Recently, we came across the story of a woman who contracted Systemic Lupus. Because of her condition, she had to leave her job - she had enjoyed her job, but it had become very difficult for her to get out of the house.

So, she began going online . . . and soon she started setting up some online auctions. What she found was that she could still interact with other people - and make money - over the Internet!

This is one of the most powerful attractions of Internet auctions as a business opportunity - it requires no travel, and you can do it all from the comfort of your own home. You could be sitting at your home desk - or your kitchen table, wherever you have your computer hooked up - sipping a drink and enjoying a snack. All the while, though, you’re plugging product after product into the website for auctioning! This is how you could get rich with Internet auctions - even if you can’t leave your house or don’t want to work!

The woman we mentioned earlier who suffered from Systemic Lupus probably summed it all up the best - “It’s given me contact with the outside world again - It allows me to be connected to society again.”

By doing a little research, you can find out what is, and is not, hot in the direct-response/ mail-order marketing world. Market research is how to dramatically increase the number of inquiries you get in the mail - and make ten times more money!

A market is a group of people that have something in common. Every market can be reached through certain publications, radio stations, television stations, or a myriad of media. There are already people out there reaching each and every market and making money off of these markets.

When it comes to your market, you should research the companies that are serving that market. Find out as much as you can about those companies. Who are they? What kind of ads are they running? What kinds of products and services are they selling? Why are people buying?

Why do you focus on such things? Because, through research, you can learn which companies and ads are winners . . . and then you can model after them!

When it comes to building a business, you want to build it on a strong foundation of proven dynamics that you learn from studying the companies that are making the most money. Then try to come up with something very similar to what they’re doing.

Research is not necessarily a difficult task. It can be as simple as sending away for your competitors’ materials to see how they are generating their leads.

All businesses have some sort of marketing plan that they are putting into effect to find and keep customers. Mail order companies have to run advertisements.

If you can implement in your own marketing techniques those things that are bringing the other companies success, you stand to make more money - potentially up to ten times more!

We became very successful and made our fortune simply because we are very close to our customers. We know our market. Why? Because we were just like our customers. We were customers ourselves before we got into the business. This gave us a very, very powerful advantage when it came time for us to develop a wide range of products and services that would be offered to our prospects and customers.

We advise you to get into a market that you know about, or are involved with. Don’t just jump into a market because you feel that it’s going to be a hot money maker. Look for something you really know something about. Do your research. Then, when it comes time to develop lead generation ads, you have some good solid knowledge of what is going to work the best.

Here are some suggestions that will really help you create your product in one day!

First of all, why not create the ad first? Before you even start on the actual one day product, come up with the sales letter first. If your product was going to be called Seven Ways To Make More Money With Your Web Site, you decide on all of the great things that you would like to have in that product.

Write down a list of bullets and benefits. Then it becomes very easy when you create the product, because you’ll have a list of all of the things you told your customer or your prospect that they were going to be learning.

If you start with the ad first, this powerful principle could help you sell a ton of products. Most people do it the opposite way, starting with the product first, including us most of the time, but we’re making a serious mistake. The times when we have started with the ads first we’ve made a ton of money.

Many times the advertisement or direct mail for these products is more important than the product. You need a good product, don’t get me wrong. Lots of good products don’t sell just because the direct mail or the Internet advertising (now we’re doing more and more of that) is not right. When you start working with the advertising first, you’re just doing the right thing.

You can have all these bullets presenting benefits which are so important. That’s really what sells your product. Ted Nickel has said something at a seminar once that just absolutely knocked my socks off. He said his best selling book has sold about a million copies over the years.

It’s How To Form Your Own Corporation. I think it started at $25 to form your own corporation, 50, 75, maybe it’s higher now, but he started out at very low fees. It’s still cheap, but he added new revisions of the book as the years went on. He said that this manual had about 35 or 40 pages, if I remember correctly, that he wrote and put into the manual itself.

He said he’s written over a hundred thousand words! I don’t know if we want to work that hard. Over a hundred thousand words in sales letters, and in ads for the book. Why has he done that? He said, “Because that is what sells the book, and that’s more important than the book.” That was quite a revelation.

Trading mailing lists with other mail-order companies is how to get some of the greatest mailing lists in the world WITHOUT PAYING A PENNY!

There’s no cost at all, except for the cost of the little computer disk you transfer your list onto. By simply trading these lists with other companies both of you can win.

What makes these lists great? They are the lists of the customers that have already bought at least once from a company that’s in the same market as YOU are! It can become a win-win situation for your company and the company you traded with . . . without spending any real money!

