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A big secret to success is...

Failing!

And if you're going to fail, you want to fail as fast as possible so you can get on to your next project. If your marketing doesn't pull a decent return when you don't even ask people to send money... it is certainly not going to pull a decent return…

Okay, here's an alternative which can make a lot of you rich. In a nutshell, it is called...

The 30-Day Hold

The way it works is like this: When you get to the ordering instructions, in your marketing sales letter, ad or webpage, you write something like this:

"We are so sure you will love this product, we are not even going to cash your check until at least 30-days after we have shipped your product. That way, you will have plenty of time to examine our product and discover for yourself how wonderful it is. If you are dissatisfied, you can return the product to us…

Joe Karbo is the first person I know of to use this type of 30-day hold on a large scale. He sold 4 million copies of "The Lazy Man's Way To Riches" by marketing it in the fashion I have just described.

I remember years ago being in Phoenix shooting an infomercial starring me and Don Drysdale (the ex-Dodger pitcher) which was being produced by Dan Kennedy. Guthy-Renker was in the same studio when I was there. They were having a problem with an infomercial selling cosmetics starring Victoria Principal. No matter what they tried, all they could do (at…

I have written two major campaigns relatively recently. One of these campaigns makes a tidy but not spectacular profit when the client uses the 30-day hold. Without the 30-day hold, the promotion is not profitable whatsoever.

I have a relationship with another client who is mailing thousands and thousands of sales letters. These letters would be quite profitable WITHOUT the 30-day hold. However, WITH the 30-day hold, the profits are spectacular!

Let me give you some numbers to chew on.

Let's say you spend $1,000 to pay for your advertising. Let's say you are mailing all the letters you can mail for $1,000 or spending $1,000 to run newspaper ads or maybe spending $1,000 to buy Google ad words. Let's say for every $1…

So we have a $2,000 gross... minus $200 in refunds... and minus $1,000 for the costs of advertising. What you have left then is an $800 contribution to overhead. Not bad.

Now let's add the 30-day hold into that same equation. Here's what will typically happen: You will TRIPLE your response rate. And you will…

We now have a $6,000 gross... minus $1,200 in refunds... and minus $1,000 for the costs of advertising. What you have left then is a $3,800 contribution to overhead. Now I'm not positive about this... but... Sir Gary of Halbert believes...

It Is Better To Have $3,800

Than It Is To Have $800

The math doesn't always work like this. Sometimes adding the 30-day hold will more than triple your gross sales... and not increase your refunds. Sometimes adding the 30-day hold will just double your gross sales... and double your refunds.

Let's see what the numbers look like using the worst of the above cases. Okay, so you double your gross, which now means you take in $4,000 and you double your refund rate (from 10% to 20%) which is $800 in refunds and you still have to subtract the $1,000 for the cost of advertising. That means…

Here's another thing that, from my exalted guru status I firmly believe:

$2,800 Is Better Than $800

Now let's take an even worse case scenario. Let's say using the 30-day hold increases your sales by 50% but triples your refund rate. In this case, you will have gross sales of $3,000 minus $900 in…

So, as you can plainly see, using dismal figures like this worst case scenario, you still have $1,100... which... at least to my befuddled brain... is better than $800.

Consider this fact: I have been in direct marketing since just before George Washington was elected the first president of the United States. And in all that time, I have…

Now Why Doesn't Everybody

Use This Powerful Secret?

First of all, most people don't know about it.

Those who do know about it, don't know just HOW POWERFUL this secret is. They have no idea what a HUGE INCREASE using the 30-day hold will make in their bottom-line profits.

There are two more reasons people do not use this technique:

The first is fear. They are irrationally afraid the 30-day hold will cause all (or maybe 70, 80 or 90%) of their customers to return what they are selling and decline to pay for it. To my knowledge, something like this has NEVER happened. I suppose it is…

Let me pause here a moment to tell you a true story.

There's a man named Melvin Powers who owns Wilshire Books in the Los Angeles area. Years ago he wrote a book about how to become a mail order millionaire. The problem was, Melvin, himself, did not know how to become a mail order millionaire. That's because…

Melvin refused to test my ad. Melvin demanded his money back.

As you might guess, I told him to go piss up a rope. I'm not going to deal with anyone who thinks their marketing judgment is better than mine. So much so, they won't even test what I've created for them.

Well, it came to pass I was in Melvin's office while he was sitting at his desk almost apoplectic with a red face and veins so swollen, they looked like they were going to rupture and burst. He opened the top left hand drawer of his desk and reached in and grabbed with both hands a bundle of checks…

To which I calmly replied, "Mel, let me ask you something. Were the ads that produced all those bad checks profitable?"

"Yes, they were," he replied.

"Well then," I thundered at him...

"You Should Wish You Had A Barn Full Of Those Checks!"