Vendio Free Store Offer

Vendio is offering a free online store as described in our previous article/Review on the All Business Auctions Blog:

Vendio Platform Review

Does anyone have a follow up on this service and the effectiveness of the free ecommerce store Vendio is offering to the public?

If you do, please chime in here on the TAJ Forum with your thoughts!

Thanks!

Scott

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It is no secret… I love Wordpress  as a Content Management System and I am an evangelist when it comes to discussing  the possibilities this CMS offers small business owners for website development .  The shear magnitude and the purity of this web publishing systems capabilities and simplicity is absolutely mind boggling to me… Yet there is a hitch…

What is the Hitch? The Catch? The Red Herring?

Whats the Red Herring?

The catch is that if the Content Management System has no content, it still will work better than a html hand coded site, but not a lot better.

I have been bumping into this situation with my clients (and even sometimes with myself) for some time now.  The “Build it and they will come” mentality just does not wash in this world of search engines and instant information.

A website is judged, not so much on what you have done, but what have you done lately?  This applies to all websites, no matter the publishing system they use, if there is no recent content, then there are no recent visits from the nifty search engine spiders or bots.

Build it – is where it all starts…

This lesson became clear to me a long time ago but more recently a situation with a family member clarified my thoughts leading to this article.

My Brother

My Brother is a Fancy Yacht Air Conditioning Man!

My brother Steve is a tradesman, he has worked with his hands all of his life.  He is also a specialist and he has a niche like no other to specialize in, Marine Air Conditioning on Yachts.

Steve has worked on installing and maintaining sea going marine refrigeration and air conditioning for the last 25 years. He owns his own business – Cooler Marine Air in St Peterburg, Florida and although he is a small operation his clients are loyal and varied.

Steve has been flown as far away as the Caribbean and Mexico to repair cooling systems on large yachts and he has consulted with manufacturers of the air conditioning and builders of the finest yachts to share with them his experience and his knowledge about what really works in the field.

Steve Pooler can teach both the theory and practical applications of all sorts of marine refrigeration and air conditioning installations, troubleshooting and repair.

So… the guy is good, and that’s not just cause he is my brother! He has fans all over the country in this niche and he deserves to be recognized for his very specific skill set and experience…

Boing! His brother (me) decides he should have a website…

Last winter (the slow time for any kind of marine AC work) I decided I would build my brother a website.  I knew that if he shared just a small piece of what he knows on the Internet that he could develop an audience of fans which could then be converted into paying customers. So, with very little fanfare I set up marine-ac.com for my brother Steve in October 2008.

Marine-AC.com (My Brothers Website)

To be honest, I don’t think Steve was really sold on the idea of having a website.  He just did not see the real possibilities or capabilities even though he is a fairly Internet savvy individual.  With this in mind, I did not go hog wild on the site design (using an image, taken with an iPhone, of a yacht Steve was currently working on as the basis for a vary basic header) and setting up just the basic plugins and settings for Wordpress.

I showed my brother how to post an article, how to insert images and how to add keywords, tags and categories.  I then explained how he should write a short article 2 – 3 times a week, just covering what he does, what problems and solutions he comes across or whatever piece of equipment he happen to work on that day.  I explained that it is not rocket science and that he did not have to be Ernest Hemingway to add content to his own website.  Just 200 – 700 words is all he would need per article, that’s it, a few pictures from the iPhone and he would be set.

(This article is currently at 646 words)

As with all new website owners, Steve became animated somewhat and actually wrote a few articles.  He did what a lot of us do and he wrote long articles.  Articles that I mentioned could be separated into a series and kept in smaller bite sized chunks for the readers. Since my brother has an (unfamiliar to me) stubborn streak, he failed to listen to my advice (I can’t imagine where that stubbornness came from) – Steve liked his long articles, but writing them would take up and entire day of his time because he would write and edit and write and edit and then he would edit some more.  We all do it, its natural, we want to be Hemingway when in fact we are just people sharing simple knowledge about our specific niche subjects…

Once Steve had published two or three articles, and he saw that those articles were being found in search and people were coming to his website to read them… He became much more excited and animated about the prospect of being an Internet ready business.  Steve was becoming Web 2.0 even if he did not really know what that was… It did not matter a hoot really, because he was helping himself and his business by becoming an expert online and by increasing the confidence of his audience in his abilities and knowledge.

