MLM and the Myth of “Duplication”

Most of you have probably read the rant I wrote in a previous newsletter, “My Career as an Enthusiastic, Naïve Ambot.” It chronicles my path from 21 year old Amway recruit to successful 31 year old guy with business sense, and the scars that prove it. The short assessment is: It was a priceless experience because I cut my teeth in sales. I developed a lot of skills I use every day.

Downside was, virtually everything they told me was a half-truth. Like the idea that I even owned a business at all. (I had legal title to absolutely nothing.) Now I’m just glad I never scored any big points in that game, because when the thing caved in, the clunk was heard ‘round the world. Heck, Amway (Quixtar) is still disintegrating, like a week-old dead goldfish when its fins and tail are falling off and floating around in your aquarium.

OK, so anyway, the MLM industry is still alive and well. Most of it now is being done on the Internet and teleseminars instead of hotel and living room meeting rooms, but it’s still being done.

And I sometimes have consultations with people who are doing MLM; this stuff comes up regularly.

Just today Mendy and I were talking about this. There are some realities that all of us, whether in MLM or not, should be privy to.

Duplication is Bad, Bad, Bad. In MLM-land, the key to success is duplication. Hundreds, thousands of people duplicate your efforts and that’s how you multiply your time.

Truth is, duplication in marketing is always bad, not good. Duplication is, by definition, copying a USP. When you copy a USP, it’s not Unique anymore. It’s the same. It’s dilution of your biggest asset. Duplication in marketing is commoditization. Being a commodity is bad.

Realize this: Duplication in manufacturing is great. Duplication in printing is great.

Duplication of systems and processes is great. It makes 20,000 McDonald’s restaurants possible. But remember, McDonalds may have 20,000 franchises but it’s only got ONE marketing department.

Duplication is an Illusion. Think about this: Any time you see someone who’s really successful in MLM, it’s because he or she is not doing the same thing as everyone else. It’s because they’re not duplicating. Not because they are!

It’s not just that they’re working harder, either, although they may be running Mach 2 with their hair on fire. At the bare minimum, they have more personality, more flair, more magnetism, more charisma. They have a unique voice, a unique story to tell, a uniquely compelling energy.

As often as not there are other things too. They have a slightly better, “under the table” compensation plan. Perhaps they’re using different tools than everyone else. They’ll still stand up on stage and tell everyone they’re a ‘product of the system’ and they ‘just followed the pattern.’ But I eventually came to realize that every time Dexter Yager stood up on a stage and crooned, “You can aaaaall pass me by!” – he was saying that because it was impossible to pass him. You couldn’t beat him running through the maze because he owned the maze. (Duh.) Every time he’s say “This business is not saturated!” – he was saying that because it was saturated. (Duh.)

Recruiting Costs Real Up-Front Money. If you’re going to replace manual labor with automation, you’re going to go negative (many hundreds of dollars at least) for each person you sponsor. You can overcome this with organizational momentum, but it’s expensive up front. Your marketing blade has to be razor sharp.

Candid Advice to an MLMer: Last fall I had a gal in my coaching program who was selling nutritional supplements online, buying Google ads and selling products retail. It didn’t take her long to discover that the click prices have risen to a point where a person running a retail MLM business can’t make a profit just acquiring a customer. Here’s what I told her:

I used to do something similar back in 1997 (offline not online). These thoughts are in no particular order.

-When you do marketing to promote your MLM business, it reveals the true cost of acquiring a customer, which is somewhat hidden from you in the conventional way of doing MLM. Suddenly cost to get a customer has a real number and you have a benchmark for seeing how much those customers are worth, how long they last and how profitable they are.

-In most MLM companies, the person who actually acquires the customer doesn’t make money, they lose money. The person who recruits you makes money. This leads to all kinds of promotions in which the upline convinces the downline to invest in marketing, not telling them that they’re going to go negative doing it. (That is compensated by the promise of how much those new people are going to recruit and multiply).

