Remnant Review, Vol. 37, No. 6 (June 19, 2010)
What I am about to reveal, I would not have put into print a decade ago. That was when I first came up with this business idea. Most people could not implement this program even if they wanted to. The fact is, even among specialists, I don't think anybody has come up with the idea.
I presented a preliminary outline of the idea in an article that I posted on Thursday. I will assume that you have already read it, or if you haven't, you will read it now. It has to do with the ability to create effective Yellow Pages ads, and combined them with a website. If I were younger, I would not be sharing this information. I would be implementing this strategy.
It was good that I didn't implement it -- not because it might have failed, but because it might have succeeded. If it had worked for me the way I expect it can work for someone with the right skills, I might have been sidetracked. That can be an irreversible mistake, as I wrote earlier this week.
I don't know why something like this has not been attempted by people who have had some success in direct-response copywriting. There are a lot of people who have read books on direct mail. There are a lot of people who have taken courses on how to write effective advertisements. Yet no one has seen what I have seen.
If you learn how to write a good advertisement, you can take this skill and apply it in many forms. Obviously, the most common form is a direct-mail letter. You can take this strategy and apply it to websites. There are a lot of websites that are essentially one long mail advertising piece. It is an effective way to persuade people to buy.
The other area where the techniques work is in Yellow Pages advertising. Yet very few Yellow Pages ads are ever written by someone who has been trained in direct-response marketing. The ads are cranked out by in-house staff people who were hired by the Yellow Pages companies. These people do not know how to write effective display ads. They are paid simply to crank out ads as fast as possible, so they can meet the demand of local business people who want to have a professionally designed ad in the Yellow Pages.
Local business owners know nothing about designing display advertising. They take the word of the salesman who sells them Yellow Pages advertising space. The ads all look pretty much the same, and that is why they do not work effectively.
Over the last decade, we have seen a transformation in the Yellow
Pages' markets. In the good old days for the Yellow Pages, when
there was no competition from the Internet, there was no
negotiating possible with salesman from the Yellow Pages
companies. It was take it or leave it. But with the rise of rival
Yellow Pages publishers, and with the rise of the Internet, and
with the transformation of web marketing by Google, Yellow Pages
companies are now facing stiff competition. They are no longer in
a position to extract monopoly return from their product. There
are tremendous opportunities for independent advertising
specialist in the field and compete with the Yellow Pages
companies.
The standard rate for advertising companies is 15% of the cost of the display ad. If you create your own advertising agency, you can negotiate with magazines and newspapers directly. You can ask for a 15% discount off the normal price of the ad, because you're an advertising agency. I did this from the beginning of my career in writing display ads to promote one of my books. That was back in 1977. The magazines never argued with my request for the 15% discount. This is how advertising agencies make their money. This saved me tens of thousands of dollars.
The problem with the Yellow Pages was always that there was no discount for advertising agencies to place an ad in the Yellow Pages. So, there is no incentive for advertising agencies to get into this field. This created a monopoly for the in-house ad writers who work for the Yellow Pages companies. It was easy money for the Yellow Pages. It was another aspect of what was effectively a local monopoly. An ad agency had to persuade local business to pay 15% or 12% above the cost of the ad. Very few local businessmen were willing to do this. They did not have enough advertising sense to know a good display ad from a bad one. They figured the people at the Yellow Pages organization knew what they were doing. Those people did indeed know what they were doing: benefiting from a local monopoly.
With the rise of the Web, a new approach to Yellow Pages advertising becomes possible. The Yellow Pages ad becomes a way to attract ad readers to view the company website. A page or even an entire website is created by the advertising agency to work in tandem with a display ad run in the Yellow Pages.
If you look at a Yellow Pages ad, you will find almost no examples of companies that use their websites effectively. They may list the URL of the website, but the display ad itself is not designed to drive people to the website.
The Yellow Pages companies have no incentive to create such an ad. Such an ad would let businessmen know how important it is to create an effective website that sells their products or services. The Yellow Pages company wants the businessmen believe that he is almost completely dependent upon the Yellow Pages ad to draw traffic to the business directly. In any case, the in-house ad writers at the Yellow Pages companies have no experience with website advertising. So, they focus on turning out as many display ads as they can in a short period of time.
This has opened a window of profitability to anyone with skills in direct-response advertising. A person can combine the Yellow Pages ad and an effective webpage as a way to increase sales for local businesses. Businessmen do not know how to do this. Very few advertising agencies know how to do this. The Yellow Pages advertising staff does not know how to do this. So, the person who develops the skills, and who learns how to implement them into separate advertising venues is in a position to create a home business that can produce income over a long period of time. Basically, this is passive income. Passive income is the best kind of all.
