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MY NOTE TAKING NERD “Giving You The Edge”

What My Note Taking Nerd Learned From Dan Kennedy’s Back End and Joint Venture Program

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One of the easiest things to backend is more of the same. More tapes, more DVDs etc. One of the things to remember is that different people want things presented in different ways. Some people would rather have a book, some would prefer an audio book, and others want a video. It's a simple VAK distinction, but it's very powerful. If you have products that you only sell in one form, then think about how you could translate them toother media

What flows naturally from that is “advanced more of the same.”One of the tips that Dan gives from an ancient copywriting seminar, is that a very simple way to get more productand sell more to your customers, is that every time you create some new, call it “Volume 1,”because for every group of people who buy volume 1, a certain percentage will come back and also by volume 2

Obviously, what flows from here is to bundle your products together. Have bundles with the three volumes of the product, have other bundles that include all of the video, audio and transcripts of seminars and interviews, and package it and sub package it up so that there are many different ways for people to buy from you. Remember that in every group ofpeople, some will buy everything you're selling, or willbuy the most expensive package. So make sure you have available “The whole package”bundle, selling everything

Any type of continuity program also makes a great backend “___of the month" Any time you canbe charging somebody on a fixed basis is a good thing. It's the perpetual backend

Consider Faith Popcorn’s “box of the month" club. Every month she'll send you a box of crap that she thinks is cool. It comes with a tape or a CD that explains why she sent everything in the box. For example, she might say “this little gadget has been revamped, and now it can do six things, instead of one. What can you do with your product or service to make it do more?" When you're charging $20,000 per year to send out a box of crap, you don't need many to make it well worth your while

A variation of that is the client newsletter. For example, dentists can subscribe to a company that will write a newsletter for their patients every month. Every month they get a hard copy and a disk, so that they canput their name and their picture in, add or edit any of the articles and send it to their list. Dan’s student does a service like this with 200 clients. So he's making $12,000 to $14,000 per month to write an eight page newsletter once a month. When you consider that you could probably pump out a full year's worth of newsletters in a weekend, and that the costs of setting it up are extremely low, you can see what a good business this is. These works so well because you're doing the work for them. Everybody wants to pay to get things done for them. Remember, people are fundamentally lazy

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The truth is that every business should be doing a monthly newsletter, or a periodic and regular mailing to their client base, but most people will never take the time or effort to do this on a consistent basis. These prefab newsletters don't have to be verybig, they can be simple. Exercises of the month, stretches of the month, recipe of the month, etc. So long as you make it easy for people to do this, of course they will pay you to do it for them. The next step is to charge them more and offer to actually mail it for them

Another great back end is so called “dead products”, brought back to life and sold under different packaging, in different combinations or bundles or price points, or maybe compiled with other people's products in a joint venture. As you churnthrough your list, as new customers come in and old ones drop off, then there will be room and a desire from them for you to bring up your old stuff, the stuff you thought wasn't going to make you any more money

As a side note, it would be incredibly easy to find a lot of free content that you could spininto those monthly newsletters. If you're incredibly lazy, you could go to elance and have people write all of the newsletters for you. If you've got a list of people who want something like this, it would be very easy to outsource the actual writing of it, and just market the benefits of the newsletter

Remember that when you do anything in continuity, in other words in the “of the month” variety, you’re automatically creating a backlog of it, which you can sell later on. After a year, you canpackage together the “Complete package of”your of the month program

Also remember that when you're involved in any type of continuity product, that you have to look at renewals as a separate product, or asanother sale. Don't expect that they will renew automatically. You have to market renewing your product, you have to market to them to let them know why it's important that they stay with you. You should look at this as a positive thing, that's another thing that you have to sell

Keep in mind that this is a backend seminar. These tactics won't work nearly so well on the front end, because most of them require a high degree of trust

If you have differing levels of customer relationship or involvement, like Kennedy's Silver, Gold and Platinum levels, then you canstructure some events or sales in such a way that it virtually forces the upgrade, so that they caneffectively go to the event and upgrade for free, because of the price preference given to higherlevel members.