-In manufacturing, duplication is the key to everything. In electronic and print media, duplication makes mass communication possible. But in marketing, duplication is suicide. That’s because in marketing, the most essential ingredient is a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition, something that you can uniquely provide and guarantee. But marketing duplication, by nature, is the exact opposite of this. In marketing, the person with the USP wins and the people who duplicate that USP earn money for the person with the USP. Let me explain what I mean by this.

Let’s take a superstar in your business, a Double Diamond or whatever. He tells the world how he followed the system and made it simple and duplicatable and it led to success. That’s may be essentially true, but if he’s successful he’s doing something unique. Many times it may just be his unusual, attractive personality, his personal magnetism. Often times he’s getting a better ‘deal’ than most other people, or he makes more on tickets or tapes than other people, but the key to his success is, in part, that he’s NOT exactly the same as everyone else. He’s a little extra special.

That said, trying to be duplicatable is a very secondary motive for you. If you have 20 people duplicate what you’re doing w/ your Google campaigns, it’ll just drive the bids up. Not to mention if 200 or 2000 people do it.

What you want to do, from the standpoint of an independent business owner, is add unique things that differentiate you from everybody else so that when people click on your ad you have something to say to them that others don’t or can’t say. Then the world starts to tilt in your favor.

One thing I tell all my students who are MLM folks is the same thing I learned: Once you master marketing, you wake up one day and realize that you don’t need an MLM company in order to be successful. You know how to get traffic, you know how to say something that makes them buy, you know how to make the sale. So at that point, why would you settle for 15 or 20 or 25% commission when you could source the product yourself and make 60-80%?

There are only about ten thousand companies out there trying to sell some products, they don’t know how to sell it like you do, and some of those products are really really good. When you’re the marketer, you’re in the drivers’ seat and you’ve got the goods. You can sell ANYTHING you want to sell. In retrospect, MLM was the thing that opened your eyes to a much bigger world – they cleaned you up, put on a suit and tie, taught you some very important things, and now you’re the boss. Go to a trade show or something and find something you can sell – and sell it.

-With everything I said above, the long term focus of all your marketing is to constantly improve your USP. What do you add to the formula that others don’t? Why should they buy from you instead of any of the other 200,000 distributors? Especially on the Internet, which is a universe of niche marketing, this is a vital question to get answered.

Thanks for your questions, hopefully you’re OK with my frank and honest answers, and I look forward to talking with you on future calls!

I’ll never forget when the light bulb went on. I went to a low-key marketing seminar, big contrast to the hyped-up MLM seminars I was used to. It didn’t take me long to notice that a very large minority of people in that room (not just the speakers) were making six figure incomes or better, and they were not doing this by promising 1000 other people the moon and the stars. They were doing very nichy, obscure, unusual things, and doing them very well.

I realized I didn’t have to play that silly duplication game any more. So I stopped. It’s been onward and upward ever since.

I’ll never forget the new sense of hope I had when I’d finally let go of something that was holding me back, and because of letting go, was able to see a whole new set of possibilities. Why duplicate someone else? The best way to have a Unique Selling Proposition is for you to just sell YOU.

To your success,

Perry Marshall

No Fake Scarcity Here!

Just a few days ago Jonathan Mizel, Glenn Livingston and I launched a special teleseminar for Google AdWords users, teaching a new technique. There were 475 seats available. They filled up in about 6 hours.

We could have gone ahead and gotten more teleseminar lines (which would have been expensive but profitable). We didn’t do that. Why not? Because we said 475, and that means 475.

Not 875. Everyone else will have to wait for the MP3 and the transcript, which will come five days later.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in one of my promotions. I don’t do fake scarcity.

And when people find out that 475 really means 475, they’re quicker about reading my emails as soon as they come in. Ya think?

Admittedly I’ve screwed this up a time or two. The last time I did it was when I was forming my Renaissance Club Roundtable group (which is fantastic BTW). I let a guy go past the deadline, and then he still didn’t sign up. Then a week later we talked again and I went soft on him. Shame on me, ‘cuz now he probably thinks I was never serious in the first place. (Plus I can’t even reject his application now, ‘cuz he never turned it in!)

