’ve split it up into forty-minute segments. You’ll get all of it for free. But we have another version called silver. Believe it or not, we only charge $37.00 because we want everyone to get this. It’s kind of like a co-branding for Jonathan and I. With that they get the PDF and they get the audio that they can download to their hard drive so that they can listen to it offline. And the gold version, of course, is the resell rights. Joel, you know all about resale rights. We give them the website, we give them autoresponses for their messages. We teach them how to sell this product to their own constituents so they keep a hundred percent of the product. We call it the 100% commission plan for affiliates.
Joel: I couldn’t believe you were giving it away at such a low price. I couldn’t believe it. I’m like wow! What a value.
Alex: Well, it’s difficult, because some people question the quality, but that’s why we did if for free, so people could see it. I’d never seen resale rights for 90 bucks. But here’s what we do. Some people try to get you with autoresponder messages, right? Here’s what we do. When someone has bought the silver, not the bronze, because all we have is email address and name, but when someone buys a silver package, which is they spent a whopping $37.00, then what we do is those people who give us a fax number, we send them an upgrade reminder. Ten days into their autoresponder sequence we send them, “Important upgrade reminder for Joel Christopher. As one of our silver members you still have 3 days left to upgrade to Gold and get your three free surprise bonus gifts.” And there’s one of those winky smiles that you do on your keyboard. It says, “Take advantage of this special offer. Click on gold version at the bottom of marketingbraindump.com. Your courtesy will be most appreciated. Jonathan and Alex.” There are less than forty words, and we haven’t tested it yet, but I know having done this with other upgrades, it will work, because we’re not going via autoresponder or email, we’re going via fax, and it blows them away. They can’t believe they got it by fax. Joel, it totally interrupts their pattern, because they know us as Internet marketers, not as brick and mortar marketers. The auto-reminder fax, if anyone has versions of a product, use it as an upgrade. You know what I do it for? For my teleclasses that cost like $199.00. There’s very specialized ones, like Traffic Conversion Secrets Revealed. I give everyone an auto-reminder from now on, via fax because they’ve given me their fax number, the day before. Instead of giving them an email and it’s just like that extra touch. It’s that extra touch. We do something else by phone, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But the fax is 5 cents, it’s nothing. And many times you can do it out of your own fax machine. And if you have like ten upgrades a day, what’s ten faxes? I mean, anyone can do it. So the fax is a fantastic tactic to use for upgrades, auto-reminders, or anything dealing with an existing customer when you want to buy more. If you want to have something else to sell to them just send them a fax and tell them, this is it, here’s the password, and here’s how you get in. And watch what happens. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than postcards or direct mail. And it will be seen, because generally, Joel, my fax machine is right next to my computer. How about yours, George? Are those two machines close by?
George: Easily within arm’s length.
Alex: Within arm’s length. So when that thing is coming through, you hear it come on and you read it. It’s not like mail. You read mail typically once a day. I read it three times a week. But faxes you read every single day. It’s an exceptional method and I hope everyone will use that tactic. And again, anyone listening can get and listen to the 51/2 hours of Marketing Brain Dump. Just go to marketingbraindump.com and click on the bronze version and it’s free. Next tactic?
George: Go ahead.
Part 9 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
Alex: George, this is absolutely ingenious because it looks so darned official to me. Now, this is offline tactic #3, the fax broadcast. Now, let’s be fair, a fax is less expensive than a post card. You can get fax broadcasting for 5-6 cents. I’ve heard as low as 3 cents. A postcard, just postage alone, is 23 cents. So a fax broadcast is pretty darned powerful and it is going to the fax machine, which means they’re going to see it before they see the mail. Very, very powerful. It’s got to be used properly, though. Now the fax broadcast is an exceptional medium, not to sell products, but to do an auto-reminder. And it costs less than to mail a postcard. I’ll give you an example. Case study #8. I got this from the Internet Support Group. Now, I don’t know what the Internet Support Group is. But I do know I have a domain name called cashtrap.net, which I didn’t want to renew. It was coming up for renewal. I renewed cashtrap.com, but I didn’t want to renew cashtrap.net. So anyone out there listening, it’s theirs if they want it. I have domain name cashtrap.net, a toll-free number, a URL, internetsupportnet.com, and a reply deadline, 10-21-02, and the date they sent it. And it has a tracking number. And it says, “in accordance with U.S. legal code be advised protecting a domain name or trademark owner from confusing or conflicting domain name registrants it’s not the responsibility of the domain name and trademark registration process, and blah, blah, blah.) It looks official. And then it says, look, you’d be crazy to give this thing up. It’s yours right now. Call 1-800-919-3134. I got 3 of these. I called. And I called to tell them, you guys are doing a great job. What do domain names have to do with the brick world? Nothing! But they’re using fax broadcasting instead of sending an email. I recently had a client who I did a face-to-face consultation with, and he hired me for a day, I got an auto-reminder via fax from his assistant that, we look forward to seeing you tomorrow at 8 am. I loved it. That was a brick auto-reminder, only that wasn’t for the click, which was for me to physically be there. This is for the click, from Internet Support Group, so when domain names are expiring people are sending faxes out. It’s a heck of a lot more powerful than spamming or emailing because it looks like spam. Who are these guys? I never heard of them. Does that make sense to you guys listening? Because bottom line is, a fax is not spam. You can complain about it. You can get off the list. But it’s not spam. It’s not held in the same regard that spam is which is horrible, terrible. Spam lasted for about 6 months, back in the mid-90s. Faxes aren’t that way, and they’re really spamming you with a fax, and they’re just letting me know as a courtesy reminder that my domain name is about to come up.
