Desktop publishers scream a bloody murder
Micahel Samonic, editor of the Special Effects Cookbook, made millions of dollars from desktop publishing, and I want to tell you how you can do it too.
This is what he did …
As an entrepreneur, he was always relatively successful with space ads.
Then he ordered and read Karbo, which launched me into direct mail marketing. Until that point, he had never done direct mail.
He had always been interested in health and cooking, so the first project he did was how to cure hiccups. He hiccupped when he drank anything irritating or ate spicy food. I always used to have hiccups.
Did a little research. This was long before acupressure. He called it an acupinche.
He went and discovered that there was a Chinese meridian on your left forearm that if you pinch it just in the right place, you could interrupt that impulse.
It worked for him, so he wrote a little course about four or five pages long and put an ad on one of the rags. It was the Enquirer. Sold some books. It was nothing great.
He received 20 or 23 orders. The cost was only $ 5 or $ 6. The ad was only $ 20 or $ 30, so it made a profit early on.
From there, he moved on to a full-size book that he created, How To Get Free Dental Care.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
He had bad teeth and lived in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time there was a dental school there, Case Western Reserve is still there, a dental school. If you call, you could enter the school and be a guinea pig to the students.
Fillers and all kinds of procedures performed for free. At that time, there were federal programs, funded by the state.
So he put together a whole directory of schools and a funded program where you could go in and say I have dental problems, fix them for free. That was my first best-seller.
Sold tens of thousands of those.
So, he put together a directory. The first ad was a junior page ad.
A junior page is smaller than a full page, but dominates the page. If a full page ad measures 7 x 10 in a magazine, a junior page will be 5-1 / 2 by 6-1 / 2; somewhere out there.
My first ad was on The Spotlight. Now it’s called The American Free Press. It is a tabloid newspaper.
It was posted in Washington, DC Extremely good for testing health food related articles.
The headline is what really did it. The headline was Dentists Scream Bloody Murder.
You can bet that the headline caught people’s attention to read the ad. That headline’s job is to grab the reader’s attention right away. You only have them for half a second and if you don’t get them right away they just turn the page and disappear forever.
The dentists scream bloody murders. Readers of that post are heavy on conspiracy theories and political conspiracies and the like. So, he designed the headline to match the demographics of the readers.
The subtitle was Dentists are crazy because now you can get free dental care or something.
This was an advertisement with many copies. It is all that was. All of their ads are editorial.
This was his first advertisement for this product.
It was weekly, and once you place the ad, you wait ten days to two weeks depending on when you place it before the ad appears. He had to pay for everything in advance.
At that time I had no credit with anyone.
The cost of the ad was $ 600. That was late … maybe ’79 or ’80. Even with all the risk, he wasn’t nervous. In fact, he was excited.
Then he waited.
Received 700 orders. At $ 10 each, that’s $ 7,000.
I was in business.
Do you have any good ideas to share? Information is worth money and people will pay for it. You can make millions from your desktop publishing.