One of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to putting their items up for bid on Internet auction sites - especially large ones like eBay - is that they end up putting what they want to sell in the wrong category.

This is a very common occurrence on sites like eBay. How does this happen? Most people who put things up to be sold have one thought - it has to sell. They don’t spend any time trying to figure out what the best place to put the item up for bid is.

The category you place your product in is ESSENTIAL to your success. If you place your product in a category that is not correct or specific enough you will not make the most money that you can with your auction!

Why? Because, if you put it in the wrong category, the people who will be looking at it will not be the people most interested in buying it. They’ll be wanting the things that BELONG in that category . . . and you’re auction bidding will end up ending at a price much lower than you could have potentially gotten had you placed it in the right category!

Study the auction sites you plan to use. Check out the categories. See how specific you can get . . . and make sure to get your product in the right category when you get ready for auction!

Since there are so many people who’ve gotten their products in the wrong categories, there’s actually a way you can use it to your advantage . . .

Want a great way to find cheap product to sell over the Internet auctions? Here’s something you could try. Search through the categories on the auction site. Find products that are obviously in the wrong category. When their auction time comes around, bid on them!

As we stated earlier, since that product is presented in the wrong category, it won’t bring in nearly what it would have if it had been in the right category. But what if you were to win the auction, turn around, and offer it in the category that it really should be in?

That’s right . . . you could potentially make a huge profit! This is how to cash-in on a simple mistake that many auctions make!

Remember, people who are interested in something stand a higher chance of buying it that people who aren’t interested. And the more interested they are, the more they’re willing to pay for it! Use this to your advantage - both ways!

Here’s another thing about competition: the people, when people buy one thing, chances are they’ll buy from you if they’ll buy from your competitor. From what we’ve seen, there is plenty of business to go around. There’s plenty of business for everyone.

If somebody buys from you once, they’ll buy from you again and again, and they’ll buy from your competitors, and they’re insatiable. For years, we have rented our mailing list out to other companies who sell the same types of products and services that we sell, and we get additional revenue every month from renting our mailing list out.

In this article I want to direct your attention to another great source of information that is yours for the picking, almost always absolutely free, and can be used anyway that you want.

It’s the Consumer Information Center out of Pueblo, Colorado.

You’ve seen all the ads, the little consumer information booklets, pamphlets, and what have you that you can order for fifty cents or a buck. They’ve got millions. They are basically the publishing outlet or sales outlet arm for the federal government’s publication service.

They have a website at http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov where you’ll find categories such as: cars, children, education, employment, housing, health, food, money, small business, travel, and more. There’s a button link there that actually says “and more”. Click on these button links and you’ll find that there are dozens of their pamphlets you can order on-line.

You don’t have to order a thing. What’s really wonderful about web technology is they are now making these pamphlets and the information in them available to you to read right on-line by clicking on the pamphlets. Many of them come in Adobe Acrobat format, which means they’re already typeset and looking really good.

Now here’s the secret. When it produces one of these booklets, the federal government CANNOT COPYRIGHT THAT MATERIAL. It is owned by every citizen of the United States. It was produced with taxpayer dollars.

Now I want to caution you: there are some pamphlets and information, such as some from this Consumer Information Center makes available, that are produced and copyrighted by various companies for the federal government. They may place a restriction such as it being free to use only for educational purposes. Most, however, are yours free of charge.

There’s one drawback to this information - most of it is deadly, dry, and boring. It’s filled with the facts, figures, and information you need from federal government agencies. You can then wrap this information into your own products very easily, and flesh out and use snippets of them.

In fact, what I found really fascinating is some of these pages and online pamphlets are actually designed as very pretty websites that stand on their own. You can literally put together links on your website that jump to these pages and offer the information on your website, as if it was from your website but jump people over to that page and then come back to your site. You would not even have to take the information, just push people over to it.

Now the secret to making this stuff...

The reason I said it’s dry is because of what it’s missing. The one element that I wanted to bring up that is the one thing people most want to know about is other people. They want information, but I think one of the key secrets is that the real power of having other people create your product for you is that it’s people telling you this.

It’s different people, you’ve got more then one person involved in that product, people telling stories, war stories, and what have you, about how they’ve survived this or that or come up with this or that new technique or new idea.

