How? Realize that the people on the Internet auctions, whether they be buyers or sellers, are a target market. They’re a very hungry target market, and they’re a hungry target market with money. Lots and lots of money - and you can sell services and products to these people!

It is being done every single day. For example, a lot of the Internet auction sellers would make more money if they took credit cards. So, there are a lot of companies out there now targeting these Internet auction sellers and getting them merchant accounts.

What other product would some of these Internet auction sellers need? Maybe a digital camera. Maybe they need web site hosting to keep their pictures on of their products. Maybe they would be interested in buying books on how to make the most money.

There are also some people focusing on selling to Internet auction buyers. They actually sell software that keeps track of all their bids and when they are getting out-bid, and it goes to the site and automatically updates.

So, instead of looking at the Internet auctions just as a way to sell products and services, you can actually look at the people on those Internet auctions as a market. And they all have wants, and they all have desires, and they all have money.

If you can find a way to give them something that they really want, or maybe to solve a common problem they have, you can cash in very big. There are people doing it right now. By just taking a little different look at that market of people on the Internet auctions, you can make additional income.

There are so many places where you can get free advertising or “almost” free advertising on the Internet. We know our service provider, where we get our e-mail and other things, will give clients a non-commercial Web page free.

But we’ve found that if we’re willing to pay $35, they’ll let us have a commercial Web page. Putting announcements on that page to drive them to our Website has turned out to be a very smart move. Make your Internet advertising sizzle! The #1 thing you can do right now!

There are literally hundreds and thousands of Sites on the Internet Web where you can get low cost or free advertising. The trouble is, people do this to just drive more people to their own Sites. So they have cheap advertising or in some cases free advertising. But there are hundreds of ads - thousands of ads! You just get lost in that tremendous quadram of ads.

You really have to make your ad stand out! You have to really use something to make your ad stand out.

Fortunately for you, even though there are hundreds or thousands of ads on these Sites, most of them are bad ads. 80% - 90% of them will never get much response because they do not turn anyone on! They try to sell a $30 business book from a 25 word ad, it just doesn’t work! What you want to do is have a dynamite headline! You want to knock the reader or the viewer off their feet and drive him to your Website! So, work on that.

This article stems from a situation when I was helping a client who was in some pretty serious trouble. He called me up and said, “I started my mail order business, but I’m kind of in a bind.” I said, “Well, explain it to me.” He said, “I set up my mail order business. I’ve got a fax machine, phone lines, computers, and I made contacts with printers, a mailing house, and all this stuff. I even bought my first ad in a magazine.”

I said, “It sounds like you’re off to a great start. What’s the problem?” He said, “Well, you know, I don’t have a product.” That’s kind of a big problem, especially after you paid a couple hundred bucks for advertising in a magazine and the deadline is quickly coming up.

I said, “What do you want the product to be? Do you have any ideas?” He said, “Well, I’d love it to be a product about making money in marketing. For example, it could be about all the different ways you can market products. It seems like that’s a hot market. The people would love to read that type of information in the place where I’m advertising. That’s the kind of product I want to sell.”

I said, “Okay, how much experience do you have? Could you write a product like that?” He said, “Well, you know, I’ve been doing this now maybe a month. I read all the books.” I said, “Well, not too many people are going to buy a marketing book from a person who’s had one month of experience and basically has made no money in marketing. What you need to do is use this idea.”

There are a lot of experts concerning this topic. A lot of these marketing experts have been doing this ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty years. They write articles for a lot of the money making and opportunity magazines. You’ll actually find this in a lot of different niches, not just with this niche.

Let’s say you’re interested in horses or arts and crafts. A lot of these magazines have articles written by experts who have been in the field for five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty years. In many cases, what you can do is contact these experts and say, “Look. I’m compiling a product right now.” It’s all on a specific topic. (In this case, it was all on marketing.) What he did was he contacted Russ.

He also contacted a couple of other experts who have articles in these money-making publications and he said, “Look, I would like to reprint your article exactly the way it is. I won’t edit it. I won’t change a word. It will be your wording. I would like to reprint that in my own book. In exchange for that, I’ll let you put any offer you want at the end of that article that I put in the book.” That’s, in many cases, the exact deal that these authors get with the magazines. Their payment is getting this free advertising at the end of the article.

