If you picked it up hoping for huge breakthroughs in your business, you bought the right book.

But first, I have to get these definitions out of the way.

By non-direct marketing business, I mean anything but a mail-order, catalog, or online marketer who directly solicits orders for merchandise.

Examples of direct marketing businesses just about everybody knows are the TV home shopping channels, QVC and HSN, Home Shopping Network; legendary catalogers like Lillian Vernon, J. Peterman, and SkyMall; and contemporary catalog and online catalog/e-commerce companies like Amazon and Zappos; businesses like Fruit of the Month Club; and mass users of direct mail to sell things like Publishers Clearinghouse.

There are tens of thousands of true direct-marketing businesses. Some are familiar to the general public; many, many more are familiar only to the niche or special interest they serve. For example, I have over 50 direct marketers as clients, each selling books, audio CDs, home study courses, and seminars and services by mail, internet, and print media, and teleseminars, and webinars, which market only to a specific industry or profession—one to carpet cleaners, another to restaurant owners, another to chiropractors, etc. If you are not a chiropractor, you don’t know the name Dr. Chris Tomshack and his company Health Source. If you are a chiropractor, it would be hard not to know of him, thanks to his full-page ads in the industry trade journals, massive amounts of direct mail, and other direct marketing. There are also direct marketers unknown by name but known by their products or brands, like a long time client of mine, Guthy-Renker Corporation, the billion-dollar business behind TV infomercials for Pro-Activ acne creams. What all these have in common is their fundamental process of selling direct via media to consumers, with no brick-and-mortar locations or face-to-face contact required.

These are not the folks this book is for, even if they are the kinds of entrepreneurs I work personally with the most.

This book is for the owner of a brick-and-mortar business, a business with a store, showroom or office, a restaurant, a dental practice, an accounting practice, or a funeral home, that is some kind of ordinary business, one most likely local and serving a local market. These are the entrepreneurs who have populated my audiences for two decades, subscribe to my No B.S. Marketing Letter, and use my systems to transform those “ordinary” businesses into extraordinary money machines that far, far out perform their industry norms, peers, competitors, and their own wildest imaginations. How do they do it? The big switch is a simple one to state (if more complex to do): they switch from traditional advertising to direct-response advertising. They stop emulating ordinary and traditional marketing and instead emulate direct marketing.

Most “ordinary” businesses advertise and market like much bigger brand-name companies, so they spend (waste) lots of money on image, brand, and presence. But copycatting these big brand-name companies is like a rabbit behaving like the lion. It makes no sense. The big companies have all sorts of reasons for the way they advertise and market that have nothing to do with getting a customer or making sales! Because your agenda is much simpler, you should find successful businesses with similar agendas to copycat. Those are direct marketers. You and they share the same basic ideas:

Please stop and be sure you get this life-changing principle. Be careful who you copy. Be careful who you act like. Be careful who you study. If their purpose, objectives, agenda, reasons for doing what they do the way they do it don’t match up with your purpose, objectives, agenda, then you should NOT study or emulate or copy them!

Please stop and be sure you get this life-changing corollary principle. Find somebody who is successful, who shares your purpose, objectives, agenda, and pay great attention to what he does and how he does it.

I believe some call this sort of thing “a blinding flash of the obvious.” Well, you can call it obvious if you like, but then how do you explain the fact that 99% of all businesspeople are operating as if ignorant of this obvious logic?

I might add, this principle has power in places other than marketing. You can eventually get south by going due north, but life’s easier and less stressful, and business more profitable, if you actually get headed in the direction that leads to your destination of choice. Emulating inappropriate examples is the equivalent of trudging south to get to the North Pole. Odds are, you’ll get lost, tired, or eaten by a giant iguana long before seeing snow.

The reasons for the cluelessness and vulnerability to victimization are many. Here’s a big one: Marketing Incest. When you got into whatever business you’re in, you probably looked around at what everybody else in the business was doing and copied it. Gradually, you’ve tried to do it better, but not radically different, just better. So you have everybody in an industry standing in a circle looking inward at each other, ignoring anyone or anything outside the circle. It’s incestuous, and it works just like real generational incest: Everybody slowly gets dumber and dumber and dumber.

All of the people you’ll meet in this book did something very different. They turned their back on the circle and deliberately went far afield from their peers in search of different—not just incrementally better, but different—ways of marketing. Now you will, too.

From now on, every ad you run, every flier you distribute, every postcard or letter you mail, every website you put up, every/anything you do MUST adhere to these rules. To be fair, they are simplistic and dogmatic, and there are reasons to violate them in certain situations. But for now, sticking to them as a rigid diet will work. You can experiment later, after you’ve first cleansed your business of toxins.

We’ll tackle each Rule in depth, in the next ten chapters.

I once wrote an entire book about breaking rules, and generally speaking, I think rules are for other, ordinary mortals—certainly not for me, and not for you, either, if you are a true entrepreneur. So you’ll chafe at rules here just as I would. However, when you are attempting to undo bad habits and replace them with new ones, some hard-and-fast rules are necessary, temporarily. Once you fully understand these and have lived with them for a reasonable length of time, then feel free to experiment if you wish. But get good at coloring inside the lines before ignoring them altogether.

The chief way we avoid vagueness is with the making of offers.

If you begin paying attention to advertising and marketing, you’ll see that most of it merely shows up and talks about the marketers and advertisers, but does not directly offer something specific to be had by immediately and directly responding. A lot of ads and commercials and business cards and brochures now include websites, Facebook sites where you can go like ’em, etc., but present no Godfather Offer as a compelling reason to go there. All this is undisciplined. It is sending money out to play a backyard game with no rules; worse, no scorekeeping, no clear means of judging victory or defeat. A chaotic mess. When you take this undisciplined approach and simply spend and hope and guess, you’re at the mercy of opinion about your marketing. Do you like it? Does your mother-in-law like it? Do your customers say nice things about it? Try putting any of that feedback on a bank deposit slip. This all changes with Direct Marketing.

Direct Marketing imposes discipline.

Direct Marketing imposes discipline. That discipline may be as important and beneficial as the benefit of direct response itself. For some mysterious reason, business owners are willing to let advertising and marketing off the hook, but tend to hold everything else accountable for results and return on investment. If they tie up money in certain product inventory, they expect it to sell—or they refuse to restock it. If they employ a sales representative, they expect him to make sales. If they buy a delivery van, they expect it to start and run so it can make deliveries. If they pay a laborer by the hour, they expect him to clock in, be there, and work for the hour. Yet, marketing and media investments made for marketing are permitted to skate. Only Direct Marketing imposes discipline, by always making an offer or offers, so response to those offers can be tracked and measured.

My old speaking colleague, one of the all-time greats, Zig Ziglar, always described salespeople who wimped out at closing sales and directly demanding orders as “professional visitors,” not professional salespeople. Since you will be doing selling in print, online, with media, you rarely want to let it be a professional visitor on your behalf. Fire all the wimps. Demand real performance. So your task is to incorporate a direct offer each and every time you put out a message, of any kind, by any means.

I mean: of any kind. By any means. We teach most business owners to use Thanksgiving greeting cards and / or New Year’s greeting cards, with past and lost as well as active customers, clients, or patients, and, often, with unconverted leads too. We also teach no greeting card should arrive without being...