My notes on “How To Make Millions With Your Ideas” by Dan S. Kennedy
- To win with premium prices, clobber competitors with service
- Call every customer after the job is completed to verify satisfaction
- Offer strong guarantees
- Get crazy publicity & word of mouth with free product to local companies (works if you own a cafe anyway)
- Stake out a market leader position from the start – define a new niche
- Break even on the first sale / product to get a mailing list together. Sell to that group long term
- Repackage the same core product / service in heaps of different ways, different formats, different prices, to different target markets
Creativity Checklist for Inventing or Reinventing Products, Businesses, and Marketing Messages:
- Opposites
- Very small / very big
- Eg Whitecastle burgers are so small they come in 6 or dozen
- Eg cola / uncola
- Magnify / Minimise – huge / tiny
- Eg TV
- Adaption
- Apply what works to different business
- Eg drive thru / vending machine
- Exaggeration
- Eg Facecream: “your friends will acuse you of plastic surgery”
- Eg 2 “this basketball star is comfortable in this mini”
- Addition / Subtraction
- Eg lite, fat-free, filled donuts
- Combining
- Eg Supermarket + petrol station
- Rearranging
- General Purpose / Special Purpose
- Eg 80% of cleaners are 99% the same with a different name & label
- Time Frames
- Eg 30 seconds mould remover
- Eg “your pizza delivered in 30 mins or less” Dominos
- Eg “Give us a week and we’ll take off the weight” Slim Fast
- Packaging that sells
- Specific solutions
- Eg Mascara that is waterproof, wear-proof, tear-proof
- Coined Terminology
- Eg “schweppervescence”
- Symbols / Characters
- Eg “Ronald McDonald”
- Technology
PR Techniques
- Be Predictive
- Be Provocative
- Be Public
- Be a Personality
- Be Persistent
Nice thoughts for the day. Now, how to apply them?
I think it’s as simple as taking action on an idea you have. I purchased 3 domains today, set up hosting, planned the content, and I’ll start building websites on them tomorrow. This only happened because I scheduled the whole day off (and tomorrow) to dream and plan and scheme and create.
Dont you think you’re over reaching? I’m currently trying to focus on building up 1 site at a time.
One site is way too risky for me. How would you know if you’ve got a dud or a winner? Better to launch 3 (or 5 or 10), work on them for 10 hours each and wait and see which ones have got potential. Invest more time into the ones that look promising, and dump the others.