This person had literally a book in a day, because he contacted a lot of these authors and experts in a one day time period. Basically, they all agreed. It’s really free advertising for them. Many of them agreed and said, “Take not only this article, but we’ve also got five, six, or seven other articles on marketing. Please print those in your book. Just make sure at the end of each one you give a little bit of context about us, our products, and how they can buy them. That’s great. We’d love you to do that.”

Literally, within a day, he had a compiled book all on marketing, all from experts who had been in the industry for a decade. It’s now ready to sell using the advertising that he’d previously purchased. That’s if you’re just doing it through print publications.

Remember, he made the contacts all within a one day period, then he had to go back through and retype the information, reformat it, and put it into book format. Basically, the authorization, and all the articles, he had compiled within a one day period.

You can start a direct-response business small and slow before you expand. You can learn as you go. You can make money as you go. You don’t have to take big risks or do anything rash.

Starting out you keep it slow, testing things carefully. When you’re doing lead generation, run smaller ads. Remember, all you’re doing is trying to get people to “raise their hands,” not get people to instantly send you money.

Ads that ask for people to send their money typically take up more space. Since the lead-generation ads cost less money, there is also less risk. This is how you can get paid fantastic amounts of money while you are learning and just getting started!

You can start small. You can start part-time. You don’t have to risk much in the beginning. Go slowly. Test as you go. Learn as you go. This is how to test the waters before you jump in!

By keeping focus on your back-end sales and keeping them stable, you can make sure your income doesn’t go up and down like a roller coaster! The most profitable side of your business can make you rich . . . and that is the BACK-END SIDE!

Remember, marketing is all the things you do that make people do business with you the first time and then all the things you do that keep those people coming back to do repeat business with you again and again and again. Back-end sales are the second part of that two-part formula.

How do back-end sales work? First, you sell to the people who first accept your offer. Then, you go back to those people with offers for related products and services to keep as many of them buying from you as you can.

This keeps a certain amount of money coming in. While this is going on, you still have that initial offer out there attracting more new customers. These customers are added to your list of back-end customers. Every time you get a new order from a new customer you have another name to add to your back-end list.

Potentially, the money you make from back-end sales should keep growing and growing, while the front-end offer keeps getting prospects to “bite” and become customers. It’s a never-ending cycle that. When it works correctly, it just keeps more and more money coming in all the time.

The money made from back-end sales will soon become the money your business is most dependent on. Why? Because it is the most stable amount of money you have coming in. There should always be a certain amount coming in. That money is then used to finance the testing and implementation of other front end ideas you have that will bring you new customers . . . and new repeat customers! Front-end sales are not the most important part or your profits - back-end sales are!

Many businesses out there shoot themselves in the foot before the race has even started. Many companies are trying to sell things that people really don’t want. They come up with what they think is a good idea, and they don’t test it. Instead, they try to force it upon the market.

To get more people to buy your product or service you have to know why they buy. Why do they want something? What things do they want the most? What will they buy?

The more experience you get, the better you will become at knowing these things. The key is asking yourself “why” and then finding out “why.” Why will people give you their money for your product or service? They will do it if it is something they really want.

The benefits have to be very appealing to them. They have to be able to relate to what your product or service does. They must be able to picture themselves actually having those benefits.

By knowing all of this information and using it to make your ads better, you can “fine-tune” your marketing - TO MAKE SURE YOU TURN THE BIGGEST PROFITS EVER!! But it’s like fine-tuning a car; it has to be done constantly. You can’t just tune it up once; you have to keep doing it in order to keep the car in the best running order possible. It’s a steady, never-ending process.

Many of you have most likely seen estate auctions - perhaps you attended one after close relatives passed away, such as your grandparents or parents.

Usually, about 40 people show up, looking through the items that will be for sale. They stand out there with their auction bid sticks or signs, and the auctioneer stands at a podium on a hay trailer, calling out, selling off all of those previous possessions - and a great majority of the items up for bid will sell for far less than what they’re worth.