I'm going to present a program for developing a home business based on direct-response copywriting techniques. If you have these skills, you are in a position to create your own business that will be very profitable over the long run.
Another advantage is that almost nobody will figure out what you
are doing. This is a classic business that operates under the
radar. If you keep your mouth shut, and you don't tell others
what a great idea it is, and how much money you're making, nobody
is going to find out about. Your clients have no incentive to let
their competitors know about you. Rival advertising agencies
rarely deal with Yellow Pages companies, so they will not find
out about you. I suggest that you not tell a lot of people about
this issue of remnant review.
Your first step is to get a copy of each of the local Yellow Pages in your community. Start with the one that is aimed at the narrowest market. Maybe it will be only your small town, or your side of town. Don't consider a big city Yellow Pages book until after you have developed some skills and have some testimonials.
There are four categories of Yellow Pages ads that should catch your attention initially. These are categories in which it is common for local business to pay for a full-page ad. They are as follows: attorneys, physicians, chiropractors, and dentists. These are professionals. The most successful of them run full-page ads. These are the ads you want to sell.
Yellow Pages companies give first place -- the most desirable positioning -- to the companies that got there first. If a physician bought a full-page ad before any other physician did, his ad is first. The second physician to do so must settle for second place. This is an incentive for businesses that run full-page ads to continue to run full-page ads. If they allow the ad to lapse, the number-two ad becomes the number-one add the next year. If the company running the ad decides to get back in line, it goes to the end of the line, and it stays there. So, once hooked, businesses rarely abandoned their possession. They want to have full-page ads.
This is your targeted audience. The reason for this is clear: the company is unlikely to drop out of the competition. If you can sell the owner of the company on substituting your ad for the existing ad, you will generate a constant stream of income. Every year that the ad runs, the company will pay you your commission. You are the owner of the ad; the company merely leases it from you.
Look at the full-page ads. See how many of these ads promote the corporate website. Most of them probably mention the website, but they do not focus on it. Go to each of the listed websites to see whether a site is an effective sales tool. Most of them will not be. Most of them will be a repetition of the Yellow Pages ad. They will not add any significant information. They will not attempt to generate an e-mail list based on some sort of giveaway. It will be just a passive webpage, comparable to a passive Yellow Pages display ad.
If the first full-page ad in the category is an effective ad, and if the website has an effective website, your target is the second full-page ad. You are looking for a full-page ad that is not an effective ad from the point of view of direct-response copywriting. You are also looking for an ad that does not guide the reader to the website. Any ad that only lists the telephone number, or focuses exclusively on generating a call, is a bad ad. There is a potential market their for a pair of good ads: Yellow Pages and website.
You will be amazed at how poor the ads are. They all look the
same. None of them stands out. None of them has a call to action.
Any ad that does not have a call for action is a poor ad.
Next, decide which category you feel most confident about with respect to your abilities to write an effective ad. Your first test will be an ad designed for a business in this category.
You have to run a test. The test will involve the creation of the website as a backup to the Yellow Pages ad. The site should be more than a backup; it should be the focus of the ad. It should be the heart of the action step.
The action step may be to go to the website. It may be to send an e-mail to receive a free report. That report will be delivered instantaneously by an auto responder system. This will enable the business to develop a clientele. The professional simply assigns one of his secretaries to be in charge of the mailing list. It is simple to run them. There are two major companies that are in the business: Aweber.com and MailChimp.com.
Once you decide which category to select, you will have to begin to design a website. I recommend WordPress. You will be in charge of each website that you create. You have to hold the hammer. If you ever stop getting paid, you simply shut down the website. That will put the person in a bind. He has built up a clientele expects his website to be there, but you are in control of the website. If he ever refuses to pay, you simply put up a message on the website saying that the site is no longer operational.
This puts the businessmen at a distinct disadvantage. He probably will not think of this, unless he is an attorney. He can always create a new ad in the Yellow Pages, with a new website, but people tend to forget to do this in time, and it is not something that can be done easily at the last minute. It takes forethought and confidence for businessmen to go out and find a different web designer who understands direct marketing. There are very few web designers who understand direct marketing.
Create a generic website based on the Yellow Pages ad of the professional you want to sell your services to you. It should not be too specific. It should be based on whatever is in his ad. The idea here is to create and ad that could be used by a different professional, with relatively minor changes.