I was just being sloppy and permissive. Sometimes I need to kick myself in the butt and be the hard-ass. Next time I will.

Oh yeah – Roundtable costs about ten grand a year. If you’re going to be a hard ass, sometimes you’re going to have to have the guts to turn down the ten grand. Personally, I suspect that in some strange way, the money itself has more respect for you when you’re willing to walk away from it. You should practice walking away from money every now and then, it’s a good exercise.

Pitfalls of The Mindless Marketing Checklist

Case in point: You have an offer and you go through some copywriters’ checklist and it says “Scarcity increases response.” The garden variety marketer is going to figure he needs to make something up. So he’s gonna send an email that says “We’ve only got 119 lines left on our teleseminar and the seats are filling up fast! Don’t delay another minute or you may miss the most important teleseminar of your entire career!” When of course they’ve got all the lines they need and only 8 people are signed up anyway.

Let’s see, how many things can I think of that are wrong with this? Well first of all it’s just not true. Second it perpetuates a scarcity mentality. Third, people do sometimes catch you and after they do, they’ll know from now on that you play these kinds of games. Fourth, what are you going to do when you really do have limited quantities?

NameSqueeze™ vs. Traditional Pages: Report From The Trenches

Jonathan Mizel coined the term “NameSqueeze”, a web page where you can do one of two things: Sign up and opt in, or leave.

I’ve got several on my own site – www.perrymarshall.com/google, www.perrymarshall.com/whitepapers, www.perrymarshall.com/guerillamarketing.htm, www.perrymarshall.com/9.

Do they work?

Yep.

But sometimes, depending on the page, depending on the topic, squeeze pages can feel a little smarmy. Dan Scheff (www.BackStageDevelopment.com) tested a “hard” squeeze page against a “soft” squeeze page, which has the normal site navigation at the top but an offer at the bottom.

This version here with navigation on the right won. People were more responsive if they had a chance to take a look around his site first, then come back and sign up for the Free Estimate.

Recently I was involved in an experiment to determine the effectiveness of adding pictures to testimonials. After months of maddening testing – maddening because it produced counterintuitive test results – we discovered that the pictures reduced the response, rather than helping it.

 

 

Go figure.

Right?

You’d think that more is better.

But sometimes it’s not. In this case, I only have a theory. The theory is that pictures make a non-glitzy site look glitzy and it’s a turnoff. It’s inconsistent with the overall feel of the site and people don’t like that. That’s my hunch.

If my hunch is even close to correct, this suggests that doing the right thing in the right context is vastly more important than the cleverness of any one technique.

It also proves (not merely suggests) that you can read books and go to seminars and listen to gurus, but you don’t actually know anything until you test it.

“Go test it” is an easy cop out for a guru who doesn’t know. The reason you hired the guru in the first place is because you don’t have time to test everything, right? Truthfully, all teachers can do is offer solutions that have worked well for other people and guide you in your implementation. But

it’s essential that you not just randomly grab tricks from copywriting manuals and stick them in somewhere just because they seem clever. There’s a lot of dogma out there about prices, headlines, sales funnels, offers, etc. that may have nothing to do with your particular situation.

Wildly Successful, Low Cost Lead Generation with Email

Some time ago one of my Marketing System Toolkit customers used his critique certificates to get help on an email blast. Christoph sold rotary machinery sensors and he decided to rent the Sensors Magazine email list. He sent me a glitzy, lovely HTML ad with pictures of his products, which he planned on sending out. It was a techie version of Madison Avenue – you know, clever text about how cool their stuff is with some features and benefits and a link to their website.

No, no, no. I told him to do it like this (also notice the email header – it comes from Sensors Magazine but when people reply, the replies go to Christoph):

To: Perry Marshall

From: Sensors Magazine

Reply-To Email Address: Christoph Schmidt @ company

Subject Line: Rotary Sensing Tech Guides

Dear Perry,

I just wanted to let you know that our technical support guys have finished writing three convenient guides about rotary encoders and I’ll be happy to send you a Free copy if you reply back:

- “How does an Optical Encoder work” (20K) gives you a brief explanation of the sensor technology used in an optical encoder.

