I remember back in 2006, when Amazon announced its new Amazon Web Services.
How clever, I thought. Like Donald Trump selling golden mailboxes at Trump Tower to entrepreneurs who want the ritzy mailing address.
After all, Amazon already had all of the computer boxes and wires and know-how for connecting them together. Other businesses didn’t have this — but wanted it. So Amazon could make a nice business by making its internal IT resources publicly available on a per-use basis.
And what a cash cow it turned out to be. AWS is now estimated to bring in $25B a year — more than McDonald’s — and is one of the main profit centers at the famously profit-free Amazon.
Now here’s a puzzle for the marketers out there:
What’s lying around your desktop (literal, computeral, or mental) which you could sell like Amazon sold AWS?
Don’t just shrug if off, but think for a minute.
Because even some of the most successful marketing businesses out there don’t collect this free money. Case in point:
Agora.
Agora is probably the biggest direct response company, with dozens of subsidiaries, and hundreds (thousands?) of offers, mostly financial newsletters.
You can bet that with all this experience selling high-margin info products online, the people at Agora know a thing or three about copywriting and Internet marketing.
And yet, in spite of its tremendous proof elements and branding, Agora doesn’t have any offers in the profitable and growing copywriting/IM niche.
Or at least… they didn’t.
Right now, Agora is spinning up a new division focused on Internet marketing.
I’m not sure what it’s called, but they have an email newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.
On different days, you can read insights from Evaldo Albuquerque, one of the most successful copywriters at Agora Financial in the past few years…
…from Peter Coyne, also a successful copywriter and the youngest publisher inside Agora…
…and finally, from Rich Schefren, a big name in the IM space for the past decade or two.
I’ve been signed up to these emails for a few days. So far, it’s been like they say — IM secrets you can’t get nowhere else.
Except perhaps, in my own email newsletter. After all, my only fun in life is scouring the Internet for new marketing and persuasion ideas, and then giving them away in my daily newsletter. Usually packaged up in some kind of story.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, then you can try out my (FREE!) email newsletter here.