Having worked on thousands of these pages for companies with budgets up to $500k/mo I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t (although I still get it wrong a lot and only testing yields the final result). Now, for your benefit…here are the top 10 landing page mistakes I see advertisers make.

1. Landing page is inconsistent with ad campaign. When a user does a search, and looks at an ad, and clicks on a page, the page has to be consistent with every other element of the campaign. If not, they’ll bounce.
2. Product pages for etailers - quick…give em what they want. If they typed in say “Noxon Watch” take them to the page with the best selling Nixon watch. Tell them it’s the most popular and x number of people have bought at your discount price. Big picture…multiple images of the watch, then your discounted price and call to action. Be sure to include a sidebar or something with other great deals or “customers purchasing this have also bought…(more bestselling market related items). Don’t promote the 80% of the 80/20 promote only the best selling items. No one cares about the rest.
3. Not enough landing pages. Don’t be a cheapskate. You need a different landing page for each segmented campaign. Depending on your ad media you may need hundreds or thousands of campaigns. This could be simple things such as different headlines and keyword variations, but could also be completely different messaging and graphics. Right media-to-market-message is VERY IMPORTANT. Nothing will kill your sales more than a one size fits all approach. Even if it’s something as simple as personalized URLs. Really, I’ve seen pages that do great in one segment get killed in another. Graphics are important in this respect. You may have the same messaging but what you think is a graphical “improvement” can kill sales. Everything needs to be consistent with the ad that’s bringing the traffic. Otherwise, you’re just throwing money out the window.
4. Scale. If an ad and creative are working, run the same ad in similar channels with minimal changes such as headline, price point, call to action, etc… If you really feel the need to change, setup a different ad and different landing page campaign entirely. Don’t mess with what’s working - scale it.
5. Don’t be a follower. Follow what’s working to a point, but test new ideas. Spin selling or concept selling can help. For instance, Acai berry weightloss publishers are all doing the same thing. Yes, try what works, but experiment to with positioning and angle. Remember, first, best, or different is truth. If you can take a different angle on what everyone else is doing this can often work well.
6. Irrelevant and inconsistent with the traffic generation campaign. Don’t mislead. Everything needs to be exactly what it claims otherwise you’ll pay more for online media. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to keep things consistent and still accomplish your goals. It just requires more effort.
7. Be open to new ideas. If you’re locked into an idea consider calling a consultant for a different perspective. I’ll give you an example. I was working with a bizop publisher looking to get a sale from the first hit on their page. I had a better idea. break the page up into multiple parts. 1.) “Enter your login details” (way to get name and email). 2.) “Tell us about yourself” (get remaining details, push sales message, and draw prospect deeper into the funnel). 3.) “Thank you for registering” ) now is time to send them to the sales message after getting all their details. Of course this depends on the product/market.
8. Check and double check. There is nothing that will kill a landing or sales page faster than a wrong number or incorrect link to a buy or optin button. I’ve been guilty of this myself several times in the heat of the moment. Nothing makes you feel dumber than buying media and having the wrong phone number or URL. It happens all the time. I worked on a diet ad that got zero conversions. We couldn’t figure out what the heck was happening. I shot it over to a friend of mine for a look. He did the simplest thing…tried the form, only to discover it did not work. That mistake cost thousands. Same thing with wrong numbers.
9. Don’t assume prospects know what to do. Spell out everything as clear as you can for instance…”enter your email below. When you do here’s what you’ll get. Here’s what to do once you get it, etc…” If you have a multi-step process spell out all the steps somewhere on the first page “step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, do this…here’s what you’ll get”, or, “here’s what to do now…Click the buy button. When you do you’ll get X”
10. Follow up. Make sure, for every action you follow up and reassure prospects/customers they’ve made a good decision. This will increase sales and reduce returns. People need reassurance and letting them know they’ve made a good decision is always a good idea.
11. Bonus - Arrows. I’ve tested this on over 100 campaigns. Arrows help tell people what you want them to do. Don’t believe me? Try it and prove things for yourself.

