Yes, it?s true. I wrote a sales letter recently that in the short span of a few weeks genuinely produced over $100,000 of revenue (and it?s still growing at last count). The income after the mailing expenses and fulfillment costs? Over $65,000! Not too shabby, eh?

Of course, I wish the entire $65,000 had been mine to keep, but in fact it went to the entrepreneur who sponsored the project. For the risks involved in any direct mail effort, he obviously deserved the income. I was paid up front for my efforts and had very little to lose if the project went bad, except, of course, future writing assignments!

How does such a thing happen? How do you take several pieces of paper, an envelope and a stamp and get people to send you lots of money in the mail? I?ll show you in the next few minutes as I outline the project from start to finish.

(To preserve my customer?s privacy, I can?t reveal too many specifics like the exact markets, titles, content of what was sold, etc., but you can still get a pretty good idea about the process ? the overall concept is what you need anyway.)

1. Find a Niche Market that?s Highly Targeted:

For starters I must reveal to you that this audience was NOT a Network Marketing audience. Does that bother you? You were probably hoping to finish reading this article and take 5 minutes, jot a few ideas on paper, and get rich next week mailing your killer sales letter!

But what I?m about to tell you worked because we had a highly focused group reading our letter.

Just because it was not written to an MLM mailing list per se does not mean it could not generate thousands of dollars of product sales for an MLM product. Nor does it mean that you couldn?t develop your company?s next highly successful leader from those product users. It simply means we did not mail to a normal "MLM Mailing List."

Who were these? On average, they were 40+ years of age. Within this group, ages 55 to 70 are not at all uncommon. They work hard and tend to be educated and affluent.

Often they have successful businesses or at least high-paying jobs (or did before they retired). While they?re interested in investments and investment information, they?re probably not so interested in part-time income or pitches for fast money. In fact, they are probably well insulated against "get rich quick schemes."

If not Ph.D.s, they are at least readers and independent thinkers. Being independent thinkers, they like alternative information sources and subscribe to one or more newsletters rather than depending on mainstream news and information outlets. While not interested in extra income, these people are very interested in having good health.

In case you didn?t catch that, these people have been proven to spend money on the type of information we?re about to send them. They are not simply inquirers.


In addition, we know what they?ve been reading. Their editors have been writing about a certain unique problem that the mainstream media mentions almost nothing about. But these people believe it?s a serious problem.

How big is this target audience?

Probably less than 50,000 people nationwide. Maybe 100,000 tops. Whatever the actual figure, it?s relatively small. But we know what they?re reading and what they?re sweating with fear about even though most of America doesn?t share their concern. In other words, you don?t have to have a product that you can sell to everybody to do well.

By the way, this entrepreneur told me that the leading motivation factor for this group was the fear of loss rather than the desire for gain. If the product could combine the two, so much the better, but failing that, the mandate was CREATE FEAR in the sales letter. I know that we?re supposed to aspire to higher ideals in life but it was his money paying me to write this stuff and his audience that he?d been serving for years! Most MLM ads tend to be "Want to get rich?"? desire for gain.

For future projects we?ve narrowed the target base even more. Of the 50,000+ or so who might fit our profile, there are a specific 18,000 people who?ve paid $100 to $200 for the type of products we?re creating. That?s a great target group to work with because they have money and will spend it if they think it?s worth it!

2. Know Their "Hot Buttons":

Because we know what they?ve been reading, we have some idea of the information they?re looking for. We?re trying to build off what worked in the past and create a new product.

In this instance what worked in the past was information on a natural health information source. The source ended up selling so much product (much of it MLM products by the way!), they had to build a new small warehouse next to their home to handle the volume! The entrepreneur made money selling information pertaining to the source though nothing on product sales.

Our job was to come up with a product that

met this proven desire for information, but also ? if possible - with
a "unique selling proposition" that was strengthened or leveraged by the target audience?s additional specific fears about the future.
Don?t miss that!

If people, for instance, already love ice cream, we wanted them to buy an information product with a topic something like, "What ice cream lovers can do about the impending international ice cream ban if they act now!"

See a formula developing?

Love ? Fear of Loss ?
Special Information - Act Now Before It?s Too Late!

OK, so you want to write a sales letter that will make you rich or at least richer, right? The first question you have to answer is two-fold:

Who is your desired audience?
Is it already successful network marketers?
Is it people who haven?t been in an MLM before?
Is it left-handed billiard players?
Is it people who have paid for a certain type of information?

Perhaps there are multiple criteria you?re using.

Don?t know what type of person you?re looking for? Ask yourself,

"Who has been my best prospect to date?"

Maybe it?s nurses. Maybe it?s schoolteachers. Maybe it?s auto mechanics. Maybe it?s opportunity seekers with fax machines.