Catalog companies will push your product like crazy because it makes them money. Let’s not forget that this is the main point: When you’re trying to work with a catalog house, that catalog house becomes your customer. You have to show them how you can make them money, because that’s what they are really interested in. That’s what win-win situations are all about.

Many times businesspeople think that business is only a win-lose situation. These people have the wrong idea about capitalism. They think it’s centered around greed and marketers are people who sit around and think up ways to bilk people out of their money.

That’s not true. There is deviousness in good marketing, but it shouldn’t be used for ripping people off. Instead, it’s used to find out what people want. Then the business can develop a way to give the people what they want. Consequently the marketer and his business can make money.

Catalog companies need to turn a profit in order to make money and survive. The people who find products for the catalog companies have the job of making the money for the company. If they can’t do it, then they lose their job.

Therefore, you have to show them that you can give them what they really want. You have to show them how your product can make them money. Give them the reasons they should include your offer in their catalog. Catalog companies are always in search of hot, new products that will make them money, and that’s an important reason why catalog houses will PUSH YOURS LIKE CRAZY!!

Electronic books are generally small software programs that are actually designed to open up a book, or a text file, and display it on the user’s screen on the computer as if it were a book. They can read the text. Some of them actually allow you click on the various programs and it literally flips the page over and you’re on the next page. Others display a book out on the screen, and allow you to just scroll up and down, and then click different chapters and jump to different sections of the book. Many of them allow you to actually offer a book in such a way that it is hyper-linked, much like web sites are, with various references in the book highlighted. People click on it, it jumps to other parts of the book that explain that. It just depends on how complex you want to get.

His particular interest was antique furniture and the Disney collectibles that are so popular. First of all, he sat down and made a list of all the antique furniture dealers that he knew of in Southern California, all the Sunday swap meets, all the specialty dealers and collectors he knew, and over a period of time he visited all those people. He saw what they had, made notes, saw what they specialized in, what items they featured, and the kind of items they bought or received.

Remember, this was an area he was already interested in. And he put all that data into his computer and made a database to start to refer to. Then he started his weekly routine.

Every day, he gets up in the morning, sits down at the computer, and he goes to the auction. He sees, in the category that he is interested in, what people have put up for bid. He makes note of what the items are, and then he looks at his list, and he sees if he has anything like that on his list.

Then, in the afternoon, he goes shopping. He makes the rounds of the stores that he is familiar with, and the dealers, and he looks for the items he has seen placed on the auction sites.

Now, he comes back, enters all this into his computer and keeps track of it. Then, when the auction closes, he knows what the top bidders are, what sold, but more impor-tantly, he knows who the losing bidders were.

Now he contacts by e-mail every one of the losing bidders. He says, “I know you really want this item badly, and I have a similar item for sale. Would you be willing to pay what the top bidder paid for that item?” And time, and time, and time again, they say “absolutely.” He then goes to his dealer, picks up the item, or has it shipped to them.

He works it day in, day out, week in, week out. It has turned into a full time business for him. It has been so profitable, he has quit his professional job and he spends his entire time tracking the bids, going to the shops that he loves to go to, and finding duplicate items, be-cause most of the stuff sold is not rare collec-tibles. Most of the stuff sold on the auctions had many thousands made, and particularly if you’re in a major market like Southern California, you can find those items in stores.

He can find enough similar and duplicate items that he is able to turn it into a full time business. But there is also a bonus because at the same time he is collecting names of people he knows has these particular interests. He knows what they are looking for.

So as he shops, and he comes across these items, he’ll contact previous bidders and say, “I know you bought such and such a lamp. You favor such and such kind of chairs, and I have such and such. What would you be willing to pay for it?”

He plays both ends against the middle, selling to losers in auction bidding.

The reference sections in libraries are the most valuable resource centers ever. This is how to locate very valuable assets that are overlooked by almost every other business!

There are many, many thousands of dollars worth of good contact sources that most people don’t tap into because they don’t know about them.

To locate references on writing, publishing, printing, marketing, and distribution, ask your Reference Librarian to search the card file. If you want to purchase a book that interests you, visit your local bookstore, or write to the publishers for their latest price information.

You have to know what is selling the best in your market right now. What products are making others in the market the most money?

Market research is the key. When you have decided which market you are going to sell to, you should go to a library that carries the publications that cater to your market.

