Writing, producing, and promoting tips booklets for marketing, motivating, and making money.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Nothing Works
"Financial planners are getting worse results with direct mail than ever before. No one is spending any money on special sales (bulk sales in the traditional publishing world). The dating and relationship industry is saturated. Hard copy print publications like magainzes and newspapers are going down the tubes and have no money to spend on premiums."
These are all statements I've heard or read in the past two weeks. I get a kick out of things like this, I really do. The person communicating each of these things truly believes what they wrote or spoke. They believe it in their heart of hearts, at the core of their being, and they can't wait to spread it around to whoever is open to it. The sky is falling, in their opinion.
Now, I don't mean to sound like I've got my head buried in the sand or that I am navigating down that river in Egypt, De-nial. I do know there are some realistic trends out there. What I also know is that a case can be built for just about anything.
I know there are still plenty of financial planners for whom direct mail works great -- when they have decent copy and an excellent offer. They also use booklets as an incentive for sales calls. There are also lots of companies who think books and booklets are ideal mechanisms to help promote their product, service, or cause. Yes, there are new dating services poppping up daily, and some developers of these services are using determination and incitefulness to make their unique and highly lucrative place among the crowd. As for print publications, many of them are shifting their focus to the addition of their website, using incentives to bring in more traffic and more advertising revenue.
The point to all of this was stated a little earlier, that a case can be built for just about anything. You can get yourself to believe nothing works. It's over, you missed the boat, the high-point has come and gone. OR you can look at things through different filters. Go down a path a little differently than anyone else. Make your own way.
What would you rather do -- listen to the dream-killers or have the last laugh all the way to the bank? The choice is and always will be yours. I know which way I prefer.
"Circulation is down, but daily newspapers are attracting a lot of readers and revenues with their Web sites."
This is the headline on an article right here at my local San Diego hometown newspaper's website.
This can means lots of good things for booklet authors who read that headline through some possibly-less-than-obvious filters. Your booklet can be used as an incentive by the newspaper (hmm, can we still call it a newsPAPER when it's a website?) and/or by its advertisers to get more visitors to the website and to the businesses of the advertisers. And the booklet can be licensed to the site owner and/or the advertisers as a PDF file, given away as a download for visiting the site or for purchasing product or service from the advertisers. It can also be licensed to be printed by the newspaper or advertisers if they prefer to distribute hard copy.
The biggest thing to focus on is, in fact, the change in focus. Just because the newspaper is no longer experiencing the same level of circulation doesn't mean it's got less readers or less revenue. Position your booklet to reinforce that change and add to the increase revenues.
The following article from a client's weekly ezine seems particularly important to the work you and I do with our tips booklets. His words reinforce what I mean when I say there is no such thing as a saturated market or that your information (or mine) is less than useful in any way. See what you think.
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THE HUNDREDTH HUMAN By Lloyd J. Thomas, Ph.D.
You might just be the one person needed to change the way human beings function in the world. You may have the power to change human nature...your own as well as humankind's. The phenomenon of the "hundredth monkey" may save the human species from going the way of the dinosaurs. This phenomenon is documented in a book by Lyle Watson, entitled, "Lifetide." Here is the story.
On a group of Japanese islands, there lives a specie of monkey called the Macaca Fuscata. These monkeys have been observed in the wild since the end of World War II. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing the monkeys with sweet potatoes to enhance their diet. The monkeys seemed to like the taste of the potatoes, but found the sand and dirt on them to be very unpleasant.
An 18-month-old female named "Imo" discovered she could remove the sand from the potatoes by washing them in a nearby stream. She taught her mother the solution to the problem. She also taught her playmates, who in turn, taught their mothers.
Gradually, the youngsters of the entire colony of monkeys learned this cultural innovation. By 1958, all the young monkeys had learned to wash sweet potatoes before eating them. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement observed by many scientists. Other adult monkeys kept right on eating dirty sweet potatoes.
In the Fall of 1958, the startling phenomenon of the "hundredth monkey" occurred. It went something like this. By then, a certain number of the monkeys on Koshima were washing their sweet potatoes.
The exact number is not known, but scientists postulated that there were 99 monkeys washing their food that Autumn morning. They further supposed that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned how to wash potatoes. It was at that critical moment, the moment the hundredth monkey learned to wash food that...it happened.
Within two or three hours, almost everyone in the tribe of monkeys was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The last bit of energy provided by the learning of the hundredth monkey had somehow created a cultural breakthrough! The most stunning event observed by the scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then spontaneously jumped over the sea. Colonies of Macaca Fuscata monkeys on other islands as well as the troop on the mainland at Takasakiyama, all began washing their sweet potatoes. It was as if, when the hundredth monkey changed her awareness about sweet potatoes, dirt, and how to solve the problem, the entire species achieved the new awareness.