If you do this though, make sure that you do that simple math for your clients. Make sure that you explicitly tell them “Coming to this event will not only get you all the great things from it, but it will also allow you to upgrade for free, which puts you into this category, where you’ll also receive these other benefits… ”

You can use this type of forced upgrade to move people from one level to the next.Why would you want to do that? Because the higher level they are, the more valuable they are to you as a client. Many psychological principles are at work with this, not the least of

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which is the consistency principle. But the main point is that if they've bought enough with you to be in your upper levels, then they will probably be much more responsive to your marketing and offers than somebody who doesn't know you, and who has never bought from you. So you want to make it easy for people to move to those levels

In the year 2000 Kennedy said that it would cost you about $5,000-$10,000 to hire a ghost writer to write a book for you, where all you really do is give them some raw material. Some speech transcripts, some articles that you've written, etc. and worryabout letting them structure at into a book. For a measly $5,000-$10,000 you canvery quickly have a book on the market with your name on it

The more you sell to your own list, the more creative you're forced to become in order to find ways to incite urgency to get them to buy now, which is why Kennedy uses a tiered customer program. So for a lot of things, he will tell everybody “It will be available first to platinum members, then to Gold members, and then finally to Silver members.”By the time you get down to the third or fourth group, there is nothing leftfor them and they’re fighting and trying to cheat to get into the preferred group. This is a good thing, you want to people from the fourth group trying to sneak in, trying to upgrade their membership, fighting for the privilege of giving you money

It's the same principle as an old seminar sales trick, where near the end of your presentation, you “suddenly remember" that you brought boxes of things that you were going to give only to people who bought your product. When you announced this, you find that people will start sneaking to the back of the room to buy your product, so that they can get the widget. So that they can pretend that they've had your product all along when it comes time to hand out the widget. Think about what's going on here: You're giving people a reason to buy now, you are letting them think that they put one over on you, and you are putting a lot of money in your pocket

One of the things that Kennedy is at the end of every year is a recycle of every offer he made throughout the year. He calls it an “end of the year wrap up”and offers them all for sale again, including the ones that were limited edition or that had special restrictions on how you could get them, and he tells people that this is their final chance to get any of this material, and gives them another plausible reason why after this he’s pulling it from the market

If you have any type of information product, the “autographed Christmas special" is a great idea. There is always some percent of your customer base that wants to give away your material as gifts, and for whatever reason they'd like an autographed copy even more. Even if you don't think of yourself as a celebrity, you want to be offering that, because it makes for anadded bonus or a little bit more value to them. Even though it's usually a pain in the ass for you

A very effective structure for selling: “get__________ for $200, or here’s how you cangetfor free, by buying __________ for $500." So you sell the first thing hard, then make them

want it, and then say to them “But you don't have to pay for it, if you buy __________ "

___

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Look into remainder houses, which sell books that have died. Remember, about 95% of books will die within a year, including ones that were bestsellers when they came out, soyou can often go to remainder houses and pick up large quantities of books at 1/10th of the cost. These make great incentives and bonuses, or great things to give away before you even make an offer to highly qualified prospects.

If you run any sort of membership program, then using products from remainder houses is a great way to pad the value of that program. For example, include three new books, that together would retail for $80, that you can get for eight dollars. If your membership program is $100, you tell them “You're getting $80 of books, plus a full years worth of my membership program. It's like getting everything I'm offering you for less than one pizza." Keep notes of any business books that you like, or any books that you like that can relate to what you're selling, and contact some remainder houses to see how many you canget at what price

If your offer isn't converting well, then it's usually anawful idea to try to discount it. Instead, Kennedy recommends upping the ante. Throw in something additional for the same price. It might be some remainder houses products, it might be additional products of yours, it might be credit to use for any of your product or services, it might be a conference call etc..

