The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits

THE BEAUTY OF DIRECT MARKETING

If you were in charge of marketing for a company like Coca Cola or American Express or Sony, you could spend millions on advertising. But you’re not. So for you, direct marketing is the only way to go.

Through direct marketing, you evoke a direct response from your prospective customer. That response can be anything from making a purchase to returning a free-trial postcard to making a phone call to providing information on your web site.

You can do direct marketing on the Internet. You can also do it on radio, on television, with magazine and newspaper ads, and with sales letters sent through the mail.

What makes it ideal for the reluctant entrepreneur is that it allows you to:

• Inexpensively test different media, products, copy, and offers.
• Accurately measure the results.
• Quickly determine what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s how one of my clients took advantage of direct marketing on the Internet to discover their Optimum Selling Strategy … 

The client sells information products. Of the many ways they tested to bring in new buyers and then convert them to long-term customers, two proved to be extremely effective:

1. Selling informational reports on other people’s web sites. Then giving buyers a free subscription to their own daily e-zine—which sells those buyers all sorts of increasingly expensive back-end products.

2. Targeting search engine users with pay-per-click (PPC) ads offering a free special report. Then giving those who responded to the ...