Author Archive | Lawrence

You’re about to promote a big launch of a new product, but here’s the thing: You know there are many, many other affiliates who are going to promote this launch, too. And obviously some or maybe most of the people on your mailing list are also on at least one other list that will be promoting this launch.

So how do you make the sales, rather than your competition?

One way is to offer a great bonus. Let your list know ahead of time that if they buy from you, they’ll get the bonus.

Another way, and one that doesn’t involve fancy bonuses, is simply to mail first.

Most launches announce ahead of time when they’re going to go live. If you’re going to be away from your computer at that time, then you can schedule your email to go out at the time of the launch. It may or may not go out at exactly the right time, and sometimes launches can be delayed. So the very best method is to send the email yourself.

Simply write your email ahead of time and get it ready to send. Then continually refresh the sales page until you see it go live, and then immediately send out your broadcast. The reason you want to refresh the page rather than rely on the product seller to email you is because sellers tend to mail to their own list first, and then notify their JV partners. This way they get to make more sales themselves by being the first to email.

Refreshing the page so you know the moment the promotion goes live will get you more sales by being the first to mail. And if you’re willing to mail several times, you’ll get even more as people who were on the fence decide to get the product.

… BEFORE They Even Hit the Sales Page!

Odds are there is a super-effective sales tool you’re not using. In fact, you might not even know about it – or if you do, you might think it’s not worth the effort.

But if I tell you that this tool is capable of increasing your affiliate sales… sometimes by monstrous proportions…

…and that it will take you less than an hour to set up once and then you can forget about it…

…would you be interested?

It’s called the pre-sell page, and it works like this:

Let’s say you’re an affiliate sending an email to your list promoting XYZ product. You could send your list members straight to the sales page. In fact, it’s most likely what you’re doing right now.

OR, you could send them to a short page that totally warms up your prospects to the sales page. In fact, your pre-sell page gets them so pumped up, they’re primed to buy before even getting to the sales page.

On your pre-sell page you don’t ask them to opt-in to anything. Instead, you tell them what the product they’re about to see has done for you. Yes, this means you’ve bought it or gotten a review copy. You’re able to talk to them as an insider who knows exactly what this product does. And you can tell them the exact benefits you got from the product.

This works extremely well for increasing conversions. Mind you, you’re not trying to sell the product – the sales page should do that. Instead, you’re merely warming them up, sort of like the introduction to a speaker or the trailer to a movie.

And if you want to take this one step further, you can offer them a free report which does the same thing. This way your email (or your ad) offers them the free report. They don’t have to opt-in, they just go to the page and there’s the report. They don’t even have to download it, they can read it right there. And of course the report does two things: Offers value AND warms them up to your offer.

Try it. You might be surprised at the increase in sales you get. And don’t forget to add this to your autoresponder series so you can continue to profit from it for a long time to come.

Simple changes in the way you market can result in big changes in your profit. In fact, with a few tweaks you might easily increase your income by several hundred dollars each week, depending on your traffic and offers. Here are 5 proven ways that you can do it.

Cut your costs. Are you buying traffic? Look for ways to get the same quality of traffic (or better) for less. Are you paying affiliates? Consider paying MORE on the front end and less on the backend – done correctly, this can often result in more effort from affiliates and more long term profit in your pocket.

Increase the profit you make on each sale. This could be as simple as raising your price, or offering an upsell, a downsell, a one time offer or a combination.

Get more traffic. As a product owner, one of the best things you can do is attract great affiliates to bring you more traffic. Consider offering 100% commissions on the front end and bonuses to top affiliates. Then make sure you have a killer backend set up, with mid-priced and high-priced products that earn strong revenue for your business on the leads affiliates send you.

Increase your conversion rate. Simple adjustments combined with testing can raise the conversion rate on your sales pages – sometimes significantly. If you look at your sales for the past year and then ask yourself – “If I had increased conversions by 2% over this time period, how much more would I have earned?” You’ll see that the increased income can be tremendous, all from tweaking and testing.

