Many successful marketers are building their fortunes selling just one product. Now, granted, if you have a successful product, by no means should you stop selling it - you should capitalize on it as much as you can!

What most marketers miss out on, though, is the fact that a successful product opens up a door of opportunity - to expand that product into an even larger moneymaking opportunity!

Here’s a good example of this concept put to use. You’ve got a successful product. Now you want to capitalize on its success so it makes you even more money. How do you do this?

The answer - advance the product! It’s how to instantly make more money from each online customer who reads your sales letter!

The original product could be the basic version. You could have versions with more information and/or bonuses, and give them titles like “silver,” “gold,” “platinum,” or whatever. A version with more information could have a plus symbol on the end, or a revised edition could state which revision it is, i.e. “5th Edition.”

It could have specific information dealing with other topics. You might have a version with more examples of the product in use. The opportunities are endless!

Curiously, this technique is seemingly used the most in the entertainment industry. Video games that have sold very well will typically end up after 6 months or so with a few new levels added to them and a few gameplay improvements coded in, and they get the name “Gold” added to their title.

Look through the video rental stores - you’ll see various forms of the same movies. Some are widescreen editions, also known as “Letterbox” editions, which restore the width the movie had in the movie theatre - typically a couple of inches are cut off on either side of the film in make the movie fit on a television screen, which has a different shape than a movie screen.

You’ll find versions of movies that have been digitally restored. You’ll find versions that have footage originally cut from the theatre release restored and put back in the movie.

Check out the music industry. CD’s that have sold very well over the years find life in a variety of formats. They could be digitally mastered, they could have songs added that were originally cut from the album, they could have commentary from the band, they could have hidden songs - one of the wilder ideas we’ve come across is selling special, 24 karat gold versions albums!

Underneath all of the gloss and glitz, the same basic product remains. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is still “It’s a Wonderful Life” whether or not it’s been colorized, digitally re-recorded, and an hour of extra footage has been added.

The same is true for any product you sell. The basic architecture is the original product. But, by building up on it and adding new bonuses - creating new editions, throwing in new improvements, more tools, better interfaces - you are creating yet another product.

This is a product that stands a good chance at success. After all, it’s previous version was a success - so why can’t a newer, better one succeed?

And the customer who bought the original version and found it good will definitely want the new and improved version! You could double the money you made, because instead of selling that one product once, with just a little work you can create a new version - and sell the product to them all over again!

Giving away free samples works better with some products than others. But when you have a product that naturally lends itself to being bought and reused again and again, there is no better marketing strategy.

The key is getting people to try it one time and getting them hooked in. Then they are compelled to buy from you repeatedly. This is how “samples” can make you THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS!

Also, anytime you are willing to give someone a free sample, you are proving that your product is the best. You are making a very strong, very convincing argument for your product or service by just offering to send a free sample.

There are people that will come to you. “We want to put an ad on your site. We see you’re getting all these visitors. We want them to see our ad for IBM, Microsoft, or whatever it is.” You say “Great.” You get your web geek pilot head guy to put this ad on there for you (I call them that since I have no idea how it’s done).

Actually, you find someone smarter than you to do it. Then, you collect money. You’re selling electrons. You have no fulfillment, no shipping, no packaging, no printing, no writing, no recording, no nothing. There’s no cost of duplication. There’s no postage. You just sell electrons. Your product can be up in just a day or two, a couple of days, by setting up a site and putting all these links on it. So, there’s just one example.

Find something everybody wants to know about. Search the Internet and collect all the sites that you think are best. Put them all on one page. Call it a hub, a link site, or a gateway. Then, people who search for health, since you have all those links listed on your site, you’ll rise in the search engines. You’ve got them all on one spot. You got the most magnetic site. That can be on any topic, but health was one example that’s exploding.

The reference sections in libraries are the most valuable resource centers ever. This is how to locate very valuable assets that are overlooked by almost every other business! There are many, many thousands of dollars worth of good contact sources that most people don’t tap into because they don’t know about them.