Your goal for both the website and the YP ad is to get the potential client's attention. Once you have got that, you have him just about hooked. People are very interested in their own names. They are interested in their businesses. They want to talk about their businesses. They want to brag about their businesses.
Your goal is to get an interview with the business owner. In this interview, you will have a sales opportunity. But this sales opportunity will be concealed. Your initial goal is to get in the door in order to work with the individual on designing a better ad for him. This ad will be more personal, more directly related to the owner's interest, and more effective in terms of marketing.
You understand marketing. You must persuade the individual of your skills by means of his interest in his own name and career. This is true of every advertising agency. They have to sell the head of the company, not just whoever is in charge of the advertising budget.
You can get in the door because the individual really does want to talk about his business if he thinks that you can help them improve the response from the Yellow Pages ad. If you have sent him a preliminary YP ad with a link to a preliminary website, you have two hooks in him. You will probably get in the door. You will tell him that you just want to talk in detail about how to make the add more effective. This meeting is free. There is no obligation on his part.
You are doing exactly what he does if he is smart: you offer a free consultation. The free consultation will focus on him, his goals, his dreams, and his pride in his business. The more you talk to that individual about him and his interests, the more likely you are going to persuade him to hire you to restructure his advertising.
He never was approached by somebody in the Yellow Pages department with this kind of an interview. Nobody in that department ever sat down with him to talk about his interests, his goals, and his pride of ownership. The people in the Yellow Pages ad departments do not have time to do that kind of in-depth interview.
Your interview is in effect a sales call. He may recognize this, or he may not. It doesn't matter. If he is smart enough to recognize it, then you can sell them on the idea of getting a new and much larger stream of similar people to come in for their free consultations. If he knows what free consultation do in terms of increased sales, he will not resent the fact that you are in effect using his time to talk about his business in order to generate a sale. In fact, the quicker he understands this, the easier it is going to be for you to create a website and a Yellow Pages ad that gets lots of people in the door for their free consultation.
In the consultation, you talk about him, him, and him. The only
exception to this would be if you talk about her, her, and her.
The two most effective words in advertising are these: you
and free. Your advertising strategy must be based on
these two words.
How should you price your services? The great thing about my strategy is that you know exactly what your services are worth. At the same time, he understands exactly what your services will cost him. You charge somewhere 15% of the cost of running the Yellow Pages ad. You let the local Yellow Pages company test market for you. They have done the work in establishing a price that brings advertisers back year after year, and may even get a few of them to run a larger and more expensive ad. Let them do your work for you. All you have to do is say that you ask only the standard 15% commission that any advertising agency is entitled to in order to stay in business. This is straightforward. It is understandable. You don't look like a hard-ball negotiator. The businessmen must negotiate with the local Yellow Pages company, and the company will get blamed if the negotiations to rigorous.
It will pay you to understand the techniques used by the local company in these negotiations. If you can understand these techniques and find counters to them, you can tell the prospective client that you supply all your clients with guidelines on how to negotiate effectively with the Yellow Pages salesman. This negotiation probably will be worth the first full year of your commissions.
Here is your offer. Tell him that you will finish designing the ad and the website free of charge. You will let him test the response of the ad for a full year. If, at the end of one year, he decides to go back to his old Yellow Pages ad, he owes you nothing. On the other hand, if he decides to renew, he pays you 15% for the previous year. He gets the next year free.
The reason why you want to position it this way is that it looks as though he is always in a position to dump you. This is in fact the case. He is paying only for benefits already received. He is paying retroactively. He is always in the position of thinking of the arrangement as risk-free. In fact, this is the case. He doesn't pay for the next year; he pays only for the previous year. If he renews, you automatically get paid.
The advantage of this system is that you know for sure when someone has not renewed. You can see that he is using your ad. He knows that you will know. What if he doesn't pay? Lo and behold, his website disappears. There is simply a message saying that the website is no longer in service. You hold the hammer. You always want to hold the hammer.
When the Yellow Pages ad is working, and when the business owner fears losing his position, he is going to run another full-page ad next year. The only question is this: Will it be your ad or an ad designed by the in-house Yellow Pages staff? Your goal is to sell the idea of hiring you rather than the in-house staff.
