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THE CHEAPEST WAY TO DISTRIBUTE 8 1/2 X 11″ CIRCULARS

Most of you may already know this, but beginners don’t — and they overlook this golden opportunity that mail order offers them — co-op dealing!

Co-op is short for “co-operative.” That means that two people share in the cost and distribution of a product or service. In other words, it’s kind of like having a “buy one get one free” coupon for 2 hamburgers. You and a friend will split the cost of 1 hamburger, giving you both a hamburger for lunch. This way, you both saved 50% over the cost of buying each one separately. This is one common example of co-op dealing — and you can do the same thing in mail order.

Co-op dealing is very beneficial (and usually safe) for everyone involved. One example of co-op dealing in mail order is to send your 8 1/2×11″ camera-ready circular to a co-op printer and they’ll print your ad on one side, their ad on the back side and ship them back to you for a low cost of around $10 per 1,000. You get your printing almost free and the other dealer gets his or her flyers mailed on the back of yours free.

But what do you do with them when they are mailed back to you? If you’re new to mail order it’s doubtful you have a mailing list to distribute them to. Plus, postage costs alone would run you about $290.00 first-class. At this rate it would have been cheaper to send the camera-ready to a tabloid or adsheet publisher rather than by a co-op. But don’t despair.

Simply have the printer ship your copies to a co-op circular mailer instead of sending them to you. A couple good circular mailers we recommend are BMG Services, PO Box 429, Johnson KS 67855 (your cost is only 1c for each 8 1/2×11 pre-printed circular) or Thorn Gifts, 1807 Stillwater #5, St Paul MN 55119 (your cost is only 5c for each 8 1/2×11 pre-printed circular.) Why the difference in price? BMG mails by bulk rate and Thorn mails by first-class. Either method is effective and sure beats paying 29c each.

In addition, you benefit from the mailing list of the circular mailer. If this particular mailer sells a mailing list, having them do a 1,000 or 5,000 “test” mailing for you would be a way to test their names. You should get a few responses from a mailing of this size but it all depends on “what” you are offering and the “price” you are offering it for. It’s very difficult to sell any item for more than $50 on a 8 1/2×11″ circular. For items costing more than $50, you need to use the two-step approach. In other words, use the 8 1/2×11″ circular to generate inquiries and follow-up with the complete sales materials that constitute the higher price the customer may decide to pay.

Another idea is that you could contact a dealer with products and services not conflicting with your own and ask them to co-op mail for you. In this deal, you would pay for the 2-sided printing (with the mailer’s ad on back of yours) and he/she would mail them for you free of charge. It works!

Another way to co-op deal in mail order is by co-op advertising. High Mountain Advertiser and Popular Advertiser are both long running co-op publications. You place your ad the first time through a dealer and all future ads are 50% less. Then you have the option of mailing pre-printed copies with your name in the publisher’s block as an authorized dealer. When other people order advertising, they will send their orders to you. You keep 50% of the money and send the rest (along with the order) back to the publisher. This way, you can have your 8 1/2×11 circulars printed and mailed in a publication at a 50% savings.

Coal Publishing, 27 South 4th Avenue, Highland Park NJ 08904 also offers co-op advertising in their “Small Business Keeps America Growing” tabloid. For the low cost of $35 per tabloid-size page, you can have your 8 1/2×11″ circular along with four 2-inch ads printed and mailed to a whopping 5,000 circulation. All you are responsible for is the mailing of 200 of them. Any beginner can handle mailing 50 per week to a mailing list or to their own customers. Besides, no one can offer you a 5,000 honest circulation for this price. This is a real money-saver!

If you market the direct mail method, it’s a good idea to send a good circular you plan to keep around for awhile to a mail order printer and have 1,000 printed on ONE SIDE. Then, you can use the back of 100 or so for testing purposes of other circulars. Run down to the copy shop and run the circulars through the copier by printing on the back side. Only run 100 or less and send them to the best names you can find. If they pull orders, you may have a winner and can have 1,000 printed. Nothing is more annoying than being stuck with 1,000 circulars with something you want to mail on one side and something outdated on the back.

Happy money-saving!

WHAT’S IN A NEWSLETTER?

The majority of people in mail order and MLM businesses are still very unfamiliar with the profitable marketing advantage newsletters can actually be to their business. In fact, most of these people will avoid them completely simply because they don’t understand them; even though newsletters carry an air of prestige about them.

Most of us are already familiar with what a newsletter is. Almost every church, organization, club or group publishes their own newsletter for their particular members. Then, there are corporate newsletters that are distributed by the larger companies (i.e., General Motors, United States Postal Service, Rockwell, etc.) In this case, newsletters are normally given to employees to keep them in touch with management activities and new policies and procedures.

There are also some national newsletters. These are normally targeted to a specific group of people like business managers and corporate executives. There is a BIG difference between newspapers and newsletters.

Newspapers normally contain the “whole” story, while newsletters only present the “cream of the crop,” or the “best of the best” in a condensed format. In addition, newsletters are short, while newspapers are long. If you receive a 4-page company newsletter, you can read every single word in less than 20 minutes. But do you know anyone that reads every single word of a newspaper? Don’t most people just flip through the pages and only read what is interesting to them?

