When I first went to Arkansas, in the USA – which is the place where my original mentor lived at the time, I heard about the only source of raw diamonds in the USA. Apparently a huge meteor ploughed across this big bit of country and deposited diamonds all the way across this land. I mean it’s amazing, there is this big crater and they’ve turned it into a source of cash for the local economy. They have thousands of tourists who come along to the visitor centre they have set up around this crater and you pay whatever it is, I don’t know, 10 or 15 bucks or something for access to the crater. Oh and by the way they’ve got a little gift shop as you arrive so you can buy the shovels and the special sieve thing so you can sieve the dirt out in the crater to find your diamonds, and they’ve got the watering can for the water. Now you’re going to need some food so they’ve got the food packages. So they’ve got all these other little backend products, but the bottom line is having paid out about 50 or 60 bucks you can walk out into this crater. And the deal is you get to take home all the diamonds you can carry. Cool.
I have never seen so many people in one place scrabbling in the dirt. I kid you not, the whole day…… I mean it’s like a big family day out, “Daddy, daddy I’ve found one!” ”Don’t be stupid child.”
Most of the people there; 99.99% go home with no diamonds. Why’s that? Because everybody’s looking for a beautiful carved perfect diamond and of course you’ll never find one.
In your Cash On Demand business, when you start looking for products you’ll be expecting to see some finely polished gem that you’re going to put on the market and you’re going to make an instant million quid, and it isn’t going to happen.
The reality is that all the gems and the rocks and things actually begging as rough ugly looking bits of stone They just look like common old garden bits of rock.
You have to know how to recognise those that might just be the sort of thing that you could handcraft into a nice little gemstone.
You need to know how to polish those up so that you can make something which can make you a whole load of money.
Back in 1998 I bought reprint rights to a little rough diamond. Wasn’t the greatest looking product, it was a set of three video tapes. Those three video tapes featured the guy that I learnt this business from. They were very cleverly titled “Product Development For Profit.” Sounds quite boring doesn’t it? ”Product Development For Profit,” is not a real sort of grabbing headline is it? Now this guy, was very good at selling this sort of stuff, he sold us all reprint rights to this tape set. I don’t know how many he sold, but lets assume it was maybe 1,000 sets of these. And the tapes came with ready made website templates as well, so you could start advertising these tapes on the internet straight away.
So I had loads and loads and loads of competition because all of us that bought the reprint rights went out on the internet, all with websites looking the same…. all trying to sell this thing called “Product Development For Profit.”
In fact, I actually went online the other day and found somebody still trying to get 97 bucks for this thing. They’ve still got this same old website still live on the internet. Look it up, do a Google search, “Product Development For Profit,” it’s still there.
I thought this can’t be right; I’ve got to find another way to do this.
This is how I discovered re-branding. I decided to re-brand the thing. Now it wasn’t very clever in those days. I literally just put some different sleeves on the videos. I put a little CD together. I did that by taking slectiong one video form a set I had righst to and played it through my hi-fi at home, stuck it onto an audio tape, gave it to a company called “Sounds Good” that I found in the back of Melody Maker, and they made some CD’s for me. I mean it was really, really, basic stuff.
So I’d made a little bonus with the tapes that nobody else had. Three tapes and a bonus, re-branded covers, obviously these days it would be slightly different; these days it would be CD’s and DVD’s and that sort of thing. These days I put together a nice little cover to slip into the box and then use the same pictures to reproduce labels.
So that’s what I would do….. Do what I teach you about rebranding in the Cash on Demand course…if you were to get reprint rights to a product – rebrand it – make it look different – polish up that rough diamond to make a real gem.