Lessons about selling that I learned from Jabba!

[profitclinic]

G'day gang

More than a decade before Star Wars first appeared on the silver screen, I learned a valuable lesson in affiliate MARKETING from a series of brief, unpleasant encounters with a sleazy merchant I later learned was a dead ringer for Jabba the Hutt (except this guy wore glasses).



It was just after Christmas 1965. Two weeks before I'd graduated from college as a teacher and in five more days I was booked to go to Queensland for New Year with my friends.

The problem was that I'd splurged all but my last $10 on a tailor-made 3-piece suit and hand-made shoes for graduation -- so I had NO money left for having a good time!

I checked the jobs and part-time jobs ads. Nothing. Worst time of year, between Christmas and New Year. It was summer (Australia), school was out and if people weren't on vacation, they thought they should have been.

To make a long story short, my Dad suggested that I try direct selling on commission... merchants were always looking for commission-only reps.

So I chose a fabulous opportunity -- a fast, easy, foolproof decimal convertor for shop keepers who were panicking about the upcoming change (on 14 February 1966) to decimal currency from traditional pounds, shillings and pence.

(This was before computers. It was even before electronic calculators. It was positively pre-historic!)

I quickly discovered that not only was the market already saturated with these cheap, nasty trinkets... most shopkeepers didn't need them anyway.

So here I was, stuck with five of these pieces of junk that I'd spent my last $10 on -- and Jabba refused to give me a refund.

Recounting my woes to my Dad (an astute police officer and observer of human foibles), he suggested a couple of possibilities and made a few phone calls on my behalf.

Suffice to say that, less than 72 hours later, I'd run Jabba completely out of his remaining stock and earned myself close to a full-year's teaching salary and had the best holiday ever.

I'd turned these useless, $2 (sell for $3) bits of plastic, rubber and cardboard into the salvation of dozens of large companies' clerical departments (pre-computer era, remember?) and sold them for up to 1,000% profit (500% for bulk orders of 20 or more).

Don't ever try to tell me that there's no future for affiliate marketing or that the market place is saturated. That's just a new cover version of the tired, lame old song, "Ballad of a Loser".

If you'd like the full story of my lessons learned from Jabba and how I plucked success from the gaping jaws of failure as a naive, inexperienced 20-yo kid, free of charge, PM me for the link. (No catches.)

See if it encourages YOU to think outside the square!


John Counsel
CEO, The Profit Clinic