I Can Be A Real Asshole Sometimes!

Dear Friend & Subscriber,

I can be a real asshole sometimes.

And, since I'm not inclined to change... well... maybe I'd better explain. Listen up: Here's a true story. Once upon a time (in the late 1980's) a couple guys called me for some help. They worked for a big company that helped other companies here in the U.S. to market their wares in all the Pacific Rim countries. Every time they got a new client, it was worth serious money (maybe hundreds of thousands) to the company they worked for.

What they looked for in a new client was someone or some entity which was not already selling to Pacific Rim countries but, who should be selling to those countries. They weren't after little sized companies or even medium-sized companies; they only went after the really big fish. Therefore, they didn't have unlimited prospects, only a few thousand. And, they said, their main problem was getting the attention of and, an audience with, the top dog in those big fish companies.

Once I understood how much (how very much) a new client was worth to them, I came up with a great idea! I said they should get some paper money from each of those Pacific Rim countries. Then they should take a bill from each of those countries and put them all together in a stack and wrap a rubber band around them. Then they should scotch-tape each of those stacks of money to the first page of a sales letter and send the whole mess by Fed Ex or DHL to all their prospective clients... and then... follow-up with a person-to-person phone call.

Imagine: You're a top dog exec in a big fish company, you get a Fed Ex package with a letter with a packet of actual money from various Pacific Rim countries scotch-taped to the first page of a letter like this:



Top Dog Exec
c/o Big Fish, Inc.
123 Elm St.
Massillon, OH  44646
Dear Mr. Top Dog Exec:

I am writing to ask of you a small favor.

All I want is for you to take the rubber band off the packet of money attached to this letter and look carefully at each of the bills. They are all real. Each one of these bills is an official government banknote from a different Pacific Rim country.

Why am I sending you all this money? The answer is simple: You see, your company, Big Fish, Inc., manufactures a line of products that would sell like crazy in every one of the Pacific Rim countries from which I have sent you a sample banknote. This could be a brand new profit center for Big Fish, Inc. which, in fact, could turn out to be... even bigger... then the domestic market for your widgets here in the U.S.

In truth, selling your product line in these countries could become a dream come true for Big Fish, Inc. It has the realistic potential of tripling your corporate profits.

On the other hand, attempting to market in these countries can become a nightmare for an American corporation if they don't have the right connections and are not aware of local business customs and all the other inside secrets that makes everything go smoothly and profitably.

That's where (hopefully) I can help you. My company, Rim Job, Inc., specializes in guiding American corporations into high profit situations in various Pacific Rim countries... and... we feel Big Fish, Inc. is exactly the kind of company, with exactly the kind of product line, we like to work with.

I'd like to explain in more detail how a relationship with Rim Job, Inc. could be very profitable for Big Fish, Inc. and I will call you later this week to set up an appointment at your convenience.

Thank you for the courtesy of reading this letter.

                             Sincerely,

                             Eldridge J. Fogbottom

P.S. If you have children, that packet of money can be a great birthday
     gift which will get your child interested in global geography.

  Talk to you soon.

OK, admit it: If you were Top Dog Exec and you got that Fed Ex package, with that letter and all that money, you'd be impressed, wouldn't you? You'd also probably take Mr. Fogbottom's call too, wouldn't you? And, you'd probably give him an appointment, right? And, if he truly had his shit wrapped tight, there's an excellent chance you would end up doing biz with Fogbottom and Rim Job, Inc.

Correctamundo?

The two guys who called me for advice were stunned when I came up with this great idea right on the spot. I was glad I'd helped them.

Or so I thought.

About a month later they called me again. They said they were looking for another idea. "You mean that one didn't work?" I asked incredulously. "I can't believe it. How many did you mail and what kind of response did you get?"

They hadn't mailed any. But they loved the idea and thought it was "fun" to talk with a creative genius like me and and they wanted to see if I could give them yet another "killer" idea.

I was livid. I got as verbally abusive as I could. I told them to never call me again. You know, to give another person a really good idea, an idea that may solve a major problem for them... and then... have them not even give it a shot... well... that just pisses me off big time. I've found out some things about myself in the last few years and, one of those insights is... I burn with desire to be a really great teacher!

God knows how many people are rich because of what I have taught them. I've received 3,000+ letters of appreciation from such people. But it still gets me, it really gets me, when I can't "get through" to someone.

Like most caring teachers, I am emotional about my "students." I love it when they succeed. I love it when they eclipse me.

But, you know what? I've been writing this letter and giving speeches and seminars for more than a decade... and... there are lots of people who've read nearly every word I've written, been to most all the seminars I've given, bought all my tapes and videos... and...

They Still Do Nothing!

And you know what I think? I think maybe, if something comes too easy, many people don't appreciate it. However, if they have to "work" to get your pearls of wisdom, if they have to make a "mental investment" to "get" what you have to teach... well, maybe... they'll value it more, realize how precious it is and act on what you've taught them.

Which brings me to why I referred to myself as a "sometimes asshole" at the beginning of this letter and, how, right here I'm going to prove it. (Actually, I suspect there's a lot of people who have no trouble whatsoever with the concept of Gary Halbert being an asshole.)

