What Would You Do If I Gave You $1000?

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Posted In: General Chat 

What Would You Do If I Gave You $1000?

Hello everyone and welcome to this, the last El Passo Blog newsletter of 2007, it’s only 6 days until Christmas so I’m going to be keeping in with the festive mood, and I’m going to give you $1000…..well maybe not but keep reading!

This article was inspired by a post I saw on the Standing Start Profits members forum. The general question posed by the thread was this:

“If someone gave you $1000, how would you spend it?”

By the time I joined the thread there had already been a few replies, most of the replies said they would do the following with the money:

  • Create a brand new, in demand product

  • Pay a professional copyrighter to create a snazzy sales page

  • Pay for top quality graphics

And after that, the $1000 would be pretty much gone. But I’d go out on a limb and say that you would have just wasted $1000 if you had done the above. You can have the best product, sales page and graphics, but that doesn’t matter if nobody gets to see your product!

Instead of spending all that money on sales page and graphics, it would be much more prudent to spend the $1000 on generating traffic to your product. If you get traffic to your websites, then you stand a much better chance of making some money!

That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have a product that converts then the traffic won’t make a difference, so how do you create “the next big thing” with a small budget?

Here’s what I would do:

Forget about looking for the “Next Big Thing”

The “next big thing” could already be out there, it just hasn’t been implemented very well yet! I’ll let you into a secret, my Boomerang List Builder software is by no means revolutionary, there are products out there that do the same thing, and they’ve been around for years. However whilst the functionality was all there, they were a nightmare to use and the marketing was non-existent.

So I created my own version, I made the software as simple as possible to use and then set about marketing it. Total cost for the sales page, software, affiliate script and other bits came to just over $500, total return so far has been, well, a lot more than that.

As I said, the idea wasn’t “the next big thing”, it was something that was already out there but it hadn’t been implemented to it’s full potential yet.

But again, if I couldn’t get any traffic to the site then it wouldn’t matter at all how good the product was. For the BLB I rely purely on affiliates to drive traffic to the site, a lot of people promote it on their auto responder series and make healthy commissions each and every month.

If I was going to use the rest of the $1,000 I would spend it on hiring a ghost-writer to write some articles to promote my site, and then perhaps pay for some PPC traffic from adwords.

There’s also SEO that is well worth considering, my most profitable website (non IM related) gets all the traffic from the search engines, the traffic is 100% organic, not PPC.

So….that should have got you thinking, how would you spend $1000, remember the aim is to turn that $1000 into profit. Would you continue to search for the next big thing or would you spend the money on traffic to promote an existing product?

Let me know what you would do by posting a comment.

Have a great Christmas and New Year, I’ll be talking to you again in 2008!

Kind Regards,
Dan




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Comments

11 Responses to “What Would You Do If I Gave You $1000?”
  1. Hi

    The first thing I would do is obviously to buy your Resale Rights Blueprint for 67$. I would then, immediately, check whether there was an affiliate possibility to give you further clients by getting 30-40% in affiliate commissions. You would then get a blog entry on my Online Income Earning blog found at http://www.tjenfritid.dk/blog. Action instead of procrastination.

    Result = 933$ left, and potential income on the way as people read my excellent blog entries.

    Then I have a couple of e-books I truly would like to get further attention. I would set up three AdWords campaigns with a budget total 450$.

    My wife and three kids deserve a gift for having a husband involved in online income generation at the strangest hours known to man. 183$ for flowers, candy and groceries for a festive dinner with no computing for one full day.
    Remember, everything is already on autopilot, and one day must be possible to sacrifice to show people how much we appreciate them.

    Result = 300$ left, and by day two there shoud have been at least 5-10 sales through the affiliate marketing of your product. Also, the attention given to the existing e-books should also have generated some income.

    So there should be a total result of 600$ (cash + Paypal generated)

    And when that continues along with further business opportunities I should have generated enough to be the one to make the exact same offer next year – up to Christmas 2008.