Questions? Drop me a line. Comments…be sure to ad your own. If you have tested landing pages and have real life data about what’s working for you I’d love to read about it.

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Far and away, Craigslist is my favorite traffic source right now but damn they make it hard to get and keep ads live.

I’ve learned a lot since I started Craigslist posting. Craigslist is a world unto itself. This is a marketplace and the competition can be fierce. You’ve got other Craigslist marketers who go around flagging ads of competitors.

Not only that, Craigslist doesn’t like marketer like us. I understand, their business model works a lot like Googles. Google makes their money by providing the most relevant content in searches. Craigslist makes theirs by providing relevant ads. The don’t want bizop posters posting multiple Craigslist ads in the sales jobs category with the purpose of taking someone to a site and selling them.

No doubt, this is underground and admittedly black hat. But…the opportunities are too lucrative to pass up. My first group of outsourcers were only able to get a few ads live. But…from just a few targeted ads I was getting 700-1000 hits a day. Plus, I could see in StatPress stats exactly which ads and locales they were coming from.

Do you see the value there? Not only that, every time I had a conversion, I could return to StatPress and look at the corresponding time stamp. This allowed me to easily see which ads were converting and where the most profitable markets were.

So what about conversion? I was running bizop, credit offers, and some other career related affiliate offers. Conversions were incredible compared to other media for the cost. My ROI was around $1.45 for every $1.00 spent. Needless to say I wanted more.

Here’s a few things I’ve discovered about posting multiple ads on Craigslist:

1. Hiring outsourcers from other parts of the globe doesn’t really work (unless they have sophisticated systems for getting around the filters). Why? Because nearly all posting requires phone verification now with US residential numbers.
2. Posting a click here link worked the best for me…so far but…
3. .info domains get blocked. I thought I’d be tricky and buy a bunch of .info domains for $2.00/ea and use those to redirect to my offers. I can’t get any of those live. Much better off with .com, .org, .net.
4. You need to have multiple domains redirecting to the offer domain or Craigslist will quickly block you. I’ve heard you can use blogger and redirect but I didn’t have much luck there. I forget, but I think they do phone verification too.
5. Need to create multiple new mail accounts.
6. Have tried setting up autoresponders on mail accounts with messages that say something to the effect “please reply to this email address.” Not much traction with those.
7. One thing I have not tried, but will implement in the next couple of days is sending prospects to a prerecorded message directing them to the offer. This could work.
8. Okay, here’s another biggie, you need the ability to switch IP addresses. I got some tools for this but I don’t know if it’s the tool or CL but I seem to have to switch back when CL goes to HTTPs. I also have mobile broadband and disconnecting and reconnecting will switch your IP each time, but this method is a pain and time consuming.
9. Okay, here’s the million dollar biggie - getting past Craigslist phone verification. You can only have one number associated with each account for 90 days. I thought I had a great idea. I  bought a bunch of Skype numbers only to find these will not verify either. Thought about Twilio but talked to a couple of people who said they wont work either. If you can calculate your conversion ratios good enough it may be worth it to just buy discount US residential numbers. I don’t know if DIDs would work but I’ve seen them too for a few bucks per number per mo.
10. My next strategy is to place classified ads in local newspapers and run them continually looking for people who want to make fast cash posting Craigslist ads. I think this may ultimately be an easy cost effective way of getting my ads up.

Here’s a few more tidbits. Craigslist will sometimes claim they’ve posted your ad yet when you look in the category or do a search you can’t find it. This is called ghosting and essentially it’s the same as not even having an ad posted.

Watch out for services who claim they can get your ads live. Believe me when I tell you posting multiple Craigslist ads is no easy feat.

What should you say? Depends on your market, but if you want to drive traffic to your site don’t try and sell prospects in the ad. Work instead to make your ad stand out and create a sense of mystery. These types of ads have worked much better than the more straight forward ones I initially posted.

There are of course several ways to build your list this way and you’re only limited by your imagination.

Still, despite all of the negatives the cost to advertise is minimal compared to ROI generated (for me anyway). I have found Craigslist WAY less expensive than Google PPC, Facebook Ads, PPC, CPM, etc…

Something else, I’ve tried a number of other free classifieds, Thrifty Nickel online (not bad), Backpage (depends on the offer), Adland, Kijiji, etc… and by far Craigslist can deliver way more traffic.