Obviously when you're sweetening the pot like this, there are two ways to do it:

Only to people who didn't order previously get the bonus material

You always intend to give everybody all of the material, so that they don't feel cheated if they ever compared notes with a late responder. In fact, you can structure this second option in a way that makes it seem like they're being rewarded for their quick action. You might send them a liftnote with the additional material that says “Thanks for ordering before this date!! To show how much we appreciate you, we decided to also send you these unmarketed bonuses"

If you remember nothing else, remember that people want you to do everything for them. They want to sit back and have you hand them money. They want you to come and do it all for them, and make them more money by doing it. So if you can do that, then you're in for a very easy sale

The principal or structure behind selling a complete systems, or “ _ in the box” systems is as follows: Tell them everything they need to do in order to succeed in such detail that they say to themselves what I'llnever do all that. Is there any way that I can pay you to do all of that for me?"

If you can offer them a turnkey system that they pay for on a monthtomonth basis, that makes their lives and their business much easier, then you're in a good position. You want to make yourself a utility, something that's very hard to pull the plug on. You want to make sure that if they do disconnect, they're going to feel the negative effects of that

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right away, and you want them to know that it's relatively easy for them to keep payingyou every month to keep it going

You're usually not the only one selling the ideas or the information that you canprovide, but if you have a turnkey solution, if you have a business in a box, that’s what sets you apartfrom your competition.

When he says turnkey, he's not kidding around. Things like actually printing a newsletter for them with their name on it, and sending it to their client list, so that they don't even have to do the mail merge or stuff the envelopes. Or printing offany of the letters of a marketing campaign, and sending it to their list. The more you do for them, the harder it is for them to stop paying you.

So look into things like creating template recorded messages, so that they don't even have to record their own message. You do the marketing for them, you drive people to a recorded message that you have provided, and they only have to deal with the people that come in and wanting to hand over their money.

An example in the Chiropractic industry is is to have separate recorded messages for different benefits of chiropractic. “Call this number if you want to learn about preventing headaches. Call this number if you want to learn about getting more flexibility for sport. Etc”

Further you contract and telephone numbers of people who are calling in, use that to gettheir addresses, and names, and contact information (which fills your “new prospect” section in the database and opens up the door for all kinds of new direct marketing techniques).

Now, if you're doing all of this for them, and you're giving them a reportof how many clients this is generating or how much money this is generating for them, then they're never going to want to unplug, because they're getting all of this without lifting a finger.

Very tactical note: Consider sending a monthly report, that has “total revenue generated to date”and “total that they’ve paid you”to date, so that they canalways see the sum and the balance of how much extra money they have made using your turnkey system

What Kennedy is really talking about here is franchising other peoples businesses for them. So on a business or business basis, systemize it, then sell those businesses a system that you've created. Kennedy shares Gerber's belief that leftto their own devices, people will fuck up everything. So you have to do everything for them -including telling them how to close the customer once they call in or once they show up with money in their hand.

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If you look at from that perspective, there are allkinds of systems that you can put together, and if they get one client a year from it, then it will likely pay all of your yearly fees

Any time you do an event, any time you do a seminar, etc.. You're going to sell the “______ in a box" program.The seminar in a box. The boot camp in a box. So you'll be

selling people the tapes and videos and the workbooks. There are two ways that you can do this, you can sell them the complete version, which is the unedited version of your whole event, or you can sell them an edited version.

Kennedy recommends an edited version for a number of reasons. The first is that some things that work live, don't translate well to recorded media. More importantly, though, you want to be using these “___in a box”programs to drive sales to your next event, and the way you do that is to include testimonials in your product, to include some footage of people networking and working in groups, and completing exercises together etc. All of the things that the people who are doing it at home can't do. Now, if you are using this to drive sales, you will probably want to credit all or a portion of what they pay for the product to their attendance at the next live event

Also, make sure your segmenting these “___in a box”products. Have just the tapes.Just the videos. Just the workbooks, just the transcripts for sale. Then also have different packages of those things for sale

Kennedy loves sequential marketing, sequenced mail bombs, sequenced mailings and phone calls, and post cards, etc, where each piece of the sequence as a different hook, has a different reason that they need to buy it now. The biggest key with these is to be very clear and very conscientious about tracking in your database when people have bought, so that they don't get the additional marketing in the sequence

A fantastic tactic for bonuses: Have a group of 10 possible bonuses, and tell them that they canpick any three of those ten for free when they buy. You also offer them an upsell to that, where they can get all10 bonuses for just an additional $40 or whatever. About 20% to 30% of the time, people will take the upsell, which is a great source of additional income. But the real genius partof this strategy is that it focuses their attention on what bonuses they want, instead of “should I buy the product or not?”