What doesn’t sell at the estate auction will typically end up at a garage sale. Usually these garage sales don’t attract very many people - after all, most of the things considered the most worthwhile were sold at the estate auction, so people may perceive that whatever’s left is “junk.” Most of what is sold at this garage sale will go for a measly few dollars - if that much.

Here’s where you come in! You could go to estate auctions, buy up anything that seems to be valuable, and then make maximum profits by offering it up for bidding on the online auctions! This is how to turn winning bids at these low-turnout events into huge amounts of Internet auction cash!

We’re not talking about 40 or 50 people anymore - now we’re talking about 40 or 50 thousand people - everyone who logs onto the site and looks through for things to bid on! This is the hidden profit of estate sales! You can buy all of these items at the original auction for usually very little when compared to their value - buy you could auction them off online and bring in HUGE profits!

Here’s an example of how a simple classified ad could potentially make you a fortune: Let’s say you have a small classified ad that brings you 100 a month in profit. Now all you have to do is see how many other similar publications you can run this ad in... Let’s say you test 300 different publications and found that you can profitably run it in 100 of them and earn the same profit. Here’s how much you’d make: 100 ads x $100 a month ‘ $10,000 a month!

We know of a man in Santa Barbara, California who advertises in hundreds of newspapers every week and earns a small profit on each one. According to a friend of ours who knows this man, he averages about $60,000 a week in sales! His secret? He just sells something that people who read the newspapers want and are willing to pay for. Here’s how he does it: His ads ask the prospect to call for more information. Then his staff members tell them a little about the item for sale and take the order right over the phone... You could do something just like this. Make sure your offer is strongly related to the market of people you’re trying to sell to. Give them something they really want, at a price they’re willing to pay, and you could make huge amounts of money.

The “Hottest” type of merchandise you can sell is “Information.” Informational products are the “hottest” type of merchandise that will sell like crazy!

The “How To” guides and manuals written generally by people with expertise in a particular field are the best sellers. These books tell the reader “How To” succeed in the topic of their choice. This is how to use two words – “How To” - that are guaranteed to double your money!

Why are “How To” products the hottest products you can sell? First of all, the profit margin is incredibly high. Informational products have high perceived value because of the information presented in the product. Many informational products, such as books, manuals, and reports, are very cheap to have produced.

For an example, let’s take a look at books. You can have them printed usually for, in most cases, under a dollar each! But, one thing that you have to remember is the fact that it isn’t the physical materials that make books and other informational products so profitable. It is the information in the book that makes it so profitable!

It is that information that the customer is buying, not the paper, cardboard, and ink that make up the book. Therefore, you can give your informational product a high profit margin and charge many times more than the cost you put out to produce the product and potentially bring in gigantic profits!

Also, information is always in demand. People want to know how to do certain things. They want to know more about their topic of interest. They want to know ways to make their tasks and jobs easier. They want to learn ways to make more money or start their own businesses.

Magazine editors have to sell magazines. That’s their job. And, in order to sell magazines, they have to give their readers what they want. This is why magazine editors will give you thousands of dollars worth of free advertising.

You have to be able to supply that editor with what he or she is looking for that will satisfy the readers.

The best way for you to give the editor what his or her readers want is to give them something that will interest their readers, and tell them why it will interest their readers.

Another strong idea you can use to help build your business is creating e-mailing lists.

Every time you conduct an auction on an Internet auction site, you can call up a list of all the people who bid throughout the auction. It will typically have the person’s e-mail address and name. THIS IS VERY VALUABLE INFORMATION!

Why? If you’re doing like we’ve said, and offering products that are strongly related to one another, you have just found a group of very, very good prospects to make offers to in the future!

These people found the product you put up for auction enticing enough to bid on. They just didn’t win for whatever reason, be it money or whatever. By getting their e-mail addresses, you’re able to e-mail them a message station “Sorry you didn’t win the auction, but thanks for taking part,” and then you could either give them an offer for a related product or service, or perhaps a link to a website you have where you sell related products and services!

These people have already shown their interest in the types of products you offer - they are the people most likely to become your customers - by following up with such an e-mail after one of your auctions, you will be able to INSTANTLY send your best prospects offers that you know they’ll want to spend their money on!

Go ahead. Fill in the blanks and take the first step to making bigger profits as your own publisher. Answer these seven questions, and you can easily make thousands of dollars!