Your answer could be a function of your product, a certain group?s desire for more time or money, freedom, or a combination of several factors. You must isolate them and find a list of suitable prospects. Where do you find lists available with multiple criteria listed? The reference section of many libraries have an SRDS ? Standard Rate and Data Service manual, listing owners of various mailing lists whose lists might meet your criteria.

Have your ideal target audience in mind? Great.

Now you must determine one more thing:

What concerns, needs, wants and FEARS does this group have? More to the point: How does your product/service relieve your target audience?s deepest fears?
If you can answer that second question and relieve somebody?s intense, gut-wrenching fear, you can probably create a $100,000 Sales Letter or at least something very profitable from an existing list somewhere!

OK, I?m getting ahead of myself. You have to have the correct pricing structure to make that kind of money. If you?re selling an MLM product, you probably don?t have a product with that price structure so you have to learn how to work around that obstacle. But once you have the audience and know their hot buttons, you?re in business and can get started on a potentially profitable direct mail project.

What are some products that have been sold profitably by mail to relieve people?s fears of one kind or another?

Information of various kinds in the form of manuals, audiotapes, videotapes or some combination of the above. While computer information CDs are more and more popular, for now, information CDs seem to do best when they?re marketing already familiar information products for a greatly reduced price, like an encyclopedia that would ordinarily cost $495 for a price of $49.95.

Health Devices such as sprouters, juicers, air purifiers, water purifiers, colloidal silver generators, and other alternative medical devices.

Exercise Equipment of many varieties? the NordicTrack brand was built mostly by direct response marketing at first, though others have done this as well.

And, of course, Nutritional Supplements of every description.

If your product can legitimately relieve somebody?s fears, it has a good shot of working if you can target your market.

3. Write a Powerful Sales Letter That Gets Results.

How did I do this from scratch? Believe me I didn?t and neither should you! My customer provided me with several sales letters that had pulled well before. By studying them, I noticed a pattern emerging. So guess what? I followed the pattern! Why fight it?

To make sure the letter was a good one, we ran the sales letter past another copywriter for a second opinion. I?m sure that sounds expensive. While that was an expense, it was not as expensive as sending out a "bomb" sales letter.

There are books you can buy about copywriting that are excellent. Just the other day, I saw a computer program that supposedly helps you write advertising of various kinds. Any of these things can be good. The best education you can get is to read successful sales letters, especially ones that reach your target audience. A winner is usually a sales letter or ad that seems to saturate a market. The longer it appears in the mail or in print, the better. Hopefully several excellent marketers can be identified in your target market so you can learn from them. Ideally, as you search through sales journals, respond to ads and read what?s sent in the mail you?ll find a pattern emerging for you.

Once you notice the pattern, write out what the successful sales people have in common when reaching that industry.

It might look something like this?

"Personal photo on ads and sales letters."
"Ads give free information or sell information costing no more than $15."
"Sales letters are at least 4 pages for a $100 product. Proportionately more pages if price is over $100. One $500 product had a 16-page sales letter."
"_________________ seems to sell best to this market" (e.g. information, supplements, exercise equipment, etc.)
"Sales letters are on colored paper."
"Sales letters use lots of ?bullet? points."
"Some products allow customer financing, others don?t." (This varies by the price of the product and the available markup over raw cost.)
You may find many more parts of a pattern. You?ll also get a feeling for an acceptable hype level. With MLMers, the hype level tends to be extremely high. With other audiences the level of hype they?ll accept without completely writing you off is much lower. With some audiences though, they respond to hyperbole or slight (?) exaggeration and they demand it before they?ll listen to the rest of your message!

The best free way to learn the hype level is to study the ads that seem to work best.

Now this is very important? you can use a certain amount of hype to make a one-time sale. But if you?re promoting a long-term relationship in the form of your prospect becoming a distributor or at least an autoship customer, be careful with hype. Strong language, vivid imagery, and a saucy tone can sell well as long as they?re not too exaggerated. And even if you?re selling a self-contained product, you likely want to sell more products to these people over the years, so even then no sale can really be considered "one-time" any more. Costs of doing business are just too high. You want your initial customers to become satisfied repeat customers and refer other people.

Even if you?re writing a sales letter, a common trend is to include genuine helpful information even in your sales packages? "News you can use," so there?s a genuine value obtained just in reading your sales piece.

The ultimate in marketing is to have a sales piece that sells well but also has so much information that your prospects pass it around to their friends and then demand it back later! That kind of sales piece tends to be a "magalog" and my $100,000 Sales Letter was not commissioned to be that.

If you need many pages to sell a high-priced product or concept though, the magalog may be just the vehicle you want for your marketing piece. What you may not realize that increasingly, little booklets that look like mini paperbacks are sales letters. You see them selling as "impulse buys" at grocery store checkout lines. You receive them in the mail as well. Though they offer real information, they were definitely produced to SELL SOMETHING. If you?re selling a distributorship or high-priced item, these may be for you. Our sale was a specialized information product.

