Big Box Retail as a Market

What do Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Sears, Bed Bath and Beyond... (you get the idea) have in common?  How about Cracker Barrel, Appleby's and the Olive Garden?  Then, think about all the businesses in between.

There are a lot of things I could say about what all the people working in these places have in common.  They need to work because they need money.  More often than not, they are non-union which means they have no rights and are working close to minimum wage. And, more often than not, they are (at minimum) receptive to evaluating a way to make more money.

We capitalize on this "market" with a simple little flyer like this, printed 14 to an 8.5 x 11 page.

We cut them up, and every time we are out in public they are either left behind, handed directly to people, put in magazines in doctors offices...   We also take them door-to-door in residential neighborhoods, post them in stacks on any bulletin board we can find...

This is an easy, inexpensive way to initially market if you are on a tight budget.  For $60.00 you can get 1000 copies made.  This translates to 14,000 of these little (smaller than a business card) flyers.

Obviously, the email address above is mine.  We teach how to set up a gmail account with the vacation responder permanently set to "on".  This is the only thing this email address does.  We provide the template you can play with, or simply just change the email address...

This is marketing at its most basic.  And here's the good part:  it works.  You have to understand and be realistic about the numbers, but it works.  At a 1% return, you get 140 people.  If you understand the compensation model of our business, please plug in and play with the numbers.

All it takes is a $60 investment (plus shipping) and the energy to get your message in front of people. You can retire and experience a 99% failure rate with this one method.  This is simple, but not easy.  It is work.

Play with the numbers, even at a half percent return and people only participating at the $25 level. Then, look at the next level, then the next.  What can you accomplish?

It all starts and ends with getting information in front of people for them to evaluate.  No matter wht you choose to do little flyer (or one similar to it) should be a part of your mix.

My Why

This is to share a philosophy about life, home business and making money with the internet.  The reason for this is to ensure that “everyone is on the same page” as a starting point in considering joining us in a money-making venture.

But first, let me tell you just a little about me.  I am a sixty year old father of three adult children.  I work for a local college as a mid-level manager.  Through the years, I have worked in a number of jobs that had 401K plans.  To respond to different situations in my life, I have liquidated two 401K’s and used the money to “stay alive” financially.  Bottom line to all this is that I have no retirement and I am 5-10 years (reasonably) to when I would have hoped to retire.  This is my “why”.  I need residual income in the absence a retirement plan.

Everyone you run into will have a different story.  I just thought, as you investigate ways to make money, that you would find it comforting to know I am a real person that wretches at things that don’t make sense. Everyone is our community is genuinely interested in helping ourselves by helping other people.  In short, we are interested in building community of people who share the common goal of greater financial stability, the values of “keeping it real” and marketing things that you don’t need to be embarrassed by.

There are literally thousands of business opportunities that have passed through our inbox(s) through the years.  We have all spent hours watching videos, doing Google research, reading reviews… most of us have joined a few, had little to no success - and then jumped back on to the merry-go-round of sifting through the inbox, doing the research… and more times than not found some reason that whatever it was - “whatever” was not a good fit.

Some of us are on most of the major guru email lists and get inundated by the same “launch” joint venture offers all within a couple of week time frame.  These happen over, and over, and over.  One of the newer ones is selling physical products on Amazon, there have been a million information-based courses to teach you how to do stuff, there are money-making “programs” with digital training as the product.  These programs range anywhere from $5 to $5000, have different compensation models… all have their pros and cons… but the trick is to find ONE to get started with and stick with it as you move toward profitability and developing your skills and knowledge to drive income growth.

That's all I will say on this post. There are plenty of other posts on this blog that elaborate on this central theme. I encourage you to read as much as you can to simply assess if any of this makes sense to you.

The Cathedral

In cathedrals, people preach doctrine to the masses and expect these teachings will inspire conformity. Any  level of "buy-in" is pre-supposed due to the values people bring when they voluntarily walk through the door.  Those preaching then set out to teach and imbue the followers with the creed of the institution.

How does this translate to us as marketers?  We have a temple of our own.  We preach hope through practicality.  On the far end is a goal.  This is where most marketing (today) starts.  Most marketing talks about the "result", not the process it takes to get there.  This is tantamount to assuming you will go to Heaven while not having a firm handle on your belief in God.

On this end (the here and now reality - and how we approach things) is a conscious decision to believe or reject the information presented.  In our "church" we want you to actively explore the tenets and come to your own conclusions about "truth".  By doing so, we understand the risk of not hyping, of not over-promising and to simply convey information in clear, candid, objective terms.

On this level, we need to apologize.  If you need to be moved by exhilaration to take action, we are probably not the best fit for you.  Do we want you to be excited?  To us, excited may be a bit of overstatement.  We would settle for confident and absolute resolve about the choices you are making - with your eyes wide open.

Here's why:  the last thing we want you to feel is being "sold".  Our goal, in our cathedral, is that we want you to feel educated and inspired by our refreshingly honest approach to making money.  We want to earn credibility and respect.  In this metaphor, we are independent of the "institutions" and reject most of "how" the gurus advocate marketing and growing a home business.

And to invoke Robert Frost, when coming to these two roads that diverge in a yellow wood, the one you choose will make all the difference.