Anyway, here's the scoop: I know something I bet you'd love to know. And, I'm willing to lay it on you. But, I'm going to give you a mental workout and make you jump through some hoops rather than throw it at you like pearls before swine. First, to get you motivated to actually endure my Machivellian manipulations, I guess I'd better jump start your greed glands by telling you what it is I know I bet you'd like to know. Here it is:

I Know How To Make
Money Using E-Mail And
Web Sites!

Lots of people pretend to know but they really don't. They'll do stuff like tell you how important it is to have an "Internet Presence" and, how they can design and help you set up a killer web site for only $10,000 or so. You'll get your web site alright. That part is true. What you won't get however is orders and profits. Almost nobody makes money with E-mail. Almost nobody makes money on the world wide web.

But I do. I've been doing it quietly for about 36 months now... and... I'm going to teach you how to do it too.

Before I do though, let's see if you can figure it out for yourself after I give you a bunch of seemingly unrelated facts. You know, one of the gifts of a real creative problem solver is he or she can take unrelated bits of info and end up tying together all that random data in such a way as to answer an important question or come up with a breakthrough concept. Now listen: No matter how crazy it sounds, every single fact I'm about to reveal is related to making profits via E-mail.

Pray let us proceed.

FACT 1: A recent edition of the National Enquirer, the May 27, 1997 edition with these headlines on the cover, "Jon Benet Secret Police Files," "Who's Gay Who's Not," and "Dying Sinatra Confined To Wheelchair"... well anyway, that issue has two ads you should have in your "swipe file" and, lurking within those ads is a major key to making E-mail pay a profit.
One of those ads is a full-page masterpiece with the headline: "KILL FOOT PAIN DEAD!" This ad does not ask for an order. It is designed to generate leads. Here's the coupon used in the ad:

Free! Send No Money

FEATHERSPRING INTERNATIONAL, INC.
712 N. 34th Street, Dept. NE-057 l Seattle, WA 98103-8881
     n YES! I want to end my foot pain. Please rush, at no risk, the FREE FACT KIT that tells me all about Flexible Featherspring Foot Supports. I understand there is no obligation and no salesperson will call. I will look for a LARGE PINK ENVELOPE containing all the details.
Print Name __________________________________________________________________________
Address_____________________________________________________________________________
City _________________________________  State _________________  Zip_____________________
Trust me, the wording of that coupon contains a crucial element related to making E-mail profits.

The next ad is a masterpiece also... but... this one is two full pages. Do you have any idea how much it costs to run two full-page ads in the Enquirer?

Anyway, this is a very copy intensive ad with the following headline:

Can you feel your need to smoke
disappear this quickly and easily?

There are countless men and women who finally stopped smoking, even though they no longer believed they could. Their success is documented in written testimonials. Here are extracts from some of the letters that have been sent to Andre Passebecq:

Yadda, yadda, yadda...

 

Guess what? This ad doesn't ask for an order either. It's also a lead-generator. Here's the coupon used in that ad:

Detach this form and return to:
Bodywell, Inc.
PO Box 3014
Wallingford, CT  06494
Please indicate: Your age _____

How old you were when you started smoking _____

How many cigarettes you smoke per day _____

Your present weight _____

Yes, I would like to get rid of my desire to smoke, quickly and easily. Your completely free offer of information about the Passebecq Method interests me. I understand that I am in no way obligated to buy anything whatsoever, and that no salesperson will ever contact me.

Please send me the package in discreet wrapping by first class mail.
____________________________
Name

____________________________

Street Address

____________________________

           Apt #
____________________________

City

____________________________

State             Zip
ATBP06-1


FACT 2: In the early 1980's a guy walks into the Coach & Horses Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. There's a bunch of other guys at the bar and a pretty girl sitting by herself. Several of the barflys are seriously trying to lay a line on this pretty young chick. None of them make any progress. But, the guy who just walked in and, who had never seen this young lady before, walks up to her and speaks to her quietly for a few minutes. The young lady smiles and gets up and leaves immediately with this guy. Can you guess why? (And no, she wasn't a hooker.)
FACT 3: A few years back I encouraged all my readers to run the following ad in their local newspaper:


Women Needed To Address Envelopes At Home.
Must Have Typewriter, PC Or Good Handwriting.
Call (000) 000-000


   Several of my subscribers ran that ad and learned something incredibly valuable. (Something that today, relates strangely to making a profit using E-mail.) Three of my subscribers immediately "got it" after they ran it and they went on to make a very fast $750,000 profit because of what they had learned.

FACT 4:


As I revealed in an earlier issue of this newsletter, last year is the first year more messages were sent via E-mail than via the U.S. Postal System.
FACT 5: 75% of all business executives who use the Internet, use it only for E-mail.
FACT 6: There's a company that works with dentists which provides a really interesting service for them. What this company furnishes dentists with is, the name and address of every person who lives in the Zip codes near to where that dentist's practice is located... PLUS... any of those people who have a PC and who use E-mail... well... the dentist gets all those E-mail addresses also.
PAY ATTENTION! Did you hear what I just wrote? I said you can get the E-mail addresses... PLUS... the real street addresses of millions of people. Do you understand the importance of that? Of having a person's real address and their E-mail address?