The great thing about this is that the Yellow Pages company does not really care. As long as he renews his full-page ad, it doesn't care who writes the ad. The in-house agency does not get paid each year, so the Yellow Pages company has no incentive to come by and try to get the business owner to drop your ad. The old rule applies: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Your only competition will be from a rival ad agency that decides that it wants to get the business. But it has a problem. Your ad costs the business owner nothing. He is only paying for last year's ad. This year's ad is free of charge until he renews. The rival ad agency has got to come in and convince the guy to switch in the next cycle of the ad. In all likelihood, the company will not do this. It will instead concentrate on one of the other businesses that runs a full-page ad.
This is an advertising market in transition. Yellow Pages revenues are falling. Ad agencies don't want to work in a medium that appears to be contracting. I don't blame them. But you are not an ad agency yet. You are one person with an idea for a home business. If you will spend time in developing the business, you can create an ad agency, but initially your costs are minimal. An existing ad agency has overhead that you don't have. The other agency has to raise money constantly to pay for its overhead. You don't.
Copyright both of the ads. You will then own the Yellow Pages ad, it will say so at the bottom left-hand corner of the ad. You will also control the website. This is basic this arrangement. You must never surrender control of the website. The Yellow Pages company does not surrender control of the book. You must have a comparable hammer.
Once you have the initial design for the website, post it on your own website. You just want a webpage. Do not buy the domain name until after you have the contract signed in your possession.
Next, design the Yellow Pages ad. You ought to be able to do both in about 10 hours. The YP ad doesn't have to be perfect. The ad just has to be creative. It has to direct the reader to the website.
Your angle here is that you are in a position to do what the in-house ad did not do. The individual knows he ought to have a better website, but he doesn't have the information, or the expertise, or the time to get produced. It is on the back burner. Your website will be on his front burner. It is essentially a plug-and-play operation. All he has to do is sign the contract, and his website goes online. This is easy for him. It doesn't cost him anything the first year. Why wouldn't he do this? I know I would do it.
You will have to learn basic design with a simple piece of software. It's a shame that there is no such thing as a simple piece of software. You will have to learn the basics of page layout in a word processing program or other composing software. If you have to hire a college student with this background come in and teach you, so be it. This is part of your startup costs. You do have to learn some basic software. You also have to learn how to use WordPress.
There a couple of ways of generating an interview. One way is to write a letter to the prospective client in which you tell the person that you will work for only one person in his Yellow Pages category. You are presenting him your preliminary sample work. If he turns you down, you will go to one of his rivals. You tell them that you expect one of the people in this category to accept your offer. From that time on, you will work only for that individual. Unless that person cancels his ad, he will retain exclusive right to your services.
The approach here is to appeal to the individual's desire not to be left out. If he doesn't act fast, he will lose the opportunity. You can do ads for everybody in town who runs a full-page ad, but I don't recommend it. It is better to do one page in each category, and then search for clients out of town: a different Yellow Pages. Once you have testimonials from locals about how great your ads are, you can market your services to any Yellow Pages book in the country. For that matter, you can market in any country that speaks English. There is no reason to try to end up living on the income from three or four local people in one category, when there are hundreds of people ready and willing to buy your services and other zip codes.
One man pioneered this approach. He's dead now. His name was Jim Varney. You may not recognize the name, but you probably recognize the name Ernest T. Whorral. Ernest had a friend behind the camera named Vern. Ernest began his ads with the words: "Hey, Vern." With those words, Jim Varney made a fortune. He did ads only for regional clients. He could use the same material over and over in different regions of the country. He would apply the same jokes to different products. He was associated in the minds of viewers with one company. Only if a viewer was in another part of the country, and happened to see one of Varney's ads on a local station, would he have figured out what Varney was doing. Varney parlayed that into a series of low budget, high income movies. He died a multimillionaire.
Your initial one-page letter should tell the business owner that if you don't hear from within one week, the offer for the meeting is canceled. You will then contact one of his competitors. He does not want to lose anything to a competitor. He head. This is another reason why I think the strategy will work. He wants to keep you away from his competitor if he thinks you have the talent to increase the competitor's business. In effect, he really does pay for the benefits that his competitor gains from having hired you. It becomes a zero-sum game in his mind. Every dollar your ad brings in for a competitor is a dollar that he could have brought in. He does not like to think about this.
The advantage of this strategy is that the Yellow Pages already tell you who the heavy hitters are in each field. The heavy hitters are the people who pay for a full-page ad. You don't have to spend a lot of time looking for prospective clients. You can find them in a matter of minutes.