To locate references on writing, publishing, printing, marketing, and distribution, ask your Reference Librarian to search the card file. If you want to purchase a book that interests you, visit your local bookstore, or write to the publishers for their latest price information.

Use long copy when you are writing to your best customers. Use this long copy to educate them on all the reasons they should be doing more business with you. Use it to cover every single aspect of why you, your business, or your product or service is the best their money can buy. Make sure all of your prospects and customers know this. And make sure they know they’ll get their money back if they’re not 100% happy. These things can maximize your profits.

Ambition is half of what it takes to make it in direct-response marketing. Knowledge is the other half. If you are already ambitious, you already have half of what it takes to be successful in direct-response marketing.

The ambition has to be there, though. Nobody just goes out, gets rich, and stays rich totally by accident. If someone does go out and instantly make money, then they usually end up losing it as fast as they make it.

The people who get rich do so for a reason. They start out with ambition, believing that it’s possible. They start out with a fire inside of them.

Since you have this manual in your hands, you have answered for your ambition. If you didn’t have ambition, why would you be holding and reading this manual now? You already have half of what it takes to make your fortune!

Now take your ambition and add it to the other half of the equation - knowledge - and get out there and work at making your fortune!

Here’s one of the most unusual tactics we’ve come across to get sales - but one that, according to big-time booksellers Prentice Hall, is a way you could get 250% to 400% more orders!

A friend of ours met with some people from Prentice Hall at an American Bookseller Association Convention in Washington, D.C. One of Prentice Hall’s vice presidents told him that he would get between 250% and 400% more orders for his books if he was willing to sell them for no money down.

In other words, he would not require money with the order . . . the customers could order it, get it, and then send the money later!

Now, most of us marketers don’t do this. There’s several reasons for this. The good news is, you’ll double, triple, or even quadruple the responses and orders you get. But the bad news is, you’ll have to come up with an intricate billing system to keep everything straight, and there’s a lot of paperwork you’ll have to deal with.

The vice-president from Prentice Hall also told our friend that between 25% and 35% of the people who ordered never paid - NEVER. That means that one out of every three or four people didn’t ever pay for the books that were ordered.

Now granted, that’s a LOT of people when you take into consideration the number of people that start ordering when you start this offer - but compared to when you started out, it can still be a lot more money.

Teaser copy is how to get people to read your mail and not throw it away. If you use some really good teaser copy printed on the outside of the direct-mail envelopes you send out to prospects and customers, people will get excited and will be much more willing to open that envelope and read what you have to tell them.

You have to test different teaser copy. Testing different things is how you find out which things work better than others, and teaser copy is no exception.

You do not want your envelopes to end up in the trash. You want that envelope to be opened so you can give them your sales pitch and your offer. Getting your prospects and customers to open that envelope is half the battle. Teaser copy is a great help when it comes to this cause.

Therefore, what you need to do with your auto-responders is offer something interesting, even if it’s a thinly disguised sales pitch. You could have ten tips on how to catch more fish. “I’m going fishing with my son - WOW! - Ten tips on how to catch more Schnook Salmon this season. Wow! Okay, I want to read that. I could sit down with my son, go online and get that.”

And, of course, at the end of those ten tips, or at the end of each tip you could say “To read more, see our book Everything You Want To Know About Catching The Big One.” And so as you’re getting the information, you’re also being, in a subtle way, persuaded to purchase.

You need to offer something of value and, generally, it is information with an auto-responder.

What our newsletter friend did was he made a sample newsletter issue. He printed it up and he mailed it to lists. People read it, and said “Well, gee, here’s an actual sample of something in the mail. I’m not buying blindly. I’m not buying on faith. I’ve seen an issue and I like it.” And if they didn’t like it, they didn’t waste his time.

He has an almost zero refund rate because people have already taken a look at his product. They’ve seen his style, they’ve seen the content, they’ve seen the layout. There’s nothing to disappoint them. They’re already familiar. They’ve met and shaken hands, basically, with the sample issue. His problem was printing and postage - the thing we all face - the dreaded expenses.

