Sneak Preview to: Million Dollar...

Sneak Preview to:

Million Dollar

Licensing

By Bob Serling

Copyright Notices Copyright © 2008 by Bob Serling All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to ProductLab, Inc., 2039 Bruceala Court, Cardiff, California 92007-1201. Published by ProductLab, Inc. 2039 Bruceala Court Cardiff, California 92007-1201 (760) 944-5697 Fax: (760) 944-5788 www.DirectMarketingInsider.com Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Legal Notices While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, neither the author nor the Publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions or contrary interpretation of the subject matter. This publication is not intended for use as a source of legal or accounting advice. The Publisher wants to stress that the information contained herein may be subject to varying state and/or local laws or regulations. All users are advised to retain competent counsel to determine what state and/or local laws or regulations may apply to the user's particular business. The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, both federal and state and local, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in the United States or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader. The author and Publisher assume no responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of any purchaser or reader of these materials. Any perceived slights of specific people or organizations is unintentional.

Congratulations!

You’ve received this special “sneak preview” of six of the most powerful chapters from the Million Dollar Licensing manual because you’ve been dedicated in following all the videos and emails we’ve sent out for the Millionaire Licensing Club. This special collection of material will give you a “fast track” advantage over everyone else who receives the materials at the regular time. And don’t forget – you will also be shipped the full package of all the program manuals, CDs and DVDs in just a few days. So you’re miles ahead of the game. Here are the six chapters you’ll find in this sneak preview: Chapter 1 – Introduction Chapter 2 – Overview of the Million Dollar Licensing Strategies Chapter 3 – Foundation Principles Chapter 4 – Licensing Smart – How to build a profitable licensing business as quickly as possible Chapter 13 – Toll Gate Joint Ventures Chapter 17 – Licensing Proven Marketing Campaigns to Hundreds of Businesses These six chapters will give you a strong introduction to the powerful licensing strategies you’ll be using to create your own five and six-figure paydays. And they will start preparing you to profit from my licensing mindset. However, please keep in mind that this is just an introduction and in no way is it meant to be a comprehensive treatment of my proprietary licensing strategies. Because of that, I have a favor to ask of you: please do not send me questions until you’ve had a chance to review the

entire course.

I ask this favor for two reasons. First, we’re still in the early launch stage and I’m swamped with tasks to take care of. Second, most or all of your questions will be answered once you have access to the full set of materials. So for now, just enjoy this powerful introduction and let your mind begin to imagine all the possibilities that are in store for you. I promise the few additional days you have to wait for the complete course materials will be well worth it. Regards,

Bob SerlingBob SerlingBob SerlingBob Serling

1 Million Dollar Licensing Notes _________________________ ___________

Chapter 1 Introduction

Welcome Welcome to Million Dollar Licensing. The world of licensing never ceases to amaze me. It’s one of the few fields where a single entrepreneur is on a level playing field even with the largest of corporations – including the Fortune 500. You see, the core process of all licensing opportunities is to find successful companies to license your product ideas, business ideas, and marketing campaigns to. So by licensing your ideas to medium to large size businesses, you gain the instant ability to benefit from all their resources and be “playing” in a much larger market than you could on your own. The other aspect of licensing that I find totally fascinating is the fact that the vast majority of licensing deals – even deals with large mega-corporations – require little or none of your own resources. Because you are licensing business ideas and existing marketing campaigns to your clients, you don’t need a product or service of your own, a web site, any staff to manage, or a customer list. Those resources are all provided by, and paid for, by your clients. To me, it doesn’t get much sweeter than that! That said, there are many ways you can go wrong with your licensing deals. Licensing is what many people refer to as “simple but not easy”. All seven of the Million Dollar Licensing Strategies in this program are quite simple to understand. But implementing them requires attention to detail, which is why they are not always easy. However, by following the blueprints I give you with each of the seven strategies, you’ll be able to make sure you’ve covered all the nuances and all the details, reducing the practice of each strategy to as easy a process as possible. So the good news here is that my system makes this as close to both “simple and easy” as you could ever hope for.


Who the heck am I and why should you even consider listening to me? Before we dig into the course material, you probably want to know a little more about who I am and why you should even listen to me in the first place. I've been a direct response copywriter and marketing consultant – both online and offline – for more than 25 years. During that time, I've worked with a wide variety of businesses from complete start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. My marketing strategies and copy have sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products and services for my clients. My first introduction to licensing came through the direct marketing world. Large mailers – companies that mail one million or more pieces per month – attracted the most effective copywriters by offering them a “mailing fee” of three cents to five cents for every piece mailed in addition to an up front fee. For as long as their piece was mailed, the writer continued to receive this mailing fee. With a blockbuster piece, these fees could be paid for many years, often paying the copywriter hundreds of thousands of dollars in addition to their standard fee. Needless to say, all of the best copywriters were eager to produce breakthrough copy and collect these enormous back end fees. What I’ve just described is the really the entire basis of licensing. With licensing, you grant a customer or client the temporary use of an idea, rather than selling it outright. In exchange, you get an up front fee, plus a percentage of either sales or profits, which is often referred to as a royalty. After experiencing the world of enormously increased fees for copywriting and consulting by using what was essentially a licensing structure, I then went on to use it in a number of other fields. This included creating products, services, and marketing campaigns that I licensed out in areas as diverse as toys, software, insurance, publishing, manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, and many more.


But here’s why this is important to you. Let me be very candid with you - there's only one reason why you should listen to me. Or, for that matter, to anyone who claims to be in a position to give you advice or teach you something. And that reason is because of the results I’ve produced for my own business and for my clients with my proven licensing strategies. You see, it really doesn’t matter how many degrees, credentials, awards, fancy titles, or anything else someone can trot out for you. If they haven't produced exceptional results – and done so over and over again for many years – all they really have to offer is theory and chatter. For example, I was fortunate to have been able to create and license a hot-selling skateboard toy that had Tony Hawk’s logo, and logos of other famous skateboarders and skateboard companies, on it. I say fortunate, because before I did that, I failed miserably at attempting to license a number of other products. I had diligently read dozens of so-called “inventing” courses, all written by people claiming to be experts. The problem is, most of them were either patent attorneys or industrial designers. And through a very difficult, expensive process of trial and error, I discovered that what they recommended just doesn’t work! Why? Because it’s all theoretical. Plus, it’s all focused on the mechanical and legal issues. Other than having written a patent or designed costly prototypes, few or none of these authors has ever actually taken a product to market. Look, there are well over 300,000 patents issued every year in the United States alone. Where do you think the shelf space is going to come from for all those new products? The answer is, it simply isn’t available. Which is why fewer than 2% of all patented products ever see the light of day. So in order to be successful with my toy – and with every other product, service, business idea, or marketing campaign I’ve ever licensed – I turned the recommended process on its ear. I approached the entire inventing and licensing process from a marketing standpoint. First, prove that there is a large,


strong market for the product, then license it to companies eager to take advantage of these eager markets. Sounds simple and obvious, but if you pick up any book on inventing, you’ll see that they focus entirely on legal protection and prototype development. While these can be important topics, they’re a complete waste of time and money if there’s no real market for your idea. My point is this: the only reason to listen to any so-called expert, including me, is because of their actual track record, not because they have ideas that sound good in theory. The bottom line is, results never lie. And that’s the only criteria I personally use myself when I buy a business book, subscribe to a newsletter, or purchase software for my business. I only part with my hard-earned money when it's going for proven, practical results I can apply to my own business. If it's theoretical, overly expensive to implement, or so complex you have to be a PhD in math to understand it, I'm not interested. And I advise you to hold any so-called expert to the same criteria: have them show you actual results before you ever pay them a dime of your money. With that said, here are some of the actual results my licensing strategies have produced for my own business and for my clients – using the exact same techniques you’ll learn in this course and can begin profiting from right away:

A brief look at my track record I’ve done dozens of licensing deals over the past decade or so. Some have been much more profitable than others. But as I already mentioned, because you are using other businesses’ resources, your costs are next to nothing. So I’ve never had a licensing deal that wasn’t profitable. What I want to show you in the next few minutes, are three very different examples of how effective licensing can be – and how truly simple it is to do. The reason I want to give you three completely different examples is so you can begin to see the unlimited variety of licensing options


available, as well as give you a sense of just how profitable these kind of deals can be for you. So let’s take a look at these three real-life examples.

The $25 million letter I’m probably best known for writing a one and a half page lead generation letter that many people refer to as the “$25 million letter”. That’s because the first time my client used it, by sending it to just one prospect, he landed an agreement for a $25 million sale. At this point, I would normally give you a testimonial in the client’s own words describing exactly how this happened. However, because this story has been spread so far and wide, my client, who I’ll call “Mr. X” for now, asked me if I would please stop using his testimonial and name in my materials. Why? Because ever since the story first got out, and as it has grown, my client has been inundated with phone calls and emails from people asking him to share his success story, consult with them (usually for free), answer thousands of questions, and more. So to give the poor guy a break, rather than use his testimonial, I’ll just give you a review of what happened. So here goes… Mr. X used this letter – and all it took was one mailing to one prospect – to land an appointment with a U.S. Congressman and his Chief of Staff. In fact, the Congressman insisted that Mr. X fly out to Washington, D.C. immediately. Once he arrived, Mr. X had a 90-minute lunch meeting with the Congressman and his Chief of Staff and walked away with an agreement in principle for a $25 million contract. And while both Mr. X and I were convinced this letter would work well for his business, these instant results certainly exceeded both our expectations.


However, the story doesn’t end there… Now, obviously, those results are quite gratifying. But that’s really just the beginning of the licensing story. What most people don’t know is that I’ve used variations of this same letter many times in my own business – and I’ve licensed it out to many of my clients multiple times for a five-figure retainer up front plus a percentage of the profits. Remember my skateboard toy with Tony Hawk’s logo? I used a variation of this letter, that required just ten minutes to modify, to license out that toy. I also used it to license out the testing and training software suite I created along with two partners. Our licensing deals lead to the software company being acquired for $6.4 million just 17 months after we started the company. Just a couple months ago, I again licensed a variation of this letter to yet another client. The results were that he broke all sales records for the entire 25 years he’s been in business and increased his profits by 500% in four months.

Five-figure profits for just a couple hours worth of work – and no out of pocket expense This next example will show you the results one of my clients recently produced after being quickly trained in one of my seven licensing strategies. Rob Long was in my private coaching program and he was such a pleasure to work with, that I took about 20 minutes to teach him my Toll Gate Joint Venture strategy. Toll Gate Joint Ventures give you a unique, highly profitable twist on joint venturing. Instead of traditional joint ventures where you offer your own products to other companies to joint venture, you can get all the benefits of joint ventures without any product or service of your own. All you do is find one business with a great product, a second business with a great customer list, then create a joint venture deal between them with you in the middle "toll gate" position, collecting a share of the profits from one or both sides.


How well does this strategy work? Here are the results Rob produced – in a remarkably short time – right after I taught him how to apply this strategy:

“Your toll-gate strategy has been very nice to my

consulting practice. After our conversation, I used your

blueprint to put together a toll-gate deal for one of my

clients. I'm connecting them with a couple other

companies to make more moola for everyone. I feel a

little dumb I didn't think of all this on my own. It's a

quick project that was 1) cheap to put together 2) easy

for everyone to understand and 3) very (I mean very)

profitable for all parties. With just one project my

revenues are up 30% -- not including a potentially

yummy backend. My wallet thanks you.”

Rob Long, Kahuna & Big Cheese Creekport, Inc. In order to protect his client’s proprietary information, Rob has not revealed the exact amount he expects to make from this one deal, but he’s allowed me to tell you that it will be in the range from five to six-figures. All for just a couple hours of work and no out of pocket expense whatsoever. As you can see, deals like this are not hard to find or difficult to implement. You’ll soon be enjoying the profits from similar deals of your own!

The 5-minute change to a web site that increased response by over 300% This final example is, to me, the most interesting. Because in this case, the entire process took my client only 5 minutes to apply, but resulted in him enjoying a substantial increase in profits. And, of course, I’ve since licensed or sold the exact same technique to dozens of other clients. So let’s take a look at exactly how this worked. In working with a client, I recommended that he make substantial changes to the structure of his web site copy and to the content of the copy itself. Realizing that it could take weeks before his new copy would be ready, my client decided just to make the structural changes I recommended.


While these changes were substantial, and represented an entirely new structure from what the so-called experts teach, my client was able to accomplish them quickly by chopping out huge sections of his copy. It only took about five minutes, and as he’s told me, what he was left with was a bit disjointed, and not even close to what his site would finally look like. Still, it was enough to get started. The next day, he sent out an email announcement inviting people to visit his newly restructured site. Within minutes the responses started rolling in – and they kept piling up for hour after hour. When it was all done, he tallied up the response and discovered to his delight that simply by using the new copy structure I recommended, he had increased his response by more than 300%. Here’s his description of the results he’s now enjoying:

"On my old web site I used to get relatively small

numbers of sign-ups to my ezine, despite strong

endorsements from other newsletter publishers. In my

first test since changing to the format you

recommended, I have received more than a 300%

increase in sign-ups."

Michael Hepworth StreetSmartMarketer.com

What I want to emphasize is that while the technique I created for restructuring his web site is what got my client these results, the real value to my business goes far beyond the fee I’d receive if I only created a technique for a single client. In fact, my profit opportunities are virtually unlimited. I can now license this same technique to almost any business that has a web site. With a testimonial like Michael’s above – plus many more from other satisfied clients who have also used my restructuring technique, how hard do you think it will be to find dozens or hundreds of takers? The answer is, it’s a piece of cake!