- “Pros and Cons of Absolute vs. Incremental Encoders” (20K) explains the key differences between incremental and absolute encoders and suggests which one is the right rotary sensor for your application.

- “Various Interfaces for Rotary Encoders” (20K) deals with the principles, technical specification, and advantages of commonly used interfaces between the rotary sensor and the machine control.

Again, these guides are Free, all you have to do is reply back with your choices, and I’ll send you one or more guides in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Best success with your current encoder project,

Christoph Schmidt

OK, so here’s what happens: He sends this to the magazine advertising rep. She says, “Huh?

What’s this? You can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is not a normal email, nobody does it like this, Christoph. I don’t understand this.”

“The marketing consultant told me to do it this way, so that’s how I want to do it,” he replies.

“Well… Okay. I guess you’re the customer.”

So here’s what happens: He rents 1000 names for 45 cents a piece. They blast out the email.

Next day I get a very excited email from him:

Hi Perry,

I am still in “shock”, so far we got 76 answers (out of 1000). And I expect that we are getting close or even higher than 8%.

Thanks for your great idea and I great weekend I had because of that success.

Looking forward to getting your answer!

Christoph

8% response from total strangers. Not bad, eh? Also, 45 cents a piece might sound expensive for emails, but that’s the going rate for professional grade opt-in lists like this. And look at his numbers: He collected these leads for $5.60 each. He got responses from real people at real companies who have real projects or have specific interest in this topic. And he got personal replies, not just optins on a web page.

In the industrial market, $5.60 sales leads are unheard of. Not too unusual in Perry’s land of Guerilla Marketing though.

Important Stuff About How We Did This…

The most important thing you need to recognize is that we set this up so that Christoph would personally receive and process these requests, not an automated robot or web form. That’s probably what the magazine ad person thought was so strange. Why did we do this? Because we wanted an 8% response instead of a 3% response.

This affords another opportunity: A conversation. Because when Christoph sends the person’s PDF back, he replies with this message:

Dear FIRSTNAME,

Thank you very much for your prompt answer and interest in our free “Rotary Sensing Tech Guides”.

I am positive that you will find valuable information in the attached PDF files.

Is there a specific application you’re considering right now? Let me know how I can best assist you.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Christoph Schmidt

People reply to his email and a conversation begins. The next step is a warm phone conversation, and a cold prospect is converted to a hot lead. Notice how none of this ever looked like, felt like, or smelled like spam. No spammer would ever put “Rotary Sensing Tech Guides” in an email subject line. Plus the FROM field is “Sensors Magazine” which is a trusted source.

Now you know exactly how to bring hot leads to a hungry business, one or two or three days from today. All you need to do is find some email lists and go forth and prosper.

“How do I find good email lists?”

I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor, and wants to sell a non-medical product to other doctors.

Google AdWords is not very useful because doctors are not necessarily searching in such a way that specific keywords would bring doctors who want it. MD’s are pretty difficult to market to in general because their gatekeepers screen virtually all of their mail, docs tend to not be big readers (isn’t that reassuring?) and they’re a tad arrogant and tend to only listen to other doctors (imagine that).

He’s tried some trade journals but some refuse to run his ads because they’re off topic. And he tried in vain to find e-zines aimed at medical doctors. (He admits he’s not terribly Internet savvy.) So I offered some help.

I searched “physician online community” and quickly found

http://familypractice.com/ and http://www.medscape.com/home

Then I go to www.alexa.com and type in those websites. Alexa tells me

“People who visit FamilyPractice.com also visit…”

Main Street Doctor www.mainstreetdoctor.com (Site is out of date and non-commercial)

FamilyMDLinx www.familymdlinx.com This looks promising. The site is targeted at doctors in a wide variety of disciplines – Academic Medicine / Education, Adolescent Medicine, Atherosclerosis/Lipids, Basic Science / Genetics, Clinical Pharmacology… big long list. Their email subscription form requires them to submit email and snail mail information, as well as their medical specialty. They accept ads on their website and their mother site www.mdlinx.com states they are the “leading provider of online marketing solutions to the healthcare industry” including targeted online advertising. Bingo.