If you have experience posting multiple ads on Craigslist I’d love to hear from you. Let’s exchange ideas. Leave a comment below.

P.S. Stay tuned. I’ll do a review of DAP Digital Access Pass shopping cart and OptimizePress Wordpress theme for marketers. These are great products. Took me a minute to get my head around them but these really kick ass.

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Getting traffic is going to cost you either in terms of time or money. There are still keywords you can compete with for organic traffic but with more and more pages going up all the time and new search algorithms it’s getting harder and harder.

I find it valuable to make at least a small effort to review related press releases and look for new products coming out. Far and away I’ve found my most popular blog posts and entry points come from product/event related keyword searches.

If you have some resources and limited time you may want to outsource some of the traffic generation tactics below. I’ve had good luck with people from the Philippines. However for quality search engine fodder I have a friend with multiple number one Google sites who uses JournalismJobs.com and hires Americans living abroad. He says he gets very good quality for a good price. If you need to outsource this work contact me and I’ll help.

1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.
3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com
4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.
6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.
7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.
8. Start a blog and submit it to the ’s of free blog directories.
9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.
10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your websiteIt’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
12. Make a custom error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.MySpace.com.
28. Submit a viral video to www.YouTube.com
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.
32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.
33. Purchase ads on other sites
34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.
35. Sell or place classified ads on www.eBay.com with a link to your site.
36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.
37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.
38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.
39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.
40. Advertise on other product’s “thank you” pages.
41. Create a free ebook and list in on the “free ebook” sites.
42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.
43. Do something controversial.
44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.
45. Start a lens on www.Squidoo.com.
46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).
47. Get referrals form similar but non-competing sites.
48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.
49. Email your listIf you don’t have one, get one.
50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.

Have a comment? Feel free to ad it below.

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Why, a number of reasons. A couple are…a lot of direct response businesses are poorly planned. They’re started by individuals very often on limited budgets, with mediocre products, and limited customer service. There’s seldom a plan for managing growth, and dealing with customer service to keep chargebacks down.

What ends up happening is customers get mad when they receive a less than satisfactory product after reading, watching, hearing and responding to powerfully persuasive direct response advertising. Though much could be done to remedy this with good followup and good customer service that isn’t always the case. Not to mention sales funnels with 5 or 6 upsells sold to customers under less than up front terms piss people off.

Sure, multiple upsells and less than transparent terms will bring in a lot of cash fast but the model sucks for sustainability. When people get mad and companies fail to refund their money either because of a lack of customer service or by simply refusing customers do what are called chargebacks. A chargeback is when the customer disputes the transaction with their credit card issuer.

In questionable situations credit card companies are most likely to side with their customers. It’s in their interest. Anyhow, merchant accounts have chargeback thresholds based on card issuer thresholds which are somewhere in the range of 1%-2.5% depending on the card issuer.

The bottom line is once you get too many chargebacks the merchant processor will terminate your account.

Another issue that can cause problems with merchant processors are excessive refund periods and guarantees. Naturally, a lifetime guarantee is a much higher risk to the processor than say a 30 day return period.

Before I give the 10 tips for getting your high risk merchant account here are a couple more factors to consider.

Merchants also have a holdback threshold. This is your money they keep in reserve to cover their risk and is a percentage of your receipts based on risk of chargeback and refunds.  Depending on the merchant this can be very high. It’s crucial to note this money is not available during the hold-back period. This can cause big problems when the merchant processor is holding funds you need to run your business.

All that said, and in addition to the 10 tips below. Keep in mind you have to sell the merchant processor on your business. Whether that means having all your ducks in a row, or getting them excited about the earning potential of the business.

Oh yeah, one more thing. It’s also good to have multiple merchant accounts you can turn on. Sometimes if you’re running big campaigns a number of sales will look fishy and the merchant will shut down processing until they figure out what’s happening. It’s also good to stay in communication with the processor and let them know when you’re ramping up marketing.

