I live in Texas in the scenic hill country. I am married to Michelle, who is the absolute love of my life. Michelle is my best friend in the whole world. I can’t imagine my life without her. The other two loves of my life are my daughters, Ashley and Audrey. I have to admit, I was never much of a "kid person" before we had our children. But man, have they changed my life! I look forward to every moment I get to spend with them. They are both such incredible little people. The bond I have with them is something I could have never imagined. I feel so fortunate to have this business, which allows me to spend so much time with them. How Michelle and I met Michelle and I met in college, at Texas A&M University (gig'em Aggies), and have been attached at the hip
ever since. I know that sounds lame, but hey, it's the truth. We are both diehard Aggie football fans. We have season tickets to all the home games, and try to never
miss a game. Nevertheless, I still have many Longhorn (University of Texas) friends. So, don’t hold it against me if you are a fan of
the Longhorns. I am also a fan of the Green Bay Packers. It is a kind of a long story of how I became a Packers fan while growing up in Texas. But I will just say that the two teams that I always root for, no matter who they are playing, are the Aggies and the Packers! I have been doing this since 1995 I have been a full-time direct response marketer since 1995. After I left my job that year, I have been very fortunate to have never worked for someone else again. And I have achieved, what I would consider to be, a very high level of success over the years. In fact, I have been extremely proud of everything I have been able to accomplish over the past decade plus. My business had always been primarily an offline direct response business, at least until the past several years. Heck, when I started dabbling in direct response marketing around 1994, not too long after I graduated from college, I barely even knew what the Internet was. So I started reading books from all the offline gurus of that time. Here is exactly how I got started… After graduating from college, I worked at two different banks and my final job was to sell radio advertising. I had always had different jobs while growing up, but it wasn’t until I got in the “real world” that I realized just how much I did not want to work for someone else for the rest of my life. I have nothing against anyone that chooses to work for someone else all his or her life. My father did it. His father did it. And so on. But I just knew, for whatever reason, that it was not for me. And after I came to this realization, it made my job that much more unbearable to go to each day. I knew I had to do something different.
Late one night I was watching an infomercial where they talked about placing small classified ads and selling information products. I have to admit, I had never even considered earning a living like this. But I was definitely intrigued. So I whipped out my credit card and ordered the package. Now, I am not going to tell you some B.S. story about how I bought the package, and became rich overnight. But it was my first introduction to the idea of running my own mail order business. And it started the ball rolling for me to go out and look for books from “gurus” that I learned from too. I made a HUGE discovery... The very first product that I began selling was not even my own. It was a book I found through a wholesaler that taught some of the secrets to getting free and low cost travel all over the world. It was a great book, but my marketing skills at that time were horrible. I kept placing ads and kept losing money. That is when I realized the importance of copywriting. Believe it or not, great copy is even more important in the offline world than it is in the online world. I see websites all the time that have horribly written ad copy, but are still able to generate a fairly decent amount of sales because they do so many other things well. However, in the offline world, your ad copy must be good, or you can forget it. So, I became a student of copywriting. I read every book I could find on copywriting. I will just stop and tell you a little hint - just in case you don’t know this yet. Approximately 70-80% of the effectiveness of your sales letter is determined by your headline. This applies to both offline and online marketing, at least from my experience. So if you are not a copywriting expert, and do not have the funds to hire a good copywriter, then test, test, test, and test again your headline. While this will not guarantee that sales copy will be effective, remember 20-30% goes beyond the headline, it will at least give you a good fighting chance. In addition to headlines, I also learned about bullet points, subheads, subtitles, how to connect with your readers, when and when not to use white space, proper layout and flow, different writing styles, the necessary components of a direct mail package, and a lot more. And let me tell you that learning some of the basic secrets to copywriting made a HUGE difference. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I still do not consider myself a master copywriter, by any means. In fact, I hate writing copy. And more often than not, today, I will hire a good copywriter. But good copywriters are not cheap. And when you are first starting out, copywriting can be a very important skill to learn. I know I got a little off track there. So lets get back on the road… Once I had sharpened my copywriting skills to acceptable level, I applied them to my travel guide. Sales began to rise almost instantly. At this point my business was finally starting to turn a decent profit. About this time is when I realized that I needed to have my own product. It is very hard to make a lot of money on the front-end if you are not able to mark up your information product at least 8 times what it costs you to buy/produce it. It is difficult to purchase an info product for eight times less than you are able to sell it for. Therefore, to achieve these types of mark-ups, in most cases you need to create your own product. So that is what I set out to do. What I needed to do Although the travel guide was a solid seller for me, I was not an expert on travel. So, I really