So hang on, before we go any further let’s check MDLinx.com on Alexa and see what sites are similar to that:

People who visit this page also visit:

Minority Health – MCW HealthLink minority-health.healthlink.mcw.edu

The Hope Chest – Patients Newsletter members.aol.com/lungnews/thc.html

Medical Newswire medicalnewswire.com (this looks promising, so let’s see… looks like it reaches a lot more people than just doctors, but it’s got 130,000 subscribers. The home page says it’s “the only source to send your press releases announcing financial earnings, job openings, job promotions, product announcements, educational events, and anything the healthcare marketplace would have an interest in learning more about.”)

American Academy of Family Physicians’ Patient Education Doc… www.familydoctor.org This also looks promising. It’s a spinoff of American Academy of Family Physicians, even has a “health plan complaint form.”

Has an article on the home page that directly relates to an issue my friend addresses. And they have a bunch of related sites. One has links to a dozen medical journals.

That’s from a quick swipe at Alexa. But Google has a pretty useful tool too – if go to the Google search box and type related:mdlinx.com we get a bunch of sites that Google thinks is similar to mdlinx.com:

This is VERY helpful. MDConsult is owned by Elsevier, who is a big trade publisher.

eMedicine is a medical knowledge base and they sell a lot of space on their website to drug companies.

So they can be bought. MDchoice.com is a medical database too, and yes, you can “Advertise to our targeted audience…”

In this example I haven’t considered e-zine directories, which might be useful in some cases.

But you can use Google and Alexa to keep drilling down and find “related sites” until you keep coming back to the same ones again. At that point you’ve probably tapped the entire niche. If we’re targeting MD’s, we want professional publications, probably not ad-hoc stuff. Also, I haven’t even mentioned the SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service, www.srds.com) which though expensive is available at larger libraries and would certainly have some resources.

Some list owners will send solo emails for you, instead of just selling you a spot in their e-zine.

This can be very useful. However I would be very wary of anyone who offers to do this who is not an SRDS style, brick and mortar publisher. And if anyone offers to sell you the list outright, run the other way as fast as you can, it means the list is worthless. You want an audited double-opt in list.

Email Advertising and Email Lists: The Straightest Path to Fast Sales and List Building

Wanna know where the highest quality Internet traffic comes from?

Not banner ads.

Not Google ads.

Not press releases.

Not free articles distributed all over the Internet. None of those things.

The best traffic on the Internet comes from other peoples’ email lists.

That’s where the most value is concentrated, where you can get the biggest bang in the shortest period of time.

One blast to the right email lists could produce more results for you than nine months of search engine traffic. If you need fast results, the first place you should start looking is email.

An industrial client I used to work with finds that if they advertise in trade magazines, cost per sales lead is about $200. The same client can buy the top advertising slot in an e-zine that goes out to 50,000 corporate buyers for $1250. They offer a white paper or guide of some kind and collect 150 quality sales leads in one day. That’s a cost per lead of about $12.00. You can’t beat that in business to business! If your sales are sluggish, the right e-zine ad could save your bacon.

See the ads on the right side of this e-zine? If you do what ABB does here – or some variation on it, a white paper, a quick guide, a slide chart, a “cheat sheet” – you can collect hot sales leads quite inexpensively.

How This Changes Your Economics – A Typical Customer Acquisition

Let’s say you sell a software program for $199 and you sell it with a NameSqueeze™ page that offers a free download version of your software. You have an autoresponder sequence that follows up with a series of ten emails. Subscribers automatically get on your newsletter mailing list too. You pay 25 cents a click and 25% of the people who click, fill out the form and download the software.

If that’s your math, then each software download costs you $1.00 before Pay Per Email. After Pay Per Email, each software download costs you $1.10 plus a penny per monthly newsletter. Your marketing costs have gone up 10%.