What my licensing strategies can do for you Those are just a few examples of the results my licensing strategies have produced. I could show you many more examples. But the real question now is, “What can my licensing strategies specifically do for you?” After all, that’s what you really came for. So here’s the answer to that question. First, you’ll get seven proven licensing strategies that anyone with a reasonable level of intelligence can use to immediately start closing five and six-figure deals. As you’ve already seen, with just 20 minutes of instruction, one of my clients recently closed a deal – without any out of pocket expense – that should easily put five to six-figures in his bank account. Since there are no costs associated with this, just a few hours of his time, that’s pure, bankable profit. So you don’t need any prior experience, and you certainly don’t need to be a copywriting or marketing whiz to get the full advantage of my licensing strategies. You’ll get everything you need in this program to quickly and easily put each strategy into action. Now, the seven Million Dollar Licensing Strategies by themselves can allow you to easily build a business that produces six-figure profits year-in and year-out. But I don’t want to just “give you a fish”, I want to “teach you to fish” so you can build the kind of business, quickly and easily, where there are no limits to your upside potential. So in addition to the seven licensing strategies, I’ll show you how to modify and apply them in a number of different ways, so you can repeat your success over and over again. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you have strategies that will work for you with nearly every product or service imaginable, and in nearly any industry you can think of. All you have to do is understand which components of each strategy to modify and how to make the modifications in the shortest time possible.


Who this course is for One of the greatest benefits of licensing is that it has such broad application regardless of your situation. You’ll find that the strategies in this course can be used equally as well if you are:

1. An entrepreneur

2. A business owner

3. An employee of a business If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll find this course to literally be a wonderland of ways to make serious money in the shortest time possible. And in most cases, it requires almost no assets of your own. You can quickly and easily build a six or seven-figure business. And most importantly, because these are strategies that will work extremely well now and for years to come, your business will also be sustainable. I’m sure you’ll find that to be quite different than the typical “flavor of the month” marketing strategies most courses offer. If you’re a business owner, you’re in for a real treat. You’ll discover dozens of simple, no cost or low cost ways to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional profits – and possibly much more – out of your business. These are profits you never would have seen without this course, not

profits that infringe on anything you’re already doing. If you’re an employee of a business, you can use these strategies to increase your income and your prestige within your company. By showing your employer how to use these strategies, you can often get a share of the profits you generate – or at very least, a handsome bonus for all the extra money you bring in. And your ability to generate significant gains for as long as you stay with your company could easily win you a promotion to a coveted spot in your company.

What you'll get in the rest of this course The material in this course is broken out into three major components for each of the seven Million Dollar Licensing Strategies:


1. How each strategy works and how to profit with it

2. All the marketing documents you’ll need to sell these strategies to your clients

3. A step-by-step blueprint for the marketing and

implementation of each strategy The main manual (which is what you’re reading now) contains everything pertaining to Component 1 – How each strategy works and how to profit with it. Each strategy is laid out in comprehensive detail with plenty of examples to make sure you understand every nuance and finer point of maximizing your profits with these strategies. Component 2 gives you all the marketing documents you’ll need to market all seven licensing strategies to your clients. These are contained in a separate manual, so you can keep both manuals open and see the examples without having to turn back and forth through the pages. Component 3 provides you with detailed, step-by-step blueprints for implementing all seven licensing strategies. There are two different implementation checklists for each strategy. The first implementation checklist covers the steps you take to market the strategy. The second checklist covers all the steps for implementing each strategy with your clients. The blueprints for all seven strategies are contained in a separate manual for easy reference. The combination of these three components leaves nothing to chance and nothing for you to wonder about or to have to figure out on your own. When you’ve completed this course material, you’ll have everything you need to start closing lucrative licensing deals from the start and for years to come.

A word of warning – why you might fail at licensing Most courses that deal with money-making information promise you the moon without any effort on your part. Now, you already know that you can make serious money with licensing. And you also know that it will require some effort and some investment of your time. But the beauty of


licensing is that most deals come together pretty quickly and only require a minimum of effort. Even so, there is still one factor that you must overcome or I can practically guarantee that you’ll fail at licensing. What is that factor? To put it simply, the answer is…

The need to look good.

Please read that again, because it’s of the utmost importance. In fact, one of my favorite quotes says it more clearly than I could hope to: “Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll

show you a guy you can beat every time”.

Lou Brock Hall of Fame outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals As with anything else that’s new and different, there are times where you’re going to feel foolish when you first start using my licensing strategies. You may think that you’ll get laughed out of the building for approaching a client with a licensing deal when you have little or no prior experience. You may feel so nervous in your first couple of presentations that your throat tightens up and your voice comes out in a high squeak. Just accept it. Its par for the course and it will go away after you’ve done a deal or two. Not to pat myself on the back, but one of my greatest strengths is that I’m not afraid to look stupid. When my son was younger, this used to cause him tremendous embarrassment. If we were at a comedy show and a volunteer was needed from the audience, I’d always raise my hand. Of course, I’d end up looking like an idiot and my son would want to run out of the theater. However, this trait has served me well in business dealings. Believe me, when I licensed my toy to a $100 million a year toy manufacturer, I was incredibly nervous during the presentation. But I didn’t let that stop me. When I met with the Senior Vice President of Licensing for a major division of IBM to talk about them licensing


our software, I knew we were a three-man company entering the Giant’s lair. Was it intimidating? Yep, no doubt about it. But I went ahead and did it anyway, despite my fears. But here’s the best part. With both of these deals, I discovered that the people I was meeting with were just that – people. They were actually quite nice people on top of that. And each of them were just like you and me – full of hopes and dreams for the future, wanting to do a good job, wanting to provide for themselves and their families, and maybe even a bit nervous as well. So do not give in to any fears you may have in the beginning. Simply recognize that you feel a bit scared, then go ahead and do it anyway. With a little practice, you’ll get over your fear. And like I said, you’ll soon discover that you’re almost always dealing with some pretty nice people who share your same dreams and goals.

A note about the layout of this material I'm sure you’ve noticed that the page layout for this material is a bit different from other materials you may have purchased. Each page is designed with ample room for taking notes right next to the material you’re reading. As you can see, the right-most column on each page is labeled “Notes” and I've left plenty of room for you to write down vital information. This way, you can keep your notes in the same place as the information they pertain to. You won't have to search for your notes later on or risk losing separate sheets of paper. Alright, that does it for this introduction. Now, let’s get right to the details of how to cash in with licensing!


Chapter 2 Overview of the Million Dollar Licensing Strategies

We won’t be getting into the full details of the actual Million Dollar Licensing Strategies until Chapter 4. But it’s important that you have an understanding of what all 7 strategies are in order to: (a) have a big picture idea of what lies ahead of you; and (b) fully understand the information in the next chapter on Foundation Principles for licensing. So here’s a quick overview of my licensing strategies, starting with a list of all 7, followed by a brief description of each.

1. License successful marketing campaigns to hundreds of businesses

2. Toll Gate Joint Ventures

3. Past customer reactivation

4. Product customization

5. Fee-based lead generation service

6. Other people’s expertise

7. Business cloning

Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #1 – Licensing proven marketing campaigns to hundreds of businesses. At first blush, a lot of people think I’m crazy when I tell them that I license the same marketing campaigns – that one client has already bought and paid for – to many other clients, over and over again. However, the key point to understand is that clients would much rather pay for a campaign that’s been proven many times then invest their time and money in a new concept that could easily fail.


In this program, I’m going to show you how to create and quickly test dozens of marketing campaigns at rock bottom prices. Using a combination of the Internet and dirt-cheap offline techniques, my system gives you a step-by-step method for creating winning campaigns in nearly any market. Next, I’ll show you how to use professional copywriters – and get their services for free or a very low cost – to quickly and easily create and test dozens of additional marketing campaigns for you. By the time we’re done you’ll have all the tools you need and clearly understand why this is such an easy, high-profit strategy to implement.

Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #2 – Toll gate joint ventures. This is one of my favorite strategies because it’s been so profitable for me for almost two decades. But it’s also a strong favorite of mine because Toll Gate Joint Ventures are so easy to put together. Typical joint ventures involve you selling your product or service to a partner’s list of customers and you pay that partner a share of the profits. Or, you sell your partner’s products or services to your list and get paid a share of the profits. But with Toll Gate Joint Ventures, you don’t need a product or service or a customer list! Instead, you put these highly profitable deals together by matching one company with a great product with another company with a great customer list, and you’re in the middle “Toll Gate” position taking a share of the profits from one or both sides. Because you don’t need to have a product or list of your own, you can broker dozens or even hundreds of these deals and get paid a retainer up front plus a share of the profits for as long as the deals are active. Let me tell you, with a couple of well positioned TGJVs, you can make some serious money. In fact, you could easily build an entire business around this single strategy alone. While the concept is simple, there are many nuances that aren’t readily apparent. I’ll cover them all in detail and


get you off to a fast start with this fascinating strategy a little later in this course.

Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #3 – Past customer reactivation. Very few businesses understand that there's a ton of profits "hidden" in their past customer list. This strategy shows you how to make serious money reactivating these past customers for your clients quickly and easily. Like Toll Gate Joint Ventures, this is another simple, yet highly profitable licensing strategy that you could easily build an entire, multi-million dollar business around. Once you understand how to reactivate past customers in any given industry – let’s say the software industry – and you have a proven campaign for doing this, how hard do you think it will be to get dozens, even hundreds of software companies to line up to license this service from you? I can tell you from years of experience, it’s a piece of cake.

Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #4 – Product customization. I love this strategy because: (a) It can be used with nearly any product or service; and (b) so few people understand how to properly apply it, you rarely see it being used – which means you’ll be able to dominate the markets you choose to use it in. With this strategy, you show companies how to take a single existing product (or service) and quickly turn it into dozens of products by customizing it for different markets. One of my clients has taken the same service and customized it – with 90% of the core service remaining the same – for more than 40 different industries. Naturally, his sales have soared exponentially by offering versions that are tailored-made for each different industry. The best part is that this strategy, while remarkably effective, couldn’t be easier to put into practice. And as with all my strategies, you license it to your clients in exchange for a solid up front fee plus an ongoing percentage of the profits.


Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #5 – Fee-based lead generation service. The vast majority of businesses lack the ability to consistently generate all the highly qualified leads they need. Consequently, their sales and profits suffer. Once you understand precisely how to generate leads for almost any type of business, the sky’s the limit when it comes to selling those leads to companies that are desperate for new customers. It gets even better when you apply this strategy to businesses with high-value clients, such as accountants, cosmetic surgeons, and dentists, because you can easily command $250 or more for every lead you provide. I know of companies that make $80,000 per month just by providing this one service, and you’ll be able to do the same once you’re armed with the information you’ll get from this course.

Million Dollar Licensing Strategy #6 – Other people’s expertise. Every business has best practices, systems, and processes in many different areas (marketing, production, operations) that can be turned into training programs for other businesses. But you’ll rarely find a business that even recognizes they have these dormant assets, and not one out of a hundred has any idea of how to capitalize on them. With this strategy, you’ll learn precisely what to do to take this expertise that exists in every business and create and license out training programs that can be marketed for hundreds of thousands – or even millions – bringing your clients windfall profits and paying you a significant share of the profits. While this strategy is a bit more sophisticated and may sound complex at first, by the time you’re done with the course materials, using this strategy effectively will be a breeze.


MFN Licensing Strategy #7 – Business cloning. I’ve saved one of the easiest and most wildly profitable licensing strategies for last! I’ve used this strategy with a number of clients and it’s always produced remarkable results. Here’s how it works. For many businesses, one of the best things they can do to substantially increase their sales is set up a second business to compete with their primary business. The product they offer is exactly the same, but given a different name and a second company is created in order for the product to compete against itself. However, what really makes this strategy work is that the copy appeal must be very different for each company. For example, one business may emphasize the best price, while the other emphasizes the best customer service in the industry. Companies I’ve worked with who use this strategy produce net profit increases as high as 80%. Yet you’ll rarely find anyone who even knows this strategy exists. Once you understand the finer points and nuances of putting this strategy into action, I know you’re going to love it as much as I do.

Conclusion Alright, now that you have a solid understanding of all 7 of my Million Dollar Licensing Strategies, we’re ready to move on and get you firmly on track to building your own highly profitable licensing business. The next step is to introduce you to 12 Foundation Principles that will give you the mindset you need to be as successful as possible. With that in mind, I’ll see you in the next chapter!


Chapter 3 Foundation Principles

Licensing is the most rewarding way to make serious money that I’ve every come across. It’s so much fun, and so profitable, that over the past few years I’ve cut out just about everything else from my business to focus nearly exclusively on licensing opportunities. The various licensing opportunities I now focus on are covered in the seven Million Dollar Licensing Strategies you’ll be learning throughout this program. But before we can get to the actual strategies, it’s important to understand a number of underlying principles that will “grease the wheels” and make all your licensing efforts far more productive. There are 12 Foundation Principles that I’d like to share with you. Here’s a quick overview of them, which will be followed by a detailed description of each Principle:

1. Licensing is one of the easiest, steadiest ways for anyone to make a small fortune.

2. The Million Dollar Licensing Strategies are

reproducible.

3. Licensing requires few or none of your own resources.

4. Licensing is a low-traffic business.

5. Start with the easiest deals possible.

6. Business owners love licensing (even if they don’t

know it). 7. Thousands of businesses are happy to pay top dollar

to license proven business ideas and marketing campaigns.

8. Look for the long-haul deals.


9. Always start a client with a single strategy. 10. Action is the determining factor in your success.

11. Cashing in on the Law of Averages.

12. Why self-confidence can be your worst enemy.

Foundation Principle #1: Licensing is one of the easiest, steadiest ways for anyone to make a small fortune Do you have a favorite short-cut that you use to get to work – or to a sports stadium, movie theater, or some other location where traffic tends to bog down? If so, you probably get a nice little laugh every time you use your short-cut and reach your destination more quickly and more easily than everyone else does. But if you think about it, what is it that makes your short-cut work so well? The answer is: few people know about it. And once the rest of the city discovers your secret route, it isn’t long before your short-cut fails to be a short-cut anymore. That’s similar to why licensing is one of the easiest, steadiest ways for anyone with average intelligence to make a small fortune. Because so few people know about licensing, and even fewer understand the finer points of making licensing perform like crazy. And even though licensing has been around for a century of more, it’s still an elusive area to most people. And believe me, that isn’t about to change anytime in the near future. So the competition is very low, and the payoffs are extremely high! Now, that’s a situation I love to be in. What’s perhaps even more important is that businesses have a never-ending need for new product and service ideas, new marketing campaigns, and the ability to stay ahead of their competition. But few businesses have the time or skills to develop all of these things on their own.