George: I can validate that, Alex, because in the broadcasting business, people ask me all the time, what’s the most effective way to send a press release. Of course, email is becoming more and more popular, but emails get screened out. Reporters and TV people get so many emails, that in fact I was telling Joel this morning, that often there are two email addresses for reporters, and assignment editors and columnists. They have one that’s broadcast to the public, then they have their real one. And very often the one that’s broadcast to the public they just through very quickly. But if you send a fax into a newsroom somebody has to look at it. Usually they don’t throw it in the trash can, they pass it on to somebody else. So the fax for some reason just gets attention.
Alex: You see more than just the subject line. It takes work; you need to click something to see the email. And then you have to look at a frequency that’s vibrating on the screen, which is very difficult on the eyes, and some people, use fonts that are just illegible. You can’t read them, it’s very irritating, and many people don’t have netiquette. So because of those things, email becomes a nuisance. With a fax, you just take it out of your fax machine, you read it, or it goes straight in the wastebasket. But you read it, you looked at it. This one got my attention and it was good enough to make the case study with.
Part 8 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
Alex: Okay. It will be my pleasure. And perhaps the most powerful thing about postcards or direct mail is that you can’t delete it with your pinkie. There is no delete key. It does take effort to throw it away, and it does get looked at. I would die; I would kill for my mailing list, for 50% of them to look at my message. That’s not the case. But 50% of the people will at least look at the picture on the postcard. So that’s the sheer power. You just get more pulling power because there’s more readership. Okay, offline tactic number two. This is called the BRC Warranty Survey. This is absolutely brilliant. A BRC is a Business Reply Card. You know when you buy an electronic item of any kind, let’s say a Palm Pilot or a digital camera or a computer, you know how they have these little business reply cards that have a bunch of questions, and they say it’s your warranty card, but they just want to get information from you? You’ve seen those. They’re a little bit annoying, but there’s no postage necessary, so that’s good enough for me. Well, check this out. I bought something US Robotics, 3-Com US Robotics. I bought something, and in the actual box, and this is an offline technique, it was a post-purchase survey. But here’s the beauty of this survey. No human interaction. No human touch. I can’t imagine the amount of money and time they save because of this. And I’ll tell everyone how it can apply to them, too. On the card, on one card you have the business reply information, no postage necessary that you’ll dump in the mailbox. Then you open that fold, and you have all the questions. You know, thank you for your purchase, please give the model number, etc. Well, on the fourth panel, it says, “Your feedback is important to us.” Now that is a bad headline. Let me tell you something that out-pulls that. “We need your advice.” People don’t like to give feedback as much as they like to give unsolicited advice. Any married couple listening to this call knows that. So at this point, if I were to change this card, I would say, “We need your advice,” or “Your advice means much to us.” In any case, it says, “We want to make our products even better. Please answer the questions on the reverse side of this card, fold it in half, seal it, tape it, and then mail it in. Or, register online at www.3-com.com/homeconnect/register. Someone doesn’t want to drop it in the mail, because they don’t want to go to a post office, they’re at their home computer, at the browser, they go, “Okay, I’m going to do my warranty thing online.” So, www.3-com.com/homeconnect/register. How does this apply? Very simple. Any time you sell something like software online, or something that can break down, or let’s say you want an opinion poll. How was my product, if it was an information product. What they should get is some form of an auto responder, using Zoomerang.com, epoll.com, or one of the polling companies that are out there that are thoroughly web-based. What you do is have a little questionnaire, and you go back to the questionnaire, and have them fill out their address. Now, they already did that with their credit card purchase, but you have them fill it out again, and upon getting that, the auto responder, you send them a postcard, thank them for what they did, giving you feedback, and give them a surprise gift. I recommend brick and mortar, a special report, something physical. Now Joel, when you get something physical in the mail from an Internet marketer, as opposed to something email, like a 200-page PDF, which one is more of a headache to read? The online PDF, or the physical one, which all you have to do is flip pages and start highlighting. I’ll ask you, which one is more difficult to read?