Sell more products and services along with higher priced products to your existing customers. This is perhaps the best technique of all, and one that marketers often forget. Sure, you’ve got a $10 product and a $100 product, but what about that $500 a month coaching program, or the $1,000 big product? Don’t be scared to bring out the big guns – it’s actually what some of your customers are craving. Also, offer select promotions to your customers – products that you have personally vetted and know will help them. These two steps alone can add thousands to your bank account each month.

What to do right now: Work on #4: Increase Your Conversion Rate. This is the one thing you can begin working on immediately with very little effort that can make a tremendous difference.

Plus you’re increasing your list of buyers, which gives further opportunity to sell more products and more expensive products. And the higher your conversion rates are, the easier it is to attract great affiliates who send boatloads of traffic.

Once you’ve increased your conversion rates, choose another method and begin working on that. Before you know it, you may have doubled or even tripled your online income. Yes, when you’re a product owner, giving yourself a hefty raise really can be that simple.

When Joe Cool Marketer does a big splashy launch with prizes for the top 10 or 20 affiliates, wouldn’t you love to be on that list, making those commissions and earning those prizes? Not only do you make good money, you also get courted by other leaders to promote their products. Pretty soon you’re a high profile affiliate, and able to get joint ventures with product creators and the other leading affiliates – a great position to be in…

But if your list is relatively small, you might think it’s not possible – at least not until you get a bigger, better and more responsive list.

Guess again – there is a way you can get on those leader boards, and the trick is so simple you’ve probably overlooked it: Join up with other marketers. Find several other marketers with lists comparable to yours and make yourself a promotion club. Pick launches of a medium size so you’re not competing with every big name marketer out there.

Pool your resources and your bonuses with your fellow club members to offer a killer bonus package. Everyone in your club promotes the same link and you all share in the profit. Take turns on who gets their name(s) on the leader board, or choose a new name for your club.

Your promotion club can do a lot more than win affiliate contests – you can also ban together to create and promote products and help each other with ideas and implementation.

Play it smart. You want people in your club who are in this for the long haul like you are, who are trust worthy, who you like working with, and who you can mastermind with. Together the 5 or so of you can accomplish far, far more than any one of you can individually, and it is likely you will find more ways to partner together along the way – possibly even creating products and running your own big shot affiliate program for others to join and profit selling YOUR products.

Success is a momentum game. Everyone starts at the beginning and builds their way up. Partnering up is a great way to speed up your journey to the top of the game!

If you take a look at any of the top internet marketing and online business building forums online, you’ll find these questions asked repeatedly:

“How much time does this take?” “How fast can I make money?”
“Do I need any skills to do this?”
“Do I have to learn anything?”
“Does this require any investment?”

And so forth. We’ve seen these questions so many times, they seem legitimate – as though a business should take no time, require no skill, need no investment and so forth.

Just press a button and WHAMO! Hundred dollar bills start spewing out of your computer. Anything short of this is something we’re just not interested in, thank you very much.

And there lies the clue of why so many people fail in business, and in life.

They’re not willing to put in the time. They’re not willing to invest even the smallest amount of money, other than to purchase the initial ‘how-to’ product. They’re not willing to just DO IT.

Most people will say it’s because we’ve gotten lazy. We want success NOW, not in a week or in a year. Everything is NOW NOW NOW or never.

But I have another theory. I don’t think people are lazy. Nor do I think they lack the time or the motivation. Heck, just look at how much time some people spend looking at and buying new how-to-make-money products. They literally invest hundreds of hours reading sales pages and buying products.

And they might even read some of them. Maybe. But do they put them into action? 99 times out of 100, they don’t.

And it’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because they’re AFRAID.

Somewhere in the recent past, we forgot that it’s okay to not be a smashing success the first time we do something. We forgot that it’s okay to fall down and get back up when we’re learning to walk. We forgot that it’s okay to look like a complete jackass the first few times we try to dive off the diving board. We forgot that the first time we made love, we were as awkward and clumsy as could be.