Newsletters are intended for a specific target market. Look at some of the examples we have cited previously. Club newsletters are published for its members, just like church newsletters are published for their congregation. You never find a Baptist Church taking out a 12-month subscription for a Catholic newsletter. And you never see the Boy Scouts subscribing to the Alcoholics Anonymous monthly newsletter. Newsletters are intended for a specific target market.

When mail order and small business was a smaller industry, the total amount of circulation (how many copies were printed and distributed) was sufficient for generating orders and marketing. However, in the 1990’s mail order and small business has literally boomed! Large companies have been forced into bankruptcy and laying off workers. These highly skilled workers decided to open their own mail order and small businesses instead of risking another unemployment crisis! People soon found it more profitable, and secure, to work for themselves.

So, because the mail order and small business industry has grown so vast — it is now necessary to narrow your market and advertise your products to a specific target-market. Back in the old days mail order basically consisted of marketing small gadgets, jewelry and recipe books. But now, mail order is one of the leading industries in the world! You can purchase anything from groceries to clothing to electronics to long-distance telephone services through the mail — including anything in-between.

Now, because of these wide variety of different items being purchased no business can survive unless they advertise to the target-market of their specialized products. In other words — you wouldn’t be able to sell exotic chocolates and desserts to diabetics or software to people who don’t own a computer. Regardless, if you are giving away your product free of charge — these groups would not be interested in it. So your advertising would be a waste of time.

Here’s where newsletters come in. Since it is much more important in the 1990’s to “target” your audience (rather than just simply market to a wide circulation); you can effectively accomplish this goal by publishing a newsletter.

Newsletters are different from other advertising vehicles because you normally only mail them to a subscription list. Subscribers will pay you a certain amount, per year, to receive your newsletter. This means, you are paid UP FRONT but you must budget this money throughout the year, or the length of the subscription. But don’t let this scare you! Since some publishers are used to dealing with a minimum circulation of 1,000 or 5,000 per issue — most will feel like it’s not worthwhile to publish a newsletter to only 25, 50 or 100 people.

But, you must keep a very important fact in mind. While the amount of your circulation will be decreased — you will be mailing to people who will READ and STUDY EVERY SINGLE ISSUE! That fact makes newsletter publishing one of the big differences in your marketing efforts.

Information is a time-tested product that will continue to make money particularly now that we have so much options and the society we live in is constantly hungry for information.

Information about how to better our lives, particularly reports and other varieties of materials that show us ways to improve our livelihood, our careers and our way of life lead the list. These are the best items you can sell by mail.

BUT THISNK ABOUT THIS: Marketable Information need not always be in printed form. The electronic media, such as audio tapes, video tapes, and computer disks are taking over from what was once the exclusive domain of (paper and ink) printed materials.

Of course, you can still sell pre-written materials or very easily create your own. You can write an informational report in an hour that will create income for the rest of your life! The thing you need to know is…what is the best type of information to sell?

You will make the most money by selling MONEY-MAKING information. Books that tell how to start different businesses, short reports on business topics like increasing advertising effectiveness or new business ideas, manuals, all of these are very viable, well selling ideas for informational products. The best way to break into this field is by reading the mail order publications you get in the mail. Pay attention to what others are selling, and order some of the things that look good. Read through them, and look not only at the content but at how it was produced, and how long you think it would take YOU to produce something like it. Find things you could improve upon. The best sellers and easiest to produce will be short reports. You can produce a 4 to 6 page report and sell it easily for $5-$10, depending on the topic. Just be sure your content is packed with information your customer can benefit from, and push those benefits in your advertising.

Also, when you find a good product, contact the seller and negotiate terms for you to sell the product. Try to make a DROP-SHIP arrangement. Drop-shipping means your customer will order from you, you take your profit from the payment (usually 50%), then you send the rest of the payment and a shipping label to the source of the product. They stock the product and will ship it directly to your customer. This saves you from having to buy quantities of the product and stock it.

You will make the most money, though, from informational products you produce yourself. You have no one to share the profits with, you handle it all. If you are selling short 4-6 page reports for, say, $6-$8 each, your cost will be maybe 30 cents for photocopying the report and 29 cents for postage to your customer (if you don’t have the customer include postage). Don’t just send your customer their order alone in the envelope… Include flyers for your best offers, too. A customer who’s ordered once from you is more likely to order from you AGAIN, and return customers are where you make the MOST money.

Another way to save money in the production of your reports is to use your computer, if you have one. It is much easier to write a report with a computer, because it’s easier to make changes. The biggest advantage, though, is you can print your reports whenever you need them, in whatever quantities you need. Save them on a disk, and if you get an order for, say, three reports, just load them in and print them out on your printer. Six pages printed on a typical dot-matrix printer (the least expensive type) would cost only around 3 cents, if you buy your paper in bulk like I do. Figure out your profit from selling your report for $6-$8. Also, you can keep your mailing list of customers on a disk, and save addressing time each time you mail by printing out labels on your printer.

Your mailing list can then be used for extra income by renting your customernames to other mail order dealers.

If you don’t already have a computer, you will also learn exactly which computer setup is the BEST and most ECONOMICAL in this report!

Above all, to be a success in this business, be sure to have a GOOD product. A flaky report that contains questionable information, or little usable information at all, will get you NO satisfied customers that want to send you more of their money. Take the extra time when writing your reports or manuals. It’s worth it. If you’re not 100% confident of your information, go to your local library and check your facts. You may just find extra info you can include in your report. Cover all your bases in your reports, and your customers will come back time and time again!