Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Ignoring the "Rules"
I sat in on a teleconference with direct marketing mastermind Vincent James tonight and he had one comment that struck home. He described the tricks he uses to choose profitable mailing lists to send his sales letters to and compared it to the way that most unsuccessful direct marketers do it.

The information he bases his decisions on is readily available to anyone and the way he uses it is strictly common sense. But he says that it never dawns on most people to do what he does and check the history of a list to see how many use it repeatedly (suggesting a profitable list) and how many people use that list only once (suggesting an unprofitable one).

He said that most people go no farther than what they've been told. They've been told to rent a mailing list, so they do exactly that, without putting any thought into the results they want to accomplish. They assume that any list that relates in any way to their product will automatically make them a lot of money, so they burn through their money, list after worthless list for names and addresses that have a history of being unproductive.

Eventually, they give up, concluding that all direct marketing is just a worthless money pit.

I've noticed the same thing with many new Internet marketers. They take the first step into marketing, then get stuck on thinking that some magic "rule" that someone told them is all they have to do to succeed. They try the same rule again and again and again without thinking what they're doing through, without trying to find a more effective way.

And when their repeated effort to redo the same failed step keeps failing, they blame Internet marketing as being something that no one but the insiders who refuse to let anyone in on the "real rules" have any chance to succeed in.

But starting a business online has little to do with rules. Yes, there are techniques you can learn and use, but there's nothing one-size-fits-all about them. They're dynamic. You have to think, to learn, to grow as a person in order to find your way to success.

Success isn't just handed out as a reward for taking some basic, one-size-fits-all actions and then sitting back and waiting for success to be handed out. It comes from understanding what the ultimate goal of business is—to help your customers find a solution to some need—and then finding a way to bring them that solution. And that takes more than just some simple rules.
Jeff