A friend of his suggested that he handle the Internet Coding and our friend handle the other tasks. The Internet Coder just took something of our friend’s - his sample issue. You could do the same with a special report, or it could be a chapter out of a book - you can even put audio online now. Let’s get back to print information for now, though.

His friend put the newsletter on an auto-responder. Now people go on the site and it says, “To get a free sample issue, click here!” They click and it automatically responds by sending the sample through email to their computer. Then they click and they can read it right there, or click on the print icon and it prints out on their printer. It is instantly delivery. There is no cost to our friend AT ALL! Zero. And the only cost to the person who received it is a little paper out of their computer printer.

They get instant gratification, and they get good information, and along with it of course there is an order form and a pitch that says “Hey, if you like reading this you might want to do it every month. And if you subscribe now, we’ll send you a bunch of back issues.”

It is working like a charm, and of course, now the only challenge is how to get more people to click on the auto-responder!

Our friend has just whipped up a simple postcard. On the postcard it says “I have $195 a year newsletter. I would mail you one, but then I would have to charge you full price because the cost of postage and printing, and ...(blah blah)... so here is the deal. If you’ll go on the Internet and click on this auto-responder on such and such a web site, then you can get the free issue. The money I save on postage and printing I will pass along to you and the subscription will only be $97, about half price. Is it a deal? If not, no problem. All we wasted was a little postcard and a minute of your time it took to read this. If you want the newsletter, you can make up your mind in the comfort of your own home after reading the sample issue.”

People really like it. It is non-threatening.

You don’t have to worry about getting the envelope opened, because there is no envelope. When you get a postcard, you take a look at the front and then you flip it over to the back to see what it is. If the message is short enough, you have read half of it before you realize it.

The secret to getting thousands of new customers every year is providing them with a benefit that no one else has to offer. Benefits are crucial. Prospects and customers only really care about what they’ll get out of accepting your offer. The better and more unique your benefits are, the more prospects you’ll be able to attract and the more repeat buyers you’ll be able to keep.

You have to study and find out what the people in your market really want, who they really are, what their frustrations and challenges are, the problems they have, and the main reasons they want to buy the types of products and services that are available in the market.

Having this intimate knowledge of your market is crucial. Using this knowledge to your advantage is how to steal new customers away from your competition!

Why? Because with this information you can develop and provide products and services that no other companies in the marketplace are providing.

You have POWER. You know what it is that the people in your market want, and you can find ways to give them the most of what they want! People will compare you with your competition. See that you offer them more, and they will come to you. This is how to easily break into a new marketplace with a BIG BANG!

You have the potential to send ripples throughout your marketplace - and affect everyone in it. You can pull business away from your competitors and create your own success.

Risk reversal is a key to success. In every business transaction, either the customer or the supplier risks more than the other. The prospects are usually the ones who take the greater risk.

You should construct offers that take the risk away from your prospects and customers and puts it on your shoulders. Remember, in mail order marketing, your prospects and customers are buying sight unseen. They need to feel that, even if what you claimed in your advertising doesn’t come true for them, they can still be either equally compensated or actually gain. This is called risk reversal.

By using risk reversal correctly in your advertising, you increase the amount of money you can make simply because the prospect really has nothing to lose and something to gain. You’ll be able to attract more customers and orders - thereby making more profits. Change one simple thing - add risk reversal to your advertising - and make up to ten times more money!

What if a firm has a successful concept that would increase your profits?

The obvious answer is to simply contact that person with the required expertise, and offer to pay him/her a fee for his/her advertising, operational, production, marketing, or other concepts that are working for him/her.

The most successful marketers are never so arrogant as to assume that they cannot learn some very valuable lessons from someone else.

Therefore, you could offer another appropriate firm a percentage of all your profits or savings that are the result of having applied its concepts to your business. Once again, the type of deal you make is entirely up to you.

