It all started innocently enough.
One day I got one of those marketing letters in my email box. You know, the one where you send 5 dollars to each person on the list and then everybody’s supposed to send money back to you. I’d never even given any of those kinds of emails a second look before, but this one got my attention.
It was the sales letter. My stars, it was a thing of beauty to behold! All done up in brilliant colors in HTML. Wow! And saying and doing all the right things with bullet lists of benefits and plenty of testimonials. If all those people say it worked for them then certainly it will work for me! What’s this, this one guy says in his testimonial that he’s a medical doctor but it’s signed Joe Smith, Ph.D.? Not to worry! It’s just a typo…
And the brilliance of the idea. Wow! MLM without any of the work!
Somebody had carefully crafted that letter down to the finest detail just to hook me. And it worked. Boy did it. I was a goner.
The next thing you know I had sent off the 5 bucks to each of the people on the list. I anxiously awaited the special reports they would send back so I could start sending out my own copies of the letter (I had never even heard of “spam” and the people in the reports would tell me that “bulk emailing” was perfectly legitimate).
Once I got the reports I did EXACTLY as they said to do. I knew nothing at all about any of this Web marketing stuff and this guy in the report sounded like a real heavy-duty expert to my untrained ear. Lots of free classified ads and lots of bulk mail, he said.
So I put out a ton of free classified ads in the places the report said to. And I bought a million emails from some service. That’s right, a million! As one not-so-famous guy once said, “When you go on a spree, go the whole hog plus postage.”
Yes, I went for it. Imagine sending out a million emails! It boggled my puny mind. If only 10% of those people answer…
So out went that exact same letter that had hooked me, but with my name now proudly emblazoned at the top of the list. To a million people. And then the waiting started…
I waited… And waited… I told my wife that it would take a few weeks, and then the money would just start filling up our mailbox, like with that teenaged kid in the letter. She looked at me with amused skepticism written all over her face, but didn’t say anything. Which was nice of her.
So I waited… And waited… And waited some more. Nothing. Not one single solitary reply.
I’d been had. But it had seemed like such a sure thing! Surely at least a few of those people would answer. All those ads… And a million emails… A million is a huge amount, after all. And didn’t I fall for that letter? How could others not fall for it? It was the world’s greatest sales letter.
And so closed the first episode in my marketing life. That was over a year ago, but I still comfort myself (my wife just looks at me funny and shakes her head) by telling myself that those million emails never really went out. You see, it was the world’s greatest sales letter…
Click here to sign up for FREE B2B newsletters from Murdok!
On-line home biz and writing coach Bruno
Carlson would love to help you start up or
rev up your on-line home business! Sign up
for BrunoMarketing News, a newsletter packed
with tips, articles and info, and get three
killer bonuses. Subscribe today at:
http://www.BrunoBiz.com