did not have an interest, or a passion, for writing my own guide on travel. But what I had become really good at was researching home businesses. I mean for a large part of the mid 90’s I purchased well over a hundred different info products and “turn key” home businesses. Some cost as little as ten or twenty bucks, others cost several hundred dollars, and a handful cost into the thousands. And this does not even include all the hundreds of other home businesses that I just “researched” information about. I was a “home biz junkie”. Plain and simple. But my junkie habits were about to pay off for me very nicely. One day it hit me like a like a ton of bricks. My first self-published book should be a home business directory. I could just share my experiences with all these different companies in my quest. This was WELL before Google existed Keep in mind, this was a time before Google came into play. And the search engines that were in existence offered no where near the abundance of “information at your fingertips” they do today. Therefore, it turned out to be a great product idea, especially for that period of time. Combined with my new copywriting skills (at least acceptable skills), my product was a run away success. In a short period of time, I sold over 1,000 copies of this book at $20-30 a piece. And this home business directory continued to be a great seller for me for over 5 years. But the best part was that I knew I was on to something big… Over the next several years, I wrote and self-published numerous other books. Several of which were much bigger sellers than even my home business directory. I wrote a guide on offline affiliate marketing strategies. I wrote several other ones on direct mail strategies, techniques, and game plans. I wrote several more on the proper way to merge a network marketing program with an offline mail order campaign (since I had become involved in several networking companies during that time period). I wrote another info product on the proper way to use inquiry leads as a secondary source of income. This product was a solid seller. But I had a BIG catastrophe with it. It could have destroyed my business. I will tell you about this a little later. I also had a few other marketing books I wrote that were not as big sellers. In addition to this, I also sold mailing lists, reprint rights books on disk, printing services (all of which I contracted out), and nutritional supplements. Plus, I also sold numerous other marketing, self-help, and business strategy books, tapes and CD/DVDs on the backend from OTHER authors. I realized early in my business that I needed to have my own products on the front end to make my campaign cost effective. But on the backend, I could offer tons of different products as “ride along” offers when I fulfilled the original order. This was essentially like “free money”, since the markup with these products did not need to be nearly as high as it did on the front end. So I built relationships with some wholesalers and began including individual offers, and catalogs, for other people’s products. Little did I know, my biggest success was yet to come… Up until this point, my primary advertising medium had been classified and small display ads in magazines and newspapers. This worked fine. But the problem was that classified ads and small display ads were not large enough to allow me to put enough information in the ad to sell my product directly. I needed to use a two-step approach. With a two-step approach, the interested person either writes to you for additional information or leaves their name and mailing address on a voice mail or live answer line so you can send your info packet to them. This works well. However, it is extremely time consuming to send out thousands of information packets each week. Of course, you can include your web address (as we did) in your advertisements, which will cut down on the number of info packets you have to mail out. But not everyone will go to the website. Some people will still prefer to get the information via mail. You can also hire a fulfillment company to send out your information packets for you. And you can hire a company that will either transcribe your voice mail requests, or use a live operator to enter each person’s name and address into a computer database. These methods work very well, too. But they all cut into your profits. This is when my profits skyrocketed... It was not until I discovered how to use direct mail effectively that my profits went through the roof. I have also had pretty decent success with full-page ads, as well as card decks. Both of these work like direct mail, in many ways. At least in the sense that they allow for a one-step process, which can ramp up your earnings quick. But direct mail was my preference when it came to offline advertising. Direct mail, when done correctly, can be like turning on a facet of revenue. The key is that it MUST be done correctly. If not, you can lose your shirt, quick. It is because of this that I was afraid to try direct mail on a large scale for years. But finally I got enough courage to really give it a try. I quickly discovered... The key to making direct mail work was to test, test, test, and then test some more. Test your: headlines, subheads, body copy, paper colors, ink colors, envelope color, envelope size, envelope teaser copy, postage type (bulk, first class, first class presort), price, package contents (sales letter, order form, coupon), upsell offers, bonuses, rush delivery options, ordering choices (fax, mail-in, Internet, live order, voice mail), toll-free vs. toll number, and DEFINITELY test your mailing lists. Code each of your mailing lists differently. So you can know which lists are performing, and which ones you should dump. These are the things that you MUST do correctly in order to succeed at direct mail. Think about it. If you are sending out 100,000 mail pieces at one time (I would often send out more than this in a single month), your testing must be near perfected, or you stand to lose a bundle. Including the cost of your mailing list, outer envelope, reply envelope, sales letter, order form, brochure/coupon, list purge, bulk postage (first class will cost more), postage application, mailing label application/imprint… Consider