No Matter Who You are…

I don't Care Who You Are...

No matter how accomplished you are, no matter how many people know your name at the store or on the docks or at the club… The shear numbers of people who can be exposed to you and your expertise online with just one good article published on your own website, will dwarf amount of handshakes you can make in a lifetime.

Steve found that out…

He suddenly got calls from people he would never have expected to hear from. Manufacturers of pumps wanting to exchange links, people asking for advise, old customers saying hello.  It was exciting.

Then Steve hit on an idea… Since it was the slow winter months (A time notorious for not producing much in the way of sales or service in his field here in Florida), Steve thought he would write an article which would detail why the winter was a great time to get the service done on the air conditioning and refrigeration in yachts precisely because it was a slow time for marine ac repair techs.  He wrote this shorter and more concise article and he then sent it out to his entire customer list via email as a link to the website, introducing his new website to his customers with an article that promoted the use of his services at a time when they did not normally think about air conditioning.

The article and email campaign was a success!

Steve recorded more business last January than in any other winter month in his history of doing this kind of work.  All attributed to one article and one email and Steve was a happy, yet busy man.

Does the story end here?

Well, yes and no…

The story does not end, but for some reason after that one success, Steve pretty much walked away from his website.  Since October 2008 Steve has only published 9 articles and just one in the last 4 months.

The Forum

The Forum…

Sometime in March Steve asked me to add a forum to his website.  Steve has a great deal of experience as a user of Internet discussion forums and he expressed that he would feel more comfortable with one on his site to answer specific questions from his readers and customers.  I installed SimplePress for him and did a quick, light setup with some basic topics.

In hindsight I would say that I should not have done that so easily.  I needed to reinforce the idea of creating new content in the form of articles on the website/blog.  Because I know that Wordpress will out perform a forum for targeting specific nich traffic and creating a website that draws new visitors as well as search engine spiders but only if one actually publishes content.  The forum is not bad at all, it is a good thing, but it should not be thought of as a replacement for the other work that must be done to maintain a dynamic website.

Fast Forward to the weekend of my daughters birthday – July 10th 2009.

We were visiting my brother Steve at his home and he mentioned that he really did not like the look of his forum, the colors were not right.  This was a surprise to me as he had not mentioned the problem in the previous 3 – 4 months since the forum was installed.  But nonetheless, being the web developer brother, I sat down at Steve’s computer to remedy the situation with a quick forum theme change.  First I found that the forum was corrupted and would not allow even administration access and then I found a few other issues which needed my office computer to fix….

In addition, I had not been to the site in several months so I was surprised to see that he had not really posted any articles in quite sometime.  So I inquired as to why that was?

Wordpress SUCKS! was what I heard… I get more traffic from my forum than from the “blog” and I really don’t need wordpress, can you just make it a forum?

This is where the aforementioned family stubbornness trait kicked in on my side of the spectrum.. (The trait I claimed previously to not being aware of its existence). I was indignant that my brother, of all people would Dis- Wordpress to my face.  Does this fella not know how I make a living? Does he not realize Wordpress gave him his best January ever?

Does he just not understand?

The answer is yes, he did not understand and he is not alone.

My brother did not understand that for Wordpress to work as advertised, for it to bring organic traffic in the way that millions of successful users can attest to, it first must be used to publish content on a consistent and regular basis.  Content in the form of words and pictures and videos and anything else your heart desires.  But it must be used.

Did I fix it?

The weekend was long and there were problems with an update to the Simplepress forum which required my shutting down the forum over that weekend.  I did not get to the issue again until the following Monday. Steve was not happy with me, he wanted his forum back because he had an ongoing technical conversation going with a gentleman who was diagnosing a problem with a marine air conditioner.