Remember, that you're always looking for anexcuse to get them to buy, or to make them an offer. Birthdays are a great one. It gives you one more reason to contact them every year. So come up with many reasons to get in touch with them, to create constant contact

When you find your list getting fairly big, you will want to startincorporating list cleansing offers, which means sending them an offer for something where you're practically giving it away, so that the people in that list who have any buying life in them at all will take you up on it, the people who wouldn’t respond to anything you're sending obviously won't respond to this.

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This is a way to help you get rid of the deadwood on your list, to lower your mailing costs. Lean toward the conservative side when deciding whether or not to cleanse the list, it’s better to cleanse it later rather thanearly, because while it costs a little bit to send out each mailing or each communication, if you stop to early you will be leaving a lot of profits on the table.

Also, even when cleansing a list, never completely get rid of the names of the people who have been on your list. Just move them to a different partof the database, where you know you won't be contacting them as often .

Go deep on your tracking data. Track what people are buying from you, when they're buying from you, how much they're spending, the frequency of their spending, what they're responding to, what the not responding to, so that you can create profiles to help you more effectively market to your list.

One grouping you may want to consider is the deadwood list, which hasn’t responded in over a year, then mail an offer just to this dead wood section that would be hard for anybody with a buying pulse to refuse. And if they don't buy, then they go into your full deadwood list, where they may only get one or two offers from you a year, rather than12 or24

Another cool option for your unresponsive list is the socalled “auction letter.”So you send out to them something to the effect of “We give up. We don't know what it will take to get you to buy from us, so we're going to let you tellus how much you're willing to pay for the following:… ”Then describe the items it you're offering them in this manner.

Give them a plausible reason for auctioning in this manner (you’re overstocked or youwanted to be nice to them for some reason etc.) and then use this to track or to cull out the completely nonresponsive buyers.

Kennedy gives an example of a client of his sending out 617 faxes with this offer. It only generated 17 responses, but those 17 responses generated for him a$6,000 profit. Maybe more valuable, he identified the people of those 653 who were still willing to buy, who were willing to respond

If you're having your marketing do double duty -both lead generation and asking for the sale - a good tactic is to only include one response device. They have to check offeither that they want to buy something, or that they want something free on the same form. They have to stare at the evidence of their own stinginess when filling out the response. It's as close as you can come to writing “You’re cheap!" Doing this will often force more buying activity then would be present if you included two separate response forms

There are industries built around package inserts. So for just about anything that's being sent out, you can pay a small amount to have your offer included in with it. There are a lot of benefits to this. Number one, you know that everything you're sending is going to

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a responsive list. You know that it's going to people who are buying through the mail. So even just getting lead generation through this canbe very valuable

The key to a parasite relationship like this is to make it dropdead easy for the host to accept you. Don't make the host do any work, make sure that you're writing the ads, that you're writing the sales copy, that you're creating and designing the insert, that all of the inquiries or responses will come back to you, so that the host isn't handling any of your business. You'll also want to make sure that your guarantee is in line with your hosts guarantee

The most powerful form of this is the endorsed mailing. You will get a great response from this, provided that the person who's endorsing you has a great relationship with their list. Because of the tremendous response that normally occurs from endorsed mailing, just about any deal that you can cut with the person endorsing you is worth it. And remember to make it really easy for them! All they have to do should be to say yes.

So you have to convince them that it's not going to hurttheir relationship with their clients or list, that it will be easy for them, that it will make them money and that theydon't have to do anything to make its money. That's the whole hook of this

Probably the most important part of any joint venture or partnership agreement is the dissolution clauses. How do you get out if you're not happy? How do they get out if they're not happy?

