How To Get $15,000 Worth Of FREE Advertising For Your Business Each Year

September 13th, 2003 Posted in Advertising, Case Studies, Creating Sales Opportunities, General, Making Sale, Offline Marketing, Press Releases & Advertorials

How To Get $15,000
Worth Of FREE
Advertising For Your
Business Each Year

How You Might Ask?  “Press Releases”

If you’ve never heard about the power of an effective press release, allow me to share a few stories with you …

The first one comes from Patrick McAllister’s newsletter.

You may be aware of a product we’ve been selling called “How To Earn $30,000 A Month With Low Budget direct mail Projects”. We’ve also sold licences to other people to duplicate and sell the three videos, IBM disk and workbook.

Well, one of the people who bought a licence is Mr Chan, who lives in England. Mr Chan was contacted by the editor of a magazine called ‘New Entrepreneur Magazine’. This magazine is similar to ‘Australian Dynamic Small Business’ or ‘Money Making Opportunities’. The editor called Mr Chan and said he was interested in writing an editorial story about Mr Chan’s unique products and promoting them to their readers. Not just an ordinary article or a review, but a full feature cover story! Now that’s over two full pages including photos …

Absolutely FREE

Mr Chan didn’t have to pay a cent. Zippo. Nothing. Now you may ask …why would a magazine, newspaper or any other publication want to publish press releases and do stories about your products?

Actually, it’s quite simple

# 1    Every issue of every magazine and newspaper starts off with blank pages.  They have to fill them with something. If your article is interesting, they’ll want to publish it.

# 2    Most editors and journalists are basically lazy. I mean, if you can supply them with an interesting article or a press release they can publish and fill up those blank pages – they will use it. Especially if it’s already written for them.

Anyway, let’s get back to Mr Chan. As soon as the article about the direct mail package was published, it was a huge hit with the readers. So much so that Mr Chan sold over 40 copies of the “How To Earn $30,000” package. Not only that, he sold them for £238 each.  That’s two hundred and thirty eight POUNDS each. Or over $460 Australian dollars per package. Now according to my math, this means …

That one piece of FREE advertising
made him over $18,400 in sales.

If you consider his costs to duplicate 40 copies of the package are around $2,400 in our currency, his bottom line was …

Over $16,000 in profit.

Not bad for a beginner, just starting out is it? But the money he made is small change compared to other people who used free publicity to promote their products. One is a man called Harry Moe. He is a self-publisher who sells paper and ink information products, one of which is called “How to make your pay cheque last” kit. He sells it for $19.95 and offers a 12-month money back guarantee on it.

According to Gary Halbert, Harry managed to get Family Circle in the US to run a ⅓ page write up on the above product. What would you consider this bit of free exposure in the Family Circle could be worth? Well, my dear friends, hold on to your hats. That one Free ⅓ page article, so far, has generated …

Over 181,000 orders

Now let’s work this out … 181,000 x $19.95 is … can this be right? … let me check that again. Yes, that’s right. That little blurb made him over.

$3,610,000
(That’s three million six hundred and ten thousand dollars).

Wow. Wouldn’t you like to be Harry? Well, I am happy to say you can use the same techniques right here in Australia – and I’ll show you exactly how to do it …

But before I do, let me share another two quick stories with you.

A company I know sends out 4000 press releases each year. In these press releases they offer a Free Report ($4 for postage and handling) on “How to reduce your Visa or MasterCard Bill”. Of these 4,000 Press Releases, 600 get published and 300 give details of the free report. They sold 400,000 of these reports last year, generating $1.6 million in revenue on those sales. But that’s not all …

With each report, they include a promotion for the FULL report costing around $100.  Ten percent of the 400,000 people buy this $100 report. Generating another $4 million. Are you with me so far? That’s adding up to $5.6 million so far. And there is more …

When all the other 360,000 people who didn’t buy the FULL report are followed up by telephone, another fifteen percent will buy the $100 package. That’s 54,000 people times $100, which equals another $5.4 million.

This gives them a total of $11 million in sales each year
for no advertising costs.

As well as that, the people who didn’t buy are mailed with other offers and …

… They now have a mailing list of 400,000 Visa/Master cardholders.

Whoopee. Wouldn’t you love to get your hands on THAT list? I know I sure would. But hold on, if this works so well in America…What if some smart subscriber of this newsletter were to do something similar? After all, we do have Visa and MasterCard’s here.  And they do charge enormous interest … Could this be an opportunity just waiting to be exploited? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not!! All I can say is that this formula should work for lots of other products – including direct mail how-to books, videos, service businesses, unique new products, etc., etc., etc.

The way you create a Free Report, is simply by taking one chapter of your book or creating a short booklet on your product or service and re-titling it to suit the media. For example, your press release could read …

“New book claims newspaper ads can be
500% more effective – if you know how.”

or

Free Report reveals
secrets of effective Direct Mail.

or

Local man claims new invention gets rid of insects
without screens or chemicals.

….and so on. The key is to have an appealing headline and to include something in your press release that causes the person reading it to want to ring you. Of course, if you blatantly sell your products in your press releases, the newspapers won’t publish them. The way to overcome this is to offer (as a public service to the readers of this newspaper) your ‘free’ booklet or report. This “Free Report” worth $19 for readers of XYZ newspaper” is such a brilliant idea that almost no one knew about it.

Until now that is. It almost forces the editor to want to put your phone number in. After all, he wouldn’t want to deprive his readers of this valuable free report, now would he? Sneaky? Yes! Effective? Of course. That’s why you subscribe to this newsletter!

By the way, if you’d like to see more examples of effective press releases and how to write them, you can look them up in our new Marketing Package called, “How to Get $30,000 worth of Free publicity for your business”. Oh yes, one more thing. You should always include a covering letter with your press releases and if you attach a “grabber” (something to attract the editor ‘s attention) to this letter, you have an even greater chance of success.

A good friend of mine, Justin Roff-Marsh, has produced a simple guide for creating effective press releases. I’ve reproduced it here with his permission.

One more thing. If by chance your press release doesn’t get published, you can always pay to have it placed as an ‘advertorial’. By making it look like an editorial article, you will always get a better result than if your ad looks like an ad.

Video ad: This ad gets $200,000 a year in extra business.  250% increase on previous ads.  The owner has tripled his business since using this style of ads

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