I bet you don't.

FACT 7: There are several companies in the U.S. that will set up mass conference calls for you. You can have hundreds of people on the same call. Nothing new there, right? But, check this out: You can ask those people questions and, they can give you their answer by punching a button  on their touch-tone phone.
Here's what one company does: They get several hundred people on a conference call and then, they expertly explain what they have to offer. Then, near the end of the call, they say something like this: "We have three questions we'd like to ask everybody on this call: (1) Do you like what you've heard and are ready to sign up right now? (2) Are you interested but you feel you need more information? (3) Are you not interested at all? If you are interested and ready to go, please press one; if you want more info, please press two; if you are not interested at all, please press three.

Hundreds of people then press one of those three buttons all at the same time. Then, after a little more chit-chat, the host concludes the conference call.

20 minutes later, the company that arranged the conference call, has the name, address and telephone number of all those people who pressed those buttons and...

Those Names Are Separated
By Which Button
They Pushed!

Yahoo! A dim light has started to glow in your sick, little mind, hasn't it?

Yes, you be right, Bubba. Those hot leads, the people who pressed button #1 ("I'm ready to buy") are phoned back immediately by telephone sales people!

Is that slick, or what?

FACT 8: The king of junk E-mail is a Philadelphia man named Sanford Wallace who runs a company called CyberPromotions. He sends nearly 4 million E-mail ads... daily!
FACT 9: E-mail is the most widely-used application on the Internet with 11 million users.
FACT 10: www.answers.com could easily be the most useful web page ever. It has a network of real people who can answer almost any question you might have with hard facts and a little personality. Answers to easy questions will cost you $1.79. Moderately-difficult questions cost $5.99 and, if your question requires research, you're gonna have to fork out $11.99. You post a question, pick a price range and click the send button. Within 24-hours, one of 40 researchers from around the world will send you a personalized letter by return E-mail.
 
    The answers are typically several paragraphs long and come from a wide variety of reference sources which are listed at the end. If the sources include web sites, the answer includes hot links. Before users get their answers, a group of answers.com quality assurance employees go through responses to make sure they have answered the specific questions satisfactorily. There's also an option to ask for clarification if the questioner wants an even more detailed answer.

FACT 11: For $99 you can get software that types whatever you dictate. This software has a bigger vocabulary and is a better speller than any college kid. For immediate delivery call 1-800-IBM-7235 ext. 5296 or, for more info, visit www.software.ibm.com/is/voicetype.
FACT 12: Another piece of software called Globalink Power Translator translates documents, web pages... and E-mail... from English into French, German, Italian and Spanish. Check it out by calling Globalink at 1-800-837-2095 ext. 8001.
FACT 13: 81% of the readers of the International Tribune now communicate via PC's, 73% E-mail and faxes, laptops and the Internet. They also spend 1/2 hour daily reading the paper. This data is from a survey of which you can (and should) get a summary by calling (212) 752-3890.
FACT 14: The six top markets for international phone calls from the U.S. are, in rank order:
BANK/COUNTRY AVERAGE PER
MINUTES CHARGE MINUTES
PER YEAR
1. Canada 34 cents 3.05 billion
2. Mexico 85 cents 2.01 billion
3. U.K. 73 cents 1.03 billion
4. Germany 88 cents 662 million
5. Japan $1.00 576 million
6. Dominican Republic 84 cents 410 million
                           
FACT 15: There are 50 companies with compiled directories of E-mail addresses. These are not web site directories. They are directories of personal E-mail addresses. You can check out a couple of them at http://www.four11.com and http://www.bigyellow.com. (That last dot is the period at the end of my sentence, not part of the E-mail address.)
FACT 16: People who keep their mailing list on a computer need to be very careful. Believe me, I know. Here's an article that will explain one reason why this is true:


Mailing list
gobbled

    In 1984 I began a desperate search for people who have a progressive neuromuscular disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. I was born with CMT, and I felt that I was the only person with it. I was a newspaper reporter, and I knew the power of a letter to the editor. Through these letters I found thousands of people who had the same disease. I started a newsletter and a nonprofit organization called CMT International.

    On Nov 18, one of our oldest computers went down and took with it our 4,700-name mailing list. Many of the people on it were from the United States, particularly Florida, and we have no way of contacting them.

    Please help us find our former members and reach new ones. To contact CMT International, call (905) 687-3630.

LINDA CRABTREE
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada



FACT 17: If you do a sales campaign which lets people fax in their orders and, you can't handle all the faxes, you need FAX OVERFLOW. Info's available by calling (305) 780-2855.
FACT 18: Gary Halbert has quietly been making thousands of dollars from the Internet and E-mail for the last 36-months.
FACT 19: Gary Halbert is an asshole and has decided to make his subscribers figure it out for themselves for a change.
You've got the facts, now go to it.

  Sincerely,
 
  Gary C. Halbert
"Asshole"