Over the last few years every market imaginable has gained publications that are circulated for and by people immersed in that specific market. This allows you to go directly to the market’s main sources of information - magazines, newsletters, and whatever else caters to the market’s interests - and find out what products are really popular!

How can you find this out? Simple. When you locate these publications, go through back issues as well as current issues. Find out which ads have run for the longest times in these publications. If the ad hadn’t been profitable, the advertiser wouldn’t have kept the ad running.

What are these long running ads selling? What are they promising? What benefits are they offering to give people? If the ad ran for a long time and was profitable, then the product itself was a strong part of the ad’s success. Therefore, you have found a product that the market was very interested in! This is how to pick the books that will make you HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY!

When it comes to writing sales copy such as sales letters and sales letter websites, one of the most important factors you need to remember is that they have to specifically tell your prospects what they need to do in order to obtain your product.

Don’t ever expect customers and prospects to take initiative to think on their own - they won’t. The more your offer requires them to do, the less the chance they’re going to order.

The more work something requires to get done, the more people will want to “put it off for later.” Procrastination is a very strong human trait. And if people can, they’ll put off whatever they can for as long as they can.

Ordering a product is no different. The more work it takes your prospects to figure out your offer and send away for your product, the more likely they’ll be to say, “I’ll do it later.” They’ll go sit it on a shelf somewhere and it won’t get touched again till six months later, when they’ll be cleaning house, and they’ll throw it away.

on’t want this to happen? Then tell prospects specifically about everything you can! Explain your offer! Give them the exact steps of every different way they can order!

Leave no room for your prospects to have to think or work anything out on their own - explain it all to them!

Not being specific is one fatal mistake you must avoid in every sales letter! Don’t commit this marketing “sin!”

You could either work for a small percentage, you could offer to do it for a flat fee if you reach a certain amount and actually achieve your goal. Or, you could even start your auction business, and set yourself up as a specialist in on-line charity auctions and do the first two or three for free to get them under your belt.

Either way, if you are taking a percentage or if you are taking a flat fee over a certain amount, so that you can bring to the charity that you’re not a risk. “There’s no risk involved, why not try it?” And the benefits are many. There is no risk to the institution, and you can literally set yourself up in a business acting as a charity auctioneer.

Before you start thinking that it is wrong to charge charities to raise money for them, realize there are many professionals out there who make a very handsome full time living arranging charity events and taking their fees. It is a very normal thing.

You’re not going to be asking for money from the poor, or anything like that. In fact, you could be helping raise money for the poor and making money at the same time. Who can think of a better situation? Helping a favorite charity, making money, and being able to do it quickly in a short amount of time.

The key is self-interest. It is a powerful motivating factor. People want to know how your product or service will improve their life, and if that improvement is worth your asking price. If they feel that the benefits are worth what you’re asking, they will buy it.

Let your customers know the benefits of your product. This is how to make your customers happy.

You can’t forget this. Many advertisers forget that they need to make the customer see how much better things would be with a certain product or service. If a customer is going to give you their money, they want to be pampered, pleased, and treated like kings and queens.

Back-end offers are business survival insurance. Back-end sales give you all the "Business Survival Insurance" you need to make sure that your business never fails.

When you think of backend business, think of an insurance policy. What is an insurance policy supposed to do for you? It’s supposed to protect you. It’s something you can count on. Like insurance, when a disaster strikes, you are protected.

Backend sales work like that. Yes, you always have to replenish your customer base by attracting new customers. There’s no doubt about it. If it’s not an ongoing operation, you are going to end up in trouble. But you also have to attract new customers. Then it’s the backend that will bring you the most profit.

It is good business to offer a product on the backend. Having a variety of products to sell is the only way to maximize profits. A hardware store that offered bolts, but not washers and nuts, would be, pardon the pun, Nuts!

Once a person "raises their hand" and shows their interest, you have to try to resell to them again and again and again. You can maximize those profits because you have more products to sell on the backend. In short, you have more than one hook out there waiting to "catch the fish!"

Recently we went onto one of the larger Internet Auction sites and we found some very high-priced items. Some of them could be very easily shipped at very low-cost rates.

For example, there were two rare books on that auction that were selling for $6,600, and those two rare books had seventeen bids. That would be very easy to ship!

There was a 1901 coin - again, easy to ship, selling for $7,900.

There was a 1940 Batman comic that had twenty-seven bids, and the highest bid was $10,000. Again, very easy to ship. But, there are also some high-priced items that have no shipping - yes, you read correctly, absolutely no shipping!