Once you have the appropriate communications pattern that works in mind, start writing or commission someone to write it. Copy the pattern (though not actual sales letters) as closely as possible while remaining honest about your product. (If you aren?t honest, you?ll only experience much higher product returns and chargebacks.)

Once you have a sales letter ? and possibly have it submitted for a second opinion for safety?s sake ? that?s the easy part.

Now another crucial step has to happen.

4. Get Them To Read Your Sales Letter!

As you may be aware, that?s easier said than done! In our hectic age, someone can read an ad, get excited, call a toll-free number to request information and 30 seconds later have lost interest! So by the time you?ve assembled the mailing package and spent good money to mail it, by the time "snail mail" arrives, they?ve lost interest. Your hot lead cools off pretty quickly.

So how did we get around that problem?

First of all, we did not use direct mail. Well, we did and we didn?t.

We used a newsletter insert to achieve these stunning results.

This newsletter, instead of having advertising to increase its revenues, sells inserts.

Count on it, for every 8 pages of newsletter, there?s up to 24 pages of sales letters? usually three 4- to 8-page letters or fliers. In the field we chose, you can bet on it that the inserts at least cover all the expenses so the subscription fees are pure profit.

But guess what? By inserting your sales letter or mailing piece there, you can almost guarantee the envelope will be opened and your headline will be read!

You might be thinking, "That doesn?t sound like much of a guarantee."

Well, you?re wrong.

How do you read your mail?

Unless you?re a collector of sales letters as a professional copywriter or direct mail consultant or otherwise in the direct marketing business, you probably don?t religiously open or even read every letter you?re sent, especially if it?s obviously a solicitation of some sort. (I am in the business and still don?t read all that junk!)

If you?re like most people you definitely open and scan the things that look personal or look like a bill or legal document. If it's a catalog you don?t remember requesting or it looks like a chain letter, it's probably the first thing to go into the trash!

So if you can get someone to open the envelope and give you a chance to state your best headline, you?ve really accomplished a lot. Half the battle has probably been won? now you have a fighting chance!

If your headline encapsulates pure relief for their deepest fears, you?re likely to get your sales letter or mailing piece more than a cursory glance.

Knowing this, we used an insert.

The insert generated an order rate of over 6.25%!

(Yes, I know you ? and I - want a magical 10%, 20% or 30% order rate. But you almost always only get that only when you?re mailing to past customers who know, like and trust you no matter what you?ve been told!)

Remember that it?s not the PERCENT of response when it?s all said and done, it?s the profit you make!

You could get a 100% response and still lose money if you don?t charge enough for your product or service. Or you could get a 0.5% response and be rolling in cash if your profits from the initial and subsequent sales are high enough. So don?t get completely bogged down in high rates of return if the profit is not there.

Ideally you will realize your profits immediately. Depending on how you structure your offer, your main profits may not be seen for several months if you?re selling a long-term relationship like an MLM distributorship or membership to a book or record club. In those instances, your goal is to break even initially and see a longer-term profit. The deeper your pockets and greater your patience, the longer you can go without making a profit.

Or your goal may be to simply break even up front on prospecting costs so you can run your ads indefinitely. You?re counting on your prospecting to be self-funding. Real profits come long-term from the back-end sale of various items.

Our goal for this manual as you might have imagined was to make an immediate profit without a direct "back-end" per se. Even better, we did! Amazingly so!

5. A Word about Fulfillment:

When you?re at this stage of development reaching into new markets, you want a first-class fulfillment operation. You want to be a project manager in other words, and not licking stamps yourself unless you absolutely have to.

The system we used was an 800# order line (800 numbers, now that the 888 numbers are popular, makes your enterprise look automatically older and more reputable by implication!).

Orders were faxed to a fulfillment house daily.

Reports from the order line and fulfillment house were sent to the publisher who just tabulated the numbers!

If you?re going to fulfill orders yourself, at least have a 24-hour live operator to take calls so you don?t wake up in the middle of the night to answer your phone! You?ll lose sales that way.

Throughout your project you must think about making money or at least breaking even on the front end. That brings me to another point.

6. You Must Manage the Project for Profit!

It boils down to properly estimating your costs.