yourself lucky if you can keep your costs around 50 cents per mailing piece. On a 100,000-piece mailing, this comes out to a cost of around $50,000. In other words, if you don’t have your mailing piece properly tested, you can lose $50,000, or a lot more! This is the reason so many people are scared of using direct mail, and rightfully so. The LIFE-TIME marketing lessons I learned... By finding a way to make direct work for me, in a really BIG way, it taught me several big lessons that I now apply to my ONLINE business… 1. Test, Test, Test. It blows me away how many people and companies launch websites, and then change little or nothing on the site, ever. This is what I call the “Launch Syndrome”. They come out which a new product and do a big launch. They get affiliates promoting the site, big-time, on launch day. And then several weeks later, you never hear anything about the site again. The Alexa ranking plummets. And the site is lucky to have a handful of sales from there on out trickle in each month. Why do these sites plummet? Do the products they are offering suck? Not necessarily. Some of the sites I have seen launched over the past several years have offered awesome products. But yet, you rarely see them promoted anymore. The two biggest reasons for this are… REASON #1: Not improving the website. I see websites all the time that change very little, if any, from when they are launched. Even if a website owner hires the best copywriter in the world, rarely is the copy perfect and cannot be improved upon. You can also improve the conversions of a website just by changing the layout, price, colors, order process, upsell offers. Sometimes, just shifting the same copy around to different areas of the site, or converting some of the printed text to audio or video can make a big difference. But the only way to find out these things is to test them, after the site is launched. REASON #2: Not updating the product. Depending on the product you offer, it may get outdated as time goes by. Or, in the case of a technology related product, it may not be as competitive in the marketplace compared to similar products. So, just update it periodically. It is much easier to improve the website or to update your product than it is to constantly launch new products. With just a small handful of products, you can earn more than many of the people who are always scrambling to launch a new product every couple of months. Don’t get me wrong. I am a HUGE fan of product launches. When properly executed, a launch can be “poetry in motion”. But, unless you are offering a limited-time product, your site should be able to generate a consistent income for you, month after month, when the initial launch period is over. If you are just starting your business on the Internet, You have options available to you today that were merely a “pipe dream” not-so-long ago. You can test and track website results in hours, instead of weeks or months. And you can test everything on your web page to see what is producing the best results for you. Take advantage of this… The free Google Analytics and Website Optimizer are available to all Google users. Use these, or use paid tracking software. But use something. Although it wasn’t actually that long ago. Back when I started my business, I would have never dreamed in my wildest imagination that tools like this would one day be available. I tell people all the time… If I had started my business about 5 years after I did, I would have most likely never started in the offline world. I would have gone directly to the Internet. But at the time, the Internet was just starting to get rolling. It was no where near as powerful as it is today. So I entered the offline world. Today... I am primarily an Internet Marketer. And I advise you to do the same thing. Grab hold of the Internet, and get ready for an amazing journey! Times have changed. Direct mail was an amazing tool for me, for many years. But, at least in its original form, it is becoming more and more of a dinosaur with each passing year. There are still very effective ways to use direct mail today. Such as taking your customers that you generated online, and then marketing to them offline for certain offers. This can be a very powerful marketing method. Especially for high ticket, or recurring billing products. But the original form of direct mail… where you purchase name lists and cold mail to prospects you have no previous relationship with. This is not the most effective method for most businesses. Sure, there are exceptions to this… Such as credit card companies (as seen by the number of credit card applications that still arrive by mail). As well as local merchants who advertise in their local area. However, for the vast majority of small and medium size business owners, mastering the skills of the Internet is the best thing you can do for your business. And that brings me to the point of this website… I put this website together because I wanted to share with you what I am doing related to Internet Marketing. New discoveries I make. Strategies that I feel will benefit your business. Product reviews. Interviews with other top marketing experts. Basically, anything I feel you can benefit from, related to Internet Marketing, I will introduce on this website. I try to follow this famous quote below in everything I do in life, and in my business… "You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." - Zig Ziglar I cannot even begin to describe how powerful this statement is, and how well it works. Ever since I adopted this philosophy, I became a MUCH more successful person. If you do not currently have this philosophy, I highly encourage you to adopt it. You will get more out of ALL areas of your life. And you will be a lot happier person. In closing, I would like to say… “Go for your goals, and live your dreams”. And if I can play a part in that, I would be honored to help you.
All my very best, P.S. - If you have not done so already… Be sure to join my email list at www.ResultsMarketer.com . There will be free information, webinars, audio clips, videos, and more, I will send out from time to time to those people on my list, which will not be available to anyone else.
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