It’s the information being imparted through people. I wanted to mention that because it really does have a lot of power. People are the power. Look at People Magazine. I thought, what an idiot idea. That shows you where I went with that. And they’re one of the most popular magazines in America today. The bottom line is everybody wants to know all about people.

One of the techniques many marketers use to avoid refunds is to let prospects and/or customers have a sample of their product to try out. ZERO REFUNDS!! This is how to get virtually no refunds on everything you sell!

By supplying that prospect or customer with a sample, they can get a taste of what you really have to offer, and whether or not it’s what they themselves really want to purchase. This way, you better qualify your prospects and customers, and can zero in on the ones that are going to make you the most money with that product.

Unfortunately, there are negative angles to some sample techniques. Producing a sample product can cost you money. If you’re offering an informational product over a website or such, you could simple create an e-mail sample product, which wouldn’t cost you anything.

If you are not in a position to do so, it can indeed be expensive to have hundreds of people asking for free samples. Plus, most people will quickly sign up for something that’s being given away for free, no matter whether it’s really interesting to them or not. They don’t care what it is, they just know they’re getting something for free.

This can be a very bad thing. Many people could end up getting your free sample, but only a few might end up actually buying the product.

One way you could curb the people who’ll get anything for free and qualify good prospects at the same time is to charge a small price for the sample of your product. This way, really interested people will only have to pay a couple of dollars to try out what you have to offer, while those who’re just looking for something free won’t want to pay for it, and they’ll leave you alone.

A sample should contain a very limited amount of usefulness - it should present the customer with enough information to try it out to a limited degree and see whether or not it will work for them. That’s the whole point - to try it out and see if it will work for them or not!

Then, once they’ve found that the sample was good, they’re going to want to buy the full product - and you’ll have justified sales coming in!

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the customer is just a name on the list. People call us about lists as if they’re something from another planet. All they are is a group of buyers. A group of friends actually.

You need to think of these people as your group. They’re your pals. Gather them all up, take good care of them, talk to them, and communicate with them. It’s a group and you might as well tell them it’s a group and make it a membership.

We are speaking from experience when we talk about associations. Years ago a friend of ours was giving a talk on publicity. He would be paid $1,500.00 to come and speak for the day in various businesses. Ted Thomas, for example, had him speak to his different groups over, and over, and over. At least once a month he would drop in there and speak for one day to his people. These were Harvard Business School graduates, so he was really flattered.

But then one day we told him, “You know, you wrote a letter for us that made us several million dollars. Russ has written us a letter that has made us millions and more. But look, Russ puts his information into a package and sells thousands of them. And you’re standing up and talking, which is fine. Why don’t you put it in a book and write a letter like you wrote for us?”

He did that and he started mailing that out and it started selling that book. It was doing well, and then he came up with a catchy name. Like what Russ talked about, the other people have this club, and that club, and he called it The Financial Freedom Association of America.

That made his sales just go through the roof! The idea of belonging to a financial freedom association was very appealing. We think some people sent the $29.95 just to join up. They didn’t really care what the book said. It was like an extra gift to them. They just wanted to belong, to be a part of this group. This is how The Association Concept Can Help You Make Millions Of Dollars On The Internet!

He sold 100,000 memberships at $29.95 and had $3,000,000,000.00 in gross sales. We think a big part of it was the association - the club.

Look at SAMS Club. Everywhere you go there’s a SAMS Club. You have to pay to be a member, but look at the benefits of membership. You get discounts!

They are wide open and anyone can go there, and you can’t really talk in confidence there because the whole world might see what you’re talking about. This one is a private consultation. It is like you can talk to us anytime you want, even if it’s late at night and you have a question. You can type it into your email, or rather post it, and then we’ll see it later and we’ll answer it. It’s an amazing concept. And we’re making a fortune with the private discussion group.

Now there’s discussion group software out there you can get for free, and there’s also password protection software you can get. When someone pays you, you assign them a password.

A lot of sites are going to this model now. Stock tips, for example, are being given out on one site. You have to pay to be a member, but every day you go there and they talk about what stocks they think are going up and down and what not. It’s a big, big concept.