Raw Cost to you of the Product ? How much will you have to spend to get that air purifier, shiatsu reclining chair or whatever you?re selling?
Shipping Cost
Handling Cost
Packaging Cost
Order Handling Cost ? unless you?re answering the phone 24 hours per day by yourself, your answering service will charge you for taking the order. If you?re using their toll-free number, they?ll charge you for their actual cost per minute, plus (in my experience) a generous markup. Usually you can download the orders for free? (on your long distance phone nickel, however) from their fax on demand or bulletin board.
Cost of Money ? Yes, every time you charge a credit card, they take a certain percent and the company processing your order takes their cut too. If you?re selling a $100 product, that?s $3 or $4 right off the top!
Advertising Cost ? Depending on how you market the product, this cost might include
Cost of printing mailers
Cost of insertion in newsletters
Or if you?re mailing to the customer directly,

Cost of printing & envelopes
Cost of a direct mail list rental
Cost of postage
Or if you?re doing a print ad,

Cost of display or classified advertising, plus
A new layer of "name capture" voice mail or fax on demand if you can?t make an immediate sale from the ad.
Cost of Employees ? You'll need to figure this in unless, like most direct mail operators, you?re using vendors exclusively who charge you by the job. The vendor method is something I definitely recommend until you have a large volume of business to justify the paperwork of employees.
Normal Operating Costs ? the entrepreneur who commissioned this $100,000 sales letter still had his monthly overhead whether this project was successful or not. Still, it was a pretty good month!
Add these up and you could be facing astronomical figures. I have a friend who does direct sales for a party plan company. She?s sending her daughter to college without using any loans when using a 33% markup and working 30 hours per week. She buys her product for $50 and sells it for $75. She also offers classes on how to use her products and charges people a small sum ($5 or $10 apiece) to attend. Though there?s some expense for the materials used in the classes, the profit margin is probably above 50% on that money, sometimes more.

Her advertising cost is virtually zero because the party hosts do all the marketing. She follows up with an occasional brief newsletter mailing.

She absorbs all the other costs herself that mailers pay someone else to do. She uses her home to store product and has little other overhead.

I will categorically tell you that with this pricing structure, there is no way her daughter would be in college right now if she tried to sell these products directly by mailorder. The first reason is that she doesn?t have enough profit margin. Secondly, this is a hands-on product that sells best when the users are educated by the workshops she conducts. Now, if someone called her out of the blue and said "Please sell me this product by mail-order," she could make money. It?s the getting people to call and order that costs money. She could make a decent profit if the marketing costs were removed from the equation. That would only happen if she were previewed in a magazine that gave out her phone number and the article did the "selling," obviously not a good way to create a predictable stream of business.

Read almost any "Mailorder 101" book that?s good or bad and they?ll all tell you a large markup is needed. Most drop-ship dealer plans pay only 50%, which is too low for an initial sale. The long-term mailing professionals who sell information want as much as a 10X mark up. That means your $100 product must have a raw production cost of $10. You may be able to go higher than that so that you?re working with up to a $20 raw cost, but the higher the markup the better. Don?t feel guilty about being greedy, you won?t automatically get rich off a 10X markup! You?ll need every penny to just break even!

It is possible to combine an information product and a hard product in one offer such as a manual on "Wonderful Product X" and some samples. You?re increasing your profit margin. For instance, the friend I mentioned above might write ? or have commissioned - an informative manual about her product. She could basically put her workshop in writing and/or on audiotapes and people would receive the same samples they?d get at the workshop. Then she could "bundle" product packages so that each resulting sale from the manual would be much more profitable than selling products individually.

Note: If your product is a potentially controversial nutritional supplement however, you?re risking the nasty knock of the FDA SWAT team at your door for breaking their labeling regulations. You?re better off producing an information manual and then directing people where to buy that product.

7. How To "Start Small":

The entrepreneur commissioning this work was so sure of its success, he went immediately to a publication with over ten thousand active subscribers. Printing and insertion costs alone were about 75 cents per subscriber. That was after paying my copywriting costs for the sales letter and information product and the second opinion.

As I?ve told you, things turned out GREAT!

But he?s been doing this type of business for almost two decades. You might say he has a feel for what works even though he certainly has his "bombs." As you likely will.

That?s why I suggest a much smaller test if possible. A test insertion of perhaps half of the circulation if they?ll let you would be great. They probably won?t unless they?re desperate!

Or, you may choose to mail part of their list, but then you won?t have the virtually guaranteed opening of the envelope.

But it?s worth trying anyway. If a cold direct mail piece to a good list proves profitable, a newsletter insertion is almost a sure thing in the entire publication and similar ones in that industry.

If the list is good and your sales materials have proven adequate before, you may be able to start out mailing to a highly qualified list.

If there?s not enough margin in the product sales alone, creating an information product that sells on its own merits would be a better way to get started penetrating new markets. That?s hard work, but let?s face it? we need new customers for our products. We?re killing ourselves trying to rely on the "MLM retreads" we encounter everywhere. If we can acquire outer circle prospects profitably as we prospect by selling information products, who cares if they don?t know all the MLM buzzwords? I, for one, don?t!

Best wishes as you seek to create your own $100,000 Sales Letter!

Chuck Huckaby