Prime Your Customers for Better Sales Results

It is a fact that most people do not buy a product the first time they see it, it usually takes three or four times before there is enough product recognition to create a desire to buy. Most retail outlets post new products in several places in the store intending the repeated exposure to the product will create an awareness and then a desire to try it. Book authors send out press releases and post posters well in advance of a signing to create the same product awareness and to increase sales. This technique works especially well for products like "StickySheets" which are pet hair clean up products. The grocery stores, place them in the pet aisle, the household cleaning products aisle and to increase the awareness, they place them on an end-cap of an aisle.

The same technique of increasing awareness for a product is as easily applied in Internet marketing as it is in good old fashioned door-to-door marketing. Take the example of John Craig, now author of Secrets to Creating Passive Income. As a young man on break from college, he decided to invent his own job and paint address numbers on curbs on summer. In the first neighborhood he visited, almost no one responded to the young man knocking on doors and explaining his service. In a flash of inspiration and possibly a weariness of saying the same thing over and over again, he decided to print up flyers and leave them on the doors of his future customers one day before he knocked on their doors. "I left the flyers there with an introduction, explanation of the service, a good reason to do it and the price. The next day, I got more than 80% of the people to hire me to paint their curbs." He primed the customer with an expectation and then they were actually looking forward to his visit, some of them told him they were glad he came by when he did because they were afraid they were going to miss him because they had to leave for a while.

An online version of this same principle comes in the form of the recorded phone call (phoneburner.com). Most people with 'Caller ID' ignore numbers they do not recognize and let the 'machine' pick it up, which is exactly what this Internet entrepreneur wants them to do. He leaves a recorded message on his potential customer's answering machine about an e-mail he plans on sending them. This Internet guru reports that 90% of the people he then sends an e-mail to actually open it. 90% open rate for any piece of mail, electronic or otherwise is a stunning result.

EJ Thornton, publisher at Books to Believe In suggests to her clients who buy print advertising to buy two print ads in the same magazine. Her belief is that once the book has been seen in the magazine, it has registered in the psyche of the reader, and the second time the reader sees it, they immediately remember it and check back to see if the book is actually the same book. When they realize it is, it solidifies name of the book in their memory much more so than seeing it only once. She also encourages her authors, for the very same reason, that if a magazine does an article on a book, that the author take out an advertisement as well.

Prime your customers and expose them to your new product repeatedly is a great way to boost sales and marketing success.

It Takes Money to Make Money.. MYTH!

Yes, many extra income ideas, such as the standard real estate challenge, do take some extra cash to get started. If your credit rating is low or you have very little money to play with, getting started in real estate "passive income" can be a challenge. However, there are literally thousands of opportunities all around you for generating passive income on a shoestring budget, and it's easy to find something fun to do as well!

Let time and creativity be your working capital. You can do the writing or the analysis or the research. Once you decide on a stream of passive income, it might start to produce without spending a single penny on it and you can be in profits from day one. We have had several streams of passive income start that way - books start that way, affiliate programs usually start that way, freelance article writing usually starts that way and the list goes on.

We know some teens who've made some really great extra income setting up a "pooper scooper" business in the neighborhood, and they found the tools they needed sitting idle in their garage. Find old books your neighbors don't want, either by asking outright or by paying a quarter or so per book at garage sales. "Flip" these books nation-wide by selling them for significant profits using a free Amazon reseller account. We started slow with this idea, but it worked so well we've made a fun hobby of checking out garage sales on weekends!

If these ideas intrigue you, you'll find many more passive income ideas in our best selling book Secrets to Creating Passive Income!

What in the heck is a "Passivilionaire" anyway?

When I was growing up I learned that if you saved enough money in the bank, you could live off the interest it earned. Sounds good, and yes, that can work. Surely, saving up a million dollars just might do the trick!

Pulling some numbers out of thin air, let's assume you have $1 million dollars in an account earning 3.1% annual interest. You then can live off of $84.95 each day, forever, and ever, and ever.

We track our multiple streams of passive income daily. These are ideas from our own book that we've put into practice ourselves. Once we reached $84.95 per day in passive income we celebrated and dubbed ourselves as official Passivilionaires!

You can do this too. For most of us it's much more fun, and much easier, to gain an extra, passive income stream than it is to tuck away money to reach the same goal.

Essence magazine article praises our book!