But we kept trying to walk. We kept diving off that board. And we kept making love until we got GOOD at it.

So why is it that we are so afraid to fail in business? Why is it that we are only interested in making the smallest, briefest of efforts before we throw our hands up and declare that, “This doesn’t work?”

When did we get so damn AFRAID?

More importantly, how do we get unafraid?

By putting blinders on. You choose the path you want to take, and then you research the heck out of it for seven days or less. You read and watch everything you can get your hands on, and you take notes.

Distractions are NOT an option. Nor is mulling it over and thinking of all the reasons why it won’t work. You don’t have TIME for that.

After your 7 days (or less) of research, you take action. Because you know what? Taking action is actually EASIER than learning. And it’s more fun, too. But because we let those little fear monsters whisper in our ear, we think it’s gonna be hard. We think it’s somehow going to hurt.

But once you break that first barrier and start moving, you realize that brick wall was only made of tissue paper, and you had the ability all along to walk right through it to the other side.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting: “D” and “F” students often do better in business than “A” students. Which is another way of saying that quite frequently the not so bright people build empires while the geniuses don’t have two nickels to rub together.

Do you know why? Because the really smart people are too smart for their own good. They’re thinking of all the reasons why their new business venture will fail. And because they’re so smart, they’re able to come up with all kinds of perfectly legitimate reasons why it won’t work and why it won’t last if it does work.

And they’re right, too – it will fail because they’ve already put their business on that course of failure simply by thinking about it. Not because of some voodoo mind magic, but because they will either not start the business at all because they fear the failure they see headed their way, or because they will start it but then quit at the first problem. “There! I knew it, I just knew this wouldn’t work!”

But the “D” and “F” students aren’t quite so bright, so they don’t ponder all the reasons why their new business will fail. Nor do they try to “fix” the business before they start it, with their new fangled ideas (another “A” student problem.)

Instead, they take the book or course they bought, and start at page 1, and follow the steps. When they get stuck, they ask for help. “I can’t figure this out, so I’ll ask these people on the forum, or hire someone on Fiverr to do it for me, or whatever.” And they muddle through because they essentially don’t see all the obstacles the “A” students see. They’re just following the recipe.

And guess what? They succeed!

But what about fear of failure, doesn’t that come into play even for the “D” and “F” students? Yes, it does, but to a much lesser degree. Think back to school and you’ll realize that the “D” and “F” students have a lot of experience at failing because they got those grades. Contrast that with the “A” student who had a nervous breakdown if he/she got a “B” on a test. You remember that person, right? They were practically hysterical, because they had no experience at failing, and to them a “B” was a total and complete failure because it fell short of that magical “A” grade.

Which, I think, is why so many are afraid to fail. We go through school thinking that we will always get that “A” or “B” grade, and we do get the grades until we leave school. Then we realize the REAL WORLD works differently, and we might actually =GASP= not be a stellar success from day 1 at something new.

So we decide to only do those things we KNOW we will be good at. And then the ultimate universal revenge happens – because we don’t try anything new, we succeed in not failing, but we fail in LIFE. And that truly sucks.

So all of this is perhaps a very long winded way of saying, go out there and fall in love with failing, because only by embracing the concept of failure can you truly succeed. I don’t care what online business you choose, in the beginning you will not be good at it, and that’s okay because you will learn more and become more skilled every day if you put in the effort.

Do you think the information sellers making six figures a month started out making that kind of money? No way. They started out small, threw themselves into learning the business and grew their income as they grew their knowledge and confidence. This is the way it works. This is ALWAYS the way it works. And to think that there is some magical button somewhere that, if only you could find it you could be an instant success from day 1 with no investment of time, learning and failure, is perhaps the stupidest notion of all.

So choose your path, put on your blinders, learn everything you can for 7 days, and then just DO IT.

You’re new found successes may astound you.