Think about a private discussion group. Because of the association concept, you’re part of this association that other people are not part of. It can help you make millions of dollars on the Internet.

Using small ads and small postcards to drive people to your web site is how to use the Internet to leverage your way to massive on-line profits! It gives you leverage that you never had before, because you don’t have to spend all of that money on printing and postage. Now your small postcard does the work that before took a lot of money to do.

We’re talking about working out an arrangement with a couple hundred other web sites out there. Now you’re talking about multiplying yourself and getting yourself tremendous leverage. Who says that little people, average people don’t have more chances now then ever before?

We feel that the Internet age, and the direct marketing age, which have become very prominent in the last twenty or thirty years, gives people like us - and people like YOU - a chance to compete with the big boys. The big boys are the slower, big corporations. They have to get together with a board of directors to decide to do anything.

We’ve heard Bill Gates on public television saying that he lives in mortal fear that there is someone out there working in their bedroom or garage that’s going to come up with a better program than Windows. The commentator said “Do you really worry about that?” He said “Hey, that’s how I got started. I’m sure there is someone just as clever, or bright, or more so, than me.”

We don’t even have to be so clever and bright. What we have to do is learn how to market. If we market non stop and if we use this free publicity tactic, there is no stopping us. The Internet is a vehicle that works perfectly because nobody cares if you’re a giant, billion dollar corporation or if you’re working out of a spare bedroom. If you have information, product, or services they want, they’ll buy it from you just as quickly as they’ll buy it from Sun Microsystem, IBM, or anybody else.

If you’re selling one $20 product on your one web site, you’re going to make $20. If you’re selling one a week you’re going to make $20 a week. If you go out there and work out an arrangement with a hundred web site owners, that same $20 now becomes $2000 a week, which is a $100,000 a year. Go out there and initially, over a period of time, work out an arrangement with a thousand web site owners, which is definitely not impossible. It will take consistent work on a weekly or daily basis.

That’s $20,000 a week now, that’s a million dollars a year. You’re just selling that one $20 product still, but you’re leveraging yourself out. See how powerful that is?

Now the average person can have more power than ever before!

And, when you’re leveraging and working these joint ventures, and you get that product out on a thousand web sites, that just increases the odds of millions of people pouring over web pages all day long finding your product and hitting it six or seven times, sometimes. They say, “Gosh, I’ve heard about this. I keep hearing about this. I’ve got to buy it!”

If you just work at this on a consistent, daily basis, within a matter of almost no time at all, you could actually have joint ventures with a thousand different web sites. One $20 product a week is a million dollars a year.

Basically, it’s all with NO COST advertising. You reach these web site owners and develop the joint venture with them. It just took your time . . .and it took no money!

A simple trick you can use to learn how to become a master copywriter is to write your copy as if you were writing to a friend. The more you know about your market, the more likely you are to sell them something. So, try to think of the one friend you have that would be the most interested in your product. Then write your copy to them.

Don’t actually use their name, but put a lot of “you’s” in the copy. Make it personal, as if you were writing a letter telling them about this product they will love. Tell them all about it and how it is something they want and need, and then tell them where they can get it!

You will be surprised how easy it is to write super sales letters when you take this approach! Mail order is a personal sales medium. Your ad may be run in a publication with over a million readers, but only one person at a time is reading your ad. They need to feel like your ad was written directly to them! The more the person reading your ad feels like you are writing to them, the more responsive they tend to be!

So, put some personalization in your letter. Without using specific names, use lots of “you’s” and tell them why they will benefit personally from your product! When you write to them as a person, they will begin to trust you. Once they trust you, they are more likely to become a sale!

Now, finding a sponsor ...

Another thing to do is find a single sponsor for a book. This can be a related book - say you do an e-book on maintaining your garden and doing landscaping professionally, tips and tricks that you can’t beat. Now you’ve got an entire world of companies that are related to this topic.

Scotts Turf Builder, the people that make Toro mowers, and it may not be anybody that big. Maybe it’s going to be an online company that sells catalogs that has an online catalog of garden seeds and a gardening informational book or material that you need. Again, these are great possible sponsors for a book like this.

In this case, you just determine how much you want to make from the book and they put up the money that you are paid, and you distribute the book free again. Actually offer it to them free, particularly if they’re an online business. Give away the book and always include an ad for your web site where you have other informational products that are available free of charge, and where you tell people the details on how they can also sign up to distribute the book free.