There was one item that was ten acres of land in Colorado. You don’t have to ship it, it stays in Colorado! There were forty-four bids, and the top bid was $5,000. Someone in Hawaii was selling a whole acre lot. They were getting $7,000. One gentleman even had a retirement home that he was selling. He had five bids, and the winning bid, if we remember correctly, was $66,000.

No shipping. It stays right where it is. You don’t even have to own this stuff! You can broker this stuff. You can find these deals, put them on the sites, and work out a deal to make a commission or percentage of what it’s sold for - say, take 10% of everything that sold. This is the secret to making the most cash with luxury items that you don’t even own!

There was a person that had a luxury yacht on the Internet Auction. Let’s say you found this person with this luxury yacht. This yacht is actually in Canada, and they say that if you want it, even if you have the winning bid, you pay for shipping. The boat is so large it actually has to be loaded by crane onto a truck and driven to wherever you want to sail it.

You would think this is something that no one’s going to bid on, or very few people are going to bid on it, right? Well, fifty-three people bid on this luxury yacht, and the price on it was $64,000. So, you can sell very, very high-priced things, get a lot of people bidding on it - and let’s say you just got 10% of that. That’s $6,400 you earned just by hooking up somebody that owned a luxury yacht who wanted to get rid of it and some crazy person that had $64,000 who didn’t mind shipping it across America.

In this article, I am going to cover a fast, simple, and fun way to explode your profits, make your customers as happy as clams, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Before I give you this secret, I am going to tell you where it came from. Lawrence Payback Wrote a book called, “How To Fatten Your Wallet In No Time Flat!” and he calls this secret “TPS.” It is a very powerful secret. TPS stands for, “Tell a Passionate Story.”

People are bombarded by the same old offers again and again, and as more people get onto the Internet and start sending out e-zines and e-mail, the same old offers just keep hitting them over, and over, and over again. It is the same boring old stuff!

People want something that energizes them, entertains them, gets them to purchase, and tells a passionate story. If you can do this in your e-mail marketing, you’re going to set yourself apart from the rest of the profit pack.

I want to give you a very brief, very vibrant example of someone using this. There was a gentleman that had a web site. He is a great marketer and he always tells a passionate story. Instead of just telling people that he was going to give them a discount, he would tell them why he was going to give them a discount.

He had flooding in his office once. So he was having to liquidate some of his assets. Any time something happened to him, he would make a special offer, tie the story in, and tell it in such a way that people got caught up in it and wanted to purchase.

One time he was actually going to take a break. He was going to take a vacation from his Internet business, and he was going to go to the Bahamas and take a short cruise. He was just going to take the time off. Then he realized this was a great way to market more products.

When he got to the airport, he typed up a little e-mail and he had it sent out to his whole list of customers saying, “This is my special offer from the airport.” Then he explained where he was sitting and the people walking around. He just had this great idea as he was sitting there waiting for his plane, to give them a special offer since he was going to be gone and they probably wouldn’t be hearing from him much.

He made a special offer. Tied in with that passionate story, people thought it was funny. They thought it was great that he was writing to them from the airport, so a lot of people responded. It worked so well that on the plane he wrote another e-mail, thousands and thousands of feet above the Earth. He sent it out after he got to his destination, which was the Bahamas. Then he took his little lap top out on the beach and created another sales message. Then when they finally got on their cruise he created another sales message from the boat.

Every single time he would write a new e-mail marketing message he would describe where he was, why he decided to give them a special discount, what the motivation was for doing it, and tell about some of the fun things that were happening to them. It would really get people pumped up and excited!

I got all these e-mails and I was excited about it, too! In fact, it got me to purchase, and I had never purchased from this guy before. When he got back, I actually had a chance to call him and talk to him. He said, “It was the best vacation ever because he really got to take a lot of the time off.” It only took him a few moments to write up these e-mail sales messages, but he made more money in that two week vacation than he usually made in two full months with his web site because he told a passionate story.

It really is a very powerful way to get people involved in your marketing methods. If people are getting 20, 30, 50 e-zines a month and they’re getting all these e-mail marketing messages, you have to do something to make yourself stand apart so you’ll have their attention. The best way that I know to do that is to also tell a passionate story.

Give people a reason to buy. Tell them why. Give them a reason why you are giving them a discount. If you tell a passionate story, you’re going to be ahead of a lot of people in the game who are just doing the same old thing, boring their customers to death, and losing money while they’re doing it.

We noticed a few years back that a number of mail order companies started adding a fee if you order by credit card. They started saying, “Please add 5% for MasterCard and Visa orders.” This is small thinking.