Is there a trick to writing marketing emails that get the click? Actually, there are 20 tricks, and here they are…

Use a great subject line:

Be specific and useful. Rather than saying, “You’re going to love this,” use “How to get a 27% increase in stamina.”

Identify yourself consistently. Don’t call yourself Bob Jones in one email, Robert Jones in a second email and Jones Consulting in a third. Pick a name and stick with it so recipients recognize you.

Use words such as ‘sale,’ ‘new,’ ‘alert,’ ‘news bulletin,’ ‘daily,’ ‘weekly’ and ‘free.’

Ask a question. “Are you ready for this Tuesday?” or “Do you know how to increase subscribers by 42% with one tweak?”

Test your subject lines, then reuse what works and discard what doesn’t.

Don’t use the same or similar subject line twice in a row. Ever.

Use timely topics when possible.

Use [but don’t over use] urgency.

Use all caps to emphasize one or two important words.

Use brackets to create a second attention getter, like this: 12 killer traffic methods [And the 5 WORST]

Optimize the body content:

Use SHORT paragraphs, just one or two sentences each. Make it super easy to read.

Use photos that sell your message.

Be clear about what your offer is and how it impacts and benefits the reader.

Use a strong call to action.

Give the name and location of your company – look REAL, not fly by night.

Focus on only ONE action you want your reader to take.

Make your email as long as it needs to be and no longer.

Use urgency but don’t over do it. Use action words and action phrases. Don’t use passive language. Make it personal. “Grab your copy”, not “Get a copy.”

Make your button big enough. Remember, the majority of subscribers will be reading your email on a phone or tablet, so make your button big enough for a human finger to easily tap.

Make your call to action and button visually distinctive and inviting.

Lastly, remember to make your emails mobile friendly. Picture size needs to be reduced for fast loading times. You can use a service such as Photo Resizer to reduce the file size without losing the image quality.

And define image size by proportion if your email editor doesn’t do this automatically, so the images look good on any sized screen. To do this, set the max-width to the proportion of the screen you want it to take up, and set the height to “auto” to automatically adjust based upon the width.

One final thing: Put some personality into it. No one responds positively to being bored, and blending with the crowd won’t get you sales. Instead of being a business robot, be yourself and have fun with your subscribers.

Seriously, have you ever received an affiliate commission before the product was even created? Of course not. A frequent objection I hear from affiliate marketers is they don’t want to create their own products because they will have to wait until after the product is created to get paid. BUT, what if you could get paid before you create the product?

Here’s how you do it: Offer to let your customers watch over your shoulder as you do what you’re going to teach. In other words, do a live case study so they can see step by step what happens.

Let’s say you were going to make a product on how to sell t-shirts. You would let them see the process from start to finish, watching everything you do. You then take these recordings and sell them as your finished product, too. So you get paid in advance by people who want to see you do this as you do it, and then you have an asset you can sell over and over again.

Pick something you want to learn that others want to learn, too. Spend a week or two learning the basics, and then do it. Whatever it is, just do it. Then report on your results as you go. That is, document each day what you do and the results you get.

How to Promote Your Product to Buyers

There’s likely no need to make a humongous promise, like earning a million bucks in 22 days. Who’s going to believe it anyway? Instead, promise that you’re going to show them how to do the thing that you’re teaching. You’ll use video, screenshots, writing, etc., to show them what to do in each step and how to do it, and what to do if this happens or that happens. And when you make a mistake, add that in as well, since it shows them what not to do.

You’ll begin with the very first step, whether it’s research, finding an outsourcer or whatever, and do it in chronological order. It’s easy for you to do this way, and it’s easy for your customers to follow, too.

In your marketing, you’ll tell them why they should care about what you’re teaching – for example, that it’s an easy market to break into, extremely hot and so forth. You’ll also tell them what expertise you already have that you’ll be applying to this training, if any.

Then you’ll tell them exactly what they’ll learn, step by step, and what they’ll get out of it. It might be as simple as they’ll have their first product sold.