If your conversion from opt-ins to sales is 1%, then your cost per sale went from $100 to $110.

Is that a problem? Considering it weeds out other marketers, it’s probably not a problem at all.

On the other hand let’s say you sell that software program for $9.99 and the clicks cost 5 cents apiece. The autoresponders still go out at 1 cent per message. Let’s say your opt-in rate is still 25% and conversion rate is 5%. In this case the cost to acquire a customer went from $4.00 to $6.00. PPE

adds 50% to your marketing cost. A marketing strategy that is heavily email driven may stop working.

Creating Sub-Lists will be critical to your success as an efficient, effective marketer. If you sell health related products, you won’t want to send headache emails to people who are on the arthritis list. People who want to hear from you once a month will need to be separated from people who want to hear from you every single day.

The lesson here is that if your business is heavily dependent on the fact that email is free,

you must re-engineer your business so that you can both afford to pay for the emails you send and that you use other ways to communicate with customers. Otherwise you’re in deep yogurt, dude.

Oh, and since we’re mourning the ‘Last Bastion of Free Speech’…

The other thing everyone’s in an uproar about is Google bowing to China’s wishes and agreeing to censor free speech in exchange for the opportunity to build a major online presence in China. If you search “Tiananmen Square” in China, you’re not going to get the famous picture of the student facing off with a tank – not even a mention.

No, you’re going to get the latest visitor information on Beijing’s biggest public gathering place, right across the street from the Forbidden City.

Isn’t that nice?

 

A lot of people are outraged by this, and I understand why they feel the way they feel.

But I’m fine with what Google is doing. Let me explain why.

 

Once the camel’s nose is under the tent, they’ll never get rid of Google. It’ll be easier to oust the whole stinkin’ communist government than it will to purge China of Google and the Internet.

There is no such thing as a “little bit” of free speech. Time only moves in one direction, and that’s forward.

Don’t forget, plenty o’ people were complaining about the exact same thing 15 years ago when China was just starting to open up to the West. They complained bitterly about the human rights abuses in China and said we should never stoop to doing business with such an evil empire.

But capitalism began its relentless march. Factories got built, trade got underway and today China is anything but communist. It’s raging capitalism now, overseen by The Party, thank you very much. They’ll never get rid of free markets either.

Human rights abuses? Sure. But they’re on the decline. Western individualism is seeping into Asian culture like water seeping into cracks in the street.

Cold wind blows. Temperatures drop.

Water freezes. Cracks form. The silent jackhammer destroys brittle slabs of pavement more effectively than a real one ever could. Progress relentlessly races ahead.

Wanna get your message delivered ‘round the world? Make it possible for someone to make money delivering it to others. Light the foxes’ tails on fire and send them running through amber waves of grain… soon acres upon acres of lush farmland are in flames.

What PPE (Pay Per Email) Will Look Like

• It’s going to be a bidding system. It’s impossible to assign a single number to the value of a delivered email. Some mailers couldn’t afford 0.1 cent per email. Some mailers could afford $5.00 per email. But in any case, the more you bid, the more of your emails go through.

They’ll only charge you for the ones that go through (I hope). But again it’s just like those Google ads. The #1 position gets twice as much traffic as #3 and pays twice as much per click.

So he pays four times as much for twice the visitors. He can afford to do so because his conversion rate is better than everyone else. Yeah, there’s a place for low bidders, but they get the scraps.

• You’ll be bidding against people who are competing for the same email boxes. One email box belongs to a high-flying investor who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions online. Access to him costs a nickel or a dime per email on any given day.

Meanwhile, wiccagirl@hotmail.com belongs to a Wiccan in Nova Scotia who grows her own food and doesn’t even own a credit card. Access to her: 1/20th of a cent.

• You might still be able to get through for free (or for less money) IF your readers whitelist you. Getting them to do so will be the name of the game. Since hardly anybody can get every subscriber to put them on a white list, the ones who are 50%, 70%, 90% successful in getting white listed will pay less than everyone else. People who relentlessly pitch their lists, have poor relationships with their readers and offer little real content will constantly fight an uphill battle against email costs. A cult-following email list will be a wonderful luxury for marketers like you who bring personality, flair and substance to their messages.

