Postcards may be one of the best kept secrets of modern
marketing. They produce even better results now than in the
past. That’s probably because postcards deliver information
the way people want to get it today …fast and with little
or no effort.

Use Postcards to Generate Website Traffic and Sales Leads

A brief captivating message on a postcard with an enticing
offer sent to the right prospects will generate a flood of
traffic to your website – or a large number of sales leads.

Keep your postcard simple. Make it look at first glance like
a message from a friend instead of like an advertisement.
This creates a pleasant emotional response from readers even
though they quickly realize that it is a commercial message.

State the biggest benefit you offer to customers. Then
briefly add a few other advantages or features you provide.
End with a compelling reason for prospects to contact you
…or to go to your website for more details. It’s that
simple.

Tip: Don’t try to close sales directly from a postcard.
There’s not enough space on a postcard to provide all the
information your prospects need to make a buying decision.

People Read Postcards

Almost everybody will read a postcard – even those who
usually throw out other direct mail without opening it.
That’s because it’s almost impossible to throw out a
postcard without looking at the message.

This high rate of readership is the main reason why
postcards produce a bigger response than other types of
direct marketing. With other types of marketing you often
lose prospects who would have responded to your offer – but
they never saw it.

Tip: Postcards are an excellent low-cost alternative to
email. People get so much email today that even legitimate
messages are getting deleted unread. But they get few if any
postcards. Your message is guaranteed to get their attention
when it’s delivered on a postcard.

Postcards are Cheap to Produce

Postcards cost less than 2 cents each to produce if you
print them using your own computer. You can print postcards
individually on blank 4 x 6 inch index cards or print 4
postcards on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of index card stock and cut
each sheet into quarters.

Your postcards will cost between 4 cents and 9 cents each to
produce if you use a commercial printer …depending on the
number you have printed and the quality you want.

Postcards are Cheap to Mail

Even the postage for mailing postcards is cheap – 23 cents
each to send them by First Class Mail in the US. The only
requirement for this special rate is that the dimensions of
your postcards must be at least 3 1/2 x 5 inches but not
over 4 1/4 x 6 inches.

Tip: Always use a real 23 cent stamp on your postcards. It
produces more replies than a printed indicia (imprinted
postage) …probably because people associate a printed
indicia with junk mail.

Don’t overlook postcards the next time you want to drive a
huge amount of traffic to your website or generate a flood
of new sales leads. They’re simple to use, highly effective
and very low-cost.

In previous articles under “Meaning and Marketing”, we have learned about the verb “To Be” and that the name of God is I AM.

Stephen Hawkings, the world’s greatest mathematician, and author of several books on science and the Universe, was more or less a bum during his university years in England and some years thereafter. I think he liked to drink.

Everybody knew he had the GIFT and so did he. He just wasn’t using it. But then he contracted Lou Gehig’s Disease and that got him moving.

What was the difference? Hawkings now faced a MUST and for him –he knew — it was now or never. And this MUST has kept him amazingly alive for many years.

Hawkings was facing a Moral Imperative!

Scarlett O’Hara in the book and movie, “Gone with the Wind”, is another example. However, she didn’t have a MUST, not really. She manufactured one. Her’s and Margaret Mitchell’s words will ring out forever – - “By God, I’ll never be hungry again!”

Or did she say, “I’ll never eat radishes again!?”

Her link was “Tara” – the Land. But, of course, her link was more than that. It was Ashley Wilkes. She could care less about Rhett Buttler.

Whatever her true links are, they were extremely active in her conscious and sub-conscious will and Scarlett literally storms the gates of Heaven with her demands and I AM is impressed. So are we.

Never mind that she is a louse. In the end she will find her true SELF and, to her amazement, her true love — Rhett Butler. So will you.

If you don’t face a MUST, you can always manufacture one — if you want to, as Scarlett did. Don’t be fooled. She could have gotten by on radishes, pinto beans, and settled for much less, as most of her neighbors did after the Civil War. She could have lived a very ordinary and miserable life for herself and future family. But that’s not what she wanted, was it? That’s not what she willed.

A MUST is a Moral Imperative. It’s now or never. You’ve got to get moving and you know it.

What is it you want? Why were you born? What is your destiny? You can only know and find out by allowing your “wheels to hit the road.”

Your Domain is — YourHighestandYourBest.com

This is the same as — YouAre.com

(See Article: “Meaning and Marketing: The Links”)

Now let’s pretend YOU ARE 10 pounds of Pure Uranium and fashion you into a perfect solid ball about 5″ in diameter and let’s surround you in an amazingly well fortified container and pack you in a powerful explosive.

When the explosive is triggered, the force of the explosion will be directed inward and not outward and compact you at all points a fraction of a second about 5 tons per pixel. The Chain Reaction

is then ignited within the sphere of YOURSELF. After that, it’s 10,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit in all directions.

