Secret Money Making Strategy - Expose Yourself!

By Michael J. McGroarty
Posted Tuesday, October 12, 2004

It's been many years since I learned this tip, so I may not recall every detail as Joe Cossman described it in his book, "How I made One Million Dollars in Mail Order", but I can assure you this tip is extremely valuable, and has worked for me many times over the years.

Joe tells the story of renting a booth a the county fair, where he was going to sell some little trinket that he was certain would sell like crazy. As he was setting up his display the vendor next to him was also setting up. It seems that the only thing this guy was going to offer for sale was a little rubber shrunken head. As he watched the guy unpack these things Joe was thinking to himself, "I feel bad for this guy already, there is no way in the world that those things would ever sell. They are just too darn ugly!".

Well, as you can guess, Joe had a difficult time selling any of his products at all because the crowd of people trying to buy those ugly shrunken heads was blocking his booth. For the duration of the fair Joe watched that guy sell hundreds and hundreds of those shrunken heads, while he barely sold enough of his own product to pay the rent on the booth.

Being the entrepreneur that he was, Joe worked a deal with the guy to find his source for the shrunken heads, and went on to make a ton of money selling shrunken heads via mail order. It has been so long since I read Joe's book I don't even remember if the shrunken heads were his first successful mail order product or not, but I can tell you that Joe went on to sell millions and millions of dollars worth of products through the mail.

He recounted this story in his book because he said that if he had not taken the chance of renting a booth at the fair, he would have never been exposed to the success of the guy with the shrunken heads.

You've got to expose yourself. Opportunities are not going to find you sitting on the couch. I can assure you that exposing yourself works. As a matter of fact, just two weeks ago I was sitting in my recliner reading the paper on a Sunday morning when the phone rang.

Mr. McGroarty? This is Matt XXXX. I work for your friend Dick XXXX and he suggested I give you a call. I've got a few thousand Junipers that I'm about to dump, but before I do Dick thought you might be interested in buying them at a really good price. If you're interested come down to Dick's nursery and take a look at the plants.

I went down, wrote Matt a check for $400.00, and spent the next few days hauling these plants back to my nursery. With in a week I had sold over 200 of those plants at $4.00 each. In less than 7 days I turned a $400.00 investment into $800.00 and I've still got at least 200 plants left in one gallon containers, plus several thousand of his rooted cuttings ready to be potted and will be saleable next year. Before it's over I will make several thousand dollars from a phone call I never expected to receive.

Why did that happen, and who says it could happen to you? After all, you're not in the plant business.

It happened because over the years I have done a series of things that have exposed me as a player in the nursery business. When Matt decided that he wanted to change directions in his growing business he was looking for a way to recoup at least some of the money that he had invested in the soil and containers these plants were growing in. Searching his brain for a potential buyer, Dick quickly thought of me.

Matt and I had never met before, but in just a short conversation standing out in the nursery we got to know each other, and realized that we share the same passion. By making that phone call, not only did Matt get $400.00 for something that he was going to dump, but he exposed himself to me. More than likely Matt and I will cross paths again, and the next time it will probably be very much to his advantage. The next time I am talking to somebody in this industry and I hear of somebody that is in the market to buy good quality grafted plants, you can be sure I'll tell them to give Matt a call.

Considering that just one wholesale customer could buy several thousand dollars worth of Matt's specialty plants each year, and that customer could continue to do business with him for many years to come, just one referral could mean tens of thousands of dollars in sales for Matt. And it will have all started with one unexpected phone call.

Expose yourself, and opportunities will find you.

One of the best ways to expose yourself is to write articles and offer them to Webmasters and E-zine publishers through the article announcement services you will learn about later in this manual. Submitting articles to print publications is also an excellent way to get exposure.

About the Author
Michael J. McGroarty is the author of the Free Report Series "37 Secret Money Making Strategies". Stop by (http://www.homemadebooklets.com) and sign up for the entire series. This is a Free offer.