I responded to his Monday morning “reminder” that his forum was down with some opinions I did not want to share in front of my daughter and mother, and then I said I would fix his forum, but in the meantime he should:

…post an article on the “blog” (Spit hack pooey) which states that you can answer any question in comments (While the forum is down).  Continue your conversation with your guy there, not in email. Wordpress really will work better than any forum, if you use it as intended, man. (i.e. Tags, Categories, Comments) Let the world know that marine-ac.com exists – post an article…

While working on the forum (which needed a complete overhaul) I was curious about my brother’s claim that the forum and not the blog gets marine-ac.com more traffic.  So I did a quick search on “Marine AC Forum” sure enough, there it was in Google – outranking established marine air conditioning manufacturers websites with forums or mentioning forums.  Marine-Ac.com was number 3 and 4 on the first page for that search phrase.  Pretty cool…

But what is the rest of the story?

Both of those results, the number 3 and number 4 ranking in Google for the keyword phrase “Marine AC Forum”  actually linked to published articles on the website in Wordpress.  The forum itself did not rank, it was the mention of the forum in two different articles Steve had published (out of his total of 9 articles published) that was bringing in the traffic he was referring to in his forum.

The point being that Wordpress does work, even with this minimal amount of effort and without much thought concerning keyword optimization or consistency.  The few articles my brother has posted bring him traffic on a daily basis.

Of course, it goes without saying that more articles would equate to more traffic.

We are working on that!

I hope I can inspire my brother to use the site as intended and I hope to do a redesign on it soon (waiting on more fancy yacht pictures)… In any case I feel good that he is seeing some benefit from this minimally utilized resource.

Any advertising is better than no advertising!

And… Wordpress Does Work! So There! (Little brother to big brother rasberry included)

Simplepress forum has been updated to work with Wordpress 2.8.1 and has several improvements in the front and back end interface. It is the plugin that is powering the new TAJ Forum and with this installation the forum posts and the blog posts can be linked in a way that creates a very nice internal link as well as offers readers a new way to interact with the website author as well as other readers.  I recommend the latest version as seen installed here on this site and on marine-ac.com

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Many people share the same experiences and thoughts along the development path that is … website creation.

1. Do it myself – try to buy dreamweaver or (heaven forbid a Microsoft web creation program i.e Frontpage) and do it yourself. Only to find that it will take too long to learn the program(s) required and that as a business owner your time is more valuable in other areas of your business.
2. Hire a standard HTML coder or \”Web Designer\” to do everything from scratch – Only to find that many features that you thought were standard today in most websites, cost extra when you need each and every part of your site developed by hand. The mantra (no templates) is always heard, but the truth is that there is a vast difference between a \”Template\” and a \”Theme\”.
3. Usually there is friction developed between the hand coder and the business oriented client. The \”Hand Coder\” starts with a template but says the site is \”Hand coded\” and the business owner sees that once the hand coder is done – it will take an act of god to change anything. Could every sentence possibly be right from the start?
4. The phrase- Content Management System is discovered by the client, lightbulbs go off, fireworks explode – the possibilities are awe inspiring! – Hand coder refuses to build on CMS.
5. iBusinessLogic steps in and explains the differences between hand coding and CMS, the differences between Templates and Themes and the difference between creating the site yourself, and managing the site yourself, once it has been prepared and setup by a professional. 

Below is a number of forums created to discuss different sites built or under construction by iBusinessLogic. Some Joomla, Some Wordpress, Some Both… and Possibly one or two Drupal or Moodle installlations.

Please be kind to our clients while you learn of the process as they experienced it, please take a moment and think about what you can learn from them. Then ask questions, share opinions and help us all become better!

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• This, of course makes little sense, why have a forum, if no one can register and post in it?
• The issue has been corrected and I sincerely apologize if anyone attempted to register this morning when the forums were announced.
• I hate it when I can’t find my way into something – this is no exception, a million pardons requested!

Register now! The TAJ Forums are open to all!

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Forums Available to TAJ Forums Members in this Category

• Red Ink Diary – Henrietta
• My Blog Utopia – Randy Smythe
• The Savvy Seller – Marlene Gavens
• eBay & Beyond – Dave White
• Auction Wally – Walt Kolenda
• Who Else?

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You can also talk about the top eBay and eCommerce Blogs and Podcasts in the Forum – Not just the TAJ!

More information to come, but for now just remember you have to be registered to post and all comments must be within normal etiquette guidelines – Differing Opinions Welcome but…

- no Profanity Please !