• This adds a new dimension to the Unlimited Traffic Technique and the Winner-Take-All Phenomenon. As I’ve been teaching for a long time (and as Jonathan Mizel has been teaching even longer), the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing is achieving a Visitor Value that’s higher than all your competitors. You typically start with Google AdWords, using it as your “traffic conversion anvil” and patiently work your sales funnel until it’s profitable. Then you roll out their product in other media – Overture, ezines, banner ads, affiliates, popups, partnerships, whatever – creating a cash avalanche as the fire spreads. Now email itself becomes another dimension in this formula. It’s both a barrier of entry for unproven marketers and a distinct advantage for those who know what they’re doing. Winners win even more now.

• You can no longer be sloppy about maintaining an up-to-date email list. You don’t want to pay for 3-year old email boxes that aren’t even checked anymore. People who never click on any of your links, never respond to any offers, never even open their emails need to get scrubbed from your list. People with email lists of 100,000 or a million ‘subscribers’ will find out how few they actually have. Many people will find the real size of their email list is one fifth or one twentieth as big as they thought it was. The list isn’t 3 million, it’s 300,000 and the cost to hit the list isn’t $7500, it’s $750. (“Hmm, maybe PPE isn’t as expensive as we thought it’d be, if we do it right.” Would you pay $750 to talk to 300,000 people if you knew most of them were paying attention?) You’ll devise specific mechanisms for sorting the tire kickers from serious prospects, even just within email, to keep cost at a minimum and relevance at a maximum. You’ll do lead generation inside your own list to create segmented sub-lists.

• Offline marketing starts to be taken more seriously by online marketers. If email costs anything at all, then snail mail gets a lot more attractive. Talking to customers on the phone gets more attractive. Doing customer appreciation events or instant messaging with them becomes more attractive.

• Renting space in your e-zine to others becomes more lucrative overnight. If you have a good relationship with your customers and a well-groomed email list, people who do not have those things will be instantly more inclined to pay you real money for that access.

• During the next five years, good copywriting will go from being an obscure specialty to highly prized, mainstream skill. Five years ago, ‘copywriting’ to most people meant people who know how to put that little © on a product. The word is getting out though. Direct marketing is taking over the Internet, and lemme tell ya – when email starts costing money, copywriters’ fees everywhere will go up. Sally business owner will know that if she’s paying for those emails, they better get written by someone who knows how to tell a story. If your copywriting skills are flaccid, then you’d better go to www.perrymarshall.com/copywriting and listen to my teleseminar with John Carlton. And get crackin’ because the clock is ticking.

Is This Just Going to Legitimize Spam?

The political activists do have some valid concerns. (And it’s not just liberals, conservative political groups are equally worried.) They’re afraid that email is going to turn into a medium where the highest bidder gets free access to your email box, regardless of what they’re selling, and “worthy causes” are last in line.

This is at least somewhat true. I doubt your ISP is going to get away with selling your email address to the Russians. But what will happen is the ‘spam’ you get will be more and more targeted to things you are actually interested. It’ll resemble your postal mailbox.

What’s in your snail-mail ‘junk mail’? Well there are credit card offers and mortgages and coupons and sale flyers. But most everything else has something to do with you and some list you’re on. If you read Guns & Ammo magazine, you’re getting offers for other gun magazines, gun catalogs, Cabella’s outerwear and all the rest. Most of that stuff is at least mildly interesting to you. They know more about you than guessing with 50% accuracy that you are a male and have a ‘package’ that you’d like to make bigger.

In direct mail, it’s very hard to make general consumer offers work – but it’s extremely rewarding when you have a winner. Some of the sharpest direct marketers in the world are in that business. Niche markets, much easier. The spam of the future will be targeted to your likes and dislikes and response rates will (have to) be much, much better than 0.00001%. Email will be written by good copywriters, not illiterate Russians.