This is how you market the product before you’ve even made it. After you make it, then you’ll know your exact results. Maybe you sold 82 units in 21 days. That can become part of your promise, that you’ll show them how you did it, and maybe by copying you, they can do it, too.

But What if My Product Doesn’t Sell?

Hey, it happens. You spend hours, days or weeks creating a product and only sell a few copies. Guess what? That’s okay, for two reasons. First, you now have more experience creating products. Second, and this is the big reason – you can re-purpose the content. Maybe it didn’t sell as a $27 product, but can you turn it into a Kindle book and sell a few copies a day? “But I’ll only make $5-$10 bucks a day on Kindle.” Yeah, multiply that by 365 days and tell me if it’s worth it.

You can re-purpose it into list building material, email autoresponder series and so forth. You can rename it and re-market it, because odds are you didn’t do a very good job the first time because you’re still learning. You can use it as a free bonus to sell more of your next product. You can repackage it – if it’s audio, add video. If it’s video, add a pdf. You can sell rights to it. You can sell an entire website and sales funnel based around it, and so forth.

You now have an asset. And even if it didn’t sell very well in its first incarnation, there are plenty of things you can do to still make money from it.

The Big Why of Creating Your Own Products

Do you know why you should create your own products, above and beyond what we already talked about? Because when you create products, you are exchanging a few hours of your time for an asset that can pay you for months and years to come. Creating and selling your own products will allow you to travel the world if you choose, enjoy more financial security than 95% of the population of the U.S., and live the life you want. And if that isn’t reason enough to create your own products, I don’t know what is.

Are you one of those marketers who only wants to promote affiliate products? If you are, you’re not alone. Affiliate products are great – you don’t have to create the product and you don’t have customer service problems. Heck, you can make a fortune promoting affiliate products, and I highly recommend that if your heart is set on affiliate marketing, that you pursue it without hesitation.

That said, if you are ONLY doing affiliate marketing, you are putting yourself and your income at the mercy of other people, other businesses and other entities that you have NO control over.

Plus, it’s not always a bag of laughs, either. You want to promote that cookware set on Amazon because it’s got great commissions? Cool. So go set up a website, get some lousy articles written by someone whose first language isn’t the one you need, buy a few thousand spam links and so forth to get this site ‘ready.’ Then find a way to send the traffic, and then do it all again with the next product.

Great fun, right? I’ll bet you don’t even care about that cookware set or the people who might buy it. But you should care that the seller can stop selling it at ANY time without notice. Or they can change the commission structure. Or they can do whatever they like.

Are you getting your traffic from Google? Then you already know how fast Google can pull the rug out from under you. Maybe you’re buying traffic from Facebook? Facebook has already banned countless businesses and untold numbers of marketers, and they will be banning more – without notice.

How do you like affiliate marketing so far? Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way. If you choose a great niche and focus just on that niche and build up your readers and your traffic and especially your lists, you can make a ton of money in affiliate marketing.

But you know what? You can make even MORE money by creating your products, and it’s not nearly as difficult as you might think.

Plus, creating your own products has great perks:

First, when you make a sale, you get to keep ALL of the sale.

Second, you can get your own affiliates to promote for you. Just think how much more you can sell with a hundred affiliates promoting your products, than if it’s only you promoting. The difference is beyond huge, it’s almost mind-boggling.

Third, if you’re a good affiliate marketer, you’re building lists anyway. Why not sell your own products to those lists, in addition to selling affiliate products?

Fourth, when you have your own products, you can earn money for months and years on work that you did ONCE. It’s like being a songwriter and earning money every time the song is played for the next 20 years, only instead of a song it’s an info product.

Now, I know your next objection:

And let me tell you, this isn’t a good objection for two reasons.

#1, YES you do. If you’ve been alive for more than, say, 15 years, then you know stuff that other people DON’T know but they WANT to know. Have you found a way to treat your own illness? Have you lost 20 pounds? Have you traveled somewhere? Do you know how to save major money on something? Do you have secret to seducing lovers?

