Category Archives: Marketing

First official Guru Of Sales Online school announcement

Yes you read the title correctly, I am proud to finally announce the long awaited GuruOfSales Online school.
This announcement comes after I finally received a letter today that all my teaching materials where copyrighted and protected.
I have been hinting about this for quite a while now to friends and colleagues, and already have a huge list of people ready to start a new era of learning and working online.

The Great News Is:

It’s 100% FREE for you the student.

No catch, no gimmicks, no money involved at all, you have my word for that.

The official start date is 11/1/2008 and it will be 6 months long 2 or 3 times a week.

Here is what you will learn: uh… wait.. I am a marketing and sales guru, I think I will reveal details within the next 30 days to create the buzz needed for this school.
All I can tell you right now that it will be rich in videos, podcasts, reading materials and of course it will have a it’s own URL (Will be revealed soon) and I promise great entertaining content a’La Guru style 😉

Oh, one more thing, if you’re not already subscribed, then go ahead and subscribe here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/guruofsales this is the only way you can keep up to date of everything about the school.
You can also follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/guruofsales but I won’t reveal as much info as I will on this blog.
Ciao for now 🙂

A new brilliant idea for Online shopping

As some of you guys may know that one of my favorite “Geek merchandise” website is thinkgeek.com, and there is only 2 other places that I shop online, eBay and Amazon.
That was until I wrote the article about ping.fm and I got a comment on it from a follower (now a friend) from twitter, so, as usual I went to check their site like from their twitter bio at: http://thebuyersnet.com and I found out a new way of shopping online.
The idea is simple yet brilliant, look for items, join or create a club for it, other people like the same item, they add it to their wish list or join the club, everyone buys it at the end as a group, and that’s where the savings come by buying the item wholesale price.

A great diagram explaining how it works is here.
I am currently looking for a new laptop, so far (As a proud geek) I am falling in love with the new Sony Vaio FE series, most likely with a read/write BLU-Ray player. If anyone else interested, let’s create a club for it and share the savings on http://thebuyersnet.com.
The site have categories including: Automobiles & Accessories, Computers & accessories, Electronics, Fitness, Furniture, Appliances, sports & more.

I just wanted to share the discovery with you all 😉
To follow http://thebuyersnet.com updates on twitter go here.

$65,000 for this blog!

The picture above is an actual $50,000 photo of cash I took out today from the bank.
Why did I do that?
I am just sick and tired of this one company (That they requested to remain anonymous) offers.
Here is the story in a nutshell:
4 Weeks ago, a New York based electronics company contacted me via the contact form asking me for my number!!
I thought it was like any consultation request or any developing service of mine. I was wrong..
Their “Sales manager” called me (Not even the companies manager nor the owner or CEO), simply to offer me $50,000 for this blog that you are reading right now.
As you may know that I migrated 5 of my blogs into this one, one of them was about gadgets (Electronic gadgets of course) and he said that they wanted to buy this blog, delete all categories (except for the gadget category), have me write for them for the next year in a regular bases, then they will redirect the URL to their own blogs…. HUH?!
First of all, this blog was appraised for more than that, then the fact that I would make this amount in less than a year, got me asking my self: Why stop the cash flow after a year?! And why would I work for someone else for an entire year?
I simply said: Thank you for the offer but my answer is no.
2 Weeks later the owner of the company called me (the day after my interview with John Chow) and raised the price to $60,000 and I don’t have to work for them (Except for a 2 weeks visit just to get them used to the blog “blog training” he said), I thought about it and said no again.
4 Calls followed some of them were very rude (That’s not a good way to do business) 2 calls were the day after my (interview with Yaro Starak).
They have contacted me again 2 days ago by email, the offer was $65,000, and left me with 2 choices:
Ask them for no less than $100,000
Or
Ask them to stop the rude and annoying calls and leave me alone.
I took my time to answer this time, I thought about my readership (You guys), I thought about the income that would stop coming in, and I thought about my future plans for this blog (Like the Online school I am working on launching soon), So I tweeted about it 2 days ago (If you follow my twitter you’ll know how annoyed I was). I guess they didn’t like that, I got a twitter reply by one of their employees asking to keep them anonymous.
OK… it’s over now… no wait another phone call this morning from the secretary telling me they want to raise the offers price but I have to approve to them that I actually make this kind of money, So I took on the challenge to send a clear message and went to the bank, withdrew the cash and used my photo studio to take the picture!!!
If all the above was not working, I thought maybe this blog post will, here it is loud and clear:
I am not “under-selling” this blog, for all the reasons above.
That’s the bottom line.
Another reason I blogged about this is for the lessons I learned that I will share with you:
Lesson 1: Don’t under estimate your power.
Lesson 2: Negotiate, don’t send rude emails or bad calls, be smart and you might get what you want.
Lesson 3: Don’t play games (Like having your secretary calling to raise the offer) just be straight forward.
Lesson 4: Don’t forget your people, your friends, your readers. They are the reason that made this blog as big as it is today.