My real and serious marketing career began, I guess, in 1983 when I moved to the Lake Tahoe area in California. I was 20 and on fire. This was a very turbulent time in the economy - high unemployment and inflation - but I didn't know that so I just forged ahead.
I started a floor covering business there and was not afraid to work. I ran into a problem, though, that was hard to overcome. You see, most of the homes being built there were second homes for people in the Bay Area. Unfortunately there was a floor covering store right off the freeway, so everyone seemed to just stop there when the time came to do their floors! This was really troublesome to me.
I determined that what I needed to do was get to the customer before they pulled into that store, but how? Well, I realized that every home had a building permit, and that building permits are public information. So what I did was to go straight to the building department on a regular basis and harvest those names and addresses. Then I started to write letters to those people.
At first I did this with a borrowed typwriter and by hand. Oh, I shudder to think what some of those letters looked like! I knew that I needed to make the most of the time and expense involved, so I looked around for information that would help me write an effective letter. I found a book at the library by Dan Kennedy called The Ultimate Sales Letter. Sounded like just the ticket, so I used that little paperback as a guide for writing a sales letter that performed.
It worked!
I started getting calls from the people I was writing letters to. This was good! I made a couple of sales with this system, so I refined it.
By this time it is 1986 and computers were coming on the scene. I invested in an Atari. (Remember Atari?!?) Atari was way ahead of IBM machines of that time in many ways, but still very basic compared to today. What I wanted to do was to merge the names and addresses and other unique information into my letters, automatically. The term "Mail Merge" wasn't even known then, but that's what I wanted to do with that little computer.
I found a piece of software that was kind of a data base system. With a little "fanagling" I could get it to do the mail merge that I wanted. I had to write Basic code to make it work, but it worked. This was so cool! I entered the prospect's data, a letter that I wrote and my Atari printed the letters with the proper information for each letter.
I used a Brother daisy wheel printer that took about 3 minutes per letter, but it looked just like it was hand-typed. It would take about 5 hours to type 100 letters, and then another few hours to type the envelopes. I stuffed them, stamped them, and mailed them.
I was selling carpet by direct mail! (And making pretty incredible money for a 23 year old kid!)
Since then I have continued to grow in my knowledge and experience in marketing.
I've read, and listened to, more marketing material form Dan Kennedy, Robert Collier, Joe Vitale, Bruce Barton, John Caples and others.
I've discovered that marketing is marketing. Actually, the psychology that is tried-and-proven was first developed (or maybe "discovered" is a better way of putting it) by Aristotle. Exordium, Narratio, Confirmatio, then Peroratio or AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
I have built a half dozen businesses, all unrelated to each other except for one thing -- each one needed customers, or clients. In every business I built on what I learned before in marketing to people.
In January of 1999 I bought my first domain name from a new and starting company called GoDaddy. (I actually bought that first domain name on the phone from Bob Parson's son.) It's hard to believe that I've been playing around with the internet for more than 10 years now, but I have.
I realized a few years ago that the thing I really liked doing is the marketing, so now that's almost all I do. I have about 35 websites that are working for me, and I help other businesses market their unique and special services or products.
I absolutely love the unlimited creativity that I'm able to have by doing this for other businesses! There are times that I can't sleep at night, when I see the possibility of kicking a business up a notch or two.