You have to pick the magazine that caters to the same specific market that your product or service is designed to serve.

If you have a general purpose product like the book we discussed earlier, How to Stretch Your Paycheck, you have a product that can work in many different publications. Some products can work in a lot of markets.

Products should be matched up with the publications that cater the most to the market the product was produced for. For an entrepreneur magazine you would want to send a product dealing with how a person can get started in business. For Forbes magazine you would send something that dealt with investing.

You should match up your product or service with the market that the magazine reaches. The better you can marry those two, the more potential for the product or service to make more money! This is how to “target” your news release to make up to 100 times more money!

In this article I’m going to give you a great idea for a hot product that someone could literally create within a twenty-four hour period.

It’s a directory. Directories have been very popular. In fact, directories are so popular that there’s a directory of directories out there now! If you get to a large library in your area, I strongly recommend that you go look at the directories, because you will discover that directories are hot sellers.

There are a lot of directories out there being sold on a variety of different topics. For example, there are directories of bed and breakfasts all across the U.S., arts and crafts shows, vacation spots that welcome pets, or discounts for seniors. All these are just a compilation of sources that offer a particular thing to a particular group of people.

The best thing about this type of a product is that you don’t have to do any creative writing. Basically you’re compiling a variety of different sources that a niche market would be interested in.

This can be very simple to do. I think that, with the Internet, when you tie these two together it’s a powerful tool. When you talk to people about the Internet, of course, there’s a lot of entertainment that will come up. But a lot of people use it for research.

If you want to create a product very quickly, then the Internet is a tremendous tool you can use for creating a directory within twenty-four hours - in fact, maybe even less -because you can get on there very quickly, and you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re creating a directory on freebies - specifically we’ll use free things for children as our example. You can get on the Internet on any of the search engines, and now you’re looking for companies and large corporations that offer freebies for children.

Within a couple of hours, you can have a big list of companies that offer freebies to children. You can compile that list into a print product and immediately have a product to sell!

Because the Internet is always growing, you’re always going to have new sources of information for your directories. I think that’s another strong point about directories in general - with the constant updating, people have a reason to buy the new version year after year.

The great thing about a directory is the fact that, not only can you sell it long term, but the information in the directory, over time, will get outdated. The directory that someone buys today, maybe in two or three years, is going to be completely outdated. They’re going to want to come back to you again and again to purchase updated directories.

You might have a customer who purchases an initial directory from you. Maybe next year when you have your newest edition, and the year after that when you have another new edition, they will constantly come back to purchase that new edition.

There are a variety of companies that offer directories. They offer drop ship directories and import directories that continuously update their directories. They have most of their customers coming back year after year to purchase the new updated versions. In fact, it’s become easy to create profit centers for their business.

There’s really no creative writing involved. You might write an introduction, but your real time and effort will be put into the research. Fortunately, with the Internet as your tool, you can get your research down to a very small amount of time instead of spending weeks or months in your local library. The Internet has made research very quick, very fast, and very easy.

In many of the promotions we send out now, we give people three ways to respond. They can call our office 24 hours a day, and even if we’re not there, we will return their call. They can fax their order, or they can mail it in.

It is important for you to make it as easy as you can for people to order what you have to offer. People are busy and tend to procrastinate. Your offer is an intrusion in their life, and you have to make it as easy as you possibly can for them to respond. Otherwise, you will not meet your full profit potential.

Once they turn their attention away from your materials and start to focus on something else, the chances are high that they will put off accepting your offer.

There is a small window of time for your promotions to work. Use it to its full advantage! Making it as easy as you can for them to accept what you have is one way to make the most money from every ad you run!

We’ve been using “ghostwriters” to help us create our informational products since 1989. It’s easier than you may think. Here’s a simple strategy we’ve used to make huge amounts of money:

1) Come up with an idea for a book, manual, or report you think will sell very well to a specific group of people.

2) Now, think of all the benefits that such a book should have. Think of all the great things that could be included in this book. Try to come up with at least 50 main benefits.

3) Then write an advertisement to sell this imaginary book. Make this ad very compelling by telling the reader all the great things they can get by buying your book.