As Kennedy says, it's easier to negotiate a prenup then a divorce. If there is a royalty agreement, a lot of times people will get sick of paying you money on a regular basis, so they'll create a knockoffproduct, or they'll slightly change your copy, or do any number of things where they're still using the system you showed them, using what they learned from you that they weren't doing before, and making a lot of money and try to screw you out of the agreement. So if you have provisions in at the startthat cover this, then you're in a much better place

Make sure you include provisions in your agreement for if they sell the company, if they get locked out, if they bring on another partner. In other words, in case the legal entity that you made a contract with ceases to exist. Number two, spell out exactly what each side is providing in the agreement. Writing copy and writing a contract are very similar -in both you have to be very specific, and in both you have to use language that makes them want to act

More often than not problems in joint ventures come up when either you or they over-estimate the quality of their relationship with their list. If they don't have a good relationship with the list, then there's no point in doing anendorsed mailing. You might as well just get your own list

When you're doing host parasite deals, usually, the money that you can make it is irrelevant. Much more important is the acquisition of a customer. So don't worry about

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the front end profitability. Instead, know that you're acquiring somebody for your list who will be much more valuable to you then just a single sale. So whenever you do a joint venture or a host parasite, make sure that you have a lot of stuffin your pipeline to sell new clients coming in

It's probably very worthwhile to spend some time looking at the public domain material, either to create products or bundles of this public domain material for sale, or to use it as bonuses in what you're selling etc.

On a similar note, there are websites available where you can find copyright and patent holders in just about any categoryyou canthink of. So if you have anidea for a product, you canlook up some patents and see what's already available. Then get in touch with the owner, and try to work out some licensing or distribution agreements

Any time you create a product, or write a sales letter, or come up with a system or process to do something, you have created a licensing opportunity for yourself.So take the time to think about all of the markets, all of the industries, and all of the businesses that might derive value from what you've created and then license your intellectual property to them.

It’s a lot of work to create stuff from scratch, and most people and businesses are willing to pay quite a bit to take shortcuts. One of the most important things to keep in mind as a licensor is offering continuing support for what you've license to them, so whether that's a monthly conference call, or written support, or the ability for them to contact you with questions or concerns, that continuing support is a key element in selling them on the license, and it will allow you to charge higher fees or then otherwise.

For every month that you go without mailing your list, you lose about 5% of the valueof that list. It's so important to keep a relationship going with your list, and it makes them better customers, makes them more likely to buy from you more frequently, and will extend the relationship much further than otherwise. Make sure that at the veryleast you're contacting them on a monthly basis.

Also, make sure that your mailing both pitches and genuinely valuable information to your list. Some of the content that you send them has to be so valuable to them that they can't afford to miss it. This is why, if at all possible, it's still valuable to have a paid monthly newsletter that they're subscribed to. That way, they're paying you to keep in touch with them. They're paying you to do what you should be doing anyway

Your lists appetite to spend will outpace your ability to give them products or services. It's often necessaryto license from others, or to joint venture with others, or use remainder houses, or do endorsed mailings for other people just to keep the people on your list in the habit of buying from you. If you don't do this, you will be losing out on a lot of potential money from the deals, but more importantly, you're going to be losing out on the viability of those customers because they're going to go elsewhere.

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If you can get some inserts into what your mailing to your lists, if you can get people to pay enough so that you've paid for the mailing costs, then you can mail the worst list is in the world and still be profitable. So look for people or businesses that want to pay for advertising for their product or service, and get a couple of these, charging them a little bit each, so that the total pays for the mailing that you're doing. Then any response you get from it has acquired a potential client or customer for no cost

If you are doing industry or business specific trainings or seminars in a city or town, and somebody in the audience expresses concernthat since all of their competitors are in the room, everybody will be doing the same thing, and thus negate the advantage... Then you get to point out to them that almost nobody will actually use what you're teaching, and so if they are the one who actually does use it, they will be the only one or among the only ones doing it. And if by some miracle everybody does use what you're teaching, then you point out that that will have made life much better for their end users, and doesn't that make them happy?

