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Hi and thank you for listening to this audio clip. Fax broadcasting can be absolutely one of the most cost effective ways of generating leads for your business. This is a recording from a guy named John Alanis from the “Information Marketing Boot Camp” that was put on by Global Publishing by Ron LeGrand. This is a section from John Alanis, one of the best presentations and most informative presentations I’ve ever heard on fax broadcasting. I think you’ll really benefit from it. If you like what you hear and you’re interested in more information on this entire seminar, which is a 16-tape seminar contact me and I’ll put you in touch with Bob Lee, the gentleman who has the marketing rights to the seminar. If you are someone who has the marketing rights to a product and lease space from us to promote your product, thanks a lot and enjoy.

John: Okay I’m going to start off with broadcast fax; broadcast fax is a great way to generate leads, a fantastic way, and the reason is first of all it is cheap. It’s cheap and it’s fast. You can literally get a fax list, and I’ll give you the name of a company you can get it from, you can take that fax list, you can sit down and write your fax marketing piece, you can upload it via the software they give you, and within an hour it can be out and you can be having leads coming in. One of the biggest advantages of broadcast fax is it is cheap. We’ve seen leads coming in as $3 per lead. Ron was talking about earlier that $5 a lead is great. Via broadcast fax you can get as low as $3 a lead. The thing about broadcast fax is a lot of what we found is that those leads convert at a lower rate, but who cares? Because your cost a lead is so low that you can tolerate much lower conversion rates because you’re not paying nearly as much money up front on media costs. A lead generated by fax is not as good as a lead generated by direct mail but it’s still a very good lead. Michael Kimball ran a campaign once where he did 15,000 broadcast faxes and wound up getting an $80 cost per sale on $1,000 product; he made $15,000 on that, very low cost per sale. The reason is because broadcast fax is so cheap. Here’s another thing about broadcast fax.

Ron: John, before we go any further can we make sure that everyone understands what broadcast fax really is?