Scientists have concluded that when a certain critical number of beings in a given specie achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind and group to group, without direct observable contact. The "Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon" means that when only a limited, but critical number of people know a new way of functioning; this new awareness may remain only of in the consciousness of these certain people. But there comes a point at which, if only one more person "tunes in to the new awareness," an "energy field" is modified so that the awareness reaches almost everyone in the specie.
The experiments of Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University have repeatedly demonstrated that individuals can communicate private information to each other even though located in different places.
Carl Jung postulated the existence of a human "collective unconscious" from which comes much of the individual unconscious motivation and behavior we usually refer to as "instinctive." We now know that the strength of this collective unconscious can be modified or amplified to a powerfully effective level when the consciousness of the "hundredth person" is added.
Your individual consciousness can become the "hundredth" needed to change our human awareness about life, war, peace, survival, growth, enjoyment and love. You could be the final one necessary to create the critical number of humans necessary to create a brand new world for human life. What are you doing to create/modify your own awareness along new and vital models? What are you learning and doing to become the "hundredth human?"
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Lloyd J. Thomas, Ph.D. has 30+ years experience as a Life Coach and Licensed Psychologist. He is available for coaching in any area presented in "Practical Psychology." Initial coaching sessions are free. Contact him: (970) 568-0173 or E-mail: DrLloyd@CreatingLeaders.com or LJTDAT@aol.com.
To subscribe yourself to Practical Psychology, e-mail your request to: PracticalPsychology-On@lists.webvalence.com and write "subscribe" in the subject line and an "X" in the body. You will receive Practical Psychology approximately once a week.
The following is from Dan Poynter - http://www.parapub.com Dan is one of THE gurus in the self-publishing world. His bi-weekly ezine is always full of useful information. Today was no different in that regard. One of the many things was this article I share below, in case you are doing or intend to do any registration business with the Copyright office in the United States.
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COPYRIGHT OFFICE, TURNAROUND TIME and IRRADIATION. On July 20, I mailed one of my publications (not a book) to the Copyright office for registration.
As far as I know, all mail to the Copyright Office still goes to Florida first for Anthrax baking (high-temperature irradiation).
The Copyright Office is the single largest recipient of mail in the Library of Congress. Yesterday (read: nearly four months), we received our charred and sliced cheque back with a note saying the bank had refused the damaged cheque.
The note from the Copyright Office went on to say "The registration process was halted prior to the registration of your work and the case has been closed." In other words: start over.
Today I made up a new package and sent it to the Copyright Office via UPS, Two-Day Air.I’m told that shipping with private carriers avoids the side trip to Florida due to easy sender traceability.
One report I found said: "The Copyright Office also reported that some of the mail it received was damaged by the irradiation process. So, it appears they are taking some four months to register a copyright.
It will be interesting to compare the time with Postal v UPS routing. Hmmm, and I am curious what the heat might do if you tried to register a CD. One report says: "The irradiation process may damage tapes, videos and film." So use UPS or FedEx.
In today's issue of the ezine Internet Retailer, one sentence jumped right off the screen at me in the midst of an article titled "More than half of Spanish speakers in the U.S. have shopped online." It was this:
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Spanish-speaking respondents also were more likely than non-Spanish speakers to choose the site they purchased from because of the availability of promotions or deals, (39% vs. 29%, respectively).
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Promotions or deals? I read that as 'Get a free tips booklet to download when you buy our product.' Don't you? Is your booklet in Spanish? Could it easily be translated into Spanish, or licensed to the site owner to get it translated into Spanish? Is this a new market waiting for you to explore?
Look at the topic of your booklet. Consider how it fits with the products or services of a particular Spanish language site. Contact me if you need the rest of the dots connected for you to expand your market and expand your product line.
I was reminded today of a concept I used to talk about and haven't mentioned in awhile. That is using booklets as self-liquidators. It's done by large companies, and you've most likely seen it yourself. John Kremer of www.bookmarketing.com also talks about this in his books and on his website.
Many companies offer special items for sale at very low prices with a small payment plus proof of purchase. Self-liquidating offers allow the company making the offer to cover some or all of its costs in buying the books or booklets and shipping them out, hence, liquidating the supply of books or booklets. For example, Meow Mix offered The Meow Mix Guide to Cat Talk as a self-liquidator to people who bought a bag of cat food. The book was customized for Meow Mix by simply changing the title of Jean Craighead George’s How to Talk to Your Cat.
This is another way to suggest positioning your booklet when you are talking to decision-makers at large corporations, associations, or publications, each of whom can make a profit on what they charge for shipping something that may otherwise only require a proof of purchase and no cash at all. Everyone stands to benefit in this transaction. That means the end-user who gets the information, the corporation who sells more of their product by offering your booklet, and you who sold the booklet to the corporation in large quantity.