There is no better time to get a good testimonial than at the end of a successful coaching call.

Any time you are giving any sortof a time bound service, like a subscription, make sure you have anoption in there for a much longer time frame than you think they would take. So have options for 6 months, 12 months and 36 months. Also, do your damnedest to get them to sign up for the automatic renewal, because that pretty much means that they'll be with you forever, since most people won't take the time or the effortto cancel.

There is a tradeoff though, between continuity and specified time in newsletters. The people who aren't signed up for automatic renewal have much higher turnover or attrition, and the continuity people will stay with you just about forever. On the other hand, the continuity people are the least responsive to offers, they're the most price sensitive, and they are the least likely to be buying other stuff from you

Having different levels of membership, even in continuity plans, will make it much more valuable to you. One of Kennedy's Gold customers is worth 400% -600% more than his Silver customer, as far as the lifetime value of each goes. So that should be reason enough to have different levels and gradients, and to be upselling people into the higher levels

Notes about newsletter expires:

Most people let them go too easily. Many subscribers can be reactivated and brought back to life with a fairly little marketing effort.

A tactic that Kennedy doesn't recommend, but it does make sense. When people expire, keep sending them the newsletter. Especially if the newsletter is primarily a sales vehicle anyway. You might find that you're generating enough money offof them, even though they're not paying for the newsletter

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Kennedy says that every issue of the newsletter should be selling. Some will sell more heavily than others, but every one should have some sales message.

There are three ways to structure your newsletters. You can have pieces that are pure content, pieces that are pure selling, and pieces that do both. You may want to use any or all of these in your newsletter in differing degrees. For example, you may want to have some straight informational pieces. “Here is what you cando to make more money.” You may want to have some pure pitches “Here’s the seminar were doing next week!” And you may want to do some that combine it. “Here are some lessons that people learned at the last seminar, and by the way, the next one is in ___________________ .”The main idea is that in every newsletter, you have to give people the opportunity to give you their money

It should go without saying what a real newsletter has a much higher perceived value than an electronic one. There are a lot of things that you can do with an actual newsletter, that can't be replicated with their electronic counterparts, such as inserts, including CDs or pictures that fall out when they open it, etc. The biggest thing, though, is that people will always put more value on something they can hold thanin something they're seeing on the computer

Try to have at least one product, or one sampler product, that you can give to others so that they canpad their products and their offerings. So you give them a tape, or a DVD, or a book that they canuse asvalue added bonuses in their packages, that not only fattens up their package, and gets a good relationship with them, so that you can use their material, but most importantly, it exposes your material to people who wouldn't otherwise have it, in a way that it has a high perceived value

The really important thing in this business is to figure out how to be profitable with awfulnumbers. So find the industry average numbers for response rate, or cost of production, and see if you canbe profitable under your model with much worse numbers. If you can't, then you can refine your business model or go into another industry that you canbe profitable in with completely shitty numbers. If you can, then you're set, because in the worst case you're still profitable -in the likely case, you're doing great.

Something like the Million Dollar Rolodex is perfect way to offset the front end costs of products or mailings. You charge businesses to be listed on your preferred vendors list, and give it to all of your clients, and that usually pays for production costs and mailing costs etc, meaning that you get a much higher profit.

Also remember that just because people don't use what you're selling them, doesn't mean that they won't buy from you again. A lot of people will buy without using, or they will buy as occasional users, so make sure you're marketing to these people and catching these names aswell

A great tactic. An insurance advisor used to mail out to a husband, at the startof the month of his wife's birthday, a happy birth note to his wife, so he was giving the husband plenty of notice that it was his wife's birthday coming up. He would do the same thing on

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their wedding anniversary. He would just send a little note a few weeks early, saying “Please give your wife my best wishes on her birthday. I’m sorry I’m mailing so early, but I'm going to be extremely busy and might not get to callon the day of her birthday, so I wanted to do it now, while I remembered.”And similarly with the anniversary. This builds up a lot of reciprocity to you, because you're going to be reminding a lot of forgetful husbands, and pretty much saving their marriage

When you have a big list, you want to think about segmenting in terms of responsiveness. So if you have some hyper responsive members of your list, make sure that your mailing them often, and mailing them quality. Send them your best marketing packages, send them your most expensive stuff, because you know that there are going to justify the cost to you. You know that they're going to respond.