Anyhow…without further adieu…10 tips for getting your high risk merchant account.

1. History and Experience - Describe the length of time you’ve been in business and any firsthand experience you and your team have dealing with credit card transactions (refunds, chargebacks, fraud management).

a. What is your history with merchant processors? Have you had merchant accounts before that we’re well maintained or have they been terminated? (i.e. you can’t be on the Match list).

2. About your team – executive summaries, accomplishments, highlight any experience related to type of business and transactions, organizational diagram, and anything that will lend credibility to you keeping in mind the whole idea is for the processor to mitigate risk.

a. About operations – Do you have an operations manual? How does customer service work? What customer service plan is in place to handle problems that arise? Do you have contingency plans?

b. About marketing – Fraudulent affiliate and arbitrage has created many problems for merchant processors. If using affiliates do you hand select them, or how does that work? What other methods/channels do you use?

3. Credit Risk - Your personal and/or business credit history/rating

4. Proof of income – Tax returns and bank statements

5. Financials or sales projections – the more money is involved the more the merchant processor is risking. For instance, high volume from multiple individuals will increase risk of fraud. More to keep track of and better chance of something slipping through the cracks.

6. Fraud Risk – Is especially important with this type of business. How will you manage this? Do you have systems in place to rapidly identify and prevent fraud.

7. Contingent Liability Risk – lifetime guarantees, act of god i.e. fire, flood, earthquake, theft, employee sabotage.

8. All about your product – i.e. what is it? How is it delivered? What is your supply chain? How to you track fulfillment?

9. About your technology – i.e call center, servers and data storage, fraud controls, data theft controls, etc…

10. How will you manage growth?

Finally, here is a list of problems I’ve witnessed related to merchant accounts…food for thought.

1. Bad products
2. No solid plans or systems for managing growth
3. No cushion when the merchant processor holds funds for up to 6 months
4. When funds are withheld it’s hard to make payroll, staff start getting cut and there are fewer people to issue refunds and handle customer service issues resulting in poor customer service and increased chargebacks.
5. Not having enough money in the bank creates a situation where money needed for operations is diverted into marketing to sell more products to get out of the hole the company is falling into. Company is hedging bets that marketing will pay off, but this doesn’t always happen.
6. Technology and communications bottlenecks (i.e. could be something as simple as a wrong number on a contact page preventing customers from contacting you. Leading them to believe and report you as fraudulent or seek chargeback. But could also be more serious problems such as site or server is down and affiliates campaigns are still running. Call center problems wondering why phones aren’t ringing during the middle of a campaign when refunds and CS issues are most likely.)
7. Here’s another interesting one – Usually Customer service has a high turnover rate. Problems can occur if offices are located in an area too small to acquire and train new customer service reps as needed. Could even be in a metro area but because customer service positions typically pay low reps can’t afford the commute.
8. Misleading or failing to keep the customer happy throughout the process. Not conducive to longevity.

If you have experiences or you’re a merchant processor and want to weigh in I’d love to hear from you. So go ahead and post a comment below.

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Tonight I had the great pleasure of having some drinks with someone who really knows how to make a deal. RL has run many networks over the years. Since 1995 he’s been running high traffic golf and tourism sites.

We spoke a bit about some of the deals he’s worked out and frankly, I was blown away. But…our conversation reinforced my feelings that all online efforts need supplementing with good offline strategy. You’ll always…and especially now…be more successful with your online businesses if you make an effort to contact people personally.

When RL had his golf networks he drove traffic with long tail keywords…to the tune of millions of visits per month. But he didn’t just get the traffic. He leveraged it. He got on the phone and setup golf packages. He contacted golf courses and hotels and worked out deals to send them traffic. He bought radio and television ads and drove visitors to his site in exchange for a cut of the profits from business generated by his sites.

He sold his golf network for a handsome profit. Now he has a number of tourism related sites. He spent decent money to purchase high traffic tourism related domains from people who had sites but didn’t monetize them well.

He basically bought high trafficked sights, then hired a team of top notch expat journalists to generate high quality long tail keyword traffic to the sites to the degree of several thousand pages.