The second thing you have going for you is that these guys do not want to lose their positioning in the Yellow Pages, unless the positioning enables them to move up one page. How can you take advantage of this? You look for the first ad in the list that has a rotten website. You want to be able to increase traffic for the client. You also want to increase the amount of income generated by running the ad. The first guy in the list with a bad website is your most likely candidate. You can do the most for him, and it will cost him a mere 15%. You can solve his ad's weakness. He probably knows he is suffering already. He knows his website is not much good. He doesn't know what to do about it, and he doesn't know enough about display advertising to solve his problem. You can solve his problem.
You know this guy wants to be first in line. He can't get to be first in line, so his strategy has to be to increase the rate of response from those people who actually get to his dad.
If he is six or seven ads deep, you probably cannot help very much. Not enough readers will get to his ad for your techniques to work. That's why you want to start as close to the front of the categories you can.
If the first guy has a good position, but his website is not much good, he is an ideal candidate. You can show them that you can increase his rate of return from the ad, and won't cost him anything to test you for a full year. Yes, he has to take a risk that your ad will do a little better than the existing it. Your website is what will sell him on making the transition. Your website is the sales tool. He wants to get readers to come in the door, and your website will enable him to do this.
Think of yourself as a jockey. You want to ride fastest horse in
the race. The fastest horse in this race is a combination of two
factors: page positioning and website design. He is stuck with
his page positioning, but you can help hi with the website
design. Start with the horse that is fastest. That horse is the
closest to the front. That horse has the inside
track.
Once you get onto this, you can grow the business in one of two ways. You can grow it by taking your success in one category and trying to repeat it in larger cities. You want to be in the largest cities eventually, because that is where the highest rates are charge for full-page ads. You want to be in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and other large American cities. On the other hand, you can test your skills in one of the other categories. ]
Alternatively, you can also try to one client in each of the four categories locally before you move on to the Yellow Pages. This will take longer, but it gives you a secure base.
My strategy would be to pick one category and milk at for all it's worth. I would specialize. On the other hand, if I could hire a copywriter to create a Yellow Pages ad in a website, I might do that. He will know your strategy. He is just a technician who tries to create a good ad. He probably will not imitate which are doing. You certainly won't tell him your strategy. You do not need a skilled copywriter to go into competition against you. Yet, even this is a long shot. What is the likelihood that he's going to go in competition with you in your own town. He will have to test his skills locally. You probably won't not all go to the same cities in the same categories over the next five years. If you can get this business up and running, with passive income increasing year by year, you don't have to worry about competition. Once you've proven yourself to a particular client, he is unlikely ever to switch.
The great advantage of this specialized strategy is that you are not trying to sell an unknown quantity to a person without much money. The Yellow Pages ads and let you judge which businesses in town are willing to spend a lot of money in order to promote themselves. The Yellow Pages let you identify who the heavy hitters are. You don't have to do direct mail. You do personalized mail with stamps on the envelopes. The letters are personally sign with ink of a different color. The person can lick his index finger and white it over your signature. Your signature will smear. That is the test of a personal letter you can do a personal letter, because the entire marketing strategy depends on personal letters. This is why my strategy does not involve telegraphing to other potential competitors what you're doing. They will not hear about this. You will not be renting mailing lists. Word will not get out the disc is successful.
If I were 25 years old, and I had decided not to start a day care, this is the business I would launch. I could do it part time. This is almost a perfect home business, because it does not take an enormous amount of your time to launch it. You are only doing one ad in one website at the time. There is no major capital investment. There is no liability insurance to buy. There's nothing to rent. Well, not quite nothing. You will have to buy an account at host gator or one of the other web host services. You'll have to pay nine dollars a month to rent that space. This is not what I call a killer capital investment.
If this appeals to you, you probably should buy a copy of my report on how to write Yellow Pages advertisements that is very short, and gets right to the point. You will understand more about Yellow Pages after reading that manual than 99% of all business owners understand. You will certainly know more about it than the owners of the businesses that are running full-page ads in your local yellow pages.
You can use Google to search out other reports on Yellow Pages advertising. I suggest you do so. Spend a little money and download material that will give you an enormous damage if you decide to go into this business.
As for website positioning, there's a lot of material on this site that you can access. I suggest that you go to the search engine for the forums and search for the name lancelotfL. Read everything he is posted. Think about his strategy.
However, your goal is not to generate a lot web traffic in a direct manner. Your goal is to use the Yellow Pages and to increase the traffic to the website, which will in turn lead to an expansion of the guys e-mail list. List is where he will be able to keep his people happy.