John: Sure. Broadcast is just like you rent a mailing list, you would go buy a fax list. Now I said buy a fax list. That means that when you buy the list you get to use it as much as you want. That’s very important. You can also get the names and addresses of the people in that list. What a broadcast fax is you upload all the numbers and when they send out the fax it goes out all at once, it’s like a huge broadcast, a huge antenna sending out all these faxes; all at the same time people are getting these faxes coming in on their fax machines. You can literally flood the airways with broadcast faxing and immediately start seeing responses from that. Ron wanted me to talk a little bit about one of the drawbacks of broadcast faxes that you should know up front. Sometimes it pisses people off. You guys have probably gotten a lot of broadcast faxes; I’ve got a fax machine at home and I get 2 or 3 or 4 of the broadcast faxes a day. When you broadcast fax a lot of times what you’ll get is people saying “Take me off your fax list,” and you’ll get rude faxes sent back to you and all kinds of funny messages. Just take them right off. You don’t need to fax to them again; they don’t want to buy what you have to sell anyway. Sometimes you’ll get a lot of people wanting to be taken off the fax list. We maintain a master list of people who don’t want to receive these faxes. Also, one thing about broadcast fax is there is a gray legal area about it. I’m not a lawyer; I don’t understand the law exactly but you can get in trouble sometimes if you keep broadcast faxing to people who don’t want to receive them. If someone says “Take me off your list,” take them off your list! Also don’t broadcast fax to lawyers. Number one you’re not going to sell them anything because they’re cheap and they’re not going to buy your product anyway, and if they do, they’re going to return it. But there is a letter going around, it’s known in direct marketing circles as the “extortion letter”, and these lawyers come in, they’re not making any money anyway, and they see this pile of broadcast faxes and they say “I can fax this letter out”, and they fax the letter out saying “You’re sending an illegal fax, you send me $500 or I’m going to sue you”. What they do is they come into the office in the morning and see they have ten faxes and they can send the extortion letter to ten people and maybe two will respond and they’ll make $1,000. We don’t see that much but it’s something you have to keep in mind. That being said about broadcast fax, we just want you to know that stuff about it. It’s a very, very good media to use to test the market, to generate leads very inexpensively. You can spend $500 on a broadcast and get three or four thousand names out there and find out within two days if your campaign has a chance. That’s where you should use broadcast faxing; it’s very easy test media. Cy-net, the company that we use charges about 11.5 cents per fax. When you talk to them be sure to tell them you want the rate of faxes that go through. Sometimes you get a non-connect rate five, six or seven percent. I believe you can find them on the Internet at www.cy-net.com and you can download their fax software from there. It’s brain-dead easy to use. As far as getting fax lists, where do you get them? You can call Spy Net, they work with a company called Global Marketing, it’s the same office. Call them and tell them you want to buy a fax list, the operative word is “buy”, and ask them to send you a list card of the faxes. Say you want to fax to printers, tell them you want all of the names in the printer market and ask how many there are. They’ll tell you there are 30,000 or 50,000; you can buy as many as you want. You can buy 1,000 names; you can buy 5,000 names. What we found on broadcast fax for a good reliable test is 5,000 names. I’ve tested 2,000 names and gotten good response and I’ve gone back and tested 5,000 names and got a great response. They range from about fourteen cents apiece, and if you buy in quantity, you can get them down to about ten cents. You can negotiate with them but the smaller you buy, the more you’re going to have to pay. Remember once you get that name you can use it over and over and over again. That’s a very important thing. I’ll tell you a secret about broadcast fax is if you fax out and get a good response you also have the addresses, take your fax and mail it as a postcard to them to generate leads because you know that list is responsive. You try different media to get the guys who don’t respond via fax but will respond via postcard. That’s another very powerful thing about broadcast. It’s probably going to cost you about you $600 to fax it out. That’s not including the names. Include the names, add an extra fourteen cents a name, so you may be looking at about $1,500 and that’s the fist time you fax to them. The second time you fax to them, if you wait about a month before you fax to them again your response will be very close to what you got the first time. It’s not like you wear out the list. You fax it to them; they forget about it and about a month later you go back in. You can also fax in a different format. Let me show you an example. With a postcard, maybe two or three or four weeks before you find out what your whole response is, with broadcast fax in three days you know. If you’re not getting responses as soon as that fax goes out, then there’s a problem. When you talk to the fax broadcast company the time you want that to go out, 10:30 a.m. Tuesday is when that starts. That’s 10:30 Central time because across the country most people are in their office right then, the fax machine goes off, they go over there and they see what’s coming through. Sometimes they’ll try and push it off at night and fax your fax at night when long-distance rates go down so they can save some money. Don’t you let them do that! Make sure, say “I want that fax to go out at 10:30 a.m. Central time or you’re not getting paid.” They’ll come in and there will be a big stack of other faxes from all the other guys who didn’t know to send it out at 10:30 so your fax is buried among 20 or 30 broadcast faxes sent out by cruise ships or whoever else is doing broadcast fax. You don’t want your fax buried because they’ll throw the whole thing out. I’ve seen it kill a campaign because they sent it out at night trying to be cheap instead of sending it out when they were told to. Be very firm about that, and if you’re firm they’ll follow your directions. If you want to test a full page ad in a publication but you’re not sure how it’s going to do, broadcast faxing it to a list is a great way to test. You find out if that ad works; if you fax it and don’t get any response then you don’t want to run that ad. You can fax your full page ad. What you can also do and what I have done that works real well is everybody has Microsoft Word, they have a fax deal in there where you go in a create a fax send it out and it says “fax” on it and it has your name and address and all that and it says “Comments: Please reply”, people are used to getting those and thinking they are personal faxes. If you take and create your ad to look just like that and it says “Fax, to, from, subject”, and you have your postcard ad down there where you type it in and sign it or you can even hand write it in and broadcast fax it to people it gets responses because it gets read. I call it an “A pile fax.” We talked about A pile mail yesterday; A-pile mail gets opened because it looks personal. B pile is mail that looks like advertising mail so most of the time it goes in the trash. Same thing with faxes; if you have a fax that looks personal like your friend sent it from the home computer you’ll read it and by the time you figure out it’s an ad you’re already on the phone calling for the free report. Those work very well and you can create those on your home computer. Use the exact same copy in there; just test different formats. All of that can work very well. The neat thing about broadcast fax is you can send two different headlines at the same time, 2,500 and 2,500 so you find out immediately which headline pulls better. Putting personal handwriting on there that says “Take a look at this, J” and sign your initial down there people look at it like their friend sent it to them and they’ll have a look at it. You can get a graphics designer to take your copy and put it into what looks like a newspaper article that’s been ripped out and they write on top of it “Hey check this out this article” and it looks like an article but it’s really your ad as an article. It looks like their friend sent the article so they think they need to respond to it. That works very well. The whole key is personal. Make your broadcast fax look personal; make it look like their buddy is sending it to them, it will get responses. That’s the whole key with broadcast fax; make sure it looks personal. Your response mechanism to a 24-hour prerecorded message also put “or write your name and address or just write report “x” on your letterhead and fax it to us.” What a lot of people will do after they get the fax they’ll turn around and fax it right back to you. That’s very powerful because I tested that with the 24-hour prerecorded message and tested it with the fax option in there and it increased response about thirty-three. If you want to test something in a very cheap way and get a very quick results on it and you’re going to a business, one other thing is do not fax “Opportunity Secret List.” Those are garbage. They’re on the market, they’re available but they’re garbage. We’ve tested them; they’re worthless. To businesses, people that might be interested in making more money in their business or may want to get out of their business and get into another one, what we mean by niche market is, in case people are not familiar with that term, it is a market of like printers, or carpet cleaners, or dry cleaners; it’s a small market of people who look, act and think alike. They all read the same publications; they all go to the same trade associations and they think a lot alike. That’s very important because you can take your message and match it right to them, and they feel like you know who they are because you’ve talked about dry cleaners or carpet cleaners or whatever. A niche market is very tightly matched and they’re a very responsive group because you can match your message right to them.

Michael: I want to thank you for listening. This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com. If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview please email me . You can reach me by phone at 1-800-982-6487, or 858-274-7851. Anyone listening, if you want to be interviewed please contact me and give back to others and thanks for listening.