1. Selling used ________ means big profits.
2. How to make money as a __________.
3. Selling _______ and making money.
4. Save big with __________.
5. How to start a profitable ______ business.
6. Make profits each week by __________.
7. I am an expert at __________.

You need to spend some serious time thinking these seven things through. These phrases represent hooks - things that gain people’s interest when they read them, things that compel the reader to keep reading to find out how what your offer can give them the powerful benefit mentioned.

These are the kinds of ideas you need to come up with and use. This is not an all inclusive list, and you should always try to come up with your own.

This is merely a sample list, merely a “starter’s block” for you to start with and gain some idea of what will make you profitable. These are the kinds of ideas which many direct-response marketers use to grab the attention of their prospects and make thousands of dollars.

If you learn how to correctly incorporate these ideas to develop your own product ideas and your own ad copy, and you are advertising to the correct market, you stand a very good chance of finding the same kind of success yourself.

You can sell your book through dozens of dealers who already sell similar publications. Contact them by finding their ads in magazines relevant to your subject. They are in the business of selling books by mail, and they are always looking for new products to offer their customers.

We have sold over one million publications through distributors who use their own advertising money to sell our products. This happens all the time, and it is very accessible to you.

There are always people out there looking for products to sell. Therefore, if you can package the information and put the advertising together, all you will have to do is find yourself a dealer who will sell it!

These are four essential items every promotion must have. The better each of these things is, the more money you will make. By testing, studying, and improving each of these four things, you could potentially double or even triple the amount of money you can make!

These four things are:

1. Copy: By changing a few paragraphs, a sentence, or headlines, you could increase response.
2. Offer: By adding something to your offer, maybe a free bonus, you could increase response.
3. Format: A change in format, colors, paper, print, envelope size, etc. could increase response.
4. List: A well targeted mailing list could help you realize a dramatic increase in response.

If you pay close attention to each of these parts of your sales presentation, and test different ways of presenting your sales material, you could soon realize how much profit you were missing out on! Take a look at your own sales material. What things could you change and test to find out if you can get a better response?

Testimonials are, of course, a very powerful tool to incorporate in sales copy. They provide proof that the claims in the copy are really obtainable, and they help justify purchasing the product in the mind of the prospect. But what many people don’t realize is that there is a tactic they can use to make their testimonials more powerful and more convincing!

A lot of people like to section their testimonials off from the rest of their copy in their own little group. This is, of course, better than not having any testimonials at all in the copy, but it does bring up a problem.

When prospects look at a block of testimonials one after another, they quickly recognize what they’re looking at - a load of things other people said being used to convince them to buy something.

BOOM! Resistance to the testimonials has instantly built up, and now those testimonials have a tough task to accomplish.

The answer to this problem is to scatter your testimonials throughout your sales copy - to “pepper” your sales copy with testimonials to give the whole thing spice. This is how to “pepper” your testimonials to give them more of an impact!

By doing this, the impact of those testimonials will be much more powerful. They won’t be instantly recognized as an advertising technique, so the level of resistance in that prospect’s mind won’t be nearly as high.

The testimonials will be much more influential, much more powerful, and, ultimately, the copy will be much more effective at bringing in sales!

Now I am going to show you how to automatically make thousands of dollars a month with an e-mail message you send to one special list. This is a simple idea you can quickly use to put a large amount of cash in your bank account. It can actually give you an ongoing income each and every day, week, or month of every year. It is really simple.

This idea quickly turned into huge amounts of cash for one man on the Internet, and since then, others have used his same secret to bring in truckloads of cash.

Some of you might know the man I am talking about. He started a web site that was the “Joke of the Day.” He delivered that joke of the day via e-mail. He started asking people to send him a dollar to receive the joke, and eventually he had many people, and he realized that he could build his list bigger if he would just ask people to sign up and didn’t ask for money.

The reason he could do that was because in each e-mail he sold advertising!

Everybody wants to get a joke of the day in their e-mail. Business executives, secretaries, stay at home moms, lawyers - everybody loves to get a good laugh, so they all loved receiving this joke of the day in their e-mail. He just sold advertising that would go along with the joke.