Now this is an almost infinitely tiny explosion compared to our Mrs. Patricia Smith (“Eye of the Storm” Article) whose body plus the Door at the speed of light squared was the size of a proton with a mass of 239lbs. I AM used her to fashion a brand new universe. What will I AM do with you?

Do you and I really have that kind of power? Yes, we do, if we gain weight.

But what seems impossible physically is always possible in our WILLS and in our Imaginations – if we want it to be. And that’s all it takes.

Go ahead. Deny yourself your WILL and your Imagination. But to do so is an excuse, and an excuse is always immoral. And so many people choose to be immoral: not having any direction, meaning, or purpose, and so they just get by from day to day. That’s all they do. It’s a smart, safe, but a sad way to live.

So if you are in the category of someone who wishes to live by your Will and Imagination — and I am assuming that you are — what are you going to use for your explosive material?

Use your Links! I have dozens, even hundreds. Here are some of my links and I am showing you this just to show you what a link looks like:

“The King of the Golden River” by John Ruskin, a short story which I read in the 2nd. grade;

The death of Ben in Thomas Wolf’s book, “Look Homeward Angel”.

Task Force FAITH on the East side of the Chosin Reservoir in the Epic Korean War Battle, Nov. 27 to Dec. 8, 1950.

Movies:

“Moll Flanders” – a model of endurance and true character.

“Solaris” – You will know the price of LOVE.

Music:

“A Banquet of Voices”, The Cambridge Singers “Vivaldi Concerti” and Baroque Trumpet Music, Nimbus Records, Nimbus Records #7012

My own real life stories:

The Roller Derby

The Horseshoe Tournament

The Fat Man at the Swimming Pool

The Mile Run

The Penny – (3 very recently found)

People – My Heroes… I have dozens and so do you. But how about this one for starters:

MyhighestAndMyBest.com/LanceArmstrong

Special Numbers that have meaning only for me: $17.01 & $21.01 (the ladder added in the last week)

Etc, etc, etc…

There is a story behind all my Links. These are the very best kind of Links — the ones with a story behind them, from your very own life.

BUT YOU DON’T NEED ANY OF MY LINKS. USE YOUR OWN!

Look for your own, find your own – anything that has special meaning for you and that empowers you. Open your eyes. They are everywhere!

Surround yourself with YOUR links to your past and present and use them as explosives to blast yourself to a much better future for you and your loved ones. Click on any one of YOUR OWN links and your will and you should arrive at the same place: YOU and your Destiny.

YouAre.com

YourHighestAndYourBest.com

Click on these links and you should arrive or ought to arrive at your Ultimate Link:

TheKingdomofIAM.com

You don’t believe in GOD? Then just pretend that God is the verb “To Be” and think of God as the way you use the verb “To Be” and all words in your language — as the way and the means you use to communicate with others. Therefore, every time you use your language, you will be acknowledging it’s true Source.

If God — I AM — is anything, S/he is communication. Therefore, let us not fail to communicate. After all, this is what Marketing is all about, isn’t it?

NOW YOU LACK ONLY ONE THING: A Trigger!!!

The Trigger is your Moral Imperative.

What is a Trigger? A Trigger can be one of two things: (1) Someone or Something that royally angers you. (2) Someone or something that has exhilarated you and brought to you a very special JOY.

When Jesus of Nazareth grew up in Galilee, he looked around him and saw plenty to anger him. And it is the same with you and me. When we look around us, what do we see and what do we care about? And do we not feel a similar anger sometimes?

But we can use our anger as a trigger, as many great people have already done. There are dozens of causes that elicit our anger. Choose one and go with it and use YOUR anger as the Trigger.

But in truth, the ladder (No. 2 — Joy) may be the best kind of trigger because it has more force and power and you might as well “go for the Gold” in your trigger. This is what many artists have done. Goethe is just one example.

Unfortunately, LOVE as a trigger has to do with “Unrequited Love”, as in the case of Scarlett O’Hara, but it is one of the most powerful and energizing forces in the world if you want to make use of it. If you don’t make use of it, it can destroy you.

Whom or what have you lost that you cannot recover? Instead of investing your life in sadness and regret and sometimes suicide, turn all that energy around and use it as your Trigger.

The only way you can recover what you have lost is by reforming yourself, by re-imagining yourself. When you find your true self, you will have recovered, not only what you have lost, but also much more. You will be and shall become a New Creation.

Your point right now is not to succeed, but to begin. To begin, you must have a Trigger — a Moral Imperative — and the best Trigger is unrequited love.

But if you don’t have that, unrequited love, then the other kind will do.

Don’t be fooled by Scarlett O’Hara. When she was reaching for the gold, she was mostly reaching for Ashley Wilks. She had a

double trigger! She had two triggers. She had both kinds.

