A Marketing Angle I Use to Sell My Own Products

7/17/2013

Businesses to make money with fall under one of these two categories: (1) Service, or (2) Product.

A service business is more specialized to a specific, target-marketed group of people who need the service performed. A product can normally be sold to a wider market and you can span the mail order as well as the consumer market (John Q Public.)

The item I sold was Colloidal Silver, so it fell under the category of product. But the MLM company that manufactured this product kept instructing me to build a downline and sign up as many distributors as possible. Since everyone was given this same advice, I decided to do something different and more exciting.

I learned from a colleague that the consumer market is the most overlooked market for smaller homebased businesses. Big companies market to the consumer, but the little guy is never told to do it. They are led to believe that it's too expensive, which is a lie. In fact, running classified ads all over the country is less expensive per 1,000 than mail order publications.

Now I knew from experience that if I even mentioned the word distributorship to a consumer they will immediately envision door-to-door selling. This, of course, would turn them off. Because of this I knew that marketing with this method would not get me anywhere.

So I used another angle. Why not just sell the product itself with no strings attached? Don't most consumers buy products at the store because they want to use them? When you purchased your living room sofa for instance, did you purchase it so you could re-sell them and make money? Of course not. You bought it, brought it home and used it!

So I wrote 5 different classified ads selling Colloidal Silver for $30 a bottle. I told about the benefits of Colloidal Silver and asked the reader to call my toll-free number to learn more about its health benefits. My toll-free number was a recording that sold the product (not the opportunity.)

I invested $850 to get my 5 different classified ads in newspapers across the country. My cost per 1,000 circulation was 23 cents much lower than mail order and my ad appeared within 2 weeks.

From the $850 investment, I made only $300 of my money back but the idea worked! I analyzed which of the 5 different ads pulled the most response (they were coded), eliminated 3 that didn't and invested another $500 ($200 of my own money and $300 from the first sales) the next week in classified advertising again. This time I made $750 in sales.

The next month I narrowed down the papers that pulled the most orders, added on some more and repeated the procedure. I made another $500 the first week in sales and $1,200 the second week. After processing the paperwork to get these orders filled, I ended up with 100 customers who had purchased the Colloidal Silver and 2 who wanted to join the distributorship in my downline.

Now granted 2 out of 100 is not a lot. But 2 people who REALLY want to work the program is much better than 2,000 that don't want to work or don't even want to learn how to. Besides, I had the potential of 100 REPEAT customers and the opportunity to sell them more products. I made a great deal of money using this method and you can too!!

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