They were thinking “I’ve got to recoup these costs,” because quite frankly, there are fees that come out of the money that you get by credit card that handle the processing and charge fees.

MasterCard and Visa put a stop to that quickly. They put out a ruling that you could lose your credit card merchant status if you add a fee. They didn’t want in any way, shape, or form any implication that there is a discount for not using their cards. That’s the kind of effect it had on credit card usage, and they knew it.

You have to think very carefully through how adding postage, and shipping & handling, and taxes and everything is going to affect your sales. Isn’t it better to get more sales and maybe come up with the $7.85 it costs you to ship it? Just add it to the cost of your product.

You add $3.00 or $4.00, or split the difference with the customer. Or just build it into the price to begin with. And then add to the offer, “Respond in the next ten days and save all of the postage and shipping.”

You’re looking out for your customer, and you are thinking of them, and trying to make the purchase to their advantage.

There are a lot of these home-based business books, and Internet marketing books that are 500-600 pages. All they talk about is the minutia - all the little teeny, tiny things you have to think about.

If you want excuses, pick up one of those books and you’ll have an excuse to never ever get started. The secret is putting those things away, taking action, getting started, and worrying about the minutia later, or maybe hiring someone to deal with it later.

The secret is . . . catalog houses desperately need new products to survive!

Catalog houses do all of the selling, hustling, printing, postage, advertising . . . they do it all. But they have to have new items coming in constantly. People want new things, and catalog houses know this. They have to stay caught up with the times and the trends.

Hence, they are always willing to get new items, and if you are able to show them that your product is either in demand or has a lot of potential, you will stand a great chance of getting it into their catalog!

Catalog houses depend on new products to survive. If you have confidence in your product, then be persistent, and convince them that people want your product. So why shouldn’t they?

We realize that many of you will be apprehensive when it comes to the idea of trying to get a catalog house to carry your product or service. But the bottom line is it’s a solid opportunity. You can’t waste their time with product ideas that won’t work in their catalog. You have to be professional.

The business is there, and the ideas we have given really work. We know. We’ve used them successfully ourselves. And you very well could do it too!

For a long time we were so scared that this was going to hurt our business. Initially we believed in detrimental competition, and then for years we held back our best customers. We would rent all of our customer names out month after month, quarter after quarter, but not our best customers because we still said we weren’t going to give those away. But now we even rent our best customer names out. It hasn’t hurt our business one single bit. People still feel a relationship towards us, and they are still very responsive to our offers.

The most successful people we’ve seen on the Internet or regular mail order are those people who cooperated or made things available to others and then shared with others - but also they were shared with.

The people who are the most unsuccessful that we’ve met over the years, especially mail order, are those people who don’t want to share anything, and are so afraid of competition. It’s almost like that Biblical story of the talents, where one person was so afraid he might even lose what he had that he buried it. The other people multiplied their money.

Of course, the Lord had some pretty bad things to say about the person who was so afraid of losing that he did not compete, but he just buried the talents. So I think that we can learn from the Biblical story that we’re supposed to share and we’re not supposed to just hoard. It’s a hoarding mentality that says, “I don’t want to help anybody else,” or “I don’t want to share with anybody else, because I’m afraid they might take from me.”

People need to stop thinking of competition as a negative. A lot of people use competition as their excuse for never getting started. “Well, there’s competition, I can never make it, so I’ll just never even get started.”

Other companies look at competition as a positive thing – there’s a company out there already, how do we compete with them? How do we make our products better? How do we compete with price? How do we compete with service? They look at it as a positive, find out what their competition is doing, and they try to give more to their customers.

That’s really what America was built upon – competition. It makes companies better. It makes them perform better. It makes our products better. So don’t look at it as a negative and something to be worried about. Look at it as something that is positive and can help your web site, and your products, and your pricing, and everything better.

If a catalog house is interested in your product, they will mail you a "product data form" for you to complete and send back. Here are 14 things a catalog house needs to sell your product nationwide.

The data form will ask about:

1. Your name, address, and telephone number.
2. A description of your product.
3. Materials that are used in your product.
4. Colors, sizes, and applicable instructions.
5. Cost per item to catalog house.
6. Suggested mail-order retail price.
7. Length of price protection (six months, 12 months, etc.).
8. F.O.B. point, and shipping terms.
9. Shipping location.
10. Packing and weight per carton.
11. Time required to ship an order.
12. Warranty regarding defective products.
13. Ad copy selling features.
14. Samples.