Joel: The bigger one, the online PDF.
Alex: The PDF, because you have to print it, you have to go to Kinko’s. You know what, that’s a burden to me. But when I get something physical, it’s a joy, it’s like getting a book. So, what I do is I do surveys with some of my products, and I have many of my clients do the same thing, and send them a surprise bonus gift. And that surprise bonus gift can in and of itself have one of these BRC cards, which are dirt-cheap, and the postage, you know it’s less than a postcard; it’s 20 cents for the reply. Or, you can do an online poll, and then physically send them a book. Either way, it’s clicks and bricks. Either they’re dong a poll online, and you’re sending them a physical gift, or you’re sending them a postcard, and you’re sending them a virtual gift or a physical gift. I always like the physical gift, especially if they’ve paid me money, because it makes the relationship more real. Virtual dating really has no future. People want to at least meet each other, right? So, we’re building relationships here, and that second or third date, so you can date exclusively, get married, and hopefully have children, you know, it’s an analogy, but children is hopefully buying many of your products. In the bricks and clicks method, this 3Com being with a BRC, a business reply card, think of the brilliance for a big company like that. If even half of the people filled out the online survey, just think of all the other cyber real estate that the people were looking at. Ads, new offers, and there was no human intervention, they had that all downloaded. Does that make sense, George?
George: Yeah, it really does. Joel and I had talked before about the importance of having things that you get that bring more than one of the senses into play. You may not have a scratch and sniff on that thing you send to their home, but it’s something they can feel, they can see the colors, and it’s not just something that they stare at on their computer. By bringing more senses into play, you’ve made more of an impression. Again, it just feels more personal when you do it that way.
Alex: There’s no question. And one thing I’ve been studying diligently is Joel’s master list builder tape program and in the tape program there’s a clamshell. You open the tape program – you know what I’m talking about, right Joel?
Joel: Yes.
Alex: And if you had a business reply card in there, with a survey, and you told them that if they fill out the survey, all they have to do is fill out the survey and we’ll send you something by email. Or better yet, do some, kind a of an upsell, where they pick up an item online and you give them a special password-protected site as a bonus, you will get the click from that order. Because they’re going to open that. They just paid good money for the master list builder program. It’s a tape set, they’re going to listen to it and I’m assuming they’re going to consume. When they open it give them another reason to come back to you as a surprise gift, and they will. I’ve had as high as 55% of the people will click to get the special bonus gift for free, I think number one because it’s a surprise, and number two because it is free. Make it important. Don’t make it something that is of zero value. Make it very, very important. I do have a surprise gift at the end of this call. Of course, I’m not going to steal its thunder by telling you what it is, but it’s going to be very, very, very valuable. Because everything I’m talking about is very visual and I’m sure it would be very helpful for people to see what I’m talking about. Enough said about that.
George: You’re a man who comes out of an infomercial background, and what do you hear on infomercials as much as anything else? Two words: but wait!
Alex: There’s more!
Part 7 of a teleseminar interview with Internet Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian
Alex: Case study number five, now this is from a friend of ours, and a colleague, actually two colleagues, Yanick Silver, and here’s what this is. This is for webcopysecrets.com. This is an ingenious postcard. It’s a 6 by 9. This is what’s happening. They send a 6 by 9 postcard, and really it’s a web page. It says “Here’s exactly how to write web copy that makes the sale.” And then it gives about 500 words about how Jonathan Mizelle, Marlin Sanders, Joe Vitale, Jim Edwards, who is also the co-author, Yanick Silver, also the co-author, and Dean Jackson, who did stopyourdivorce.com, and is making hundreds of thousands on that site. It talks about what is webcopysecrets.com. And you turn it over, and there’s some testimonials. What’s ingenious about this is this postcard was sent to me by one of their affiliates. So this is promoting for an affiliate, and it’s very, very simple. It says, “Go to www.webcopysecrets.com/ewi. They’ve hard-coded that URL, that extension, so once you go there, it’s an affiliate link, and Brett Ridgeway, again, a close friend of all of us, he is going to get the commission after this postcard goes out. Now does that make sense?
Joel: Makes a lot of sense.
