[Part II]

What Happens If You Have No Co-Op Prospects?

I hear from people constantly who tell me they understand the benefits of co-op advertising but don't have enough people to participate. "What can I do?" they moan. Well, for a start, you can see this as a solvable problem... not as an opportunity to bewail your fate on Spaceship Earth. In other words, roll up your sleeves and get on with the job of finding the necessary prospects.

First, review your situation. Just how many prospects do you have now anyway? Say it's your very first day in a network marketing company and you really have absolutely no one in your organization. Not to worry. Get on the phone and pitch the co-op idea to your upline. Enthuse this person with the possibilities of the card deck (100,000 prospects! Low price! Fast results!). Then urge him/her to assist in putting the co-op together. Your objective: to cut yourself in for a free or low-cost share of the responses -- and don't you forget it! If your upline won't help (sadly frequent), then ask for referrals either from her... or go to the company itself. Since helping you is in the company's own interest, asking for the names and phone numbers of those who might be interested in co-oping makes sense. Still don't have enough to make the co-op work? Post an announcement on the Internet (there are, remember, over 26,000 newsgroups). Put up the name of your opportunity and ask others in it to contact you for the chance to participate in your co-op. Remember, posting to newsgroups costs you nothing but time. Use your web site to generate still other potential participants. No web site? Now that IS a problem! In this day and age you're got to have both a web site in a place that gets traffic and the ability to send e-mail. If you don't, you're trying to win a demanding game with both hands tied. Not smart. Once you do get that web site, however, make sure there's a paragraph in it asking parties interested in a co-op to contact you. As people respond to your announcement, make sure to get all the information you need from them (name, address, phone, fax, e-mail, etc). Don't lose it!

In short, set an objective... then set about gathering all the prospect names you need. And don't forget: always pitch the biggest available chunk of your co-op (half at $800, or whatever) FIRST. Always ascertain just how much prospects can buy, not how little.

Counting The Money, Purchasing As Much Advertising As Possible

By using these methods, you'll soon have a pool of money. The first time you do this, of course, it might not be as much as you want. Not to worry. Everybody has to get started somewhere. The important thing is to buy as much advertising as possible.

Towards this end, here are the various options I offer.

1/4 card. Here you get 1/4 of one side of a card going to 100,000 prospects. You can provide up to 40 words of selling copy, including your name, address, phone, fax, URL, e-mail, etc. This is an excellent way to "test the waters" when you don't have either a lot of prospects... or a lot of money... but want to get the ball rolling. Cost? Just $250!

50,000 two color cards. Want to increase the size of your message, to include both front and back of a card? Then this 50,000 card option is for you! Just $775.

100,000 cards. Here you get the full run of 100,000 with your message and necessary reply information on two sides. $1449 for two color; $1600 for four.

Promoting Your Internet Domain Through Co-Op Advertising

As anyone knows who's been on the Internet for at least five minutes, traffic is the name of the game. If you've got it, you prosper; if you don't, you wither. It's as simple as that. One superb way of developing traffic if you're a domain owner is to create a domain co-op card.

Here you approach the advertisers in your domain and (as shown above) divide the cost of the card. Each advertiser gets a percentage of the card. 8 advertisers, for instance, can get front and back 1/4 card ads.

What's different about this approach from that discussed above is that the domain owner can turn this card both into a self-perpetuating profit center in its own right... and can get free advertising, too. Here's how this works:

1. domain owners decide how many ads to place on the card, 8 is a good number.
2. they determine the cost of the card, then price their ads to make a profit. If the cards cost $1449 (as 100,000 two color cards do in my deck), then the ads should cost $250 each. Even factoring in the cost of designing the card (about $150) there's $400 profit in this.
3. They then include this crucial information on the printed card: Put your ad here. Reach 100,000 eager prospects. $250. Call (your phone) e-mail (your e-mail) or visit (your URL). By including this information you've getting a powerful free ad that enables you to:

increase your domain traffic
build your crucial house e-mail list
get sufficient response to make putting together your next co-op a piece of cake. In other words, not only do you get the advertising, but getting that important advertising becomes self-perpetuating.

Smart domain owners who are associated with the Worldprofit Malls easily get 400,000 free cards a year using this method... and, using my card deck brokerage services, get into other decks, too, at the lowest possible price, where they get still more (free!) coverage!

A Note On That All-Important House E-Mail List

One of the best ways to develop co-ops is by e-mail.

1. It's low cost. After you pay your monthly access charge, you can send as much e-mail as you like.
2. It's fast.
3. You can keep people alerted, literally minute by minute, as to how many co-op shares you have left.

Personally, I am an e-mail fanatic. This means I am a fanatic about getting e-mail addresses. As soon as you have that address, you're in control of the marketing game and can play it with incredible efficiency and success.

Say that you've decided you want 6 people to participate in your next card deck advertising co-op. When you've got e-mail addresses, you send all the pertinent information out, including the fact that you're looking for 6 participants. As soon as 1 of those six slots is sold (which can be within minutes), you send out an updated e-mail; (it can be the same template with the new information about the top). Do this every time you've sold a position. In this way, you're both effectively using your e-mail and motivating faster response by selling a dwindling resource. I call this "minute to minute" marketing, and it's incredibly effective . . . whether you're selling advertising co-op shares or anything else that exists in limited supply!

Last Words: Provide Tips To Help Your Co-Op Members Succeed

Card decks provide fast response. That's one of the things I like most about them. They're mailed... and within literally 4-5 days you're getting responses! Moreover, these responses come in for weeks. Indeed, it's not at all unusual for responses to come in for a year, or more, after the deck mails. The key is to be prepared for the response.

Thus, tell your advertisers when to expect response and to be prepared to deal with it effectively. This means having the necessary marketing materials to respond with and, if they're smart, having them both in an e-mail template as well as the traditional mail-outs. Remember, your objective is to have your advertisers succeed and REPEAT... so that you get more and more free advertising. Before the deck mails, or when you send advertisers a confirmation of their participation, include a few tips about how they should prepare themselves for best results.

By the same token, YOU be organized, too. Your job is to collect as many new prospects you can... and as much useful follow-up information, including name, address, phone, fax, and that all important e-mail address. As you hear from your prospects, always pitch the most valuable position remaining first. Then if the prospect doesn't bite for that, sell off the lower priced shares. The important thing is that you pitch the advertising co-op not just to the people who are already on the card... but to the new people you'll hear from.

Remember, the first time you put together a co-op should be the most difficult. After that, if you're doing things right, you're getting more and more prospect leads... creating more and more co-ops... getting more and more advertising... and getting richer and richer... for less and less effort. Which is just the way it should be, don't you agree?

Dr. Jeffrey Lant's quarterly 100,000 circulation Sales & Marketing Success Card Decks mail in October, January, April and June for the lowest costs in the entire card-deck industry. For details on how you can participate, call (617) 547-6372, e-mail drjlant@worldprofit.com or use 24-hour fax on demand (403) 425-6049, document #3. Profit from a web site in or link to his 10 Worldprofit Malls at http://www.worldprofit.com, now getting over 5 MILLION visits a year. One-year web sites and linking from existing web sites are just $199.95. For more details e-mail webmaster@worldprofit.com, visit worldprofit.com/advertise or call (403) 425-2466. For a free subscription to Dr. Lant's quarterly Sure-Fire Business Success Catalog call (617) 547-6372.