The big problem with this is that he is not interested in running an e-mail. He will have to train someone on how to do this. This means that you would be wise to create a manual and a YouTube-based series of videos on how to manage a mailing list. You can share that information. Make it proprietary. If people learn from you about how to manage a mailing list, you'll get traffic to whatever site that you operate. Maybe this won't make you any money, but it will certainly enable you to find out if the videos are doing any good. People will write and say that they were helped or not. You can improve the videos because of the response. The videos will add credibility to your initial letter to the business owner. Never hurts to have YouTube videos out there that enable people to find out more about how to improve their businesses
Up finishing up the business of he doesn't know about decent advertising. Go about designing a website. He is losing a lot of money because he is not generating responses from his Yellow Pages and his website.
Think about the amount of money that you're going to be able to generate over 25-year or 30-year period. Each ad becomes a source of revenue, It becomes a stream of income. In this sense, it is like an annuity. You make the initial investment of time, but from that point on, you get an annual payment for the work you did before.
You enter the field in which people do not want to give up advertising. You know that, because you have gone only to people who are already paying for full-page ads. Most people will not drop your ad. The longer the business becomes dependent upon your strategy, the less likely the owner will cancel the service. It is only costing and 15% per year more. He will be afraid to switch his entire advertising strategy for the sake of saving 15% per year. The risk is too high. So, once you have hooked him, he will probably not leave.
There is a problem that you have to factor in. Yellow Pages are declining in terms of revenue generated. The industry is on the defensive. As competition from other advertising outlets increases, the Yellow Pages companies will be forced to charge less for the ads. Because you are taking a percentage of whatever the Yellow Pages ad costs, your income will decline as the Yellow Pages income declines. There is no way around this that I can figure out.
On the other hand, it is a magnificent niche market. It is a market that is untouched by the mainstream advertising industry. They have never gotten involved in Yellow Pages advertising. The commission structure was against them. I don't think it is likely that companies are going to move into this field in t he near future.
Today, there are existing entrepreneurial is companies that do sell Yellow Pages advertising to local businesses. So, it will be difficult to break into a large city. But if you can take Sam Walton's approach, picking small cities and towns where there isn't a lot of interest from existing advertising agencies, then you can gain a nice income. Walton went into small-town America before he attempted to penetrate large cities. He had his income stream very high, and he was able to negotiate discounts from his suppliers. Then he started building in large cities.
Call your local Yellow Pages representative. Ask him what it costs to run a full-page ad locally. Then figure 15% of that as an income stream per full-page ad. You'll find that it's a nice income stream.
You don't have to sell a whole lot of people. You don't have to up-sell anybody. You don't have to tell them that they ought to spend a great deal more money. They're going to spend 15% more, but they will get a really first class website for the money. In effect, the Yellow Pages ad is free. They're paying 15% only to get a good website. They're also paying to get the information they need to make that website pay.
You will own the website. You will also own the ad. As part of
the agreement, you say that a person cannot run your ad without
your being in charge of the website. If he says that's not
agreeable, go to his competitor. Somebody who will accept the
deal. So, he will not be in a position to steal your ad, put a
different website URL in the ad, and quit paying you. First of
all, people who are already visiting the site, who may already be
his clients, will not go to his new website. They will go to his
old website. That is where you will post the notification that
the website is no longer available. He does not want that to
happen. So, once you lock him in, he really will stay. This is
why I like the sales strategy. Your work continues to produce
income for you over long periods of time.
If you decide to pursue this, and if you have gotten the training on this site to do the page layout, you can ask more questions on the business forum. I'll do my best to answer these questions.
I hope one of you is this. Actually, I hope three or four of you will do this. I don't expect as many as 20 people to do it, even though this is an obvious way to generate income, even though it can be done as a home business, and even though it can be done with almost no capital outlay other than time, people don't like to start new projects. They delay. Then they forget. I hope this is not you.
I wrote a short manual on how to create an effective Yellow Pages ad. I have sold only a few dozen copies. This does not interest most people. Yet every business owner with a YP ad should read it. But the old rule holds true: never try to sell someone anything that he is not interested in, even if he really does need what you are selling. Maybe a few of you are now interested in what I am selling. It covers the following:
Putting the 80/20 rule to work
The USP
The headline
The Big "I"
Setting up the phones
How to write an ad that pulls
What not to put up front that everyone puts up front
The missing hook in too many ads
Your logo
How to test your ad
Multi-step ads
The strategic use of a YP ad
The follow-up plan
The care and feeding of data bases
The correct use of a Website
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