In this article I’m going to give you some great tips on how to run a garage sale. In addition to these garage sale tips, I’m going to give you some general marketing advice. Let’s get started…

1. Be sure to give every single item a price. Don’t make people guess. Add some certainty. Make sure your labels are easy to read; small writing isn’t allowed.

2. Use tables. Lot’s and lot’s of tables. This keeps your stuff off the floor. This makes at-a-glance shopping much easier. People don’t like to lean or bend down, especially older shoppers. Plus, stuff on the floor gets kicked and broken.

3. Lay books and magazines flat. (Another reason for using tables.) People like to see covers not just the spines of books. This same lesson applies to CDs and DVDs. You use up real estate but your sales will be 2-3 times as high.

4. Cluster similar things together. Reel people into a book or CD section for example. Make it easy to browse your stuff.

5. My biggest tip is that you should sell food and drinks. This can be very simple. Buy a case of bottled water and 2-3 dozen donuts. You’ll sell a ton. Get creative about the food you sell; this works like magic.

6. Be sure to say “Hello!” to every single person. Make eye contact and smile. This will drive up your sales. Human contact pulls people in and makes them more likely to purchase.

OK, now I’m going to give you three internet marketing lessons. You can learn a lot about online marketing when you look at how to run a garage sale.

1. You have to know WHY you are having a garage sale. Are you selling to make money or are you really selling to reduce your inventory. This is important with online selling too — what is your real goal? Are you trying to build up a customer list or make a ton of money right now? Low priced items will help you build a list fast than high priced items, for example.

2. You need to know your audience. People at garage sales are looking for great deals. They are also open to haggling for lower prices or volume discounts. Online you can do the same thing. “If you buy this product, I’ll give you this one for nothing.” Think about bonuses that compliment your main product. Be smart about grouping items together for maximum value.

3. Make it easy to buy. I gave a couple of examples above about grouping items together, making it easy to find prices, and laying items flat for easy viewing. The same concepts holds online. Use images smartly. Use headers and subheaders to group content together. Use boldface to highlight key ideas and concepts.

Good luck with your garage sale and internet marketing adventures!

~ John S. Rhodes of “The Rhodes Brothers”

p.s. Be sure to review our marketing services. We can help you make more money online starting today. We make thousands of dollars per month — can can you.

p.p.s. If you want to make a lot more money in the “real world” then do not miss the Offline Cash Formula. Some of our clients are making $5K or more per month, without much work.

This is an Offline Cash Formula testimonial. It’s really something amazing.

I purchased your series of videos Offline Cash Formula which has become my bible and proceeded to follow your instructions.In the last couple of weeks I have signed up four small local businesses, I have outsourced the web design, the article writing, the blog writing, I have set up the domains, hosting and autoresponders and worked with them on free reports or a series of articles to get their customers to opt-in. We still have a long way to go and at this time I am not expensive, no one has argued at all about the $1500.00 price tag especially when I tell them I am just setting up my business so they are getting the start up price.

I have a maintenance program starting at $100.00 a month and if they do not see results within 6 months (providing they also do some work) then I will give them another 6 months maintenance for free Without exception they all thought this was a good deal.

So, the Offline Cash Formula has made Lizzie $6,000 this month plus she’s going to pull down $400 per month very limited amounts of work. This is the power of taking your online skills and using them with local businesses. If you know how to grab that business, you can make a killing.

Here’s the truth: There’s not much in the world better than helping other people make a lot of money online.

~ John

p.s. The Offline Cash Formula is a series of 6 videos, 2 hours in length. We also give you a 96 page transcript including very useful screenshots. There are several bonuses on top of that. Imagine what you would do with $6K per month. It’s something that you can do today.

(Maybe you just want to jump right into The Offline Cash Formula?)

At this point in my life I can safely say that I’ve made more money doing business offline in the “real world” than doing business online. I’ve made most of my money by working for other people but here’s a real secret…

My highest profit has come from consulting while working offline.

I’ve made a ton of money by running my own businesses and selling my brainpower directly to my customers. When I’ve worked directly for companies I don’t make as much as I do when I directly consult. Yes, I make a lot of money, but nothing like my consulting. It’s really that simple. I know that the vast majority of internet marketers would say exactly the same thing.

Before I go on, let me make my points above extremely clear. First, most of the money I’ve made has been made offline. There’s a lot of money offline. Second, my highest profit margins offline have come from selling consulting services to my customers. That is, working for myself. The return on investment — hour for hour — is incredible.

What does this have to do with internet marketing?

EVERYTHING!

Here’s the scoop. Most offline, real world businesses are clueless about internet marketing. This isn’t an attack. It’s an observation on business. These business are also used to paying big money for advertising, marketing services, internet work, and more.

But, there’s more. You see, these companies could easily dominate local markets simply by getting online the right way. Everything you know as an internet marketer is of very high value to local businesses. Better still, you can easily charge a lot of money to small and medium businesses because the value you can provide is so insane.

Think about all of this. Soak it all up. What I’m saying is that your online marketing skills are extremely value to small, local businesses. Therefore, you can pull down serious cash offline by selling and exploiting online marketing services.

I hope that you’re excited about this. I’m telling you point blank that you can make a killing by using the skills you already have. And, how about this. Even if YOU don’t have the skills, you know the topics and domains. You also know how to outsource the work and deliver real value. Again, this allows you to pull down thousands of dollars per month.

