OBE PACKAGE

. . . yet still be able to earn a good income as an Independent Publisher of information and software.

One of the most difficult and time consuming tasks in the information publishing business is having to continually create new products to sell. Coming up with good products is hard work, and unless you have the tools and time to develop them yourself, it's easy to get left out of the game.

The biggest problem most information publishers face is this: unless you develop the products yourself, you don't own the rights to them. And when you don't own the rights to a product, you usually end up having to pay someone else a huge chunk of your profits each time you sell their product.

In most businesses, this is the norm. You buy products from someone else at wholesale, and then you sell them at retail, hoping to survive on the margin. Unfortunately, the markup is generally 50% or less. Which means if you buy something at $10 wholesale, you'll generally sell it for $15, and try to survive on the $5 you get to keep.

Of course, all the marketing costs, overhead, and taxes come out of your slice of the pie, not the wholesaler's.

Now this system works fine if you're a big company like Wal-Mart, where you average a billion dollars in sales each week. If you also average a 25% margin, you have up to $250 million a week in potential profit. And that's enough to keep the babies fed.

But most of us don't have sales figures that come anywhere near Wal-Mart's. And most of us in the publishing business don't want to give up 75% of each sale to a wholesaler. That's why we work so hard to develop our own products . . . so we can keep all the profits ourselves.

Consider the advantages of being able to bypass the wholesaler. If you sell $1,000 worth of products purchased from a wholesaler, you might get to keep $250, at best. The rest goes back to the wholesaler. But when you sell $1,000 of products you own outright…

Being able to keep all the profit yourself quickly adds up in your favor. When you sell $2,000 of products you own, you get to keep all $2,000. But to be able to keep $2,000 in a wholesale arrangement, you would have to sell $8,000 in products. . . four times as much!

Of course, the actual amount of sales needed to match wholesale versus outright ownership depends on the wholesale pricing arrangements, but you get the general idea. It's much easier to make a good living when you get to keep the entire profit yourself!

And that's the problem. In most cases, owning the rights to reproduce a product means you must first develop it. And developing products can be a very time-intensive process. Unfortunately, most would-be entrepreneurs simply don't have the time to develop their own products (and as a result, they miss out on the huge advantage of selling products they own).

Even people who do have time to develop a product quickly discover that it usually takes more than one or two products to be successful. Customers love being able to buy packages, combinations of products and premiums, or FREE gifts. And if that's what they want to buy, then that's what you have to offer them . . . more than one product at a time!

In our own business, you may have noticed that we almost never offer a single product. Instead, we create great packages filled with books, CD-ROMs, and other interesting premiums. We know that by doing so, we greatly increase the "perceived value" of the product, and end up with many more sales.

In addition, by adding premiums to our packages, we create a better "OBE" or Out of Box Experience. This "OBE" is the reaction your customers have when they open a package from you. And the "OBE" has a tremendous influence on whether your customer will value the product, or be disappointed with it (which leads to product returns and payment refunds).

For that reason, it is important to be aware of, and continually trying to improve, the "OBE" of the products you sell. This can best be accomplished by making sure the customer is impressed by the box the product is packaged in, as well as its contents.

To achieve the highest "OBE", you'll want to have a professional-looking shipping label on the outside of the box, and on the inside, a warm cover letter thanking the customer for the order, a printed invoice with all the ordered items listed, and of course, the product and premiums in good condition and packaged well.

If you get the "OBE" right, you'll have a happy customer, one who will value the product, appreciate your professionalism, and be happy to do business with you again. But if you get the "OBE" wrong, you run the risk of having a disappointed customer who will return the product, demanding a refund. (Also one likely to tell his friends about the bad experience he had with your company.)

Our Own Approach to Getting Great "OBE"Now that we know the value of doing it, we spend a lot of time and effort trying to achieve a great "Out of Box Experience" for our customers. If you've ordered anything from us lately, you probably have a good idea of how we do this . . .

We get the professional look by using Order Desk Pro(which prints invoices, shipping labels, and envelopes). And we enhance the value of the products we deliver by including our latest book, "301 Direct Mail Tips, Techniques & Secrets," plus one of our most popular CDs, "593 Business Letters."

This seems to create an insatiable "OBE" and has resulted in many, many repeat orders.

As you may know, we occasionally offer reprint and duplication rights to books, CD-ROMs, and video tapes we produce. People who acquire the rights receive all the benefits of product ownership (the ability to make and sell as many copies as they like), without being burdened by development efforts or ongoing wholesale pricing arrangements.

Owning the reprint rights to one of our books, videos, or software packages allows you to do with the product as you like . . . sell it by itself, package it with other products, add it to your catalog, sell it on your website, even give it away as a premium to attract new customers. The only restriction is that you cannot resell the duplication rights to others.

Anyway, we've decided to make the reprint and duplication rights to our two most popular products available in a very special package. This special package includes:

Reprint and Duplication Rights to the newly revised "301 Direct Mail Tips, Techniques & Secrets" . This latest version of this highly rated book is 190 pages long, is professionally printed and bound with a color cover, and is an ideal product for the income opportunity or business market.

In this latest printing, we have removed the price (so you can price it as you choose), and have removed all the ads for our products. This is one of the most popular books we've ever developed, and is the first time the reprint rights have been offered. The reprint rights allow you to reprint and sell the book as your own, and keep all the profits for yourself.

We provide you with a camera-ready master copy (which you can take to your printer), a diskette master (in Pagemaker format), and 20 copies of the book as a starting inventory. This is truly the quickest way to get into the profitable book publishing business!

You even get a "killer" 4-page direct mail sales letter that sells the book for you! We send you the sales letter on diskette and we'll even customize it for you with your name, address, and phone number. This sales letter will make you a lot of money!

The Reprint and Duplication Rights to "593 Business Letters" on diskette. We've taken this popular premium item, and moved it to diskette so that it is easy for you to duplicate. The diskette contains everything found on the 593 Business Letters CD, including over 600 letters, legal documents and forms, all of which can be viewed and printed with the automatic Windows 95/98 interface.

This diskette makes a great companion item for almost any business related product, and costs you very little to produce (blank diskettes cost as little as 23 cents). With the reprint and duplications rights, you can duplicate and sell as many copies of this diskette as you like, and keep all the profits for yourself. We include the master diskette, 20 diskettes, the diskette label master, and complete instructions for duplication. This is a great product to offer as a FREE premium, something everyone likes to have around.

Your very own copy of Order Desk Pro , our complete order entry, sales tracking, customer database management system! If you sell anything by mail, classified or display ads, over the telephone, or on the Internet, you need this software! It keeps track of all your customers and orders, prints invoices and shipping labels, maintains inventory, tracks ads and sales letter performance, and provides instant reporting of every phase of your order business.

This is the software we developed and use in our own office every day. And we love it! Order Desk Pro runs under Windows 95/98, and is network ready (you will also need Lotus Approach, under $60). Order Desk comes with a comprehensive Reference Guide, ready-to-use demo and tutorial, Internet support, and is so easy to use, you'll be up and running in no time!

So what do you think? A pretty good package, right? We've done our best to put together products you can use right away, in a package that will retain its value over the long haul.

But for this to be of any value to you, it has to be affordable. So with that in mind, we are making the complete package available to you for . . .

P.P.S. One secret to long term success in the publishing business is being able to develop or acquire enough products so you always have something in your product line to appeal to customers who view your catalog or website. Sometimes it's slow getting started, but by adding three or four new products a year, you can develop a good product line in a relatively short period of time. (That's what we've done.)

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