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How did this lead to an Ass Hat?

This morning, I opened my email and was of course caught in the avalanche of electronic stress messages. (Why don’t I listen to Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week?).

One of, well, several of these emails – 12 to be exact, was from LinkedIn. LinkedIn was informing me that I had 12 people who “had asked to be part of my network” – ahhh this is nice, lets do that for some easy mindless wakeup data processing…

As I worked through the invitations and replies (mostly from colleagues at the Examiner.com), I came across one particular invite that caught my eye.

And no… not just because this person is an attractive blonde…

First thing that caught my eye was the tag line…

“Creator and Owner of the Daily Blonde blog”.

In today’s world you must be unique and you must say something in a short flash of time to catch peoples ever crowded trains of thought. Cheryl Phillips says to the world that she is a blonde on a daily basis – not that there is anything wrong with that… (Paraphrasing Seinfeld).

To me this says Cheryl has a sense of humor and… the moxie to make something of it. I dug deeper, which in today’s world is not a huge demand on journalistic resources… What I did was follow the link, on LinkedIn (get it) to the Daily Blonde Blog.

The first story on The Daily Blonde was a bit of a trend follower, a cynical view of the recent Sara Palin story (Sara Palin Leaves Office Early), but something else on the homepage caught my eye. What I saw was another story of interest, which of course lead me to click another link.

AssHat of the Week.

From the Daily Blonde

The Asshat of the week story leads in with:

…I realized that it was time to pay tribute to the irresponsible parents that seem to think I run a home daycare and restaurant for their children. So, this week’s AssHat award covers quite a few heads. It’s a big hat so there’s no problem making sure everyone fits under it.

The story goes on to describe -in letter form – to the irresponsible parents in this single mothers neighborhood, not only that she is not the summer day care provider, but more so, that these other parents should be responsible for their own kids. Parents should feed, bathe, and make sure that their own children are safe, not pawn them off on another parent for 10-12 hours without a care.  It is an article that any responsible parent in any neighborhood in America can relate to these days.

Why am I writing about this Asshat Award thing?

• It is a unique article with humor and touches on a subject many of us parents have wanted to say out loud, but never had the moxie to do ourselves.
• The entire idea of the blog has originality and style, coupled with humor and caring.  It is a recipe people obviously like.
• I only found this blog through Social Networking and LinkedIn, now I am writing about it – This is how the Internet of Today works!

The last point is what I wish to stress in this article.

People are searching the world we call the Internet for information.

No matter what business you are in, no matter what you sell, no matter who you work for or if you are an attorney or a broker or a architect or a ditch digger – there are people out there that want to know what you know and they will find the information you publish – if you leave enough “clues” to follow.

Clues in the form on links, links in the form of: LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts (with active tweets), Facebook profiles, forum posts and more…

People will follow these clues, bread crumbs, links, Tweets, opinions… all back to you.

These are the people you are looking for as an audience, they will find you and see you as a leader if you publish the information they are searching for.  Without an audience, there are no leaders, without leaders the audience continues to search…  Find your audience and help them to make you a leader, let them stop searching for your information, give them what they want no matter what that is.

Just Do IT!

Get out in the world and write something, post a video or take a picture – people will find and admire what you have to say or share, if you make an effort to share good things and if you spend some time contributing to other peoples lives by sharing and recognizing others that share as I am doing today.

I had never even heard of Cheryl Phillips and the Daily Blonde before, even though she is a blogger of note and one who should be followed:

With an Alexa rating of approximately 150,000, over 1600 email subscribers and an average “stay” on The Daily Blonde by readers of over 3 minutes. She also spreads the word about her blog to over 16,000+ Twitter followers every day. Cheryl is currently ranked in the top 50 Twitter users and was written up as one of the Top 10 Women on Twitter in the world.

Cheryl is a stay at home mom with more kids than she should be able to deal with and she is cranking out quality blog article posts that bring her an every increasing audience – is there really any reason why you can not do this for yourself or your business?  Cheryl Phillips and the Daily Blonde are not just one isolated story of the power of Internet self publishing, she is but one of millions of people who have found notoriety and possible success with social media and blogging.

