Top 5 Issues of The Gary Halbert Letter

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My personal, totally subjective Top 5 Favorite issues of The Gary Halbert Letter, in order of awesomeness…

(click on each to read)

1. How To Become a Copywriter in Just 30 Days

2. The Famous A-Pile/B-Pile Direct Mail Lecture

3. The “Spooky Secret” of Neurological Imprinting

4. The Magic “Twists” to Riches

5.  The Original Source of “Find a Starving Crowd”

Agree with this ranking? Disagree? What’s missing from my list? Contact me to let me know.

And did you know you can read all back issues of The Gary Halbert Letter for free? Just click here.

By the way: If you’ve never read anything by Gary Halbert before, you simply must click on the link above.  You’ll always remember where you were when you read your first Gary Halbert Letter.  Believe me…it’s that powerful in changing your “marketing-mindset” forever!

7 More Ideas on Swiping Business Models

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Still kicking around the ideas found in the Laurence’s post  “7 Breakthrough Info Marketing Offers And How To Create Your Own”…and I started wondering:

How many successful — and profitable! — mail order businesses (or products) in the past have simply ceased to exist due to:

The seller or business owner retires from the business due to age…

Or simply gets tired for the concept and moves on to something else…

Or sadly, the business died because the owner passed away and didn’t pass it along to any heirs?

Here’s the deal:

These businesses didn’t fail due to a lack of demand, costs sucking out cash, etc.  The business model and products might have been perfectly sound and extremely profitable.  What if the business didn’t ever fail, really — it simply stopped because there was nobody to keep it moving, like a car without a driver?

Now if someone with good business sense (such as yourself) happened to pick up this business or hot product, and brought it back to life, would it still be a profitable enterprise? ?

Here’s how I would go about testing this idea:

1. Go to a public library and start reviewing specialized niche magazines from 10, 20, or even 40 years in the past. Example:  Magazines for gardeners.

2. Start noting mail order ads, especially for information products (reports, books, courses, etc.) and see if you can discover a  control ad that ran for several years, but then just mysteriously stopped at some point.  Example:  You find a control running from 1975 – 1980 in several gardening magazines promoting a book titled “Growing Your Own Food for Survival.”

3.  Google around and see if this product is still being sold somewhere.

4.  Google around and see if you can discover what happened to the person or company selling the product. Maybe you’ll come across an obituary, contact information for a family member, or some other clue to what happened. Example: You find an obituary listed in the Google News Archives that the owner died in car crash in 1981. You then locate and make contact with one of his children.

5. Try to purchase a used copy of the product.  If it was a book, try to locate and purchase a copy via Bookfinder.com.

6.  If you can locate the business owner or heirs, try to get the story on what happened with the business, and pitch the idea of buying the rights to (or  licensing) the product if the business stopped due to non-market factors. Example: “Dad died, so his business went away because none of us kids cared to continue it. Sure, I’ll sell you the rights. Toss out a number.”

7. If you can’t locate the original seller, or if the seller or heirs are unwilling to sell you the rights to the product, or if are simply feeling creative — can you recreate the product and business yourself? Perhaps you can update and improve the ideas behind the original product (don’t plagiarize them).

Now, here’s the important part:

If it was a solid business concept in the past, and if it’s success factors were rooted in unchangeable aspects of human nature, isn’t the business idea at least worth a small market test? Example: You create an entirely new book inspired by “Growing Your Own Food for Survival” and using updated sources. You model your ad concepts on the original controls, though again, updating for today’s market…

(I don’t know the full story, but I’m guessing this is what happened with Joe Karbo’s The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, which has been updated and sold in recent years by a Richard Nixon.)

One more thing.  I haven’t actually tested this experiment.  But some point soon, I’m going to try it out.  In the mean time, I would welcome your thoughts, critiques or other input on the idea…

The PERFECT business opportunity?

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If you’ve ever thought about starting a business of your own, it’s easy to find reasons to not follow through.  Starting a store…what location? Selling a widget…where to find raw materials? These are all valid concerns, which must be factored into any business plan.

But what if you found the PERFECT business idea…would you know what it looked like? Here are some suggestions on what to look for:

(1) The ideal business sells the world, rather than a single neighborhood or even a single city or state. In other words, it has an unlimited global market (and today this is more important than ever, since world markets have now opened up to an extent unparalleled in my lifetime). By the way, how many times have you seen a retail store that has been doing well for years — then another bigger and better retail store moves nearby, and it’s kaput for the first store.

(2) The ideal business offers a product which enjoys an “inelastic” demand. Inelastic refers to a product that people need or desire — almost regardless of price.

(3) The ideal business sells a product which cannot be easily substituted or copied. This means that the product is an original or at least it’s something that can be copyrighted or patented.

(4) The ideal business has minimal labor requirements (the fewer personnel, the better). Today’s example of this is the much-talked about “virtual corporation.” The virtual corporation may consist of an office with three executives, where literally all manufacturing and services are farmed out to other companies.

(5) The ideal business enjoys low overhead. It does not need an expensive location; it does not need large amounts of electricity, advertising, legal advice, high-priced employees, large inventory, etc.

(6) The ideal business does not require big cash outlays or major investments in equipment. In other words, it does not tie up your capital (incidentally, one of the major reasons for new-business failure is under-capitalization).

(7) The ideal business enjoys cash billings. In other words, it does not tie up your capital with lengthy or complex credit terms.

(8) The ideal business is relatively free of all kinds of government and industry regulations and strictures (and if you’re now in your own business, you most definitely know what I mean with this one).

(9) The ideal business is portable or easily moveable. This means that you can take your business (and yourself) anywhere you want — Nevada, Florida, Texas, Washington, S. Dakota (none have state income taxes) or hey, maybe even Monte Carlo or Switzerland or the south of France.

(10) Here’s a crucial one that’s often overlooked; the ideal business satisfies your intellectual (and often emotional) needs. There’s nothing like being fascinated with what you’re doing. When that happens, you’re not working, you’re having fun.

(11) The ideal business leaves you with free time. In other words, it doesn’t require your labor and attention 12, 16 or 18 hours a day (my lawyer wife, who leaves the house at 6:30 AM and comes home at 6:30 PM and often later, has been well aware of this one).

(12) Super-important: the ideal business is one in which your income is not limited by your personal output (lawyers and doctors have this problem). No, in the ideal business you can sell 10,000 customers as easily as you sell one (publishing is an example).

Adding up all these ideas, it’s easy to agree with Lawrence Bernstein that information marketing meets the requirements of a perfect business.

You write something once…perhaps it’s a how-to book, self-published using Lulu.com (Why a physical book and not an e-book? What can I say…I’m a bibliophile and don’t like e-books…)  You sell it to the world, 24-7 online.  Once you’ve established cash flow from this enterprise, hit the keyboard and replicate it with another product.

What do you think? Throw in the fact that writing a book — becoming an author — makes you an instant and obvious expert…and it seems to be a no-brainer.  What’s stopping you? What’s stopping ME?

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