Many of our clients have these ideas in their mind that just aren’t right. We want to help straighten out their thinking. They spend way too much time obsessing over technicalities. They become obstacles then.

“I don’t know how I should charge.” “I don’t know how I should package this.” “I don’t know the best way to ship it.”

Instead of going for the big picture, they are just bogged down with all these “I don’t knows” and it adds such a weight and then they can take no action. It’s really, really simple. First, get the orders and then figure out how to ship them.

There are people that know how to do what you don’t know how to do. We’ve been in business now since 1985. Do we know how to do book work? No. Do we know how to do taxes? No. There are so many things that we don’t know how to do that other people are doing for us, and our time is focused on just bringing in the money and letting other people do what they do.

It reminds me of a story. There’s this wonderful story in the book “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill’s classic book, where Henry Ford is being accused by the local Detroit newspapers of being a total fool. They were writing things about Henry Ford, saying he was an idiot. So he sued them for slander.

At the time, Henry Ford was the richest man in the world. Yet the newspapers were calling him an idiot. In court, he is suing these newspapers for millions of dollars and they were trying to prove that he was a complete idiot.

They were asking him questions like, “What is the state capital of Missouri?” And, “What river runs through . . . ” Finally he just got frustrated and said, “Look. If I want the answers to those dumb questions, I’ve got ten phones on my desk. I can pick any one of them up and get somebody right there in my office, in ten seconds flat, to give me the answer on those stupid questions.” He said, “I focus my time on running my company and bringing in more business with my company.”

What we’re going to cover now is: add one special page to your web site and get hordes of web site owners to practically beg you to let them pay to put their advertisement on that page. It really works and it is very easy to do. We’re going to tell you all about it.

The one page that you can add to your web site that will get other web site owners to practically beg you to give you their money to put an advertisement on is a contest page.

Now, we’re going to give you a suggestion here, and you can take it and use it just like it is, or there are lots of variations. The basic idea here is to set up a contest, and have that on a web page on your web site that gets people to sign up for that contest, and then to sell advertising on that web page.

What we recommend is a thousand dollar contest. You can use ten thousand. We’ve seen hundred thousand dollars. It all just depends on the amount of traffic you’re getting and the amount of advertisers that you have footing the bill for that.

You could pay for some of that thousand dollars or any of the prize money out of your own pocket, but you absolutely don’t have to. In fact, you can pay the prize money and have extra money left over each month in your own pocket.

All you have to do is run ads to tell people about the contest. For example, we’re going to stick with a thousand dollar prize because that’s what we used for our numbers in this example. Let’s say you were having a thousand dollar contest.

Create irresistible offers that the people in your market really want. You can bring in thousands of new customers every year. An irresistible offer is one that offers your customer so much value that it’s almost too hard to pass up. They feel compelled to send their money to you in exchange for your products or service. You can create these irresistible offers by:

(1) Knowing what your market wants. Understanding the things that excite them the most.

(2) Knowing the things they are looking for that are the most important to them, and knowing what they are not getting enough of right now.

(3) And then applying this knowledge to whatever you’re selling.

Your knowledge of these things will grow through the process of serving your market. You’ll learn a great deal about the people you’re selling to... You’ll find out what these people want and how you can help them get it. This knowledge and experience can help you attract thousands of new customers every year.

Let’s say you get an offer that says something like, “What are the top three words that if you tell it to someone they’ll immediately hand you a $100 bill?”

Immediately, you want to know what those three words are. It’s captured your curiosity and you’re willing to pay $30, $40, $50 bucks just to figure out what in the heck those three words are!

This is a powerful technique in marketing - it’s capitalizing on the prospect’s curiosity! Use this technique to build up your customers’ curiosity to the boiling point . . . and buying point!

It doesn’t take a lot of questions to really build up someone’s curiosity where they’re willing to take that chance and say, “Look, even if just one of these things that he’s talking about really does what he says, I’d be foolish not to pay $1,000 for this information!” That’s the key secret.