With the tools available to everyone in today’s world of CMS publishing on the net, using platforms like Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal to name a few, there is no reason why any business or professional person should not have the ability to share and inform on a daily basis, just as the Daily Blonde does.

Pick your topic, fulfill your niche, find your audience and you will create a market that never existed before for your business.

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Simply put all of this can be a pain!

Well, a friend of mine passed along this wonderous link to a free service aptly named: TransferBigFiles.com

The service works with pure simplicity, just select the files you want to send, enter the email address of the recipient and click upload.

The files will upload to Amazon S3 and a link will be sent to your friend or collegue with an explaination about how to retrieve same. So simple even a cave man could do it! (Sorry GEICO)

For a bit more security you can even add your own password to the files so only your friend or associate can have access to them for download.

I have used many services, I have installed flash upload managers on websites and I have been using FTP clients for years but I have to say this is the easiest and fasted way to get large files transferred to who you want, when you want – set and forget!

Enjoy!

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This is the first in a series I would like to call “What is Scott Doing Now”?

It seems that I have “gone missing”, people ask me where have I been, what am I doing?  Well, I have been busy and have not had the time required to keep this and many of my other blogs current.

I love my Trading Assistant Journal readers just as much as I hope they appreciate me, and in fact I want to thank the readers who have sent me notes of concern, wishing me well, and asking me to come back.  I am still here, I just have been so busy working for clients and on my own projects, that I have not had time to keep up with a lot of the stuff I used to comment on here in the Journal.

So without further adieu, Part 1 – “What is Scott Doing Now”?

BonanzleStore

BonanzleStore Opening Late Summer 2009

In our vast eCommerce world Bonanzle.com has been one of the hottest topics of discussion for over a year now .

Late Summer 2009

As a result, my company, iBusinessLogic has created a new way to optimize a Bonanzle merchants business and Internet marketing capabilities with what we call the BonanzleStore.

A “BonanzleStore” (launching late summer 2009) is an outside website, separated from Bonanzle and allowing the merchant to brand themselves with a completely customized eCommerce Web 2.0 Site.  This website (A BonanzleStore) will include many features never seen before in eCommerce.

The main feature is a completely automated and constantly updated presentation of the merchants products for sale.  One inventory, two selling locations – i.e. list an item on Bonanzle, and it will appear both on Bonanzle and on the merchants BonanzleStore site. Sell that same item, and it will be removed from both locations. No chance of over selling inventory.

Combining the ease of use of Bonanzle itself, along with the automated Googlebase feed and Oodle feed, the simple checkout using PayPal, Cash, Check, Google Checkout and other options, makes this a very efficient and symbiotic relationship between a venue (Bonanzle) and a Merchant Home website – (BonanzleStore). Where the website offers a home base and more, the venue offers simplicity and ease of use.  Where the venue is clean and efficient yet sparse and mostly unbrandable, the home base allows for unlimited expansion, branding and content dedicated to promoting the merchant and his or her products.

The two work together as a team to bring more traffic and more sales to any merchant who uses each to its full advantage.  With this unique combination of a website working with a venue, most merchants will enjoy a freedom to express themselves and promote their company like  they have not experienced before.  This is web 2.0 and social marketing meets eCommerce shopping cart.  BonanzleStore combines many of the best of both worlds and makes it easy to manage both a website and a venue with ease.

To see a working example of Alpha2 (Soon to be Beta) of our Bonanzlestore please go to one of my sites: http://allbusinessauctions.com/blog/bonanzlestore-demo/ here you will see the products of the Delectably Yours Decor (Bonanzle Booth DelectablyYours) presented on a completely off topic website/blog.

BonanzleStore Demo

These products have been parsed by category automatically by our software and are automatically presented on pages on the site with pagination which can be adjusted according to the users preferences.

The most interesting result of this BonanzleStore system is found when one selects any of the titles or any of the description content and then pastes that title or description content into Google search.

Delectibly Yours Decor

Remember, these products, presented in the demo on All Business Auctions, are showing the same exact titles and descriptions as they do on DelectablyYours Bonanzle Booth, her own website www.delectably-yours.com, on eBay and on Ooodle. Some of these products have been indexed on her own website for months.