He usurped news posts about the areas he covered taking ownership of the press by becoming a spokes person. Anytime news about one of the areas came out he would issue a press release saying something like “ah yes, we’re so proud to receive this award on behalf of….town x….click this link to learn more.

But he didn’t stop there. He sold loads of advertising which he essentially put up for sale to the highest bidder. Later creating private label tour companies which routed to advertisers. Once he had the top 3 or 4 search engine sites he offered to keep the best advertisers, instead switching them from a yearly model to an equity share model where he would get a certain percentage of the business.

Then he offered other advertisers free advertising on his network in exchange for a link back to the site with the revenue share model.

This is how to make deals. You have to get on the phone and present people with a value proposition they understand. For instance, why wouldn’t you trade 10K per year for zero up front money in exchange for a revenue share. That transforms the relationship. Now, my interest goes from selling you advertising to helping us both make as much as we can.

One resistance of buyers once his sites eclipsed even the board of tourism sites is that he would become a retailer. Which…in fact, is the goal; to grow the network so large that he is actually the one selling tourist packages directly from the site and routing them to individual vendors for a percentage.

I’m sure you see the logic in this strategy. There is a clearly defined plan of action. But…you have to sell. You have to get on the phone and meet people to make deals.

If you want to grow your online business beyond what most people will realize you’ve got to make deals. I hope you found this post as enlightening as my conversation tonight. Got something to add? Weigh in with your comment below.

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In our conversations I am always amazed with their similarity in thought and personality type. So similar in fact, I sometimes get confused with who I’m talking to. I remember saying to one of these individuals “wow, that’s so weird, this sounds almost identical to a conversation I had with another successful serial entrepreneur just the other day.” He replied, “that’s because these are the positions people who think like this end up.”

Napoleon hill studied successful people of his time before writing “Think and Grow Rich.” He made a number of observations. Unfortunately it’s been years since I read that book and I can’t remember any of the principles except that those who succeed give just a little more effort than those who don’t.

Anyhow, here are 10 of my personal observations on traits, qualities, and skills of successful people:

1. Like Zig Ziglar says…”Help enough people get what they want and you’ll eventually get what you want.” I’ve noticed there is a great skill among these individuals to help others and bring them together as a group. They build incredible companies by finding skilled, motivated people and making them stakeholders. They also have a keen focus on helping customers get what they want.
2. Humility - of course there is pride in accomplishment but the most successful people I know have a humility that brings people together.
3. Understanding of weaknesses and the willingness to surround themselves with people who can help.
4. Curiosity and desire to learn new things.
5. Unusual capacity for connecting the dots, being able to see the big picture, how the elements should fall into place, and the next logical step.
6. Salesmanship and the ability to negotiate to the advantage of all parties involved.
7. Not afraid to ask questions.
8. Not afraid of asking for help.
9. Ability to see the project as a living, breathing entity and in doing so create a desire in others to nurture the project.
10. Focus on the most important aspects of the business, sales, marketing, and creating a winning team.

Of course there are many traits but these are the most apparent to me. If you’ve read Micheal Gerber’s book “The E Myth Revisited - Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Succeed.”  Gerber points out most small businesses are started by what he calls “Technicians.”

Technicians are people who previously worked as employees in a trade such as carpentry, bookkeeping, cooking, etc…who thought to themselves one day, “Why am I working here? I could do this better,” and broke off on their own.

Technicians may or may not share these traits but I’m not referring to technicians here. Those I am referring to are entrepreneurs in a different sense of the word. They are not simply replicating a business in a field where they worked. I think it’s important to point out most of these people began life as entrepreneurs. They have always (or nearly always) been in the idea business, creating and materializing businesses from a clear mental canvas rather than painting over an already painted mental canvas.

Have some thoughts on this? Please share them by commenting below.