This is typically used most effectively when you use specific examples and follow up with a question as to how the results were obtained.

For example - “This man made $1,000 in one week through selling his book - and it cost him nothing to advertise it! Why? You can find out in our new book!”

If you are able to capitalize on your prospects’ curiosity, you will grab their interest from the word go, and make that product very very attractive. Use this technique whenever you can!

You have to touch people’s hearts before you can ask for their hand. That’s a little quote that we’ve got hanging up on our wall. You’ve got to reach them emotionally before you can ask them to do something for you - like send their money to you.

So you send very sincere messages to them, and send them on a regular basis. Make these messages almost altruistic, so it is just serving them. Ways to help them ... solutions. Letting them know that you care about them. Touching their hearts. And then, asking for their hand or asking for the check, cash, money orders, credit card, or whatever.

Here’s a brief example of how someone is actually doing this. There is someone online right now that has a very large publicity package about how to write press releases and get a lot of free publicity and free advertising. It’s not us, even though we sell that type of information, but it is someone in that market selling that type of information.

It’s a very highly expensive package, in the area of $400 - $600. Now, that’s a hard sell if people don’t know you, don’t know your name, and are not sure what type of information they’re going to get. That’s a hard sell, getting people to spend $400 -$600 on the Internet.

What this person has done is brilliant. He has created a 30-40 page book that’s an introduction to writing press releases and getting publicity, and he has offered it free of charge to anybody who wants to download it. It’s a free e-book. And people have been rushing like crazy to get this e-book and download it, and once they download it, they get the information, and they see it’s valuable.

There is a link in that e-book that links from that book directly to this person’s web site where he can now push them on the bigger package.

You’ve given them a small taste. The e-book is like the person standing in the grocery store aisle giving you a small taste of a cookie so you’ll buy the entire package of cookies.

He has given these e-books away free of charge, but he is also using the power of viral marketing because he is allowing anybody who wants to give away that e-book the power to give it away. In fact, there are links inside that e-book that says “If you want to give this e-book away to every person on your e-zine list - if you want to give it away to all of your customers, if you want to give it away as a special offer, or as a freebie with something you are already selling, or if you want to make a special Christmas offer - just point them to this site, let them download it free of charge, and they’re going to be able to get this e-book absolutely free.”

That is spreading his e-book like crazy over the Internet. And every time some marketer gets that e-book and downloads it, they see information in the e-book that says they can now spread it to their people. It is spreading like wild fire. And of course that e-book then pushes people to the site that sells the bigger package.

This is a fantastic way to pull people in, give them a short taste of what you are selling, and then get them to spend even more money and sell your info products without spending a lot of money on marketing.

Here’s another story, another concrete example. There is a gentleman on the Internet by the name of Terry Dean. He created an e-book titled 101 Of The Hottest Internet Businesses. Basically he went to this customer list and he said “First of all, you can pick it up absolutely free. But, it is Christmas time. I know all of you have customers, you’ve all got e-zines, why don’t you offer this to your customers?”

And certainly people did. In fact, over the next six months, that one e-book was downloaded about 2,000 times per week from people offering it free. And people weren’t only offering it free on their e-zines. People were actually posting it on their web sites, on their home pages and saying, “Hey, here’s this free e-book. Go to this site and download it.”

In talking to Terry Dean, one of the things he said is “I do banner advertising. I do offline advertising. I do online advertising. I do classified advertising. I do a ton of advertising, but this free e-book 1) pulled in the most traffic to my site, and it’s probably responsible for the most sales ever on my web site, and 2) it’s constantly going. I still get 500 - 2000 requests for information from my site from that one e-book. And because I let everybody give it away that wants to give it away, it continues to spread just like a virus.”

So using the power of viral marketing, tied in with the power of e-books, you can spread your message and spread your information all across the Internet and pull people back to your web site, and back to products that you want to sell for top dollar. It’s a great way to market, and it’s very low cost because you’re letting other people do the marketing for you and giving them a taste of your information at the same time.