That puts you in the driver’s seat, allowing you to take proven business ideas and marketing campaigns, where the value is immediately apparent to business owners and managers, and license them out for a four, five, or six-figure up front fee plus a share of the profits. If anything, prepare to be shocked by how easily you can put lucrative licensing deals together right from the start.

Foundation Principle #2: The Million Dollar Licensing Strategies are reproducible All seven of the Million Dollar Licensing Strategies are reproducible – that is, they can be repeated over and over with hundreds of different clients, but with very little change. This is intentional. You see, there are a number of other licensing strategies that I could also teach you, but I rarely use them because they can’t be duplicated easily. And I’m not going to waste your time with something that I don’t value enough to do myself. One of my key business goals is to work as little as I have to and still make an exceptional income. I’m sure you share that goal with me. Who doesn’t want more time for their family, friends, hobbies, special causes – and whatever else floats your boat? So I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money to test and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, which licensing strategies consistently deliver the most profit for the least effort. My bottom line is this: if it can’t be duplicated, easily and with only a minimum of modification, I’m not interested in it. I want only those strategies that are so easy to use and to duplicate for any client in any industry, that they become second nature and I can implement them practically automatically. I realize this may sound theoretical at this point. But believe me, once you begin setting up your own licensing deals, you’ll be elated with how easy it is to get any of my licensing strategies up and bringing in profits with hundreds of different clients in any industry imaginable.


Foundation Principle #3: Licensing requires few or none of your own resources It’s difficult to choose which is my favorite Foundation Principle, but this one is certainly at the top of my list. I mean, how cool is it to be able to get clients to pay you a five to six-figure retainer, plus a share of the profits:

• Without spending a dime of your own money

• With no employees

• Without a web site

• Without a customer list

• Without a product or service of your own

• And without most of the stress of a typical job or business

This is not a trick or a limited concept that I’ll weasel out of later. Most or all of the points I’ve just listed are typical of every licensing deal you set up using my strategies. Part of what you’ll discover is that you never use these strategies with new or start-up businesses. You only use them with businesses that are already viable. Because of this, you use their money, their staff, their product or service, their customer list – and very little or none of your own resources other than your time. At the same time, all your licensing deals are leveraged to be as profitable as possible. By charging a smaller amount for your retainer fee up front, then taking the lion’s share of your fee out of earned revenue or profits, you make it easy for clients to say “yes” to the deal, and you also build in substantial paydays for yourself. I have licensing deals in place that pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars each out of the increased earnings they produce for my clients, whereas if I were to charge a flat fee for the same deal, the client would choke if I told them my fee was $320,000.


Don’t worry, I’ll soon get to all the details of how you strike these deals and give you foolproof strategies for closing them as easily as possible.

Foundation Principle #4: Licensing is a low-traffic business Here’s another principle that puts a big smile on my face! With most businesses, particularly those that are Internet based or have a strong Internet presence, you’re in a constant struggle to drive more and more traffic to your site. This isn’t the case with licensing. I’m happy to tell you that great licensing deals can be consistently made with very little traffic. Let me give you an example that will clearly show you exactly what I mean. Let’s say that you want to license my highly successful marketing campaign for jewelry stores to dozens of jewelry store owners. With a quick web search, you can get a listing of all retail jewelers in any state (I’ll show you how to do this when we get to the chapter on licensing out marketing campaigns). Once you have this listing up on your screen, you copy and paste about 10 physical mailing addresses into a Word document. Then, using the letter you get with this course, you do a quick mail merge and mail out 10 letters. This process couldn’t get much easier. And you did it all without generating any traffic whatsoever. Plus, you didn’t have to pay a dime for a mailing list! Are you beginning to see why there is very little cost or expense involved in landing your licensing deals – and why, like I said in the first paragraph above that this Principle puts a big smile on my face? I sure hope so!

Foundation Principle #5: Start with the easiest deals possible One of the best ways to insure that you’re successful with licensing is to start with the easiest deals that let you take


advantage of the “low hanging fruit” and avoid any problems when you’re first getting started. So what does an “easy deal” look like? Here are a few pointers. First, when we get to the material on the seven Million Dollar Licensing Strategies, you’ll see that there are three that I refer to as the Red Zone Strategies. This term comes from American football and means you’re in the area 20 yards out from the goal line. This is the area where most touchdowns are scored from, so it’s the easiest, surest area to expect to score in. My three Red Zone Strategies are the easiest, surest strategies to use to close an immediate deal. So by focusing on these strategies, you greatly increase your chance for immediate success. Second point. Unless you have a direct contact (hopefully a personal friend or a relative) at a very large corporation, it’s best to start with medium sized companies for your first licensing deals. Even though it usually takes no more time or effort to close a deal with a large corporation, most people feel intimidated working with larger corporations when they’re starting out. I know I did. My first licensing deals were done with medium sized corporations, and most were smaller than I’d ever consider doing business with today. But they gave me the ability to get the experience I needed without feeling intimidated and make some serious money before moving up to bigger and better deals. Remove the stress from your first few deals. Start by using the Red Zone Strategies in licensing deals to medium sized corporations. You can still make a lot of money by following this advice and you’ll establish a solid foundation for landing mega-licensing deals in the near future.

Foundation Principle #6: Business owners love licensing (even if they don’t know it). Business owners – who are the clients you’ll be selling your services to – love licensing. Some don’t know it yet, because they haven’t been involved in a licensing deal up to this point. But once they discover licensing, I’ve never met a


business owner who didn’t love it and want to do more licensing deals. Why? Because, for one, the type of licensing deals you’ll learn here reveal hidden profit centers to business owners that they haven’t thought of. And you help them capitalize on these profit centers with very little cost or risk on the business owner’s part, particularly when compared to working with traditional advertising agencies or consulting firms. Secondly, licensing not only makes their business more profitable, but it also makes the business owner’s life easier. You see, while they immediately recognize the value of the strategy you’re proposing, most businesses don’t have the staff, skills, or time it takes to capitalize on these strategies on their own. So they’re more than happy to have you step in, run the project (even though you’re using their support staff), and pay you handsomely for bringing them additional profits they wouldn’t see without your help. This is an important factor that makes it extremely easy to land lucrative licensing deals as soon as you’ve completed the materials in this course.

Foundation Principle #7: Thousands of businesses are happy to pay top dollar to license proven business ideas and marketing campaigns When people first hear about my licensing strategies, particularly the strategy that involves licensing the same

marketing campaigns to different business owners over and over again, there’s one question that I frequently hear:

“Why in the world would someone pay you good

money for marketing campaign that someone else has

already bought and paid for? Don’t they want a brand

new campaign of their own?”

I always answer this question by asking them a question of my own. “If you owned a business and were about to sink $25,000 or so into a marketing campaign, what would you

rather invest your time and hard-earned money in – a marketing campaign that has been proven to produce stellar results in a number of different industries, or a brand new,


shiny campaign that has a much higher risk of not producing the results you want?” It’s important to understand this critical point. Not only will it help you close more deals, but it will produce a lot more satisfied clients for you, once they start ringing up all their new sales.

Foundation Principle #8: Look for the long-haul deals Long-haul deals are the deals you’ll make with businesses that lead to more and more deals. I advise you to seek out these types of deals as frequently as you can. Deals like these have built in profits that are easier to generate than constantly looking for new clients. Once a client has profited from one of the licensing strategies, they’ll be strongly inclined to do another project using another strategy. Because you don’t have to go through all the work of seeking out a new client, and you’re already familiar with how the existing client’s business operates, these deals require far less of your time. And an existing client is usually much quicker to put another strategy into action, having already benefited from a previous strategy. The good news is, every deal has the potential to become a long-haul deal. For the very reason I stated above – the fact that an existing client has already produced additional profits – you’ll find very few clients that aren’t interested in engaging in a second, third, and fourth project. Here’s another reason to aim for long-haul deals. People frequently ask me how I keep my clients honest about the profits they report to me and the amount I get paid for my monthly share of those profits. By letting a client know that you only do one project at a time, you have a built in “honesty detector”. Any client who is banking profits from your efforts is much more likely to pay you your fair share knowing that you have another highly profitable strategy waiting in the wings for them once the project you’re currently working on is completed.


Foundation Principle #9: Always start a client with a single strategy As a marketing consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to help hundreds of other consultants improve their marketing skills over the past 20 years. Interestingly, this includes many other marketing consultants, as well as consultants of all types. You see, most consultants are excellent at providing their services, but they fall severely short when it comes to marketing their services. One of the biggest mistakes I see all types of consultants make with their marketing is attempting to offer a “total solution”. They meet with a client and propose to solve every one of the client’s problems from soup to nuts. By doing this, they are unwittingly driving off business – tons of business – they could have otherwise closed. The reason why is quite simple: few businesses are prepared to deal with more than one or two problems at a time, regardless of how important each of those problems may be. When faced with the overwhelming task of a major overhaul, most business owners or managers back away and end up doing nothing. This does not have to happen to you when marketing your licensing services if you simply understand that the most effective way – actually, make that the only effective

way – to market is to start each client with a single strategy. Please re-read that last paragraph again. It may be the most important piece of advice I give you in this entire program. Because if you can’t sell your licensing services, you really don’t have a business. By offering your clients just one strategy at a time, you make their decision easy. Now, all they have to decide is, “Would I like to increase my profits substantially just by doing one joint venture that my licensing specialist will engineer for me (or any other strategy), or would I rather just let those profits evaporate into thin air?” Faced with this type of decision, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get. They don’t have to think about 3, 4, or


5 different choices. They don’t have to figure out how to juggle other projects to be able to make all those new initiatives happen. All they have to do is decide, “Do I want to put more money in my bank account or not, simply by doing one thing”. How much easier can it get? One more important point. Each single project you do for a client is always the set-up for the next project. It only stands to reason that if a licensing project puts extra money in the business owner’s pocket that they wouldn’t otherwise have seen, they’ll be eager to do the next project. As long as each project continues to be profitable, the next one leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on – just like starting to knock down a long line of dominoes by tipping over the first one. By using my “one project at a time” approach, you actually end up with far more clients, and far more projects with each of them, than you ever would with the ill-fated “total solution” approach.

Foundation Principle #10: Action is the

determining factor in your success If you’re the kind of person who plans and plans, then plans some more, then plans even more just to be sure, I can practically guarantee that you won’t succeed at licensing. Look, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with planning. But people who over-plan almost always do so in order to avoid taking action. If you never take action, you never have to feel the fear of stepping off into the unknown. If you never take action, you never have to risk failing. But if you never take action, nothing will ever happen. As Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. Showing up means just doing what needs to be done. Taking some action, as modest or mundane as that action may be.


Here’s one thing I can promise you: if you take action, you will make mistakes. Here’s a second thing I can promise you: if you take action, not all of your licensing efforts will be successful. I know that not all of my own licensing efforts are successful. But I learn from each one and if a deal doesn’t come together, or falls apart during implementation, I move on as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean that I’m happy about it, but you can’t dwell on errors or broken deals. You simply learn from them and move on. Most importantly, from teaching thousands of people in various workshops over the years, I’ve learned that the key factor that distinguishes someone who is bound to be successful from someone else who has little chance of success, is the ability to take action. Sure you should plan. But just enough to get started. Nothing ever goes according to plan. Once you’ve taken just a step or two in your plan, new information is revealed that forces you to modify your plan. But if you never take those steps, you’ll never know what to modify, you’ll never make any progress, and you certainly will never be successful. Commit now to taking action with what you learn in this program. Even the smallest, simplest action is all you need to get started and on your way to success.

Foundation Principle #11: Cashing in on the Law of Averages This Principle follows closely on the heels of Principle #9. By understanding the Law of Averages, it can give you the motivation you need to consistently be taking action. Top sales people realize that the Law of Averages can work for you or against you. For example, if it takes 10 cold calls per day to close a deal, the Law of Averages can be used to leverage a sales person’s closings. Don’t worry, cold calling is not a technique I encourage or teach in this program, I’m simply using it for this example. Anyway, if a sales person skips just two of those calls per


day, that’s 10 fewer calls per week, meaning one less deal closed. Over a period of a year, that’s 50 fewer deals. On the other hand, if that sales person spends less time chatting over coffee in the break room and makes just two more calls per day, they will increase their closed deals by 50 more per year. So the Law of Averages works strongly in your favor if you put it to work for you. Now, obviously, the numbers in my example above are hypothetical, but they give you a clear picture of what the Law of Averages can do for you. I’ve personally used this knowledge many times on days where I just don’t seem to have as much energy as I usually do. I know that if I put in my time to research just 3 more companies I can send my licensing pitch to, I’ll match or exceed my sales projections. So I make a little extra effort to get that research done, knowing that it will pay off in the short term with a new client or two, and in the long run with clients who become “long haul” repeat buyers over and over. Be sure to use this knowledge of the Law of Averages whenever you feel scared about taking action or feel a bit more sluggish than usual. It can’t fail – and you can’t fail either when you put the Law of Averages to work for you.

Foundation Principle #12: Why self-confidence can be your worst enemy Everyone want to have self-confidence, right? And the more the better. But let me warn you, there is a dark side to self-confidence. And if you don’t understand this dark side and do everything you can to avoid it, it can flatten your success with licensing before you know what’s hit you. Let me give you a specific, painful example of my own to illustrate exactly what I mean. Earlier this year, I closed what appeared to be a perfect deal with one of the largest software distributors in the world. I was going to drive new traffic to their web site for a five-figure retainer, plus 50 cents for every name added to their various subscriber lists.


