My fellow marketplace warriors…
I want to invite a few of you to a special conference call at the end of this week. Let me tell you why and then please let me know if you can make it. As you may know, our mission is to help believers worldwide build successful businesses so they can in turn (with their profits and influence) make a significant and lasting impact on the culture within which we live. How you make that difference is up to you. Helping you succeed in that calling is our privilege and our mission.

A mere 18 months ago…
Our business was dependent on me going out somewhere in the world and doing consulting or training. Product sales were minimal and not much of a focus. The revenues generated through our website were limited to five or six hundred dollars per month. Insignificant. I began applying some of the rainforest lessons to business and it grew substantially. Then we retained on a consulting basis, David Johnson of Epiphany Consulting to really help us establish a long term, reliably growing stream of income using the internet.

Last quarter what used to be less than a couple thousand dollars per quarter, was over $100,000 using the internet. That’s 50-fold increase! Our ranking on search engines has also improved significantly, our number of e-mail subscribers has more than doubled, and many good things are occurring. I know there are many of you who could benefit from his knowledge so I asked him last week if he would be willing to get on a conference call with me and share some of his wisdom and experience with you. He agreed with one stipulation…

He wants to focus his input…
…on folks who have an established business or who are responsible for generating leads or demand for an established enterprise. For example, one of his clients is a specialist in the medical profession who got virtually no business off his website and was skeptical that people would come to him via the internet. But… he was wasting money on ineffective advertising and he knew it. About a year later, over 50% of his patients find him from the internet, due to the help David was able to provide.

David and I have set aside several time slots this Thursday and Friday to discuss specific strategies to help you experience similar results. This is not for everyone, but if you want to grow your business using 21st-century strategies, you are welcome to join us. Register here now so you can be sure to reserve your spot on one of these conference calls. (As always, we are limited on the number of callers we can have on each conference call, so it’s a first-come, first-served basis.)

Warmest regards…

Michael Q. Pink

P.S. Get your calendar out and choose your best meeting time now… these calls will fill up quickly!

It’s Rainforest Friday, where we use God’s creation as a text book for business. One of the most fascinating things to observe in the rainforest is the practice of marketing. It’s what the flowers and orchids do every day. They combine three factors of design, color and scent to transmit a message to a niche market with the purpose of attracting customers to pollinate.

Last week, I spoke of color and how expensive it is for a plant to create, but that it must expend the resources to create color and market its product or it will perish. Without color, we could not see or perhaps only barely see (as in glass) any physical object. In effect, color announces the presence of something, in this case a flower. For all practical purposes, color is to the flower what headlines are to an ad. If the headline grabs your attention, you are much more likely to read the article. Headlines are the ad for the ad!

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 This is “Rainforest Friday”. As you may have noticed, once a week I use God’s creation for a text book. Romans 1 says that “the hidden things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and divine nature.” The kings of the earth came to hear Solomon’s wisdom, much of which he gleaned from the created order. 1 Kings speaks of Solomon saying that “he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springs out of the wall: he spoke also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.”

On Friday’s, I take you to the rainforest and share with you the wealth building secrets built into the most fruitful, abundant ecosystem on the planet. Today, I want to begin a series that has to do with marketing principles gleaned from the orchid. Walking through the Panamanian rainforest with our guide from the Smithsonian, I was struck by something she said… “In the rainforest, color is very expensive.”

I thought it was very unusual language for a scientist, so I inquired further. She went on to explain that it costs more energy for a plant to produce color than it does to produce the green you see in leaves. I learned that some trees go so far as to shed all their leaves to preserve energy so they have enough energy to produce colorful flowers. The reason, I was told, was marketing. The trees had to attract customers. They used flowers to do this. Without the birds or the bees or the monkeys checking out their flowers, they would never pollinate and thus not be fruitful. So they spend a significant amount of resources to generate new business. You might call that - advertising.

So the question I leave you with today is: If God thinks it wise to spend resources on marketing, do you think we might be wise to do the same?

Until next time, be fruitful, then multiply!