He didn’t have any products to ship, no shipping costs, and no inventory. He just sent out these jokes every day by e-mail. Some people read the joke and delete it and others forward it to their friends and relatives. Eventually, a percentage of the people who saw that e-mail would click on the link to the advertisers’ web sites. That’s how he made his money.

Now, as long as the e-mail that he sent out contained something of value, something that people wanted to receive, something other than just a sales pitch, it was welcomed every day by these people and they actually looked forward to receiving it every day.

While the joke of the day idea has already been used, there are lots of other things you could e-mail every single day. You could use a tip of the day. A gardening tip, a golfing tip, a fishing tip, etc. You could send a recipe of the day.

There are many things you could do that haven’t been used already. Once you decide on the subject, you simply have to build your e-mail list by telling people to sign up to receive your tip of the day. Be sure to remind them that it is free. Once your list is large enough, you can be charging other web sites to advertise in your e-mail. Then you send that every day.

We call this idea “The Internet auction short cut,” and it’s “How to get a ton of people to keep giving you huge bids for every product that you list.” It’s really simple. We think you are going to be surprised at how simple this is.

But don’t let the simplicity fool you! This is powerful!

There are two steps here. First step: you have to build your mailing list of all of the people who have given you respectable bids. You don’t want to put a mailing list together of people who just bid a dollar on something that is worth a couple of hundred. Those aren’t the kind of people you want on your mailing list. Anybody that has given you a respectable bid should be put on your mailing list, and also the people who actually won the bids for whatever products that you had listed on the auction. Your mailing list is vitally important!

Step number two: you stay in touch with those people. You continue to let them know about other items that you have available for auction.

It will be your job to introduce an unknown product to the mail-order company, a much more doubting reader. Your offer must provide solid reasons why the catalog house should consider selling your product to their customers.

To develop convincing reasons, you must research every fact that could possibly influence a buying decision. Offer an item with a more competitive price, a major price break, better quality, or extra benefits.

You have to think about every aspect of your product first. The simpler and easier you make it for the catalog house, the more inclined the catalog house is to accept and run your promotion. Why? Because you’ve already done all the work for them.

Nobody should put in as much work to sell your product as you do. This is the same thing we tell those who write press releases. We tell them to do it all for the editor and make it as easy as possible for them to run the piece in their publication.

The key here is to know everything about your product. Know why it’s a winner, and work on it as hard as you can. Then, you can write the best pieces about it. You can get it into the catalogs much easier if the catalog house doesn’t have to put much - if any - work into what you’ve already done! By doing this, many companies have made thousands of dollars in a matter of months. And knowing everything about your product could put giant sums of money in your pocket - within only a few months!

You can revitalize your creative energies by easing the stress of pressing mental efforts. Here are a few suggestions to ease stress.

Stretch: Eliminate the tension in your muscles by giving them a nice long stretch. Gently and slowly stretch the muscles in your legs, arms, neck and back, etc., until you feel a tug. Then hold it for ten to 20 seconds and release. You either can do this just with the muscles that are tense, or throughout your body.

Walk: When tension is high, walk it off. Just get up and take your tension for a stroll. A brisk ten- or 15-minute walk can reduce muscular and nervous tension.

Take a Mental Trip: By visualizing a stress-free scene that appeals to you, you can unwind the tension you feel. Just sit back and “see,” as vividly as you can, the beautiful scenery of your next vacation, or a single flower. Use as many scenes as possible to experience your stress-reducing vision.

Take a breather: When a person is tired or uptight, breathing becomes rapid and shallow. You can decrease tension by deliberately breathing more slowly and deeply.

Take six seconds to inhale, then seven seconds to exhale. Repeat this for five minutes, or longer if necessary.

Practice “progressive relaxation”: PR is a way to de-stress yourself anywhere. First, sit down, lean back, and close your eyes. Then, clench your right hand, tensing the muscles in your wrist and forearm, and hold for five seconds, concentrating on the tension building in your hand. Then release, letting the tension drain away. Pay close attention to the feeling of relaxation. Repeat this sequence of tension and release with your left hand, then your upper arms, shoulders, neck, back, face, legs, feet, and toes.