If everything went according to plan, I’d make a minimum of $600,000 per year for at least 3 years from this deal. Needless to say, I was pretty excited and started making plans to leverage this success with other software companies in non-competing markets once I had the results of this deal to impress them with. The contract was signed, I received my retainer and used part of it to buy myself a new wrist watch in celebration of this exciting deal. Then my increased self-confidence struck a nasty blow. Since this deal was signed and would immediately begin paying out $50,000 or so per month to me, and since I’d leverage the results into 2, 3, 10 or 20 more deals, I could now coast a bit and cut back on my lead generation efforts. BIG mistake! This project, which was incredibly easy and was supposed to be implemented within one month, missed its launch date. Something about a reshuffling in management at the client’s company. Then the next target date was also missed as the marketing manager I was working with was having health problems. Now the delay had grown to two months. The third target date also passed with no action taken. The person filling in for the ill marketing manager wanted to go in another direction and hopefully gain more attention for her leadership ability. The end result is that they thanked me and cancelled the project after four months of delays (I did get to keep the retainer, however). But the critical point is that my self-confidence did me in. At the time I closed the deal, I was feeling on top of the world. It was the third deal I had closed in two months, and in my own mind, it was looking like I could do no wrong. Plus, I had all those other software deals waiting in the wings for me, so why not relax, goof off a bit (OK, a lot) more than usual, and enjoy the situation? The problem is, my timing was way off the mark. It would have been one thing to let my self-confidence affect my actions once the project was implemented and paying my monthly fees for a couple of months. But to give in to this


burst of false pride before any concrete results occurred, was a huge mistake. Consequently, I didn’t make my sales projections for the next couple of months and I had to scramble to get my lead generation efforts back up to speed. So beware of this costly indulgence and try to avoid it at all costs. Once you land a deal, take yourself and a loved one out to a nice dinner to celebrate, then get back to work. Spending money that isn’t already in the bank – as you’ve seen from my example – is a costly practice.

Conclusion So there you have it – 12 Foundation Principles that will serve you well right now, and for as long as you’re enjoying the profits available to you with licensing. My advice is to review these Principles again right now, and then at least twice each year. I personally review them about once each quarter. It helps keep me on track, reinvigorates me when my batteries need recharging, and never fails to stimulate new ideas I can use to improve my licensing business even further. I’m confident they’ll do the same for you!


Chapter 4 Licensing Smart - How to build a profitable licensing business as quickly as possible

As you make your way through this course, you’ll see that I’ve carefully designed it to give you everything you need to be successful at licensing. But I’ve also designed it to be as compact and devoid of filler as possible. Nothing bothers me more than purchasing a how-to product to find that it’s been artificially pumped up in size with boring, repetitive material – or worse, the same material presented in different formats (audio, print, video) to give it the appearance of being more substantial than it really is. So I’ve left out the filler and included everything that you need to be successful, but only in its most clear and useful format. But I didn’t do this just for you. You see, I use these exact same strategies and marketing tools in my own licensing business. And I don’t have the time to reinvent the process every time I need to use it. So I’ve developed a simple, powerful, and repeatable system that you can use over and over again with all of the strategies. Now, there are slight variations for some of the strategies, and I’ll cover all of them, but for the most part, the process you’ll use to market one licensing strategy is nearly identical to the process you’ll use for all of the other strategies as well. Because I’ve designed the marketing materials this way, you can be up and running your licensing business in the shortest time possible. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, I’m going to start by showing you three “Red Zone” strategies that are the easiest of all seven strategies to implement. And I’m going to throw one more curve into the mix that I’ll tell you about in just a moment. But first, here’s a list of all seven of the Million Dollar Licensing Strategies again:


1. License successful marketing campaigns to hundreds of businesses

2. Toll Gate Joint Ventures

3. Past customer reactivation

4. Product customization

5. Fee-based lead generation service

6. Other people’s expertise

7. Business cloning

Please note that the first three strategies appear in bold text. As you may have already guessed, these are the “Red Zone” strategies. These three strategies are the easiest to pitch to clients, the easiest to implement, and all three are extremely profitable. So they’re given special emphasis.

A slight curve And now for that curve I mentioned a minute ago. Of the three Red Zone strategies, there’s one that’s even easier to implement than the other two. Because it is exceptionally easy to get clients to agree to use it and the implementation is remarkably simple, I’m going to switch the order in which I teach you how to use and market the seven strategies. So we’re going to start with Strategy #3: Past customer reactivation. In the next few chapters, I’ll show you exactly what to do to implement this strategy. You’ll get all the details on what this strategy is, why it works so well, precisely how to implement it, and a comprehensive step-by-step blueprint (along with all the marketing documents you’ll need) to win licensing clients for this strategy.

Accelerating your learning curve One last point. Because the core process for marketing all 7 licensing strategies is essentially the same, once you’ve finished the chapters on marketing Strategy #3, you’ll have


mastered 95% of what you’ll need to market all the other strategies as well. In this way, your learning curve is accelerated considerably. So you’ll spend a lot less time poring over meaningless material and get to profiting from these strategies as quickly as possible.


Chapter 13 Toll Gate Joint Ventures

This is the second of the three “Red Zone” licensing strategies. These first three strategies are the easiest to sell to your clients, and therefore, the easiest to profit from right away. In addition, another hallmark of the “Red Zone” strategies is that you can easily build a complete multi-million dollar business around any one of them without ever using any of the other six strategies. So these three strategies deserve added emphasis and attention before we get to the other four strategies. Let’s take a look at all the details of how this powerful strategy works.

A quick review of joint venture theory For the sake of review, a joint venture is generally defined as offering your product to a joint venture partner’s customers and paying your partner a share of your profits, or offering a partner’s product to your customers and you get paid a share of their profits. Simple, right? Yes and no. In theory, joint ventures are simple. But in actual practice you run into two significant problems. The first problem is that your potential joint venture partners often have limited time in their schedules to make the offer to their customers. This is particularly true with online marketers who tend to email to their lists frequently. They could easily be scheduled out for many months ahead. The second problem, and one that is far more serious, is that you can quickly run out of potential partners to joint venture with. If you have only one product or service, there will always be a limited universe of potential partners to joint venture with. And when you combine this with the delays


that often occur due to potential partners’ schedules being filled, this problem can severely impact the value of joint ventures to a business.

A powerful solution – Toll Gate Joint Ventures Toll Gate Joint Ventures go a long way toward eliminating both problems. So this advanced form of joint venture is far more profitable than standard joint ventures. Let’s take a look at the very simple theory of how Toll Gate Joint Ventures work, and then I’ll get down to all the details of using them to make a small fortune with your licensing business. There are two basic premises that make Toll Gate Joint Ventures so powerful:

1. You don’t need a customer list of your own

2. You don’t need a product or service of your own Instead of using your own list or your own product (or service), you find one business with a great customer list, a second business with a great product, then create a joint venture between them. This puts you in the middle “toll gate” position where you collect a share of the profits from both sides. With these two powerful factors working for you, Toll Gate Joint Ventures solve both of the problems inherent in standard joint ventures. First, because you have an unlimited universe of potential deals, if a project looks great but can’t be implemented for a number of months, you just put it on your schedule for later and move on to those deals that can be implemented right away. Second, with this unlimited universe of deals available to you, you never have to worry about finding more partners. In fact, in just a moment when I show you precisely how to find hundreds of companies to do deals with, you’ll discover that what actually happens is that you have so much choice, you have to manage it properly to keep from becoming distracted and fragmented.


Toll Gate Joint Ventures are one of my favorite strategies. They are extremely easy to put together and can quickly put tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in your pocket. But as simple as the theory sounds, there are a number of nuances for optimizing your ability to find as many deals as you can and to make each one as profitable as possible.

Multiplying your earning power exponentially The advantages of Toll Gate Joint Ventures that I’ve just shown you are extremely powerful. But it gets even better still. The real money in any business comes when that business reaches a certain point of “business maturity”, where it has a balance of solid products and loyal customers. It also has the finances to operate efficiently and effectively, as well as the proper staff to carry out the daily operations. Ultimately, what this means is that all of these assets are now Owned by the company. However, Ownership is accompanied by tremendous risk, a burden of debt, and dozens of management headaches. But when you orchestrate Toll Gate Joint Ventures, something nearly magical happens. Two companies now loan you Control and Use of some of their most valuable assets. Yet you have no risk whatsoever! By putting together these lucrative deals – by being granted Control and Use of assets that have taken years or decades to accumulate – you exponentially multiply your reach into any market, your resources (all of the resources your clients loan you), and your ability to amass substantial profits quickly. On your own, it would take years to accumulate these types of assets, and the risks could be grave. But with this strategy, you let your clients do all of the work up front to build a successful business, invest all the time and money, hire and fire people until they have just the right staff, and develop the products and solid reputation that can be leveraged with multiple joint venture partners.


You then capture all the benefit of their hard work – through Control and Use – after your clients have reached the point of “business maturity”. This gives you the ability to function as if you were a much larger company because you have the Control and Use of assets equivalent to being two large corporations for every deal you put together! The leverage you gain is nothing short of amazing. If you were to put together 5 or 6 Toll Gate Joint Ventures each year, the combined income from these deals would easily exceed the income of the highest paid CEO of any of the companies you’re working with. Simply put, I’ll take Control and Use over Ownership

any day. With this in mind, let’s now take a look at exactly what you need to do to make Toll Gate Joint Ventures a big part of your licensing business. We’ll start by examining a powerful mindset that drives this strategy and many of the other Million Dollar Licensing Strategies as well. This will give you a critical insight into why licensing is the single greatest business opportunity available to people today.

Strategic thinking – why Toll Gate Joint Ventures are like printing your own money What I’m about to reveal to you is the single most important point in this entire course. Once you understand it, you’ll gain a powerful strategic approach to licensing that’s more important than all of the techniques combined. This concept holds true for Toll Gate Joint Ventures, but for all the other licensing strategies as well. So here it is – please read the sentence below two or three times, as it’s that important to your success. I call it Serling’s Maxim of Ultimate Leveraged Licensing:

Any company with a great customer list is really

much more than just a company – it is the foundation for a powerful distribution network.

What this means is that each client actually represents the potential for dozens of deals, not just a single deal. You


see, a business with a great list is actually a distribution

network capable of selling dozens of additional products and services to their customers. So instead of finding just one joint venture partner for a company with a great list, you could easily find dozens. This obviously increases the overall value to you of every client you land. But in addition, it also reduces the effort it takes to put Toll Gate Joint Venture deals together. Let’s say I have a client with a massive list of customers interested in self-improvement. If I find them a partner with a great new stress reduction system and both sides make a handsome profit they never would have seen without this Toll Gate Joint Venture, three powerful benefits now kick in. Ultimate Leveraged Licensing Benefit #1: The company whose customers we sold the product to is going to welcome any product I now come up with that’s matched to their list. I don’t have to waste hours convincing them to test and I don’t have to endure a delay of months. I’m now a proven resource who has the rapt attention of my client. This converts that client from being a one-shot deal to an ongoing distribution network. I now have full access to making dozens of offers to this client’s customer list. That client is now a distribution network for every product I can find that’s a good fit with their list. And as I’ll show you in a moment, there are always dozens of products and services that are a good fit for any list. It really doesn’t get much better or much easier than this! Ultimate Leveraged Licensing Benefit #2: The next benefit kicks in when I begin to approach other companies with products I want to offer to my client’s customers. To be perfectly frank, the first deal you put together is almost always the hardest, simply because you have very little credibility in the market. But once you’ve put one successful deal together, it provides you with proof you can use to dramatically increase the number of deals you make and decrease the time it takes to make those deals. So once I’ve had a hit with my first deal which was selling the stress reduction system to my client’s customers,


can you imagine what happens when I approach a second company to cut a deal to sell their goal setting system to my client’s list? All I have to do is show them how easily the company with the stress reduction system made tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit, and the deal nearly closes itself. Ultimate Leveraged Licensing Benefit #3: Now, let’s jump back to the company with the stress reduction tapes. After the first deal has deposited a nice chunk of money in their bank account, they’ll be salivating for you to line up even more deals. After all, who doesn’t want more profit that’s so easy to come by?

Exponential leverage – become a “distributor of distribution” When used strategically, Toll Gate Joint Ventures allow you to leverage your efforts exponentially by commanding your own “distributor of distribution” center. On the one side, you gain a powerful distribution network with each client who has a great list. With just a handful of clients, you could easily orchestrate dozens of deals for many years to come. On the flip side, with each client that has a great product, you gain the ability to create Toll Gate Joint Ventures to sell it to dozens or even hundreds of companies’ lists. The highly profitable fact is, you can leverage distribution from either side, or both sides of every deal, and exponentially increase the number of deals you get.

How to master the skill of being a “distributor of distribution” Here’s a real life example that will clearly demonstrate the profit potential of harnessing the power of distribution. My son recently started a clothing line for offroad racing enthusiasts – people who love to drive loud, fast trucks, sand rails, motorcycles, and all terrain vehicles in hot, dusty


desert climates. He’s essentially turning his passion into a business. While his initial sales have been alright, a major piece of the puzzle is gaining distribution in retail stores where offroad enthusiasts buy clothing. Right now, he’s on the brink of closing a deal to get his clothing in half a dozen stores of a chain that has over 40 stores. If that goes well, then they’ll roll out to more and more stores until his clothing is in all their stores. This is great because it gives my son a critical piece of the puzzle – expanded distribution. And expanded distribution means access to tens of thousands of customers who he otherwise couldn’t reach. However, with this expanded distribution comes far more risk. While the chain is smart to test in a small group of stores to begin with, this still represents the largest single order my son has ever had. And it will require a significant outlay of cash, since all retailers expect to be given generous payment terms, usually 60 days after they receive the merchandise. There’s also the chance that the clothing won’t sell well, and then he’d be stuck with a lot of inventory that’s tying up his much-needed cash. But even if his clothes sell like hotcakes, which seems fairly likely, he still has a number of attendant problems. Large retail chains are known for being what’s called “slow pay but good pay”. Meaning that even when they agree to pay you in 60 days, you won’t get stiffed, but you’re more likely to get paid in 90 to 120 days. But once the clothing is selling well, which is usually before the 60 day payment period has elapsed, the retail chain will want to place his clothes in another 10 to 20 stores. At this point, my son hasn’t been paid a penny, but he now has to bankroll an even larger order! Not to mention that he may need to find additional vendors to manufacture the clothes, coordinate shipping to a couple dozen locations, handle substantially more paperwork, and on and on. Phew, it’s enough to make me want to take a nap just thinking about it!