Alex: Anyone who has an affiliate program can do this, and who has ever heard of getting postcards that are like web pages by mail? None of us do it. Very, very few of us do it. In a year, we’re going to be forced to do it, but the purpose of this call is to get ahead of the bandwagon, and go back to 1995, when everyone says, “Okay, it was the early years.” But I’ve got news for you. This right now, 2003, January, is the early years for clicks and bricks marketing and anyone who gets off this call and starts using some of these techniques, and I’m only on case study number five, and we have nineteen of them, you will make a lot more money than you’re making now at very, very little cost. Case study number six, and this is from American Express, and it’s the final one for postcards. Now I’m sure if anyone is living, and can fog up a mirror, they have seen something from American Express. They are very good postcard marketers. They have been a client of mine for about a year and a half, and I do a little of their business and copy-writing design. This is from Offer Zone. Offer Zone. So I get a postcard, and it’s again 6 inches by 9 inches, the big card, and it says, “Free shipping and handling for the holidays. We’re in the giving mood, too. AmericanExpress.com.” Okay, so you turn it over, and it says, “Get free shipping and handling on holiday gifts at Offer Zone,” and it talks about what’s happening this holiday season. This was sent to me sometime in, I think, November, so it was priming the pump for December, before Thanksgiving. And then the URL is www.AmericanExpress.com/offerzone. AmericanExpress.com/offerzone. And gentlemen, there is not one phone number on this card. And then, over to the right, it has all the affiliate partners, who probably helped pay for the mailing. It says “free shipping and handling for Bloomingdales.com, Clinique.com, DesignerRoulette.com, Drugstore.com, Origins.com, Tourneau.com. So what does that mean? How can this apply to us? Okay, these case studies are for big, big companies, but how can this apply to us? So let’s say you have thousands of affiliates, and you go to seven of them, and you say, “Joe, I’ve got a deal for you.” Or I go to you and say, “How would you like to market with postcards and generate 40% commission on every postcard course I sell? You’re an affiliate. Here’s what I’d like you to do. I’m going to hard code my site, and it’s going to say www.marketingwithpostcards.com/joel, and that’s going to be your affiliate link. So anyone who types in that will be redirected and it goes to Marketing With Postcards, and there’s a cookie that goes on Joel’s computer, and he gets credit if there’s a sale there. However, what if I have thousands of affiliates, and I want to promote Joel? What if I want to promote masterlistbuilder.com or successaccess.com? Well, if we’re part of an affinity group, the postcard can have five or six different websites, all of them take part in the payment, and all of a sudden, your thirty or thirty-one cents became five cents. Does that make sense?
Joel: It makes sense. A great coopitition model, right?
Alex: Coopitition, or it’s just a co-op mailing. I wouldn’t even have competitive sites on there, because you don’t really need it. You just have a co-op mailing. Like there’s nothing I sell, Joel that would be in competition with you. So what if you had a postcard that said some of the top online products, and it had our names and a description, you know, the domain names and a description of each. That is like buckshot. It’s going to capture someone’s attention. And on the backside of that postcard, if you put the glossary of terms for the new digital economy, someone is going to keep that card. And a year from now, because I’ve done this before, they’re going to turn that card over, because they’ve read the glossary, and there are a lot of words on there that they didn’t know, and then there’s your domain name. And now you have physical real estate. Not cyber real estate, which is gone, poof, in an instant, but you have physical real estate. And you get it by getting someone to print your webpage, only it’s on a postcard. So Joel, you’ll be my first call when we do that campaign, because I’m thinking about doing that. It’s a very, very powerful approach to take. You can send thousands more, because you’re just a percentage of the number of people on that postcard.
Joel: I plan to book you right after the call.
Alex: There you go.
Joel: Those are all the postcard tactics for now. There are hundreds more, but that’s six for now.
George: And that’s six case studies out of the nineteen that you were going to do for us tonight, and as you said, it covers the postcards. If I can just briefly summarize, postcards are like mini-billboards. They bypass the email box, and go into the snail mail box, which these days is sort of like stealth marketing, isn’t it?
Alex: Yes, it is.
George: It doesn’t suffer the risk of being deleted without even being looked at. Someone is going to look at it. It’s inexpensive, has a lot of color, can be very personal, because you can write a very personal note on there, and that differentiates you from a lot of other people out there who are doing marketing strictly online. I think maybe the most interesting of all, Alex, you achieved a 5% conversion rate using postcards, and who knows what your return on investment was for the amount of money that you spent. Those are some pretty spectacular statistics. I’m really curious if you can match some of the good stuff you’ve told us with some of the tactics that you’re going to share with us tonight. Go ahead and get on with some of those.