Discuss your Situation: Open the pressure valve. If you are “really” stressed out, open your mouth and let out the pressure. Talking is one way to do this. Sometimes the quickest way to ease writer’s tension is to discuss it calmly with someone else. It is a great way to depressurize yourself. And, do not forget to laugh. Laughing at a stressful situation can restore calm and give you a more productive perspective.

One of the best benefits of having a direct-response marketing company is the fact that nobody but you has to know how big your company really is. You’re advertising in publications, and you’re using direct mail. In those mediums, you do not deal with many, if any, walk-in customers.

Our company has served over 250,000 customers, not counting the seminars we’ve had for our customers. Out of 250,000 customers, only about 1,000 people have actually physically walked into our main place of business on their own.

Nobody, except someone who actually walks in to your main place of business, actually has to know how big your company really is. People can think you’re a giant company simply from how you present yourself in your ads and sales material. These ads and sales materials are the only things people have to judge you by! This is how to make your customers and prospects think that you have a much bigger company than you actually do!

We have a friend and business associate who just set up a Site that’s about wine. He’s into fine wine - he lives right near the wine country. He likes to go to these wine tastings and visit Mandavi and Viavi and the famous wineries.

So, he’s set up a Site - it’s brand new, he’s still working on it - which will review wine. There are magazines and newsletters out already that do this and they sell a ton of advertising. So he’s setting up this Site - and it’s free. He’s not charging anything for it just like the Internet, when it first started, was free. And then he’s going to go to the wineries and say, “Your wine has been reviewed on this Site.”

Once they see he’s for real, the same advertisers that are in the magazine will start wanting to place ads on his Website.

Most of these magazines, as you know, make all their money from the ads. They don’t make their money from subscribers. So he can skip that whole subscriber and printing thing and just go on the Internet and have an Internet review magazine.

You could do that with any kind of a product! You write to all the other publications about food, about wine and travel, you get American Express (give them a free ad on your Site) to put an exchange ad on their Site, you could do it with airlines, you could do it with food.

And then there’s all the other magazines - you could get news releases in there. They seem to be pretty cooperative. They don’t feel you’re in competition with them. This is how you can live the life of a millionaire - get free products - and make a ton of money with your website!

There was a Site that actually sells wine that was written up in Money Magazine. And Money Magazine doesn’t feel any threat. They said, “Oh, this is one of the best Sites on the Internet!” They talked about Virtual Vineyards, and they got tons of publicity. Our friend talked to the guy at Virtual Vineyards and he said when that story came out they could barely keep up. Their Site was red hot for weeks after that story was in that magazine!

The publicity can drive people to your Site and then all the advertising brings in tons of revenue. And if you exchange ads, it’s a way that you can trade advertising for free with a huge and successful Website. Imagine if you traded an ad with Amazon.com (one of the most high traffic sites on the Internet)!

Newspaper and magazine editors will help you get rich! But to gain their help, you have to give them what they want too. Editors are not in the business of helping you promote your product or service; they are in the business of pleasing their readers. Your whole proposal to them should focus on the fact that you have a product or service that can give their readers something very important to them.

Let’s look at the example you read earlier about the man who wrote the book How to Stretch Your Paycheck. In that particular magazine that book dealt with something very important to the magazine’s readers.

Yes, the man was lucky. But was luck responsible for mailing that news release to the magazine? No, that was his decision. You create your own luck. You get lucky through getting into the market and trying things.

Some people try free publicity by sending out a few news releases. They don’t get very good response from these news releases, though, and they give it up and say it didn’t work for them. Those people fail to realize that even the people who make a lot of money play it as a numbers game. You don’t get into many publications, but the ones you do get in have the potential to make you a lot of money. You have to treat it like a business, not a gamble.

Another thing you should remember is that you can’t just cross your fingers and haphazardly slap together loads of cheap items and mail them off to editors. They won’t take it seriously, for good reason. You have to put together a professional package. When you read through a magazine and read stories about successful products and individuals, almost every single one of those stories was generated by a professional publicity company.

It seems like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people pay little or no attention to it. They see it as a gambling where they just send something cheap to an editor hoping that they will get lucky. Then they end up giving up because no one who gets their mailing takes them seriously.