But what would happen if he chose to

leverage distribution instead?

Once he’s gained distribution in this retail chain, whether or not his clothes do well, my son has now gained a far greater asset. He has access to a powerful distribution

center. You see, he’s completely dialed into the offroad racing industry and knows just about everyone in the industry. He could easily put together deals to get many companies’ products offered to the customer list of this large retailer. He would be in the Toll Gate position, collecting a share of the profits from both sides. There are also hundreds of non-related, lifestyle type products that appeal to the participants of that retail chain. Many of these are produced by smaller companies that don’t have access to that type of distribution, but have products with strong appeal in that market. These products represent dozens of additional opportunities for Toll Gate Joint Venture deals for my son. And don’t forget the flip side. For every product that sells well, my son can leverage those results to cut even more deals to sell them to other companies’ customers. Do you see how a single Toll Gate Joint Venture deal can easily become a self-perpetuating chain of dozens or hundreds of deals with no practical end in sight? Now that’s the true meaning of leverage.

A final note on leveraging distribution When viewed through a strategic lens, rather than a tactical viewpoint, the advantages that harnessing an unending distribution chain – or multiple chains – gives you is incomparable. Are you beginning to see the vast range of possibilities here? By now, it should be getting clearer and clearer on why I truly mean it when I tell you that Toll Gate Joint Ventures alone can be the foundation of a highly successful, highly profitable licensing business.


Next, let’s take a look at some of the types of Toll Gate Joint Ventures that are just waiting for you to capitalize on.

A universe of possibilities for finding joint venture prospects When people hear that joint ventures play a big role in my business, many of them want to know how I manage to pull it off. They tell me that they’ve approached other companies to sell their product to, but very few of these deals come together. There are two primary reasons for this. First, they aren’t approaching these deals in the right way. You won’t have to worry about that, because this course will give you everything you need to approach prospects effectively and close as many joint venture deals as possible. However, the real root of their problem is that they quickly run out of companies to approach for their deals. This occurs partially because, as I mentioned above, there is always a limited universe of potential partners for any product or service. But equally important, most businesses have such limited vision when it comes to joint ventures, that they fail to see the wealth of opportunities available to them. For me, it’s just the opposite. The opportunities are endless. When I sit down to create a list of new Toll Gate Joint Venture prospects, the number and variety of opportunities I come up with are mind boggling. Want to know exactly how I do this? Great – because that’s precisely what I’m going to show you in the next couple of sections of this chapter.

Two exercises to build your joint venture muscles The greatest skill you’ll need to master for being successful with joint ventures is the ability to spot opportunities where no one else sees them. Fortunately, this is extremely easy to do, primarily because very few people even think about looking for these opportunities. But


equally important, there are a couple of simple exercises you can do quickly and easily that will pump up your joint venture muscles like crazy. By taking the time to do these exercises – and by using them whenever you want to brainstorm new joint venture opportunities – you’ll gain the vision that’s needed to spot hundreds or thousands of lucrative opportunities you can turn into Toll Gate Joint Venture deals. Few people will ever know this is even possible, let alone understand how to do it, which gives you an immense, almost unfair advantage. Ready to rock? Then let’s go!

Joint venture muscle blaster #1 Both of these exercises use a valuable tool that’s easily available to anyone: the Yellow Pages. And while you can do this with any Yellow Pages, online or offline, I prefer to use a physical book. I also recommend that if possible, you get a copy of a Yellow Pages directory for a reasonably large city in the United States. American businesses advertise with far greater frequency than businesses in other countries. So if you have a Yellow Pages directory from a reasonably large city in the U.S., it makes these exercises all the more effective. However, if you live outside the United States, it will probably be easier to do these exercises with the online versions, which can easily be found by searching on the term “Yellow Pages for X”, where “X” is the name of any large city in the States. Here are the directions for the first muscle blaster exercise. Step 1: Grab your yellow pages directory and randomly stick your finger in three different spots. Each time you stick your finger into a new page, write down the type of business you land on. If you’re online, you’ll just page through the listings quickly and stop at three random places. So after three random sticks or clicks, your list might be: dry cleaners, window replacement services, and veterinarians.


It really doesn’t matter what three business types you come up with. Just make sure you have three different business types. Step 2: Now, take your three business types and for each one, spend 5 to 10 minutes flipping through the Yellow Pages (or clicking through it if you’re online). Skim through the pages quickly. You can either go through them in order or jump around from section to section. On each page that you come to, there will be a number of different types of businesses listed. Write down as many of these business types as possible that have products or services that could be offered to the customers of the business type you’re focusing on. Before you know it, you’ll have a large list of potential prospects to create deals with for all three of your main business types. Another variation of this is to take any business magazine and randomly stick your finger into a page. Find the largest advertisement on that page and write down the type of business it’s for. For example, let’s say its “Retirement Planning”. Now, starting at the beginning of the magazine, page all the way through the magazine and look at the ads on each page. Make a list of all the businesses with products and services that could be offered to the customer list of the Retirement Planning company. Again, you’ll come up with a wealth of ideas in short order. By the way, this variation is particularly valuable if you already know which business category you’d like to specialize in. Get copies of all the magazines that pertain to your category and run this exercise to come up with a valuable list of prospects you can work with from both sides of the Toll Gate Joint Venture strategy. I promised you when you purchased this course that the techniques I’d teach you are powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive. It doesn’t get much easier, effective or inexpensive than this! And I guarantee that when you do either variation of this exercise, you’ll be shocked by the


quantity and quality of great opportunities it opens your eyes to.

Joint venture muscle blaster #2 For this exercise, grab your Yellow Pages again. We’re going to add even more high quality prospects to your list – and more importantly, yet another skill that will be extremely profitable for your licensing business for many years to come. Step 1: Stick your finger in any page of the Yellow Pages (or click any page if you’re online). Pick just one business that’s on that page. For our example, let’s say you pick Carpet Installers. Step 2: Now, make a list of all the things that people buy when they’re about to have new carpet installed. Think about everything they buy before the purchase and after the purchase. In case you’re having trouble envisioning how this is done, let me give you a real life example that has cost me more than I care to think about. Last year, I wanted a new big-screen plasma TV for a Super Bowl party I was planning on having. I cleverly made my case to my wife: you’ll be able to watch the food shows you love and see every glorious detail even better… the surround sound will make the classical music you play in the morning a sheer joy to listen to… we’ll both lose weight by staying home to watch rented movies more often instead of eating all those Junior Mints I normally buy at the movies. You must admit, I came up with a very compelling case! Obviously, it worked, because soon after, I bought a beautiful new big-screen plasma TV and surround sound home theatre system. Boy was I ever feeling like a marketing genius! Then, reality reared its ugly head. According to my wife, the table my new gem of a TV was on was all wrong


for our family room. We simply HAD to have a new table. $4,000 later, the new table was delivered. Now we had a serious problem that simply could not go uncorrected. Because of the slightly different color of the new table from the old table – which only a trained artist would ever notice – we needed a new couch and chairs to restore everything to perfect, color coordinated order. I can’t even bear to mention how much that little purchase cost me. Of course, with these new additions, the paintings, throw pillow, and area rug were all wrong and they, too, had to be replaced. Not to mention that the walls now needed updating, so an interior decorator was hired to select just the right tone of off-white to repaint the wrong tone of off-white that was currently on the walls. It continued on – the coffee table was recently replaced, as was the curio cabinet. Oh yeah, the stone tile floor had to be stripped and refinished too. It’s been nearly 10 months since the Super Bowl and the buying frenzy continues. Is there no end in sight! Sadly, painfully, this is a true story. I know I’ll manage to recover somehow, but within this story is an important point for your licensing business. It demonstrates how many different yet allied products and services exist any time a purchase is being made. And if you use this as a guide when you do this exercise, and allow your mind to conjure up all the possibilities, you too will be as expert at identifying joint venture opportunities as my wife certainly has proven to be.

Two insanely easy, high-profit sources of Toll Gate Joint Venture deals Now we come to two areas that are so powerful – and so obvious – you could easily find yourself wondering, “Why didn’t I think of these?” But don’t worry, what’s really important is that you’ll be able to mine these two powerful resources month-in and month-out for as long as you’re in business.


On their own, these two Toll Gate Power Sources could provide all the prospects you’ll ever need for both sides of your deals. So let’s take a look at them.

Toll Gate Power Source #1: Magazines and Trade Journals In Chapter 12, I mentioned that if you were looking for prospects for Past Customer Reactivation (or really for any

of the seven different strategies), and your hobby was golf, by going through the various golf magazines, you’d find dozens of prospects. Well, the same holds true for Toll Gate Joint Ventures. Any magazine, consumer or business, is a great source of finding and matching up partners. Take any space ad in a magazine, then thumb through the pages looking at the other ads and you have one of the richest, instant sources of partners you could ever hope for. The same goes for trade journals. For example, if you’d like to find dozens of potential partners in the area of software, just pick up copies of the trade journals for software developers. You can find these by searching on “software development trade journals” on your favorite search engine. Some trade journals have part or all of each monthly issue online, but I find it easier and more stimulating to go through the physical issue. Most trade journals are free, so that’s an added bonus as well. Not only are the ads in trade journals a great source of potential partners for your deals, but so are the articles. Each article generally lists a number of companies within the article, so you can compile a nice list fairly quickly with just 3 or 4 articles. As I mentioned, these have to be the easiest sources of finding partners for both sides of your deals that you could ever hope for. But don’t overlook them because they are so easy. Magazines and trade journals provide you with a vast list of prospects that can make you wealthy.


Toll Gate Power Source #2: Trade Shows Trade shows are another fantastic source of hundreds of potential partners. However, I use them very differently than you might think. Forget about actually going to trade shows. That’s expensive and time consuming. Instead, request an exhibitor’s kit for the trade show. It will include a directory of every company exhibiting at the show. If the directory hasn’t been published yet, most trade shows publish the preliminary list of exhibitors on their web site in order to attract even more exhibitors. You can easily hire someone on Craigslist for a few dollars to compile the entire list for you from the trade show’s web site. Whether you’re using the directory provided by the trade show, or the list you’ve compiled from their web site, both are rich sources of leads for both sides of your Toll Gate Joint Ventures.

A catalog of the types of Toll Gate Joint Ventures you could do Ready for even more ideas for highly profitable Toll Gate Joint Venture opportunities? I knew you would be. So strap on your seat belt, because I’ve got a wild ride for you here. In no particular order, here are some big ideas you can use that will make your joint venture efforts even more profitable. As you already know, I love the leverage that Toll Gate Joint Ventures give you. Yet even with everything I’ve already shown you, there are ways to get more leverage – what I like to call “ultra leverage”. Here are a number of techniques that let you do that.

The many-to-one technique Remember I told you that Toll Gate Joint Ventures involve you putting one company with a great list together with another company with a great product? Well, why limit it to just one company’s product when you could have many?


For example, you could enlist 5 or 10 companies that make products for cats to all chip in to create a mini-catalog. It could be a physical catalog or a pdf. Then approach the publisher of a magazine for cat lovers (or a web site for cat lovers) and close a Toll Gate Joint Venture deal to send the catalog to their list. The orders all come into the magazine’s staff (online or offline) for perfect tracking. Or, you could put up a dedicated web site for just these orders. The cost would be minimal and you would be able to track all orders for both sides. Now, not only will this work with products for cat lovers, but there are also dog lovers, horse lovers, hamster lovers and more. Or how about doing the same thing for hobbies or sports – everything from tennis, golf, and gambling to knitting, gardening, and cooking. The sky is the limit with this one! Give your brain some time to noodle with this one and you’ll be surprised by how many great applications you come up with.

Finder’s fee joint ventures There are never enough hours in a day to find all the joint venture opportunities available to you. Remember, once you’ve done a joint venture with a company’s customer list, you now have access to a massive distribution network you can market to over and over again. Let’s say you’ve successfully sold computer back-up systems to the customers of a company that sells small business accounting software. Run a small, low-cost ad in the business sections and sports sections of large city newspapers offering to pay a finder’s fee to anyone who brings products to your attention that are ideal for small business owners. You’ll definitely get a lot of leads that you never would have considered. And you’ll also get responses from companies that would like nothing more than to have you put a Toll Gate Joint Venture together for them.


Why daily newspapers? Because they are cheap to run your ads in, your ad can be running just a few days after you pay for it, and the response is good. You’ll want to use the business section and/or sports section of the paper because studies have shown that these are the two sections most frequently read by business owners. And of the two, the sports section is read more frequently than the business section! Another variation of this is to run small space ads or classified ads in business magazines or trade journals stating that you have a significant distribution channel (not a joint venture partner) and you’re looking for products that would appeal to small business owners. You’ll get plenty of good leads this way as well.

The “one-step-removed” technique I’m always on the lookout for possibilities that aren’t necessarily an obvious fit at first, but make perfect sense once you think about it. For example, there’s a great guitar trio where I live that plays a lot of local venues. They make most of their income by selling their CDs at concerts that they give in our area. Although they would like wider distribution, there are very few record and CD stores anymore, as nearly everything has gone online. I suggested to the leader of the group that he go to the owners of local gourmet markets in the area and ask if they would be willing to put a rack with his CDs near the checkout stands. The market agreed and the band’s CDs will soon be offered. What’s next? I told the leader of the group that he should create a second rack with CDs from other local bands, place it next to his existing rack in the gourmet markets, and take a share of their profits. Remember, he now controls a powerful distribution network that he could easily benefit from. We’ll see if he’s up to the challenge. This concept extends far beyond local borders. One of the key points I want to make to you is that the more you can take these ideas and expand on them for yourself, the


more successful your licensing business will be. So try to expand your horizons and think about other ways of using these ideas. For example, if I wanted to take this globally, I might approach a company that publishes cookbooks and have them put together a special compilation of the best low-salt, low-fat recipes from their existing books and private brand it to large HMOs. HMOs are in the business of preventative medicine. They know that the more they can prevent disease from occurring in their patients, the more profitable the HMO will be. The HMO could buy these books at a bulk discount and give them away to all their patients. Or they could use them as a bonus in their ads to sign up new patients. There are many more ways the HMOs – and other businesses – could use these as well. How many ways can you come up with?