Think of it this way – what do you know? Make a list. Write that stuff down, and keep writing over the next few days because you will realize you know a lot more than you thought. Do this and you’ll likely have three sheets of paper filled with things you know that others want to know.

#2: Let’s say that you do the exercise in #1 above, and you come up with nothing. NOTHING. You are the only person on the planet who doesn’t know ANYTHING that anyone else wants to know.

That’s okay, and here’s why: All you have to do is pick your topic, learn it, do it and teach it. That’s it. Learn it, do it and teach it. You don’t have to become an expert. Just learn enough to get started DOING it, whatever it is. Make notes of what works and the results you get, and guess what happens?? You have yourself an info product. YES, it really can be that easy.

True. So here’s a shortcut: Choose your niche, go find an expert and use THEIR knowledge to create your product. Then cut them in on the deal. You get a percentage, they get a percentage.

“But then I’ll have to share the profits – wouldn’t it be better to just promote affiliate products?”

True, you’re sharing the profits with the expert, but remember – you can then get affiliates to promote for you, something you cannot do when you are an affiliate yourself.

So even if you give the expert 25% and you keep 25% so that affiliates earn 50%, that’s 25% that you continue to earn for as long as the product is selling.

One more thing before I forget – when you sell your own products, you are building lists of BUYERS. And as you know, one buyer can easily be worth 10-50 people who are just looking for freebies.

So when you have your own products, whether you create them alone or with partners, you are building lists of buyers that your affiliates send to you. And this alone is HUGE. So much so, that even if you gave away ALL of your commission up front, it would still be highly profitable because of all the backend products you could sell to your new buyers.

A hot niche is one where there is more demand than supply. That is, there are lots of people looking for a solution and ready to pay money for that solution, and not enough marketers out there offering the solution that buyers are looking for.

Seeing what is selling, or doing keyword research, or haunting the best seller lists of Amazon are all great ways to uncover niches. But oftentimes the very best niches are right under our noses. These are the niches were people are truly desperate for a solution and you can be the hero who steps in, saves the day and makes a healthy affiliate commission for your effort.

Just to be clear: There are niches and there are keywords, and these two things work together but are NOT the same.

Your focus should be on finding a hot niche and only then do you look for the keywords you’re going to target.

And finding hot niches can be as easy as paying attention to what’s happening around you.

Look for the problems in your everyday life. Your computer is running just about as fast as molasses in winter and it’s driving you bonkers. Cheer up, you’ve just found a niche, because you can BET you’re not the only one with this problem.

You do a Google search and sure enough, there are forums everywhere full of people looking for ways to speed up their computer or laptop.

You do a second search and find there are several products out there, with affiliate programs, that address this specific problem.

Congrats, you just found your first hot niche. You can now create your own WordPress site addressing the issue and offer the products as your solutions. In fact, if you purchase one of the products and then use some of their tips as your content (rewrite it!) you’ll come across as the authority. Then when you recommend they get the product to get the other 90% of the info they need, sales will be easy.

Another example: A young lady was taking self-defense classes but found the entire experience to be frustrating. The instructor would rush through a dozen or more examples of different moves in each class, and by the end of each class she couldn’t remember more than one or two. She said, “If only I had this stuff on video, I could actually LEARN it.” Bingo! If you overheard this comment, within minutes you could find a self-defense program for women online, and within a week you could be making profits from it by addressing the exact problem stated by the lady in class. Keep your ears open and opportunities will abound!

Promote a best selling product to an entirely different niche. Speaking of getting the product, here’s a backdoor method of finding niches: Buy a HOT selling product, one with tons of competition. See how everyone else is promoting this product, then do it differently. Look inside the product, find out who else it applies to, how else it can be used, what niches would benefit from this product who aren’t being marketed to, and market the product to those niches.

Instead of meeting stiff competition, you’ll be in a league (and a niche) of your own promoting a hot seller to people who otherwise would never have heard of the product.

Watch the news for things that are about to catch on. For example, if you were at the forefront of the Paleo diet or the Keto diet or any of these special diets, you could have cleaned up. Guarantee, there is a new diet on the way.

