Chris Porter

I just got a delivery from UPS and wasn’t expecting anything. I checked he had the right house number and name before I took the large parcel.

Now I’m like a kid at Christmas! A surprise delivery and it’s way to big to be a lawsuit, good times. I open it up and it’s an early Christmas gift from one of the affiliate companies I send most of my online dating traffic too. Thanks to Huge Traffic for the ..eerrr.. beer cooler thingy with cool LED display.

This is typical of being an affiliate at Christmas. If you do good amounts of sales for a company they’ll keep you sweet with a present but listen ‘Huge Traffic’, a little tip – next year just send me the beer (or a macbook pro).

I’ve been a fan of Tim Ferriss since the 4-hour-work-week, a book about being more productive with your time and becoming part of the ‘new-rich’. Tim does experiments in lifestyle design, from outsourcing your life to firing your customers.

What really interest me about Ferriss is his insatiable desire to learn how things work or maybe more specifically, how we learn. He is fluent in 6 languages and has some rather unorthodox methods for learning that he claims can make you fluent in as little as 3 months.

And Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com among other things (rev3, pownce) – the fresh faced poster boy of web development.

I’m not sure how Tim and Kevin came together to do this video series but I’m glad they did. In this video Kevin explains how he got scammed by some Chinese ‘art students’.

China Part 2a from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

I’ve been planning a direct mail campaign for the last few weeks and it got me thinking about something my Dad used to say: “Always use 1st class stamps for your customer’s mail, after all you don’t have any second class customers.” It’s a sentiment I can get behind but how much does using a first class stamp really increase profit?

Direct Mail campaigns have many barriers to being profitable.

You have to choose the right prospects, at around 35p+ per mail you don’t want to send to uninterested people.

You have to hope it gets there. 14.4 Million pieces of mail were lost or posted through the wrong letterbox in 2007. So say goodbye to at least 1% of your mailed out letters.

And you have to hope that your mail gets opened. There are many visual clues that indicate your mail is a sales letter (or as the customer will call it… spam!) and it then goes straight to the bin.

Then once it’s open it’s got to sell! My sums are showing that at 50p per mail we’ll need to have a 0.5% close rate to break even. Beginning with a test batch of 500 we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be changing the variables to see what makes a good sales letter and will report back my findings.

One of the main things I’m interested in trying out is novelty stamps or international stamps. Something that costs around the same price but gives it such a flair you open the letter out of curiosity. I never throw away a letter with a USA airmail stamp because it might be something from my Aunt in the US – I’m a 100% open rate customer when there’s a US stamp involved!

Whether it increases profit or not I’ll be respecting my customers by using a 1st class stamp to ensure, at the least, a quick delivery. I’ll just be using 2nd class to pay my bills.