Next are the regular customers, and below them the stubborn or semi regular buyers, and underneath that the dead wood.

You want to mail different segments with different frequency, and with different types of offers. Start keeping track of what people are responding to what offers, at what point, so that you have a better idea of what to mail them, and when to mail them.

If you've had somebody on your list for five years, and they've never done a big event with you, then you know that you either don't send them the marketing for the big event, or you test different types of offers with them, because they won't respond to what everybody else responds to.

If you're running seminars, you want alumni back. Kennedy recommends charging them some nominal percentage of the cost, and potentially giving them free admittance to future events. You should make them pay something for the first time they come back to an event, but then after that, you may want to let them attend following years for free.

You want them there for many reasons, you can point them out as examples, you can bring them up on stage, people will talk to them at breaks and they can talk you up. They'll do the work for you in marketing and selling to people on the breaks, and they'll usually lead the charge to the back of the room to buy stuff. All in all, the costs of putting in one more chair is completely negligible compared to the value that they bring

A very cool idea for the seminar circuit. If you have a number of people at your event and selling products, then make sure your marketing that same material to attendees after the seminar ends. There are a lot of reasons that they may not have bought when they were at the seminar, but they might still want to buy.

Next, use a purchase matrix to track who bought from who. So for example, if Kennedy and Abraham are both speaking, and somebody buys from Kennedy, but not Abraham, then they should get anendorsement from Kennedy talking about how great the Abraham material is, and vice versa. It's a great take on the endorsed mailing concept, and the marketing to your own list concept.

One of the biggest downsides of a“do it for them”is how they evaluate your results. You have to be very clear at the startwhat you’re going to provide, and what increase they should be expecting, because there’s lots of stuffthat you can’t control. EG: If you do a yellow pages ad, their success rate canbe SEVERELY affected by how their receptionist answers the phone. So what you’re going to contract for is “I’ll give you X increase in CALLS, not in conversion.”

If you decide to get into the coaching end of things, one of the big things is telecoaching…Make sure you record those, and get transcripts, because at the end of a 2 year engagement, you’ll have all sorts of material that you canedit and sell to others. You can do a“do it yourself home coaches”where you send the interviews, tapes, transcripts (a la the Abraham transcript consultations). You can rework that content into all types of different products. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got a gold mine to work with that becomes books, special reports, white papers, etc. You’ve got to look at EVERYTHING you do as both “What am I getting out of the current engagement”, but ALSO what you’re getting out of it for future content, future selling opportunities.

On a similar note, interviews with your best clients, people who’re taking what you’re doing and being great successes, is HUGELY motivating to newer clients, people whomay not a lot about what you’re doing, or people who are getting frustrated trying to implement it. So having interviews with your top performers is absolutely crucial.

If you start a coaching thing and somebody drops out of it, there’s a good chance they may feel funny doing business with you afterwards. So what you do is send them a nice letter acknowledging that they dropped out, that you hope they come back at some point (or whatever), and then send them a gift. A product that you have that you use just for this purpose, so they have a good feeling about it, and they don’t’have a problem doing business with you again.

Now, obviously, if you have somebody who signs up and drops out very quickly, this is the type of person that you may not want to do business with anyway, so you can think about culling them from your list. Firing some of your clients canbe a good thing.

One of the guests Kennedy had speaking on the program has a website at 3-steps.comthat might be worth checking out (coaching site)

One of the key factors in direct marketing is the relationship you build with your list. Without a good relationship, you’ll have no money coming in on the backend. Don’t have a“corporate brand”, or have them dealing with different people all the time. Build up a relationship between you and your clients.

If you can’t get at least a 5% response rate to a backend offer to an existing list, then that should set off clanging alarm bells that you don’t have a good enough relationship with your list.