If you think I’m kidding, I just got an email from one our our students. She was able to easily “sell” (zero effort) some marketing services to 4 offline companies. She also sold them service, content and maintenance contracts. In total, she painlessly sold $6,000 worth of services. So also now makes $400 per month doing minor updates. I’ve estimated that she’s outsourcing about 90% of the work. Talk about making a killing, right?

Up until this point I wanted to get you excited about making cash offline. You can trust me when I say that it is possible to exploit your online marketing skills to generate a lot of business in the real world. It can be done. It is being done by a lot of internet marketers right now.

If you are interested in learning more about making money online by helping small local businesses then you’ll want to check out a 2 hour video we put together called The Offline Cash Formula. It also comes with a 96 page transcript so you can print it out and read everything as many times as you want.

I’m not going to hype The Offline Cash Formula. There’s no point. It’s for people who are serious about exploiting their skills and brainpower in the real world. It’s pretty obvious that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Read more…

~ John

Recommended Reading

* $10,000 In One Weekend. (Yes, Really.)
* How to Make Money Offline
* Online and Offline Marketing (Part 1)

In a previous blog posting I talked about online and offline marketing. In this blog posting I’m going to talk about how to make money offline by exploiting your online marketing skills. In effect, you’re going to learn about selling your services to businesses offline. It’s easy as pie!

Most internet marketers don’t realize how valuable their online skills are to people doing business offline. To put it another way, most online marketers are only familiar with very low prices. For example, it’s pretty easy to find 500-800 word articles for $5-15. And to be perfectly clear, I’m talking about high quality, original articles. This is not about buying PLR articles or otherwise using PLR.

If you’re an internet marketer and you want to know how to make money offline, the answer is very simple. You really just need to interact with business owners in the “real world” and let them know what you do. You would explain that you drive traffic, write articles, market with videos, build lists, and so forth.

Of course your sales pitch wouldn’t be about the marketing methods. It would be about the results that you offer to offline businesses. You wouldn’t talk about driving traffic to a web site you’d talk about getting people to a web site so that they could get directions, find a business, and buy goods offline. In simple terms, you would explain the benefits not the techniques and methods.

Here’s a real example that we have outlined in the Offline Cash Formula. You would first tell an offline business owner that you could build up a list of people for them. The list might be a simple announcement list which the offline business could use to electronically (email) distribute to coupons.

So, how would you make money from this? Let’s take a look…

You would use an autoresponder service to set this up. You’d create the form, you’d manage the email distribution, you’d provide “free” content and so on. This will all be part of a customer list building service you’d offer to an offline business owner. You could charge by the number of people on the list. Or, you could charge a flat fee. There are other pricing models you could use too. What matters is that you see how you can use your online marketing skills to generate money offline.

In the Offline Cash Formula I spend a lot of time talking about pricing because it’s so important. I know that it can be tricky so let me give you some guidance now. As a rule of thumb, I recommend that you charge 5-10 times the amount to offline businesses that you charge online.

Given this price difference, imagine doing some outsource flipping. You can buy an article online via outsourcing for $10 but then you should be able to resell that original content to a “real world” business for at leat $50. Anything less than $25 is a seriously bad business decision. This disparity allows you to pay $10 to make at least $25. That’s $15 in profit for virtually zero work. This is exactly how you can make money offline again and again.

All the best,

~ John S. Rhodes of “The Rhodes Brothers”

p.s. You could very easily buy and sell PLR to offline businesses. For example, you could join a high quality PLR membership (e.g., Simple PLR Club or PLR Newsletters) and then you could use or sell that content to offline businesses who crave content for their newsletters. This is very much like Quadrant 4 that I described yesterday.

In this blog entry I’ll explain the four dimensions of online and offline marketing. Simply put, here are the options you have:

1. You can use online tools to sell online
2. You can use online tools to sell offline
3. You can use offline tools to sell offline
4. You can use off-line tools to sell online

There’s essentially a matrix here, where one dimension is how you sell and the other dimension is where you sell. To make this easy to understand here are the four quadrants spelled out with some examples.

Quadrant 1: Internet marketers and online marketers typically think of using online tools to sell online. For example, an internet marketer might use YouTube to drive traffic to an information product sales page. So, in this case, you’re selling online and your buyers are online.

Quadrant 2: The second quadrant of online and offline marketing is to use online tools to sell goods offline. For example, an online marketer might use a blog to drive traffic to an information page which includes contact information and directions to a store offline. This is using the web to drive business in “meatspace” or the real world.

Quadrant 3: The third quadrant of online and offline marketing is what many people would call traditional marketing. Simply put, that would be using offline sales methods to drive offline sales. A simple example would be to place an ad in a newspaper (e.g., coupon) to get people to buy something in a store in the real world. “Get $2.00 off of brand XYZ dog food!”

Quadrant 4: The final dimension is the one few people talk about. It’s quite possible to use offline marketing to drive sales online. Many internet marketers haven’t yet figured this out. Here’s an example to make a concrete. You could use a local newspaper, many of which are free or low-cost, to drive people to buy something online such as an information product or how-to manual. This is quite lucrative if you have the skills.

Important: If you’re interested in learning more about using your internet marketing skills to make money in the “real world” then I strongly encourage you to learn more about the Offline Cash Formula. See how you can make 5-10 times the amount of money offline that you’re making onle for the same effort. (Actually, to be honest, it usually requires less effort. Find out why.)