31. Said casually and with confidence, this alone will get you through surprisingly often. “I’d like to speak with Mr./Ms. X, please” is a dead giveaway that you don’t know them. If you want to up the chances of getting though but risk looking foolish if they call the bluff, ask for the target mentor by first name only.
32. I use this type of lead-in whenever making off-the-wall requests. It softens it and makes the person curious enough to listen before spitting out an automatic “no.”
33. This answers the questions they’ll have in their head: “Who are you and why are you calling now?” I like to be a “first-time” something to play the sympathy card, and I find a recent media feature online to cite as the trigger for calling.
34. I call people I’m familiar with. If you can’t call yourself a longtime fan, tell them that you have followed the mentor’s career or business exploits for a certain number of years.
35. Don’t pretend to be strong. Make it clear you’re nervous and they’ll lower their guard. I often do this even if I’m not nervous.
36. The wording here is critical. Ask them to “help” you do something.
37. Just rework the gatekeeper paragraph for this, and don’t dillydally—get to the point quickly and ask for permission to pull the trigger.
38. End the conversation by opening the door for future contact. Start with e-mail and let the mentoring relationship develop from there.
10. Income Autopilot II.
TESTING THE MUSE
Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness…. Thus the yeoman work in any science … is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
—MICHIO KAKU, theoretical physicist and cocreator of String Field Theory, Hyperspace
Fewer than 5% of the 195,000 books published each year sell more than 5,000 copies. Teams of publishers and editors with decades of combined experience fail more times than not. The founder of Border’s Books lost $375 million of investor funding with WebVan,39 a nationwide grocery delivery service. The problem? No one wanted it.
The moral is that intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable. Focus groups are equally misleading. Ask ten people if they would buy your product. Then tell those who said “yes” that you have ten units in your car and ask them to buy. The initial positive responses, given by people who want to be liked and aim to please, become polite refusals as soon as real money is at stake.
To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters. The approach of the NR reflects this.
Step Three: Micro-Test Your Products
Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing.40
In the pre-Internet era, this was done using small classified ads in newspapers or magazines that led prospects to call a prerecorded sales message. Prospects would leave their contact information, and based on the number of callers or response to a follow-up sales letter, the product would be abandoned or manufactured.
In the Internet era, there are better tools that are both cheaper and faster. We’ll test the product ideas from the last chapter on Google Adwords—the largest and most sophisticated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) engine—in five days for $500 or less. PPC here refers to the highlighted search results that are listed above and to the right of normal search results on Google. Advertisers pay to have these ads displayed when people search for a certain term related to the advertisers’ product, such as “cognitive supplement,” and are charged a small fee from $.05 to over $1 each time someone clicks through to their site. For a good introduction to Google Adwords and PPC, visit www.google.com/onlinebusiness. For expanded examples of the following PPC strategies, visit www.fourhourblog.com and search “PPC.”
The basic test process consists of three parts, each of which is covered in this chapter.
Best: Look at the competition and create a more-compelling offer on a basic one-to- three-page website (one to three hours).
Test: Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns (three hours to set up and five days of passive observation).
Divest or Invest: Cut losses with losers and manufacture the winner(s) for sales rollout.
Let’s use two people, Sherwood and Johanna, and their two product ideas—French sailor shirts and a how-to yoga DVD for rock climbers—as case studies of what the testing steps look like and how you can do the same.
Sherwood bought a striped sailing shirt in France while traveling last summer, and upon returning to NYC has been continually approached by 20–30-year-old males on the street who want to know where to get their own. Sensing an opportunity, he requests back issues of NYC-based weekly magazines aimed at this demographic and calls the manufacturer in France for pricing. He learns that he can purchase shirts at a wholesale price of $20 that sell for $100 retail. He adds $5 per shirt to account for shipping to the U.S. and arrives at a per-shirt cost of $25. It’s not quite our ideal markup (4x vs. 8–10x), but he wants to test the product regardless.
Johanna is a yoga instructor who has noticed her growing client base of rock climbers. She is also a rock climber and is considering creating a yoga instructional DVD tailored to that sport, which would include a 20-page spiral-bound manual and be priced at $80. She predicts that production of a low-budget first edition of the DVD would cost nothing more than a borrowed digital camera and a friend’s iMac for simple editing. She can burn small quantities of this first-edition DVD—no menus, just straight footage and titles—on the laptop and create labels with freeware from www.download.com. She has contacted a duplication house and learned that more-professional DVDs will cost $3–5 apiece to duplicate in small quantities (minimum of 250), including cases.
Now that they have ideas and estimates of start-up costs, what next?
Besting the Competition
First and foremost, each product must pass a competitive litmus test. How can Sherwood and Johanna beat the competition and offer a superior product or guarantee?
1. Sherwood and Johanna Google the top terms each would use to try and find their respective products. To come up with related terms and derivative terms, both use search term suggestion tools.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool (http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) Enter the potential search terms to find search volume and alternative terms with more search traffic. Click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” column to sort results from most to least searched.
SEOBook Keyword Tool, SEO for Firefox Extension (http://tools.seobook.com/) This is an outstanding resource page with searches powered by Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com).
Both then visit the three websites that consistently appear in top search and PPC positions. How can Sherwood and Johanna differentiate themselves?
Use more credibility indicators? (media, academia, associations, and testimonials)
Create a better guarantee?
Offer better selection?41
Free or faster shipping?
Sherwood notices that the shirts are often hard to find on the competitive sites, all of which feature dozens of products, and the shirts are either made in the U.S. (inauthentic) or shipped from France (customers must wait