Now that you have your TRIGGER — YouAre.com/Ashley — it’s time to take cover with your compatriots in your foxholes, to join hands, and to pray.

Who is there to pull the Trigger? YOU ARE. Use your WILL.

(See Article 3: “Meaning and Marketing: The Will”)

It’s now Six Trillion, Trillion Degrees and the force of the blast is moving at speeds that trouble the imagination…

(See Article 2: “Meaning and Marketing: The Eye of the Storm”)

Have a good life. Find yourself. In finding your TRUE SELF, you will find your TRUE LOVE and the world in you and around you will never be the same again.

Who knows? Your Unrequited Love may even come to visit you, but only after you have made some money, a whole lot of money. And then, if you want to — but I hope you will not want to — you can tell him/her where to go.

You are a Network Marketer. You do want to make a lot of money, don’t you? Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what you WILL?

If not, then why are you in Marketing?

Since your are in Marketing, you might as well go for the Gold. If it was good enough for Scarlett O’Hara, it’s good enough for me.

And besides all that, I have some “loves” to recover. Don’t you?

Go ahead! Pull the Trigger! Begin!

The best way to read this article is in sequence with the other articles in this series under “Meaning and Marketing”: (1) The Hurricane; (2) The Eye of the Storm; (3) The Will; (4) The Links; (5) The Trigger

“The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Intro by Michael Hulse, Penquin Literature;

E=MC(uppercase2), a book about Einstein’s most famous mathematical formula

Paul Snell lives with his wife, Jean, and younger son, Steven, and their dog Blackie in Lexington, NC. He is a former minister in the Presbyterian Church USA and has been in Network Marketing full time since 2002. Paul, at the age of 61, has recently been diagnosed as Bi-Polar with A.D.D. as a minor component. He, with the encouragement of his great mentors at the Power Shift Loop, is an advocate for the treatment of mental illnesses — all kinds, including substance abuse.

We find ourselves amazed at the amount of effort people spend trying to fool or manipulate their positioning in search engines. People seem to focus on the shortcuts to success and NOT on their Web site or the true value their content provides to their prospects.

In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices, we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotage your search engine marketing project in a “New York” second.

1. Invisible (Ghost) Text

You have kept a good secret! Your visitors might not have noticed, but all search engine crawlers have been trained to be on the lookout for this obvious technique, last fashionable circa 1997. The search engines may very well purge all your pages from their index due to deceptive practices.

And, if you are feeling really frisky, you can make this technique even more effective if the invisible text has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page it sits within.

2. Frames Usage

Search engines are not “frame-friendly”. Once they encounter a pesky frame, they either stop flat in their tracks because the frame doesn’t give them anywhere else to go, or they locate the pages beyond the frames and point people to that locale – which won’t have the frames included with it.

There’s truly no need to use frames and make attempt to justify it by believing it will improve the prospect’s experience.

If your prospects can’t uncover your site or they find slices and slivers of you, how much then have you actually assisted them?

3. Why Be Fresh And Original?

Why try to be unique, it’s just too hard anyway? It sounds foolish, but it occurs quite often. If you find something of real interest on another site, just burning a copy and slapping your links on the top does not make you a unique force on the Net. And how many actual shopping sites selling the exact same discounted products are enough for the average Web? In my book, the more sites you mirror, the least effective you will become.

4. Chubby Web Pages (Obesity Kills)

Sites with lots of graphics, animation, Flash and music do pose many disruptive elements with the search engines. Not only can it confuse your prospects, who are looking for obvious information and links, the search engines may not feel you are very relevant because they cannot be sure what to make of your Web site.

If you have a site made up of nothing but heavy graphics and multimedia, not only will you give the search engines zero to index, you may also aggravate any prospect running with a slower connection speed. In nothing else, at the least, use ALT-tags to explain images for text browsers, the hearing impaired and search engines.

5. Redirects, Redirects, And More Redirects

You may be using “redirects” within your Web pages to track clicks for advertising and also to pull together information about your site visitors. Your Web pages may be indexed, but you may not rank well at all. The search engines may not be able to see the correlation that exist between your Web pages because the redirect code often blocks their path, unlike direct text linkage.

6. Lengthy URL’s

Dynamic (ever-changing) e-commerce and shopping Web sites that use parameters and their session ID’s often manifest these difficult URL’s nicely.

If your Web site has lengthy URL’s sprinkled with question marks, percentage signs, Session ID’s, and at least three parameters, you’re degrading your hopes for search engine superiority.

Lengthy URL’s do not look very attractive to individuals searching and the site URL’s contain calls to various databases.

Leading the way for the search crawler directly into your database may quite possibly be a sure-fire way to send them spidering elsewhere.