We know of several people who claim to be earning up to $50,000 a month in sales from their home. We know two of these people personally. This is a man and wife from Birmingham Alabama who are running small ads and mailing direct-mail offers every month. They find something that really works well and every month they run the ads and mail the letters. And, according to them, they gross as much as $50,000 a month or more!

Here’s an example of how this strategy could work: Say you sell a product for $100. All you have to do is sell 500 of these a month to make $50,000! That’s just 125 of these products a week or 25 a day Monday through Friday. Can you sell 25 $100 products a day? If so, you can gross $50,000 a month from home. All you have to do is:

1. Bring in a large enough number of qualified leads every week.

2. Sell enough of these people your products and services.

Run some kind of lead generating ads that attract qualified prospects to your offer. Then sell your initial product or service to the largest percentage of these prospects. Sell 25 $100 items a day or five $500 products a day, and you’ll bring in $50,000 a month.

Many starting marketers don’t understand how powerful affiliate programs can be, and how easy they are to instigate. There are companies out there with literally thousands of affiliates helping sell their products - and you could have the same thing! Starting your own affiliate program is how you could make hundreds, or even THOUSANDS of people happy to sell your products!

Affiliate programs are referred to by various names. Affiliate programs are sometimes called strategic partners, other times associate programs – it’s all the same thing. Amazon.com was really the first to make this popular, and they have 400,000 affiliates selling their products for them! Many people have modeled that success - why can’t you?

Basically, here is how it works. They give you a piece of code that your host puts on your web site for you, and then you list the books that are related to your subject matter, or you put illustration of your books on your site, and they are related to the products that you are selling.

For instance, if your site is about health and you sell supplements, then you might show on your site a number of books that relate like mega doses of vitamins, or new natural healing methods, or anything that relates to your site. If you’re selling fishing, it’s about fishing spots, fly tying, etc.

You, in effect, open a bookstore on your site. When the visitor on your site clicks on any one of those titles, they are carried instantly to the Amazon site where they can find out more about the book, the price, the size, the delivery schedule, what people have said about it, other comments about the writer – and you do nothing!

When the visitor from your site clicks on a book or title at Amazon.com it is instantly recorded and you are paid a small commission for that sale.

What you are doing is generating customers and traffic for Amazon. It’s a win-win situation because your customers are getting something they want (more information about products that you sell) and for doing nothing, frankly. The commission is pretty much free money, because you don’t have to pack the product, you don’t have to ship the product, you don’t warehouse it, you don’t have any money tied up in inventory.

You can do this for your own products, too! You don’t have to be an Amazon.com to make this work because there is software available from all sorts of sources that lets you operate your own affiliate program.

You get other sites to sign up as your affiliate. It doesn’t cost them anything, but you give them a piece of code (your software will do that for you) and they advertise or recommend your site. They can place a banner on their site or they can place an ordinary link. They can also write an article and recommend your site in that article – that is really the most powerful referral of all.

When the visitor at your affiliate site clicks on that link or banner ad, the same thing happens. They come directly to your site, they look at your material, and if they make a purchase on your site, your software automatically records that so that your affiliate gets paid.

In fact the software we use sends the affiliate a note that says, “Hey, you just made a sale at my site.” It sends our customer a note that says, “Thanks for making a purchase!” And it sends us a note that says, “It’s time to pay the affiliate.” It tells us when and for what and how much money to write the check for and who to send it to. It just doesn’t get much easier than that.

In effect, you create an army of other sites that are selling your products for you. It’s not a complicated arrangement to set up. You can grow it as large as you want it to grow.

Essentially it is like running a national advertising campaign, where you have TV spots and magazines all running your ads, but you don’t have to pay a penny unless those ads make you a sale. That’s the beauty of this - you don’t pay a penny unless your affiliates make you a sale. It’s per-inquiry advertising at the extreme. It is a terrific way to multiply your business, and the dollars can really pour in from affiliate sales!