Posts by Bob Bly
How to Land a New Job… or a New Client
Recommendation: In any selling situation – whether you’re selling a product or yourself – shift the conversation as quickly as you can away from yourself and onto your prospect, his business, and his needs.
Read MoreHow to Sell With Statistics
The great thing about statistics is that you can use them to support almost any sales point you want to make in your promotion.
Read MoreHow to Hire a Freelance Copywriter
Hiring a freelance copywriter is no small responsibility. Make the right choice, and you get great copy that brings in leads, sales, and profits – in bushels. Make the wrong choice, and you end up pouring thousands of dollars down the drain. Fortunately, you can avoid that particular heartache (most of the time, anyway) simply by knowing what to look for in a direct-response copywriter.
Read MoreDirect Marketing Is Like Baseball
Experienced direct marketers know – and expect – a percentage of their test campaigns to under-perform the current control, or even lose money. They accept this fact without despair, because they know that if one test mailing in every two… or every three… or even every five is a winner, they can make a lot of money.
Read MoreDo You Charge So Much Your Customers Complain?
Do we really want our customers complaining about our prices? Should we, in fact, always charge the maximum price we can get away with for everything we sell?
Read MoreWhy Good Prospects Don’t Return Your Phone Call
If you sell a professional, creative, consultative, or technical service, the following “Triple Play” Follow-Up System can help you increase your closing rate of leads to sales by 50 percent or more.
Read MoreThe Only 3 Bits of Copy Worth Agonizing Over
One of the most labor-intensive, time-consuming marketing tasks is copywriting. Not necessarily writing the copy… but agonizing over what has been written.
Read MoreThe Price Is Right
Ask most experienced direct marketers “What’s the best price to charge for my product,” and the answer will be: whatever the market will bear.
Read MoreThe Worst Self-Marketing Strategy Ever Devised
Conclusion: Doing a critique OR work on spec for a potential client who has not asked for it seems, on the surface, a sensible approach to marketing your professional or technical services. But it is not.
Read MoreThe 25-50-25 Formula for Business Success
Some people go “information crazy”… buying every course, attending every conference, reading every e-book, listening to every recording, and dialing into every teleseminar you can find. Sadly, they are suffering from a syndrome I call “analysis paralysis.”
Read MoreSelling Lifestyle
“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.” – John Ilhan At last year’s ETR/AWAI Bootcamp, I was chatting with Michael Masterson before we were to give a presentation together. We were talking about…
Read MoreWhat’s Your “Signature Dish”
“You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.” – Arthur Miller In his reality TV show Kitchen Nightmares , celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey rescues a different failing restaurant each week from the incompetence of its owner and staff. One of his techniques is to help the restaurant create a…
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