How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 2 Long Term Money Secrets
(Links to all parts: Part 1: INTRO | Part 2: Long Term Money Secrets | Part 3: List Segmentation | Part 4: Bridging the Gap | Part 5: Overcoming Duplication | Part 6: Surveying and Splintering)
Believe it or not, we are all in the “mail order” business. Sure it’s called “affiliate marketing” now, but it’s just an electronic version of the good old fashioned “mail order” business I fell in love with back in 1995.
The allure of “mail order” has been around forever. The promise is simple: mail a few letters (buy a few clicks), take the profits (commissions), mail a few more letters (buy a few more clicks), then use the profits to “roll out” (scale) and make a fortune (make a fortune). It’s enough to get your greed glands going, and the first time I “got it” all the way back in 1995, I was hooked.
The magic is in the leverage—it takes the same amount of time to mail 1,000 letters as it does a million letters, but clearly there’s a difference in the actual amount of money you make, IF you can get there. Same thing with clicks in our brave new electronic world—it takes about the same amount of time to buy 1000 clicks as it does a million, but if you can profitably convert those million clicks, then do it over and over, well, then you aren’t drinking Yellow Tail on wine night anymore.
Affiliate marketing has been around way before Al Gore invented the internet. Sharp mail order operators like Dean F Duvall would sell a “program” that gave you an id, the rights to use the sales letter provided to sell Dean’s products, “camera ready art,” the contact information of a printer/mailing house (owned by Dean’s brother, of course), and the name of a list broker (who kicked back to Dean). All the affiliate had to do was mail the letter to the lists, orders would be sent to Dean, he would take them, ship them out, and Dean would send you an 80% commission (as well as dubbing you a “Dax Doer.”)
The flaw for the affiliate was the cost per sale was far more than the 80% Dean would send you. Dean would get the name of a recent mail order buyer for free, and the affiliate would lose money. Dean’s goal was to build a list of 1 million mail order buyers at no cost to him, then make his profits renting the list, which he did. Great for Dean, not so much for the affiliate. Dean was big in the late 1970’s and 80’s, ...