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1. Open the CPanel in your hosting account of contact whoever handles your hosting if you don’t have CPanel.
2. Access PHPMyAdmin and locate the database you want to apply the changes (if no PHPMyAdmin ask your DB Admin to run the querry for you).
3. Select the “Query” tab from the top.
4. Enter the following code in the query box:
   UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’, ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’;
5. If for whatever reason you renamed the wp_posts table just make sure to reference whatever you named it to avoid a query error.
6. To reapply comments globally simply change the querry to:
   UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘open’, ping_status = ‘open’ WHERE comment_status = ‘closed’;

Hopefully that will help you avoid nasty spammers or keep you from having to go individually disabling comments on hundreds of posts.

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You Don’t Become Wealthy By Buying Things…You Become Wealthy By Selling Them
- Jason Leister, author, The Independent Thinker’s Guide To Becoming A Six-Figure Copywriter

People never fail at Internet Marketing - they just quit before success happens
- Unknown

First, learn your craft. It won’t prevent you from becoming a genius later.
- Renoir, the painter

Quotes About Success in Business:

“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”
– Elbert Hubbard

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
– Jim Rohn

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.”
– R.S. Ingersoll

“The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt.”
– Robert Buzzell

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”
– George S. Patton

“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill

“Success is dependent upon the glands – the sweat glands.”
– Zig Ziglar

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.”
– Mitch Ratliffe

… and about advertising and sales copy

“There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: The television commercials for candidates in elections.
– David Ogilvy

“It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have a new idea, you are a minority of one.
– E. Paul Torrance

“There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.”
– Jerry Della Famina

“If you are writing about baloney, don’t try and make it Cornish hen, because that’s the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darn good baloney.”
– Leo Burnett

“Any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.”
– Leo Burnett

“Advertising is like learning – a little is a dangerous thing.”
– P.T. Barnum

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
– Stuart Henderson Britt

“The advertisements are the most truthful part of a newspaper.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
– Robert Benchley

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time, I was too famous.”
– Robert Benchley

“It doesn’t have to be eternal to be immortal.”
– Anonymous

“In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.”
- Robert Green Ingersoll

A little less conversation, a little more action please. All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me.
- Elvis Presley , “A little less conversation”

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte

“Experience keeps a dear school. But fools will learn in no other”
- Ben Franklin

“Motion beats meditation.”
– Gary Halbert

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”
– Zig Ziglar

“You don’t have to get it perfect, you just have to get it going.”
– Gary Halbert

“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
– A. J. Liebling (Although I first heard this from Gary Bencivenga.)

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
– Picasso

“Money solves problems not having money creates.”
– John Carlton

“Success is a process, not an event.”
– Gary Halbert

“You’re either growing or you’re rotting.”
– Dan Kennedy

“There is no problem that can’t be solved with a world-class sales letter.”
– Gary Halbert

“Would you rather have the pain of regret or the pain of discipline?”
– Ted Nicholas

“A gifted product is mightier than a gifted pen.”
– Gary Bencivenga

“You don’t have to be great to start; But you do have to start, to be great.”
– Zig Ziglar

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, now.”
- Teddy Roosevelt

“What you are to be you are now becoming.”
- Teddy Roosevelt

Any fool can keep a rule. God gave him a brain to know when to break the rule.
- General Willard W. Scott

No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
- Robespierre

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates in ‘The Road Ahead’ (1995)

I prefer being an unjustified success rather than a justified failure.
- Dan S. Kennedy

People who go into business for themselves because they think they will have fewer problems than they had in their previous jobs wear down and wear out quickly.
- Dan S. Kennedy

Only mediocre people are always at their best.
- Somerset Maugham

“Learning your craft will never get in the way of your genius”
-Renoir, the painter

“Whatever The Mind Of Man Can Conceive & Believe It Can

Achieve”
- Napoleon Hill (Think & Grow Rich)

“Don’t be anybody’s follower, be a student.”
- Jim Rohn

“Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”
— William Mizner

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Like any media buy lists can either cost you a lot or make you  a lot. If you’re considering renting a list of names make sure to ask your list broker the following questions. Nothing will guarantee your success but these questions will improve your odds.

