Although Alvin has stressed and assured that he has given us all the necessary information to kick start our online business, I am still particularly interested to read up additonal resources and information by Mark Joyner and Joe Vitale.

Mark Joyner is an interesting figure as he is given the title as the godfather of Internet Marketing. Quote from Brett Mcfall is such that Mark is widely recognized as one of the early pioneers of Internet Marketing and is responsible for introducing many of the technologies and tactics you see used on the Internet today (most notably e-books, remotely hosted ad-tracking, and integration marketing).

Till date, though I have only browsed through 2 of Mark’s books - The Irresistible Offer and The Great Formula, I find his style of writing - short, sweet and simple to read, yet profoundly quality content.

One of the examples shared by Mark in his “The Great Formula” (which comprises of successful marketing strategies used by successful entrepreneurs), set me thinking hard over creating my pool of “thirsty customers”.

Below is an extract of marketing strategy used by Joe Sugarman,

I met somebody who was the licensing agent for Pablo Picasso. The art of Picasso, who had died in 1973, was so popular that his licensing firm was able to license everything from bedsheets to many household items – all with his images.

I got to know the licensing agent well. And one day he approached me and made a suggestion. Why not put Picasso’s images on 6” x 6” tiles? It had never been done before, and besides, it would be an authentic limited edition by Pablo Picasso and licensed by the Picasso family estate.

The idea appealed to me primarily because I thought I’d have a little fun with it. First, I realized that to simply sell a limited quantity of a piece of art on a tile was okay, but I wanted to develop a business from this with ongoing sales.

I also realized that I didn’t have a mailing list of strong prospects to whom I could mail the offer. And I knew that it took years to develop a strong list, anyway. And since the tile was a new art form, it might encounter buyer’s resistance from the public.

I saw the marketing challenge as multifaceted. First I needed to somehow build a mailing list. Second, I had to establish a strong value for an art form that nobody had heard of with an artist who was world famous; and finally I had to do it rather quickly. I didn’t want to wait years to establish a company. So here’s what I did.

I took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal offering a limited edition set of six tiles at a very reasonable price - $7 per tile. In addition, I explained that the price and the offer were limited since we had only 1,250 sets to sell and that we were not making any money from it. In fact, I showed the cost to make the tiles and the cost of the ad in the Journal, indicating that we were not making a penny from it. I also explained that we would surely be oversold and that we would use a ‘random selection process’ to select the future owners of the tiles. In short, we would let our computer randomly generate who our customers would be. The ones who were not selected we would advise that the series wouldn’t be available to them.

The ad ran and it was a huge success. Not only did we sell all 1,250 tile sets, but we received a total of 8,000 requests, most of which we had to turn down.

Presto! Overnight, we had a large hot mailing list – a list that consisted of customers who were rejected and denied the opportunity of buying from me. In addition, we took the focus away from the unusual nature of the art form. It didn’t matter if it was a tile or canvas, as it was the hot nature of the limited availability of a hot collectible that was more important. And finally, we had 8,000 people who would love to buy our next offering whom we could reach by mail (thus avoiding the high cost of advertising in the Wall Street Journal) and of course, we could earn a nice profit. And that is exactly what we did, following up with a series of Picasso tiles.

Our first mailing generated a 65.8% response rate – one of the highest in my career and one of the biggest responses I’ve ever heard by anybody else. Typically, if you received a 2% response that was considered good.

The subsequent promotions did very well, and with a strong base of 8000 names, we were able to build a nice business for the next few years.

Deny somebody something, create a mailing list of rejected customers, offer them something in the future, and sit back and count the profits. Not a bad way to generate a nice little business, let alone a nice income.