Thinking beyond the obvious – using psychographics to create powerful joint venture opportunities A common thread that runs through most of the techniques I’ve shown you for finding joint venture opportunities up to this point is that they focus on finding related products or services to sell to a company’s customers. But there’s another powerful technique that yields exceptional opportunities when you apply psychographics to find seemingly unrelated products or services that are actually an excellent fit for offering to a company’s customers. Psychographics can be defined as the lifestyle characteristics of a particular group. For example, vegetarian restaurants tend to be frequented by people who are health conscious. You couldn’t say the same about the regular customers of donut shops. But in addition, as a lifestyle characteristic, people who frequent vegetarian restaurants are known to be environmentally conscious, whereas you couldn’t come to the same conclusion about donut lovers. So products that


are environment-friendly would be a good match for the clientele of vegetarian restaurants. Similarly, people who drive luxury cars lead an affluent lifestyle. The psychographics of this category show that they would be far better candidates for designer clothing, high-end jewelry, cosmetic surgery, and tax shelters, among other things, than other psychographic categories. To apply this knowledge to joint venture opportunities, you could use it to extend the types of companies you put together for your deals. For example, let’s say a gourmet restaurant where the bill averages $250 per couple for dinner wants to build its clientele. You could put together a deal with a dealer of high-end automobiles where they would give away a gift certificate worth $100 to Le Chateau Riche restaurant. Let’s say the auto dealer sells BMWs. They could offer the $100 coupons to any registered Mercedes or Lexus owner who comes into the dealership to test drive a BMW. The dealer would sell more cars and the restaurant would gross $150 on each visit after the discount, plus all the additional revenue from the repeat business. If you received 5% of the sales price of each automobile and 50% of the cost of the first dinner at the restaurant, you could easily pocket five or six-figures for this one deal. You could then multiply your income by:

• Bringing more deals for other products to the BMW dealer

• Offering the restaurant’s coupons to other businesses, such as high-end jewelers

• Putting similar deals together for more luxury auto dealers and gourmet restaurants

Here again, you’re turning a single deal into an expansive distribution network that yields dozens of lucrative deals for the least effort possible. Not a bad way to go!


You can also do straight Toll Gate Joint Ventures rather than using a discount coupon. It’s really up to you how you choose to implement the deal. Here are a few examples of how this technique could be used with straight Toll Gate Joint Ventures:

• Luxury auto dealers could notify their customers about an estate planner who specializes in asset protection and sheltering high income individuals from taxes.

• Fast food restaurants could offer a daily special to people who are having a quick oil change done over their lunch hours.

• Electronics stores could offer home theater systems ideal for watching sports to the families of kids in softball, soccer, and basketball leagues.

As with many of the techniques I’ve shown you, the possibilities are endless. All it takes is thinking a bit more broadly about the attributes of certain groups’ lifestyles to come up with dozens of ideal joint venture opportunities.

Working with associations Associations are an excellent distribution network for all kinds of joint ventures. They have distribution to large numbers of members and usually have immense credibility with those members. This is a great combination to leverage in your behalf. The key factor that makes associations so valuable for Toll Gate Joint Ventures is understanding that associations generate nearly all of their income from membership fees and membership renewals. Because of this, they are usually very open to anything that brings them additional, non-membership fee revenue. When you bring a joint venture offer to an association, always mention that you have a way to generate substantial “non-membership fee revenue” and that it’s extremely easy for them to benefit from this. I’ve done a lot of joint ventures with associations and I can tell you from


experience that the association director’s eyes light up like floodlights when they hear this. Associations are also great prospects because they’re so easy to find. A quick check of my Yellow Pages here in San Diego shows listings for 46 associations. Better yet, Columbia Books publishes an annual directory called, “National Trade and Professional Associations of North America” with thousands of listings, including the name of the Director, address, phone, fax, web site url, and more for each listing.

The satellite office technique Have you ever walked into a grocery store to find a Starbucks, a local bank, and a dry cleaners all conducting business within the grocery store? These are what are known as “satellite offices”. You can harness this concept to put together dozens of lucrative Toll Gate Joint Ventures of your own. The possibilities are endless. For example, every year in the United States, from the middle of January through the middle of April, which is tax season here, dozens of offices open up in every city across the country offering tax preparation services. If you wanted to make a quick $25,000 every month that these tax services are available, you could orchestrate a deal with local restaurants close by each tax preparation service to put in a “satellite office” that sold sandwiches, coffee, and cold drinks to people waiting to have their tax returns prepared. If you cleared just $1,000 each month from 25 different locations, that’s $25,000 per month in your pocket for orchestrating these deals. Let’s look at a more permanent example. Another type of local business that has a large, continuous distribution

network in place is health clubs. Because health clubs cater to a particular emotional component – human vanity – the possibilities are massive. For example, you could orchestrate a deal to put a dietician on site. Or a special teeth whitening service offered by a local dentist. Even a tattoo booth, a hair


dresser, dry cleaning drop off and pick up, “to go” lunch preparation service for people who exercise before work and want a lunch packed up and ready to go for them, lead generation service for cosmetic surgeons or lasik eye surgery… and much, much more. As you can see, the possibilities with this technique are endless. All it takes is a little time and a bit of creativity to come up with dozens of powerful combinations.

Triangle Toll Gates Similar to the type of Toll Gate Joint Ventures I’ve already shown you, this technique adds a new wrinkle by having three players involved rather than just two. For example, think of all the places where people have to wait while some service is being performed. This could be in a doctor’s office, auto repair shops, hair dressers, and more. These types of businesses offer you an excellent opportunity to put together a Triangle Toll Gate. Here’s how a Triangle Toll Gate works. One corner of the triangle is the business where people are forced to wait – this is the distribution network of your triangle. For the purpose of this example, let’s say it’s a doctor’s office. The second corner of the triangle could be a local electronics store that would sell portable DVD players at a discount to the doctor. The third corner of the triangle would be a local video rental store that would provide DVDs for patients to rent and watch while they wait. Or, the doctor could pay a monthly fee for a selection of DVDs and make them available at no cost to their patients. Admittedly, this is a more complicated version of Toll Gate Joint Ventures, and it can be more difficult to orchestrate. But it gives you another way to look at and to think about your joint ventures that can stimulate great ideas for you to use.

Conclusion So that’s your grand tour of Toll Gate Joint Ventures. You now understand the strategic concepts that make them


so valuable to your licensing business. And you have a wealth of ways to find the most profitable prospects for orchestrating your deals with. Plus, I’ve given you a number of powerful tools for coming up with creative, high-profit pairings for your joint ventures. The next step is to understand the mechanics of putting together your Toll Gate Joint Venture deals and implementing the projects for your clients. That’s precisely what I’ll show you in the next chapters.


Chapter 17 Licensing Proven Marketing Campaigns to Hundreds of Businesses

This is the first of the three “Red Zone” licensing strategies. But as you already know, I’m teaching them to you out of order. These first three strategies are given priority and added emphasis because they are the easiest strategies to sell to your clients. This makes them the easiest for you to profit from right away with your licensing business. The second hallmark of the three “Red Zone” strategies is that each one on its own can be used as a foundation for a complete multi-million dollar business – without ever using any of the other six strategies. With those two powerful factors working in their favor, I want to make sure you get all the information you need to succeed with these “Red Zone” strategies before we even take a look at the remaining four strategies. So let’s get right to the third strategy and discover the secrets of how profitable it can be for you.

Unorthodox thinking – why the traditional approach to selling marketing and advertising services is harmful to your profits If you’re a marketing consultant or advertising expert, the traditional method of selling your services is difficult at the very least. And even worse, the majority of the time, it’s extremely harmful to your profits. In a nutshell, the typical approach goes like this:

1. Constantly search for new prospects. Attend trade shows, write white papers and articles, try to make search engine marketing work for you, go to dozens of networking events, speak to various business groups and trade association meetings, pray that your


satisfied clients will refer a few new prospects to you – and yes, worst of all, commit to the most dreaded of all marketing tasks: cold calling.

2. Once you’ve sniffed out the thinnest hope of a new

prospect, submit a proposal that has to compete with proposals from many other consultants and ad agencies.

3. If you are lucky enough to win a presentation

appointment, invest dozens of hours creating a 75-slide Power Point presentation with fresh, new ideas no one has ever seen before, with nothing whatsoever to protect you from the prospect using your ideas should they hire someone else (this happens all the time).

4. Make your presentation to a group of executives from

the prospect’s company who are seeing so many presentations in a 48-hour period, their eyes glaze over and they nod off just a few slides into your presentation.

5. Wait weeks or months to hear the inevitable news,

“I’m sorry, we’ve decided to go with my sister-in-law’s agency”.

It’s no wonder so few marketing consultants ever do anything more than survive from pay check to pay check. I know, because I’ve “been there, done that” more times than I care to remember. But here’s the biggest problem with this approach. The prospect is always biased towards shooting you down! You see, deep down inside, if the prospect is constantly looking for fresh, new ideas, they always have to be wary of whether these ideas will work or bomb completely, blowing their budget and possibly causing heads to roll if the disaster is big enough. So the cards are always stacked against you. Fortunately, there’s a simple, two-part solution to this financially disastrous problem that plagues marketing consultants on a daily basis. A solution that will give you a


massive competitive advantage over all other marketing and business consultants. A solution that will make you the one and only source for helping your clients achieve the goals they really want. And since you’re the only source, it makes the sales process completely frictionless – and far more productive. Let’s take a look at this two-part solution and you’ll quickly understand why you gain the pre-emptive advantage of being “the only game in town”!

The Solution – Part 1: License out marketing campaigns that have been paid for and proven to work by other companies, removing most or all of the risk for your prospects While most companies claim they want something “new and different”, the truth is when they contact a marketing consultant or ad agency, what they would really like is to be able to do exactly what they’re already doing but get five times the results. That’s a big problem, because it’s never going to happen. But most companies don’t know how to market properly in the first place, claim they want something new and different, then have massive firings if someone dares to test something new and different and it fails. At the same time, the person in charge of marketing who is reluctant to pull the trigger on something new and different is really operating based on a sane policy. Because they intuitively know that anything new and different only has about a 5% chance of succeeding. This creates a no-win situation for the consultant or ad agency. Trying to get something that’s actually new and different approved and funded is next to impossible. You can use this no-win situation the business owner or marketing director is faced with to your advantage. When presented properly, it’s easy to demonstrate to your prospect all the benefits of licensing a marketing campaign that’s been


proven to work, thereby eliminating the majority of the risk, and dramatically increasing their chances for success. So by focusing on selling only those campaigns that have been proven to work, you can eliminate nearly all of the hesitancy on your prospect’s part, close more deals in a shorter period of time, and laugh all the way to the bank while other consultants don’t have a clue about what you’re doing.

The Solution – Part 2: License only one campaign at a time In an earlier chapter, I told you that most consultants harm their own sales by trying to solve all of the prospect’s problems at one time. The consultant thinks that if they overwhelm the prospect with their expertise, the prospect will be so impressed they’ll award the project to consultant. This problem is heightened by many prospects who put out an RFQ (request for quotation) that is very vague. Essentially it says, “We’re looking to grow our company. Show us what you’ve got!” So consultants and ad agencies respond by putting on a showy presentation of all the keen ideas they’ve come up with for the prospect. But this actually works against you. Always remember, the more options you present, the more confusion it causes. And creating confusion never works to your advantage. Fortunately, the answer to this part of the problem is simple. Only present one proven campaign at a time. Look, there are many types of campaigns you could recommend, including lead generation, price testing, referral systems, space advertising, pay-per-click, upsells, downsells, bundling, unbundling, and more. So it’s easy to get carried away with wanting to impress your prospects. But if you follow my advice and present only one campaign at a time, you’ll immediately differentiate yourself from all the competition, be able to clearly demonstrate how highly you value the prospect’s success, and close a lot more deals. And don’t forget, once you’ve succeeded with one campaign, you’ve now opened the door for presenting as


many additional campaigns (and as many more of the other 6 strategies) as you’d like. I can’t emphasize too strongly how important this principle is. I assure you that when you’re first starting out and you’re on the phone with a hot prospect, you’ll be mightily tempted to “show them what you’ve got”. Do whatever it takes to resist that temptation. If you want to close more deals, make it a firm rule never to present more than one campaign idea at a time. It’s one of the simplest, yet most productive secrets for closing a lot more deals.

Why companies will eagerly pay sizable fees for marketing campaigns that have already been used (and paid for) by someone else Most people don’t understand what I do for a living. When my wife and I are at a dinner party and someone asks me the inevitable question, “So what do you do?”, I like to say, “I sell companies marketing campaigns that have already been paid for and used by other companies”. Usually, they look at me like I’m some kind of criminal. I admit I do this for the entertainment value. People give me the strangest looks! But once they get over the initial shock, most people then ask me, “Who in the world would be foolish enough to pay good money for an ad or other marketing piece that’s already been used?” I answer by creating a scenario for them, followed by a question. “Suppose you’re in charge of marketing for a medium sized company and you have a budget of $100,000 for the year. With that money, you’re expected to produce successful campaigns that will have a deep and lasting benefit for the company. If you fail, people will lose their jobs as there won’t be enough business to keep paying their salaries. The company will have difficulty staying in business. And you will likely be demoted or fired”. “Based on this, what would you rather invest your marketing budget on – a brand new campaign focusing on a new idea that has as great or greater a chance for failure


than success, or a campaign that’s been proven in many other industries to pull in millions of dollars in orders, that can be customized for your company?” Given that scenario, the answer is always some version of, “I see what you mean!” And from there, my dinner partner’s view of me changes significantly. This, of course, is precisely why companies will eagerly pay you top dollar for marketing campaigns that have already been used by someone else. And this is why it is so easy, and so profitable, to license proven campaigns to dozens and even hundreds of businesses. So that’s the logic behind the marketing of this strategy. But let me take it one step further and show you what an actual client of mine has to say about why he prefers to license proven campaigns over pioneering new, riskier campaigns:

“I am pretty much a newbie when it comes

to marketing, therefore taking a risk on any untested or

unproven idea really scares me! What I like about Bob

is he can provide examples of numerous successful

launches of his ideas. It really helps build the

confidence when venturing into uncharted waters.