1. Where did the names on the list come from? Was it from a transaction? A request for information? A fund raising drive? Were they scraped from the Web? Are they subscribers? Knowing the source of the data is crucial.
2. If the data came from information seekers, buyers, subscribers, etc… we need to know what offers got them to buy, sign up, donate, or opt-in. The more information the better.  This information should be available. When I worked for a company which sold data through list brokers we always had to specify how we got the information otherwise they weren’t interested. There’s a good reason to know too. For instance, we sold our diet pill buyer names but… What wasn’t so readily known without asking was that the diet pill buyers were responding to free trial offers that switched to forced continuity. So…technically they were buyers but most of them thought they were simply getting a bottle of free pills. To assume this would be a good list for diet pill buyers is a bad assumption as the people on this list probably have negative feelings for pill offers having felt tricked into forced continuity in the past.
3. When was the last time the list was mailed? A list of names that hasn’t been mailed for six months or a year probably is no good. Someone who recently purchased something is more likely to buy. Lists need to be maintained and fresh. In most cases you will have better response from lists that are regularly mailed. Depending on the market this is especially true with snail mail considering around 15% of the U.S. population moves each year.
4. When did the transactions occur? Were they spread out over the year or are they seasonal. If the list expects to be mailed around the holidays, mailing them in July or August may not be a good bet. For instance, people are looking to get taxes done at the end of the year. Mailing them in June isn’t a good idea.
5. What formats have the list responded to? Did they call in from a television or radio commercial? Did they enter their name in an opt-in form? Did they respond to a postcard or direct mail package? If possible you’ll want to look at the original offer the individual responded to. The company can often provide this info. Another great resource is the “Who’s Mailing What Archive,” which contains full scans of more than 200,000 direct mail pieces.
6. How much did the person spend? Did they buy a $24 book, $1300 gold coin, or $200 worth of clothes from a catalog?  Comparing the offer with what was spent will help you gauge the individual’s level of commitment.
7. How often do they buy? For instance if the individual collects Lladro porcelain figures or commemorative plates and there are a certain number in the series how many did the prospect purchase? Generally, the more times they’ve bought the more likely they are to be better buyers. But…there’s a caveat here too. If they are collecting Lladro Figures, or Harley Davidson items they may have strong brand loyalty. There’s no way you’re going to sell Honda toys to a Harley collector. Which leads us to the next point.
8. Based on your understanding of all the above factors how likely are prospects on the list interested in your offer? Credit and Identity protection for instance are things people are universally interested in as are money and finance, health, personal development etc… But there are other things people are specifically interested in for instance, where computers are concerned we need to know are they Mac users, PC users, Linux users? If they’re video gamers are they more into Mario Brothers or World of Warcraft? Those are probably two very different markets.
9. Who else is mailing to the list and what are they mailing? If it’s an email or mailing list you should sign up. Or try and track down what they’re mailing in the Who’s Mailing What Archive, or the Directory of Major Mailers. Compare their offers with yours.
10. What is the breakeven? So, if you’re testing an email list of 5000 names you purchased for $1500 or $300/mil and you were selling a $24 product you would need to sell 62.5 units to break even at a 1.25% conversion ratio. 5000 x .0125=62.5 x $24=$1500. Without knowing the metrics it will always be hard to make media buying work.

Once you think you’ve got the right list make sure to test your offer and the creative.  If you’re using different lists and different creative it’s important to identify each you can do this by adding different 800 numbers, post office boxes, landing pages, etc… One other word of warning, if you send creative to a list or buy media always double check everything is working. I’ve done it before and I did it just the other day. I placed a banner ad in a newsletter that went out to several thousand people and wondered why there was no response. After thinking about it for a bit I discovered the address was wrong and the link was going to https:// instead of http:// ~ pays to check.

If you found this information useful or have something to add please be sure to comment below.

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A better way is to use a free email service like 10minutemail.com. 10 Minute Mail is a free service that grants you a temporary email address for…well…10 minutes. You can extend the time if you need too. I’ve used this service dozens of times over the years and I love it. Of course I don’t use 10 Minute Mail for everything because some lists are worth opting into. But other times I feel like I’m not planning on buying anything so why not save the mailer the trouble of having a deadbeat on his list. Enjoy!

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