4) Now it’s time to hire a ghostwriter. Just run an ad like this one in your daily paper:

5) Writer wanted for small publishing company. Up to $10.00 an hour. No experience necessary. Work from home, choose your own hours. Call (____) ___-_____ for more information.

6) You’ll get a flood of calls from the ad above. Believe me, there are many people who want to get paid to write. Just take the calls and pick the best person. Pay them $10.00 for every 8-1/2 x 11 single space page they write for you.

7) Give them the advertisement and the list of 50 main benefits you’ve already written to sell the book. Tell them to write a book that clearly delivers all these promises. They can write 2 pages on each one of your 50 main benefits. Give them several similar books they can use for reference material. Tell them they can use the main ideas in these books - but must never copy anything word for word.

8) They will write around 100 pages. At $10 a page, your cost will be $1,000 for a product that could sell for many years. This can be typeset into a smaller 6” x 9” book that will give you about twice as many pages.

9) Your book can sell for up to $29.95. Your cost to print it will be as low as $2.00 for fairly small quantities. This leaves you with a huge gross profit!

10) Assuming you have the right title and the right sales material, you can sell this book for many years at a significant profit. We sold over a million copies of just one of our ghostwritten books.

These simple steps have helped us make millions of dollars. They can help you get rich, too.

Ghostwriters can be found everywhere. Many good writers don’t know how to make money with their skill. You are different. You are figuring out a way to make money with the book before it’s even written. This may seem like a strange concept, but believe me, it contains the true secret of getting rich in Direct-Response Marketing. Writing the sales material first is a powerful strategy because all your focus is on selling the book. You’ll end up with a book that sells much better when you use this method.

We’re going to discuss how to make a ton of money paying your affiliates 100% commissions while getting people to pay to get on your mailing list. It sounds almost too good to be true, but it really isn’t!

We must be honest with you. In the beginning we didn’t care for affiliate programs. They just seemed too much like multi-level marketing to us. But we’ve changed our mind. We decided that there are great advantages to affiliate programs. You get more visibility for your product and, in effect, free advertising.

A good way to look at affiliate programs is shelf space, like in a supermarket. The more shelf space you get, the more likely you are to make a sale. And the same thing is true on the Internet.

The more your product is seen on the Internet, the more likely you are to make a sale. And if you can do all that and be seen for free ...

We just can’t think of anything better than to have hundreds or maybe even thousands of buttons, and banners and links all over the Internet that you haven’t had to pay a dime for. And you pay only for results!

That is the best kind of advertising there is, when you only have to pay when someone makes a sale. But most people sign up affiliates to sell their products just to make money. They want the profits from the sale of those products. And if you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, we think you’ll learn that the real value of the Internet is not making that first sale.

In terms of the profits from it, it’s in building a relationship and getting a customer, and getting that email name so you can market to it later. That’s the real gold on the Internet. It is a mailing list that you can mine again, and again, and again.

So, we look at an affiliate program a little differently. We’re willing to give away the store, so to speak, on the first sale. We’ll be crazy like a fox - give away the profit on that first sale if I can get someone on my list that I can sell to again, and again, and again.

That makes an affiliate happy because they can make a lot of money, and it makes us happy because I get a lot of names.

Here’s how you do it. First of all, if you’re selling an informational product, create another product that’s a slimmed down version of it, something that will appeal to the same market that you are trying to reach with your product. It might be a couple of chapters from your main product, or a little bonus information under a different title.

For us, our back end product is “How to Create and Market Informational Products” and we have a manual on how to create a product in two to four hours that customers want to buy. We then would create a product that would appeal to people who would be interested in buying our real back end profit making product.

We might create a manual that says “How To Sell Information On The Internet For People Who Can’t, Won’t, Or Absolutely Refuse To Write.”

Now, that’s an interesting title for someone who might be a prospect for selling information and buying my back end product. So we create that product. We extract that from our other back end products. We create that and put a price tag of say, $10 or $12 on it, and we make that available to our affiliates to sell and keep all of the profits from.

Now, how can we afford to do that? We create a little file, and we load it up on our web site at a location, and we just sell download.

So when an affiliate sends a customer to us, they fill out the credit card infor