In most cases, when using the title of a product displayed on the demo, the search results will include the allbusinessauctions.com/blog/bonanzlestore-demo as the number one, two or three result in Google.

These products are sold by other sites and other merchants, Delectably Yours Decor has worked hard to optimize their own website for search and her titles usually are ranked on the first page either from her store, from Oodle or from Bonanzle or eBay, yet our simple demo pages on ABA/blog a site with completely unrelated content (I don’t write about interior decor on that site) is ranking extremely highly in Google (usually outranking either Bonanzle or eBay and sometimes ranked #1) and has done so since the first day we installed the Bonanzlestore alpha test.

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Anthony Sullivan for….

Click to learn more

Pitchmen – is the new Discovery channel TV series about the art of the “pitch” and for many reasons, I find it fascinating.

This TV series is an inside look into the 2 minute infomercial concept “As Seen on TV” and two of the top personalities that make the all important and insidious television “pitch” on a daily basis to America.

Both of the primary characters of the series, Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan, have become multi-millionaires without so much as a college degree between them.  They each own production companies, work for multi-million dollar corporations and, if you are lucky, and if they choose to bring your invention to the television airwaves, these men may possibly be making a millionaire out of you to.

Salesmanship still rules!

Billy Mays Sells

What can be learned from watching a show about two men and how they sell America various products we usually would not buy on the spur of the moment?

Oh, so much… if you take the time to absorb the various tidbits made available within a show which obviously is not intended to be a primer for salesmanship. Yet, I think you may find at least one tip that could improve your online business possibly helping you to understand what sells and how to sell it.

The show follows a format, as most television shows of this type do.  First the audience is shown various examples of the completely off the wall, odd or bizarre inventions which are brought to pitchmen like Anthony and Billy on a daily basis.

From these bizarre contraptions the television audience are given a brief opportunity to ponder which one will be tested further to see it it will have a chance to make it to airwaves as a 2 minute infomercial ad spot.

The choice is not always easy.  The sampling on the television series gives us just a small glimpse into the incredible amount of work that must go into finding the products that these two pitchmen have sold millions of units of, on a consistent basis.

How do these Pitchmen select the next big seller?

• It must be something which fills a need – solves a problem
• It must be easily explained or “gotten” by the audience
• It must have some sort of “Wow” demo – An amazing proof moment on TV that the product works
• It must meet strict pricing criteria – basically no more than $19.99 per unit, with room to reduce that to $9.99 hopefully

If these conditions do not exist for the Pitchmen, they will not invest their time to even think about testing the product, much less producing a television spot.

Lesson learned?

Anthony Sullivan

The pitchmen of America know their “audience” and what it takes to get people to make an instant impulse decision to pick up the phone and buy something presented on the television, basically sight unseen.

People will not part with a certain level of funds quickly, apparently that psychological barrier is $19.99.

The pitchmen know that they must prove to their “audience” in some very convincing way, that the product is real and that it works as advertised – thus the “Wow” demo.

The limited time factor of a two minute ad spot drives the need for the product to be easily explained and “gotten” by the audience.

Anthony and Billy are well aware that people do not buy things they do not need, they must understand the problem a product solves and want to have the ability to solve that problem themselves… If they have this desire, they will buy the product immediately.

Apply these lessons to your online business and test to see if your sales increase.  In our world, we have much less than 2 Minutes to get our point across, if the product is not easily understood, fills a need, and fails the psychological price barrier of your “audience” your chances of making a sale in the 3 – 15 second time frame an internet surfer will stay on your product listing are nil.

Television is a mature advertising medium, yet in television changes are made regularily to refine the process and sell more, in less time.  Internet marketers and merchants can learn a lot from Television and even print advertising methods, copywriting and … well, the pitch.

After all we are a very young medium and would do well to look at what the experts of other industries have done to improve the presentation of products and maximise the return for advertising dollars.

Billy Mays may yell louder than you like and Anthony Sullivan may not be a household name, but we can learn from the many years of experience of these two pitchmen.

Refining your selection of products to sell, knowing the magic price point number of your audience, explaining the product in a way that takes no effort for the buyer to understand and showing the problem the product solves immediately and demonstrably… are all key to improving your bottom line.

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