Over the past couple weeks we noticed a very definite sales increase for our book Secrets to Creating Passive Income, and we were a little mystified at the sudden jump in passive income this represents. A few days ago we discovered a very nice review of our book on a site called Woogleme.com, and at first thought this might be the explanation, but a check of the posting date showed this article appeared a few days after the start of our sales increase. So we kept looking around.

Last night we received a very kind e-mail from a reader thanking us for the nice information in an article in the July edition of Essence Magazine, a popular magazine with a circulation of well over 1 million readers. We immediately went to the nearest Walgreens magazine rack (it was after midnight) and sure enough, on page 69 there's an article about "What Rich Black Women Know". A couple pages into the article, in step 4 of 10 steps for the reader to take, the author gave our book some glowing praise. Wow! What a pleasant surprise!

Passive income can grow on its own, and it's so nice when this happens. We are so grateful for the very positive reception our book has received, and mostly we're grateful that it is very likely helping a lot of people increase their personal income in fun, creative, and enjoyable ways... Much like what we're doing for ourselves!

For more information about our book, check out its Facebook fan page.

Yes you can write a book!

Income from your own book is a great way to create a passive income stream. At the risk of sounding a little self-referential, our book Secrets to Creating Passive Income is a good example.

Now here's the really, really cool idea for you to mull over today. You can actually write, market, and sell a book of your own with very little effort. You don't even have to write the contents, and yes, this is perfectly legal to do! Once an author has left this plane of existence for over 70 years, their copyrighted material is in the public domain. Anyone can print, publish, and sell their book, and it's okay to make money doing so.

Here's a great example. We discovered an axtraordinarily valuable book that was way ahead of its time, written by Wallace D. Wattles about 100 years ago and titled The Science of Getting Rich. It's a great resource, and if you like what you read in The Secret, you'll be fascinated to learn that Wallace's book teaches much the same thing but many decades earlier.

The Science of Getting Rich is in the public domain. You are free to copy the contents and create your own book. All you need to do is learn how to cost-effectively get published, and away you go! Check out this Examiner article for ideas on how to go about this.

How about Beekeeping for passive income?

Selling honey is a low profit margin business and only the largest commercial beekeepers reach profitability. That's the low-down you'll read on many web sites. But here's the good news... Keep looking around and keep thinking outside the box and you'll discover there's more to this hobby than just selling honey. Much more!

Beeswax candles sell for several dollars each, and even the raw beeswax itself sells for many dollars a pound. Propolis is a very expensive yet powerful natural anti-fungal and anti-bacterial product worth big bucks. Some large companies are paying more per ounce for Royal Jelly than the price of gold, using it in shampoos and beauty makeup products to great marketing advantage. Some commercial farmers will pay good money to rent a hive for pollinating purposes. And some entrepreneurs are making lucrative extra income from bee removal services.

You might create your own signature BBQ sauce that's based on your own organically grown honey. If you're into beer or wine making you could specialize in brewing honey beer, honey wine, or good old fashioned mead like they drank in the Golden Age of Ancient Greece.

You can even write a book about beekeeping!

The point is, whatever your passion or hobby is you can very likely create a significant passive income stream while having some fun doing what you like to do!

Even your simple idea might be profitable!

For years I've enjoyed pointing out a simple idea that can help people save a little bit on gasoline. There's only a minimal extra income, in the form of gas savings, for anyone who uses this idea directly, but recently this simple idea of mine has added a very significant kick to one of our passive income streams, bringing us some extra cash!. Let me explain.

Early in life I learned that airplane wings and even the main fuselages are rounded in the front ends and tapered to fairly sharp edges at the rear, simply because this minimizes wind drag from turbulence. Take a look at the many spock boxes on the tops of cars now days. (I like to call them that because they remind me of the space casket Mr. Spock's body was disposed of in Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.) Anyway, people like to see spock boxes with sharp leading edges, I suppose because they look like they're cutting into the wind, and the trailing blunt ends towards the back of the cars don't seem to matter. If everyone would mount their spock boxes backwards the total gasoline savings would like be very significant!

I presented this discussion and explanation on a web site containing affiliate marketing advertisements for car top carriers, and our commissions for spock box sales through Amazon increased dramatically. The prices of these items is significant, so our affiliate income stemming from this one little passionate idea of mine has been significant.

Do you have a crazy, perhaps passionate idea that you'd like to tell the world about? With a little creative thinking and planning you can very likely cash in on it. Give it some thought!