    Looking forward to it, and wishing you all the best seasonal greetings. 🙂

  2. Randy Smith says:

    Hi Dan,

    I agree in principle with what you said — however..
    For many newbie marketers – even doing what you did whould cost way in excess of the $1000.
    They would not have the resources, the contacts and the favours that you were able to put to use.

    And many would not have any technical experience to even know if they were getting what they paid for…

    The one key thing I am in total agreement with though — is getting things in place to get the traffic and affiliates is the major issue … not whether they have the latest greatest product.

    There are so many great products being created that never see the light of day…and in many ways it’s a damm shame!

    SO – yeah …traffic and affiliates are the best investment of the $1000

    Randy
    Launching today
    http://www.SalesLetterABC.com

  3. kaye jay says:

    If i will have $1000, I will use it to enhance my current product to make it more profitable in the long run.

  4. Carol Smith says:

    WOW!! Being exactly there makes this somewhat ironic. As a newer than new newbie, (I became involved in IM in October because I had a high quality book that I wanted to sell as an ebook.) Now, just to make it clear, this is a parenting book that the written copy has been previewed by professionals with excellent comments. So I thought, this ought to be easy. We’ll sell on line. WRONG!! I am launching in January come He!! or high water.

    The hardest thing in all of this has been figuring out how to “get it out there”. How right Randy, if no one sees it, what good does it do to have a outstanding product.

    If you gave me $1,000 I still would not know how to spend it. So much of what is said every place is simply not for newbies. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone has been great to help. But sometimes you don’t even know enough to ask questions or how to ask. Most of the time veterans leave out minor details or assume you know something because it is so basic.

    An exception to this (not the only one for sure) is the recent post here on what you need to know. As a newbie, I could understand almost every line. Some times I had to read it 3 or 4 times to let it soak in but that is a piece of cake.

    I sure don’t have $1,000 to spend but I could sure use any free advice.

  5. My first port of call, before i spent even one cent of the $1000, would be to contact as many of my successful acquaintances. Why! to ask for some of their advice to find out what should be my main priorities of using the money. After all they have been there and done that.

    Next step would be to collate the information and cross reference their answers. Once that was done, make a list of the areas of what they agree with each other on.

    Then and only then would i take a step forward…

    If i did not have any of the marketing acquaintances, then before spending anything i would do research to find some of the marketers like yourself (dan and randy). Try to strike up some form of friendship and then pick your brains…

    One other option for me personally would be to find someone who already has a very good product and ask if i could buy into their product by offering the $1000 dollars as an advertising revenue…

    If that failed i would say sod it go down the pub and get pissed up…

    Vince

  6. Ros Jones says:

    I would do what I feel everyone should do with a sudden cash windfall! Spend it on making yourself feel special, buy something for someone else special in your life, give some to your favourite charity so someone who might not be feeling so special can have a brighter Christmas.

    Something free, take a break from the computer – new ideas flow from a rested brain! Your email messages won’t go anywhere, let them sit and wait for a day or so!

    Merry Christmas!
    Ros

  7. Wonder when Dan says: “And the winner is…..” 😀

    Seasonal greetings. 🙂

  8. Happy New Year everyone.

    Just saw the “….well maybe not” after the giving 1.000$ “promise”….

    It was a festive occasion while the illusion lasted, and no doubt secured some extra visitors…

  9. Dan (el_passo) says:

    Hi Henrik,
    I never actually said that I was going to be giving away the $1,000, it was a hypothetical question.

    Sorry for the confusion and Happy New Year to everyone! 🙂

  10. Without question or hesitation, I would put money into the sales copy, hiring a professional to create copy that will sell the product. Traffic can always be had or generated, but if your copy is not strong, it’s somewhat wasted time and money generating visitors.Not to mention with good copy, less traffic would be required to make the same amount of sales, creating a higher return.

    Just my three cents..:)

    Ron Killian