I will say that very quickly we developed the work

plan Jan/Feb and by March I was seeing double digit

to triple digit sales increases. I saw sales

immediately begin to ramp up 210%. And first time

sales are up 700% with many repeat purchases. I have

worked with other consultants but never have I had

sustainable results like I've seen with this.”

Jim Johnson, President Business Bridges

The critical point in Jim’s comment is “It really helps build the confidence when venturing into uncharted waters”. It’s important to realize that any new marketing campaign represents a tremendous amount of risk to the company that will use it. And even a proven campaign that’s already been used by someone else is “new” in the sense that the company you’re licensing it to has never used it.


So eliminating the majority of their risk by demonstrating how successful the campaign has proven to be for other businesses, soothes your prospect’s nerves considerably, gives them a much higher level of confidence, and gets more deals done more quickly than you could ever hope for when introducing new, untested ideas.

The unlimited market for this strategy The use of this strategy is virtually unlimited. In the United States alone, there are over 25 million small to medium-sized businesses. Every one of them is a prospect for licensing a proven marketing campaign. Proven campaigns can be marketed to companies in the same industry or across different industries. For example, if you have a proven campaign for marketing software, you can easily market it to dozens or even hundreds of software companies. You just want to make sure that you don’t license the same campaign to companies that are in direct competition with each other. So you would license your proven campaign to one company in each of many different categories such as game software, data base software, email software, customer relationship management, auto responders, shopping carts, video production, graphics, word processing – and dozens of other categories. How would you find your prospects? Simple. As I mentioned in previous chapters on prospecting, all the leads you’ll ever need can be found in trade journals and popular magazines. A quick search of “software publishing trade journals” on any search engine will give you every trade journal for the industry. Some trade journals publish their issues online, while for others, you’ll have to subscribe to the print edition. Subscriptions are almost always free to trade journals. Going through the issues in print – or through the advertisers section online – will turn up dozens of potential prospects. Just select a prospect or two from each category and you’re ready to begin marketing.


Why would you want to select multiple prospects from the same category if you’re only going to license your campaign to one of them? Because by telling multiple prospects in your approach letter that only one company in each category will be able to use this campaign, you create scarcity and increase demand. Even in the same category, you can still license the same campaign to multiple companies. If a category is large enough – such as gaming software – you can license to sub-categories without ever creating a conflict of interest. In this case, you’d want to go to your local newsstand and pickup a copy of any of the popular magazines for video game players. By thumbing through the pages, you’ll find ads from vendors in multiple categories – everything from medieval fantasy games, to battle games, to games for younger children, to games for every sport imaginable. There are dozens of categories, all of which are represented in the popular magazines. And you can license the same campaign to one company in each category. Here’s another example for a different industry. You could easily license the same campaign to hundreds of different retail stores in a variety of categories. You would need to include a provision in your agreement that they are getting exclusive use of the campaign for a specific geographic area and that they can’t use the campaign online. If they were allowed to use it online, there would almost certainly be multiple companies using the same campaign. For example, if you have a campaign for jewelry stores (or sandwich shops, quick oil change services, donut shops, pet stores, etc.), each store can use the same campaign within its geographic area. Usually, you’ll want the geographic area to be a city, in order to keep from having any overlap. So you could conceivably license your jewelry store campaign to stores in hundreds, or even thousands of different cities. The bottom line is this – with just a little imagination, you’ll never run out of prospects for proven marketing campaigns.


The major difference between this strategy and all six of the other strategies There is a key difference between this strategy and the other six Million Dollar Licensing Strategies. This difference makes this strategy appear a bit more complex at first, but at the same time, it’s also what makes this strategy so wide-ranging that it gives you more flexibility and more options than any of the other strategies. So here’s the difference:

There is no limit to the kind or number of

proven campaigns you can license

The variations of proven campaigns available for you to license are massive. Just a sampling would include: lead generation, retail sales, catalog sales, pay per click, publicity, price testing, referral programs, customer loyalty programs, sales letters, web pages, email marketing – and many more. Because of this, I can’t give you one or two examples of the types of proven campaigns you’ll use that would cover all bases. In fact, even though I concentrate 80% of my own business on licensing out proven marketing campaigns, I haven’t even begun to touch the limit of what can be done. I’m constantly coming up with ideas for new campaigns to test, then license out. Just the other day, I developed a new type of customer loyalty program, did a quick test to prove it worked, and immediately licensed it to four different companies. And I have more than 30 other companies waiting to get at it. But what if you don’t have the experience and background to create and test your own proven marketing campaigns? Don’t let it worry you. In just a moment, I’ll show you a number of ways to get tons of campaigns to license out. With these resources, you’ll never run out of proven campaigns to profit from.


STOP – The most important lesson in this chapter What I’m about to show you is the most important lesson in this chapter. And it’s one of the most important lessons in this entire course. This component alone has been responsible for directly putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in my pocket every year. So as with other critical points, I strongly suggest you re-read this short section at least twice – and preferably multiple times. Now, it’s important to understand the mechanics of finding proven marketing campaigns to license. But as I’ll soon show you, that part couldn’t be much easier. However, what’s far more important to understand is the

mindset behind this strategy and to use this mindset as a filter through which you view every ad, sales letter, email, web page – or any other form of marketing that you see. Because this mindset is 100 times more valuable to you than any single campaign you’ll ever be able to license. This mindset is simple to understand – but it’s incredibly powerful. Plus, the more you use it, the more opportunities you’ll begin to see. After awhile every marketing piece you see will be yet another opportunity for you to profit from! So let me show you exactly what this mindset is. I call it Serling’s Exponential Franchise Mindset:

Every successful marketing campaign is much more than just a single campaign. It is actually an opportunity to “franchise” that campaign across dozens of other industries.

The definition of a franchise is a proven business system that works in many different locations. What people really pay for when they purchase a franchise is the security of knowing that the business they’re buying has been proven to work in many different locations. And the likelihood of it working in the location they’re in is very high. Now, while you get that same “franchise” factor of a proven campaign that can work in many different locations,


that benefit is multiplied exponentially because a proven campaign can also work in many different industries. I cannot overstate the value of this “exponential franchise” component to your licensing business. Because you can license the same campaign over and over again – both within a specific industry plus across dozens of industries, you gain the ability to create massive profits quickly and easily. And when you add in the fact that almost nobody else understands this, you have a powerful advantage that few people can ever hope to match. And if that doesn’t excite you, then you either haven’t fully gotten the concept or licensing just isn’t for you!

A quick tour of this powerful mindset in action Licensing proven campaigns to clients is the strategy that I devote the most time and attention to in my own business. A full 80% of my licensing business is devoted to using this single strategy. As far as I’m concerned, of all seven strategies, this is the most fun, most exciting, most creative, absolutely easy to use and succeed with, and massively profitable. So let me give you some specific examples of the various types of proven campaigns I’ve licensed out. Keep in mind, this is just a small sample. There are actually many more. Proven Marketing Campaign #1: The $25 Million Letter. By now, you’re probably bored of hearing about the letter I created that a client of mine sent to one prospect, landed an appointment to present his service, and walked away with an agreement in principle for a $25 million deal. But the real story behind this letter is that I’ve licensed essentially the same letter, with slight modifications, to many clients in a variety of industries. This letter has been used to sell educational software, video production services, data analysis services, oil exploration equipment, profit sharing systems, toys, household products – and of course, marketing campaigns – plus much more. Each time I license it out, I receive a substantial retainer (currently set at $30,000) plus a percentage of the increased profits the letter generates.


Interestingly, the more I license it out, the more value it gains. Because a letter that’s been proven successful in one or two industries certainly has solid value, but a letter that’s been proven successful in 10 or more industries has massive value. Proven Marketing Campaign #2: Pricing. This one is as close to “shooting fish in a barrel” as you can get. Businesses rarely do anything to test their pricing policies. They seem to just assign some arbitrary pricing to their products or services out of thin air. This is a huge mistake, because testing various prices and how the price is positioned in your offer can increase profits by 20% to 50%. I have one client who increased his profits by 32% with a simple, two-minute change to his pricing. And he’s maintained that increase for over a decade. Another client changed the way she structured her pricing within her offer and realized an immediate 65% increase in profits. That increase also held for a number of years – and it took less than half an hour to train her in the process and about 10 minutes to implement. Proven Marketing Campaign #3: Referrals. Ask any business owner or executive and they’ll tell you the best form of marketing is “word of mouth”. Of course, word of mouth is a euphemism for referrals. But even though business owners and executives covet these hot leads, it’s rare that they ever take any intentional action to generate more referrals. I had one client who estimated he received “5 or 10” referrals a year, generate 642 highly qualified referrals with a single campaign. And a whopping 80% of those referrals ended up doing business with him. The increase in business he gained was enormous, as was my share of the increased profits. Proven Marketing Campaign #4: Customer Loyalty Program. I mentioned earlier in this chapter that I recently developed a new method of building customer loyalty (and the repeat sales that come with that increased loyalty) and licensed it to four clients within a few weeks.


But I’ve also licensed other forms of loyalty programs for years now. Most businesses focus only on making new sales to new customers. Because of this, they leave a lot of profit on the table that could easily be generated with follow-up sales. Used properly, customer loyalty programs lock in multiple follow-up sales. And that can only mean one thing for you – a handsome payday when you collect your share of the profits from these otherwise abandoned sales. This is just a small selection of the types proven marketing campaigns I’ve licensed out over the years. You can easily do this too. So let’s move on to the next step and find out exactly what it takes to create massive paydays for your licensing business with this simple, yet extremely profitable strategy.

How to create and quickly test dozens of campaigns at rock bottom prices Now, let’s get down to the details of exactly how to create dozens of campaigns you can license out – and do this at a very low cost or for free. I’m going to start with the cheapest and most effective techniques, which I call Phase 1 techniques. Then I’ll move on to a number of other options you can also use, called Phase 2 techniques.

However, as you’ll see, the Phase 2 techniques are more costly to develop, require much more of your time, and are a bit riskier. But when they work, the payoff can be enormous, so I want to include them for your consideration. So, here we go!

Phase 1: Four dirt-cheap, high-profit techniques for creating an unlimited number of proven marketing campaigns The Phase 1 techniques are specifically designed to be fast, low-cost and foolproof to use. Remember, a key factor in my overall approach is to make the use of these strategies as simple as possible. You don’t want to make


creating your materials or marketing your services a second career that demands hours of your time. Here’s the list of the four Phase 1 techniques, followed by a detailed discussion of each technique:

1. License other companies’ ads, emails, sales letters, ppc campaigns, emails and more from them

2. Concept cloning – Type 1: If they won’t license to

you, knock them off, test, then license out your strategies

3. Concept cloning – Type 2: “Frankenstein”

campaign development

4. The world is your personal marketing laboratory If I was starting my licensing business, these are the techniques I’d rely on for creating dozens, even hundreds of proven marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at the details of how each technique is used.

Technique #1: License other companies’ ads, emails, sales letters, ppc campaigns, emails and more from them Can’t write copy? Don’t have a big budget for marketing? No problem. This technique can land you dozens of campaigns that other people have already invested a lot of time and money to test that you can then license to an unlimited number of clients. Here again, you get use and

control of extremely valuable assets without any of the pitfalls of ownership. Here’s how this simple technique works. Whenever you see a great ad, sales letter, email, landing page, pay-per-click campaign – or any other form of marketing – contact the company that’s using the marketing piece and propose a deal where you license the marketing piece for use in non-competitive markets and pay them a percentage of the profits.


For example, a space ad that sells furniture effectively for a retailer in Los Angeles would work equally as well in Dallas, London, Paris, Chicago – and just about any city in the world. Using this technique, you essentially become a broker of successful marketing pieces. This “one to many” strategy gives you tremendous leverage. Imagine making a solid retainer, plus a percentage of the profits from 5 or 10 different furniture stores all for having the foresight to license a proven campaign that one company is already using successfully. The possibilities with this technique are unlimited. You can find literally hundreds of successful marketing campaigns – both online and offline – that you can license for little or no money, then turn around and license out for substantial profits. The terms of your deal are completely open to negotiation. I’d recommend offering a company you want to license a campaign from 20% of all profits you make from licensing out their campaign. Put a few figures down on paper showing them how they can make substantial profits without any work or investment on their part, earning money from a “hidden asset” they didn’t even know they had. Tell them you’ll do all the work and all they have to do is deposit a check for their share of the profits each month. Do you think that would land you some very profitable deals? Of course it would! At the same time, be flexible with your terms if that’s what it takes to get the deal done. Especially when you’re first starting out, you should do anything within reason to close the deal. Then, once you have a track record to rely on with many testimonials to back it up, it will be much easier to get the most favorable terms with all your deals.


Technique #2: Concept cloning – Type 1. If they won’t license to you, knock them off, test, then license out your strategies This is a variation of the first technique of licensing proven campaigns from other companies. The difference is, you’re going to legally and ethically “knock off” other successful campaigns and create your own versions. The upside to this variation is that you don’t have to get anyone’s permission or pay them a share of the profits. The downside is, there is more risk involved. It takes a bit of experience or outside help to make this work properly. Here’s how to use this technique in your licensing business. There are two variations of this technique. The first variation is to use your own version in the same industry as the original campaign. Going back to the example of the ad for a retail furniture store, take the ad and make a list of everything that makes it so effective. Your list might include:

• A great headline

• A “comfort test” guarantee. Try this couch in your home for 30 days. If it isn’t the most comfortable couch you’ve ever sat on, we’ll come pick it up and return every cent you paid.