Or maybe there’s a really hot star who is bragging about her workout or her exotic pet or her accessories. Watch to see what’s going to catch on, and if there is an affiliate program tied to it, you can do really well if you’re a first mover.

Look for what drives people to distraction. That is, what is it that invades their thoughts at all times of the day? What keeps them awake at night? What would they pay money to solve RIGHT NOW?

Weight loss is a big one, and so are most health issues. A bad relationship is at the top of this list. Pregnant women are continually thinking about their baby and whether or not they’ll be a good mother. Men are continually thinking about sex. The key here is to get really specific and not try to go after the entire niche. A fellow marketer knew a pregnant woman who had a particular health issue. He found a product that addressed this issue, made a website on this and because it was so keyword specific, he got it ranked easily and still makes several sales from this a week, passively.

Look for the fears. All around you, people are afraid. The woman next to you in the check out line is afraid she’s going to lose her husband. The person behind her is afraid he’s going to lose out on the promotion. In the next aisle is someone who is afraid they won’t get the job they want, or any job at all.

Next to them is someone who is afraid she’s going to have to pay thousands to get her car or her home fixed. And next to her is someone who fears their tax problem will never be solved. Look for the fears and you’ll find people who will leap at the chance to get their problem fixed so they can start relaxing again and not be so worried every moment of the day.

The next time someone looks worried, or your friend complains about a problem, or you find yourself frustrated – realize you may have just found your next hot, profitable niche.

Let’s face it – some products are just more boring than others. An air filter that takes out all the nasty stuff you don’t even know is there in the first place? Uninteresting. A video game that makes you feel like you’re going at mach speed with your hair on fire? Exciting!

So how do you sell a dull product? By making it exciting. As an example, let’s take one of the most ho hum products there is: White bread.

If you’re like most people, you’re already yawning. Sell white bread? You’d rather sell dust.

But what if you make that white bread into delectable frybread? Spicy croutons? Brandied bread pudding? Combine it with chocolate fondue? Toasted cheese with tomato and turkey?

You get the picture – it’s not the product you’re selling at all, it’s what you can do with the product. It’s the sizzle, not the steak.

You’re selling pimple cream? Then you talk about how they’ll be pimple free, right? Not really. Yes, you’ll show the before and after, the face with the pimples and the face without. But what you’ll talk about is how they’ll finally get the girl they’ve been lusting after for the past six months, or how the boy of their dreams will finally notice them and ask them to prom.

How about life insurance? What product could possibly be more boring and even repulsive than life insurance? Burial insurance, I suppose. Who wants to talk about either one of those?

But what if you made that life insurance and burial insurance EXCITING! Think it’s not possible? I think it’s VERY possible.

Consider this: When Joan Rivers passed away, we heard a quote from her that went something like this:

“When I die, I want my funeral to be a big showbiz affair with lights, cameras, action… I want paparazzi and I want publicists making a scene! I want it to be Hollywood all the way. I want to look gorgeous, better dead than I do alive. I want to be buried in a Valentino gown and I want Harry Winston to make me a toe tag. And I want a wind machine so that even in the casket my hair is blowing just like Beyonce’s.”

And by all accounts, Joan’s funeral was indeed a beautiful, funny, lovely and bittersweet event attended by 1,000 of her closest friends.

So why don’t life insurance sales people and burial people help the client plan a FUN funeral that shows the person as they truly were in life? Why not help them leave behind a legacy for their loved ones, a tribute to their life and give them a feeling of immortality?

It would be so simple to do, and the insurance/burial people who do it would be rich beyond measure because they’d have no competition. Imagine that – a life insurance person being SOUGHT OUT by clients. Yes, it could happen for them, and it can happen for you, no matter what it is that you’re selling.

So stop worrying that you have a product that makes paint drying look fascinating, and find a way to make it EXCITING, memorable and yes, FUN! Do this and you will be rich indeed.