7. Forgotten about your No Index Tag and Robots.txt?

Have you created a plan to keep all those nasty search bots out? Do you have a robots.txt file living on the root of your site? Does this file contain the following:

User-agent: *disallow /

Or does your Web property have a Meta-tag:

Be extra nice to your Webmaster. He or she may depart from your company in the future and leave this little monster behind for you to find at the end of a needlessly expensive investigation into why the search engines will not make nice with your Web site.

If you are using the special robots protocol, you will not want to forget to remove them altogether if you are going live from a beta testing process.

8. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages (also know as jump pages and bridge pages) and anything that is created specifically for a search engine and does not contain more than valuable content or products for your prospect, is not an effective search marketing tool.

If you’re not providing true content, the search engines will discover this and may penalize your entire online site. If you’ve jammed yourself into this hole, you’ll probably need to return back to start with a new domain name.

9. Identical Meta-Tags And Titles

You worried over every single unique page of the Web property while developing it, but you didn’t spend a lot of concern that each page should be tagged (or classified) that way.

Imagine walking into your public library where every single book had the exact same title. What better way to tell a search bot to “take a hike” than showing them that all of your content is exactly the same. You will most likely see fewer of your Web pages indexed and much less traffic than you might otherwise.

Here’s a quick checklist to consider for your Meta-Tags and Titles:

* Do they deliver a “call to action”?

* Do they use relevant keywords and phrases?

* Is your “Title” less than 80 characters?

* Do they accurately describe what the page is about?

* Are these consistent with the page?

10. Linking Networks

Did you find a service that’s offering to link thousands of other Web sites to you today? Taking part in these programs may effectively indicate to the search engines that you really do not want their valuable traffic. The quality of these link pages as well as their overall content “value” to a human visitor is very low.

Most search engines do come together in agreement and can severely penalize accordingly. Sites that get marked as link spammers, may be briskly informed that they should find a new domain name and begin all over again.

I advise you to take these lessons in “eMarketing Sabotage” for what they are, guidelines to help you operate your good e-business practice free and clear of the many pitfalls and mistakes of other marketers and improve on your own level of success in conjunction with search engines strategies.

Soon, with a sound plan, a bit of smart work and a solid attention-to-detail approach, your Web pages may rank highest among today’s top search engine results.

What is the most valuable asset your company owns? Inventory? Equipment? Employees? If you’ve got customers, your number one asset is your customer list.

You’ve heard the old adage, “It’s 5 times easier to sell an existing customer than to find a new one.” Selling an existing customer is easy because you’ve got the right message at the right time going to the right customer. There are two proven ways to do this. First, you position yourself as the obvious expert and ask for your deserved referrals and for the next sale. Second, you practice solid customer relationship management and mine your database for all that it’s worth. The first way is passive and takes a really long time.

The second way actively places you on your customer’s radar and keeps you top of mind for his next buying decision. But if your customer information resides in 10 different places, like your accounting software, Excel spreadsheets, little Post-It notes on your monitor and a PDA, you’ve greatly diminished or erased your ability to “be there” for your number one asset when he’s ready to buy again.

Take this 12-point true/false quiz to see if you’re prepared to profit from your database. Give yourself 1 point for each “true” answer:

1. I collect complete contact information (name, address, phone numbers and email address) on every customer who buys from me

2. I collect complete contact information (name, address, phone numbers and email address) on everyone who inquires about my services

3. I keep all my contacts in a single database

4. I keep track of how each customer or prospect found me so I can duplicate my successes and thank my referral sources

5. I have an easy-to-use automated response tool to follow up with prospects before, during and after the sale so I never lose an opportunity because it fell through the cracks

6. I have an easy-to-use system to cross sell my customers on my other services because I track what they bought previously

7. I have a system to track opt-outs to my email campaigns so I can stay in CAN-SPAM compliance with my e-marketing

8. I can forecast my sales for the next week, month or quarter based on opportunities in my sales pipeline

9. I have a customer database clean-up plan to update my contact information at least once per year

10. I have an effective system for tracking open and closed customer service issues

11. I can download leads from my website and schedule a call back for myself in 1 hour or less–everyday!

12. It takes me one hour or less to launch an important email campaign to my customers.

What Your Score Means

If you scored a 7 or less, you’re working way too hard for business and leaving money on the table. Most likely, you’re developing one account at a time instead of creating a sales process that can run on auto-pilot until someone is ready to buy from you. While that’s certainly the way most of us were taught to get more business, and it’s been done like that for decades, it’s not a very efficient use of your time, or a very profitable way to spend your day, or much fun.

If you scored an 8 or above, you’re doing a great job of marketing to and reselling your existing customers. You should look for new sales opportunities with a targeted prospect list or try online advertising. Redouble your efforts with existing customers. Customers think of you as a trusted friend and treat your communications as information, not advertising. A good customer contact program includes 12-18 “touches” per year.