• A free matching service. Tell us the primary colors of your family room and we’ll bring four colors of the same couch right to your house for the perfect match.

• Free scotch guard protection. Now, create a similar ad, but with different language. This is perfectly legal and ethical. The big ad agencies do it all the time. But the key is that you must take the main ideas and express them in your own words.


If you need help with the copy, you can hire copywriters inexpensively at www.elance.com or www.getafreelancer.com You can see by the elements I’ve listed that the benefits presented in the ad are very compelling. So a reasonably well written “clone” of the ad will have strong appeal to your clients. The second variation is to modify the ad for use in many different industries. The same ad could have versions that would work equally as well for selling flooring, televisions and home theatre systems, carpeting, drapes, and many other home furnishing items. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. The key to making this technique pay off big for your licensing business is to become a permanent student of marketing. Always be studying what works for more effective marketing, what makes a great ad, sales letter, or email, and anything else that will help you recognize great marketing. This is an investment that will pay you back many times over throughout your career in licensing. I personally read dozens of marketing books and magazines every year. And I subscribe to at least a dozen marketing ezines. Reading these publications constantly triggers new ideas for my licensing business.

Technique #3: Concept cloning – Type 2. “Frankenstein” campaign development If you recall the Frankenstein fable, Dr. Victor Frankenstein took body parts from a collection of different corpses, stitched them together, then reanimated the completed body with a jolt of electricity. You can do the same with a collection of marketing pieces. Let’s revisit our furniture ad again. This time, we’ll go to the lifestyle section of our Sunday newspaper and read all the furniture ads with a big red marker in hand.


See a great headline in one ad? Put a big red circle around that headline with your marker. Is there a great offer and guarantee in another ad? Circle that offer and guarantee with your red marker. Turn the page and read the next group of furniture ads. There’s the ad with the “color matching” offer. Grab your marker and make a big red circle around that offer. Keep doing this until you’ve read all the furniture ads in that issue of the paper. Then, cut out each ad that you’ve circled a portion of. Next, sit down at your computer and enter all the best parts of each ad that you’ve circled into your word processor. Start with the headline. If you circled three headlines, write them all down. Proceed logically through all the ads, keying in the copy from each in what looks and feels like the proper order. Once you have all the component parts in place, rewrite the ad using your own words. The words you use should be very similar to the original – similar enough to retain the right tone and feel without directly copying those words. When you’re done stitching together the best “body parts” from all the ads you circled, you’ll have a winner on your hands. And if you need some help, use the resources I gave you above to hire a freelance copywriter to clean up your ad a bit. Hey, you may have flunked biology in high school, but you can’t go wrong with my Frankenstein method of campaign development!

Technique #4: The world is your personal marketing laboratory This is really an extension of what I’ve already mentioned about adopting a licensing mindset. Once you clearly understand that any proven marketing campaign is actually a “franchise opportunity” and you couple this with the continual study of great marketing, you’ll start to see licensing opportunities everywhere.


For example, I’ve mentioned my new loyalty program at least a couple of times already. But the origin of this program demonstrates how the licensing mindset can literally create profits out of thin air. So let’s take a deeper look at how I came up with this concept in the first place. I recently received one of those “business book of the month” club offers where you pay $1 now for the book of your choice as long as you agree to buy three more books within the next year. This is called a “continuity program”. A new book is shipped to you each month and you either keep it and pay for it or send it back. The problem with continuity programs is that people drop out quickly, because they have little interest in most of the books they receive. But the company still makes two or three sales before the customer quits, which is better than the single sale they would have made. The other problem with this approach is that it kills customer loyalty. Once you’ve lost the customer, there’s little chance of ever selling to them again. So even though I had no interest in joining this book club, I began to think about how to modify this method to make it much more customer-friendly and actually make more sales and lock in long-term customer loyalty. In addition, I realized that you never see this technique being used online and I wanted to create a campaign that would work successfully with thousands of web sites. Now, an important point that I want you to understand and begin to incorporate into your own life is that I wasn’t looking to create a customer loyalty program. It just fell into my lap when the daily mail arrived. And dozens of opportunities like this come your way every week when you’re attuned to looking for them. Back to the solution I came up with. The approach I used to solve this problem was the Frankenstein development process. I keyed “customer loyalty programs” into Google and made a list of the best features I found in the various results. Then I keyed in “continuity programs” and borrowed the best parts of those results as well.


Finally, I took a couple components from each list, combined them with another twist I adapted from great order form copy, and came up with an altogether new way to create massive customer loyalty online. Now I had and altogether new take on customer loyalty. As you know, I then offered it to four different clients and all four signed contracts on the spot. The overall time I spent developing this new process was about one hour. Now, will you be able to match my results when you’re first starting out? Probably not. But let’s say it takes you five hours and you come up with a great hybrid idea you can license out over and over again and make hundreds of thousands of dollar. That would be fantastic! Opportunities for creating great campaigns of your own are everywhere. Whenever you see an ad, read an email, receive a sales letter in the mail, hear a commercial on the radio – or any other form of marketing – get in the habit of asking yourself, “What simple twist could I add to this to improve it?” The fact is, the world is your own personal marketing laboratory. It will deliver a constant stream of marketing opportunities to you like clockwork. All you have to do is become aware of this and constantly be on the lookout for all the opportunities that are placed in front of you. Practice doing this on a regular basis and you’ll soon become your own powerful source of proven campaigns that you can license out over and over again.

Phase 2: Advanced techniques for creating even more proven marketing campaigns The next couple of techniques I’m going to show you are more complex and require a greater commitment of time and money. Because of this, they are not necessarily right for everyone. I’d advise using them only if you want to make licensing proven marketing campaigns the cornerstone, or even the exclusive licensing strategy, for your business. And I want to emphasize that you can easily build a six or seven-figure annual income around licensing


proven marketing campaigns without ever using these techniques. That said, they’re well worth taking a look at because they can produce explosive profits.

The secret behind why these techniques are so effective Both of these advanced techniques involve using outside copywriters to create loads of successful marketing campaigns for you. In addition, you’ll be paying them pennies on the dollar to create the winning campaigns that you’ll license out over and over again for top dollar. So you may be wondering why copywriters would be willing to work with you in this way instead of doing this on their own. The answer is simple. Most copywriters are starving for work! And while they may be great writers, the majority of them are terrible marketers. I get letters and emails almost every week from copywriters (including some very big names in the industry) practically begging me for work. And believe me, begging is not a great marketing tool. The fact is, you have to be fairly introverted to be able to sit behind a computer eight hours a day writing copy. And introverts don’t make the best marketers. Because the vast majority of copywriters are so poor at marketing their services – and nearly always wondering where the next project is going to come from – they are usually very willing to work with you at deeply discounted rates. In fact, most copywriters are more than happy to write “on spec” in order to win a project. “On spec” means that they write the marketing piece for free, in hopes of having the project assigned to them. So they are already conditioned to writing for low fees, and often for free with the promise of payment at a later time. Now I realize a lot of copywriters may get angry at me for blowing their secret, but they actually stand to make a lot more money with the techniques I’m about to recommend than they do by sitting around waiting for the


next project to find them. So let’s take a look at how these techniques work.

Advanced technique #1: Create a copywriting factory Always remember that in any business, you have to aggressively guard the best use of your time. And if you aren’t already a talented copywriter who writes very quickly, it makes no sense to waste hundreds of hours trying to develop this skill when you could be devoting that time to far more profitable tasks. A big component in my approach to licensing is the leverage you get by being able to put an impressive array of other companies’ assets to work for you. In this very real sense, you gain the ability to act like dozens of large companies, as opposed to investing all of the time, effort, and money to build just one business. You can gain similar leverage by having a number of copywriters working to create proven marketing campaigns for you – then licensing these campaigns to as many companies as you can. Always remember that not having a particular skill is not a problem, because you can always job out that skill. You can find dozens of copywriters to create ads, sales letters, email marketing, web pages, and much more. And they are very easy to find. Some of the sources you’ll want to use are the two freelancer services I mentioned above, Elance and getafreelancer.com. I’m sure you can find many more by keying “freelance copywriters” into any search engine. You can even find excellent freelance copywriters on Craigslist. Other resources are the print and online versions of the major direct marketing trade publications. Here’s a list to take a look at: DM News – www.dmnews.com Target Marketing – www.targetmarketingmag.com


Response – www.responsemagazine.com Direct – www.directmag.com All of these trade publications have areas where copywriters advertise their services. A quick glance through a couple of these publications will help you build a solid list of copywriters to approach. Once you’ve built your list, contact three or four copywriters and tell them that you’d like them to write a marketing piece (ad, sales letter, email campaign, or web page) on spec. Tell them you have a group of eager clients who are always looking for great marketing, but they want to know that it’s been proven to work. Their job is to write the copy and you’ll pay for all the testing. In exchange for writing on spec (or for a very small fee), tell the writer that they will receive a percentage of all the money you make licensing the campaign to dozens of companies. I recommend giving your writers 20% to 25% of the fees you collect. Again, you don’t have to worry about the writers you hire competing with you because the majority of writers are very poor marketers. And unless they’ve bought this course, they won’t have any idea how you license out your campaigns anyway. The best way to test copy is to create an offer for a free report around a topic that would be popular for the type of business you want to license to. For financial services, you could offer a free report on “7 Ways to Pay Less Taxes and Never Get Audited”. For a health product, it could be, “The 5 Common Foods in Your Refrigerator that Can Add 10 Years to Your Life”. As you can see, the trick is to create a compelling title for your report. Then, test your marketing piece to see how well it pulls. Once you have a winner, you can easily license it to dozens of companies within that market. By sharing the results that your marketing has produced, closing deals is like shooting fish in a barrel.


Once you get good at this, you could build a stable of writers that would comprise a proven campaign “factory” you can use to create high-profit campaigns like clockwork. You could even pay one of the more reliable copywriters to find and manage even more writers. Then all you do is license out the campaigns and collect dozens of monthly commission checks.

Advanced technique #2: Hunt only with the big dogs This technique requires a lot more capital, but it can pay off massively. In direct marketing, there are a few “big dog” industries that spend millions of dollars each year on marketing. Most of this marketing is done offline, but some of it is done online as well. These big dog industries are:

1. Health and fitness

2. Financial newsletters

3. Household gadgets (think of all the vegetable choppers, grills, juicers, etc. that you see on infomercials)

The companies in these industries will pay top dollar for space ads and direct mail that’s been proven to perform. In fact, you can negotiate for as much as 50% of the profits they earn with your proven campaign! Let me warn you again, though, this technique is not for beginners – nor for the faint of heart. Here’s how you put it into action. Using the direct marketing trade magazines I listed above (do NOT use elance, getafreelancer, or Craigslist for this), contact the writers who have experience in the category you want to test. For example, if you want to test a weight loss product, contact the writers who list weight loss or diet and fitness in their areas of experience. Ask them how much experience they have in writing copy for weight loss products and make sure you get samples of their most successful work. Pick one or more of these writers to make your pitch to.


Copywriters with a great track record will not write on spec. Usually, they charge at least $10,000 to create a campaign. Offer to pay $2,500 to $5,000 up front with the understanding that they’ll keep writing until they’ve created a winner. And once you have that winner, they’ll receive 25% of the earnings you get from licensing out the campaign. To test your campaign, you’ll need to rent a mailing list and mail at least 5,000 pieces. However, you don’t need to have the actual product to test your campaign. Simply take the orders to see how well your campaign performs, then refund all payments within 30 days in order to be in compliance with direct mail laws. I’m referring to the laws for direct mail in the United States. For other countries, be sure to check to see what the regulations are. The next step is to go to the SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service) and research the top five mailers in your category. SRDS will show you how often each company mails and how many pieces they send out for each mailing. It isn’t uncommon to find “big dogs” that mail 2 million pieces every month of the year. Approach two or three of these companies and tell them that you have a proven campaign (usually a sales letter, but many companies use space ads as well), and share the results it’s producing. Start by asking for 50% of the profits the campaign generates, for as long as it’s used. You can always negotiate downward, but it’s rare to be able to negotiate upward. With this strategy, you’re only going to license your campaign to one company. Any company that’s paying you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, is going to want an exclusive license. However, a proven campaign that works well for a weight loss product, can usually be modified to work for many other products, from vitamins and supplements, to anti-aging products, wrinkle elimination creams, and more. As I’ve already mentioned, this advanced technique is not for beginners or for the faint of heart. It requires a significant investment of time and money.


But the payoff can be massive, so you should at least be aware of this for the future.

An important note

The material in this chapter is very different than anything you’ve ever been taught about marketing. It can be a lot to wrap your mind around at first. So I strongly recommend that you re-read this entire chapter at least one more time. Also, there are three critical points I want you to take away from this chapter. If you put them into practice, you’ll find that they simplify your life and significantly improve the profits you can produce with this powerful licensing strategy. Here they are:

1. Always remember Serling’s Exponential Franchise Mindset.

A great marketing campaign has exponentially more value than its first use. It can be used dozens or even hundreds of more times – both within the original industry it was created for and in many other industries.

2. Commit yourself to becoming a permanent student of marketing.

The more familiar you become with great marketing, the more opportunities you’ll see to license out tons of proven marketing campaigns. Every ad, sales letter, email, and web page you see will now be viewed as an opportunity to profit from.

3. Don’t waste time creating your own campaigns.

The time it takes to create your own campaigns is wasted time. It takes away from the more important tasks of closing deals and implementing them for your clients. Either license proven campaigns from other companies or hire copywriters to create campaigns you can test and license out.


If you remember these three points and apply them in your licensing business, they will take you a long way toward producing the six and seven-figure income that gives you the freedom to live life on your own terms.

Conclusion Now that you’ve got the all-important marketing mindset necessary to succeed with licensing proven marketing campaigns, and you also have a powerful collection of tools to help you exceed your goals with this strategy, you’re ready for a step-by-step tour of how to go about selling this strategy to your clients. That’s exactly what I’ll show you how to do in the next chapter.

Sneak Preview to: Million Dollar...

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