Imagine a shop in the middle of Historial ’49er Gold Rush town, Grass Valley, California — and the name of the shop is actually “GrassValleyTours.Com”, same as the address line on the website, which I own.
Okay, now put a BUNCH of Souvenir items, all sorts of things that might relate to Grass Valley either by virtue of being some sort of Gold Rush or Gold Country image, or by being an object that can be associated with Grass Valley history, Gold Rush history or California history.
This can easily include haunted houses and a tour of strange and unusual places in the town, plus places and events of interest, particularly annual events.
Get out in the middle of town during a LIGHT rainfall, when the street is very, very wet, and the lights glow in the early dawn light.
Get some GREAT shots, being careful to have someone actually hold a large, wide umbrella over your head while you concentrate on getting the great photo.
Okay, now process the photos so that they end up at about 2000 pixels wide by about 900 pixels high. You’ll have to adjust the shape and size of the photo slightly to accommodate the items — they vary, and the images need some shaping to make them fit so they actually DO fit, and so they also look good.
One consideration in taking the shots is where the text is going to end up.
Another point of interest will be to make the shot look different from all the other photos of that particular landmark, and good luck on that one.
So now you have a battery of maybe a dozen to two dozen photos of your home town, and they’re ready to pop onto a variety of very saleable objects, anything from t-shirts and the usual sort of thing all the way to frisbees, fine watches and beer bottle labels.
There’s the whole gamut in zazzle, and then when you’re finished there — which will take you a couple of years if you work constantly at the job — you can pick up even more stuff on the other three POD sites.
If you run out of ideas, you don’t understand the situation, and you’re not inventing, you’re synthesizing, which isn’t creative, it’s imitative, see?
I guess not, but as you begin to understand the Alchemical Process contained in this commercial discipline, you’ll see the connections and the subtle-plane influences that inevitably develop just because you’re using aesthetics.
Aesthetics are a qualitative quantum effect, as well as qualitative, which may or may not seem obvious.
So you’ve established a line of hot cocoa, hot chocolate, lemonade, gum, and a variety of other food stuffs.
You’ve put up hundreds of items, and now that you have all your ducks in a row, you’re ready for the next step.
Like I said at the very beginning of this little million-dollar treatise, imagine that the items you’ve made are arranged on shelves, hanging on racks and displayed in counters in your store, which is on a busy local street with lots of foot-traffic and shoppers with bags.
If your local street doesn’t look like that, if it’s not crowded with pedestrian shopper traffic and you don’t see shopping bags and carryout packages galore, you might reconsider your location.
You can’t depend on people showing up at your door every single day in the numbers you’ll need to afford to run a shop and a home and get back and forth and eat food and get the stuff done you’ll need to take care of apart from the shop requirements.
In short, you’d better have a GREAT location, or don’t bother to sign the lease.
If you can’t afford a great location, you’ll need a backer. There really isn’t any way to get started on the street in a lousy location, except for one marketing gimmick — The Cash Cow.
What you do is, get a pushcart of some kind.
Pushcarts come in thousands of varieties, all the way from a hand-pushed wooden cart to a fancy self-propelled vehicle that’s licensed for street use, and that runs into money.
The simplest Cash Cart is your body.
You load yourself up like Harpo Marx, with a long coat that has hundreds of pockets inside the lining, plus giant pockets on the outside, and just stuff hundreds of items in there until you can no longer walk or support yourself on your own legs.
Remove three items, and try to stand up.
Were you successful? Are you on your feet? If not, remove items one at a time until you can just barely manage, then head out the door and find your customers — they’re out there somewhere.
You can easily recognize your customers, pick them out from the crowd — they’re the ones that buy your stuff.
Now, if you have a tourist town, this plan is outrageously powerful and success is assured, unless you act like a total Trump — sorry, I meant, of course, “pendejo” — as in, “asshole”. If you insist on losing your own customers, it’s entirely your business, I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your self-esteem issues.
If you don’t live in a tourist area, why not?
What I mean is, can you move? If you can, it might be wiser to get a little distance between yourself and the United States — I’ve been looking at some interesting malls in Antarctica, which at the moment looks a whole lot better than the Western Hemisphere.
I’m just looking at wind distribution of dust particles when I talk like that. It’s an old habit that comes from surviving too long past a disaster area, which is what this planet is going to become soon enough, but in the meantime, we can squeeze in a LOT of marketing.
Imagine that a customer walks in, sees all this stuff related to the town. This could be someone from out of town, or someone visiting a relative in town — it all works.
You’re appealing to the only thing better than the customer’s own name and face, and once the customer is in your shop, you can offer a variety of personalized items and customized objects, everything from golf gloves to lampshades.
I’ll bet you can still hear the screams from fans when their home team wins. You can incorporate photos of your HIGH SCHOOL and COLLEGE teams, not pro teams, and promote your shop that way.
You can also offer graduation gifts, birthday gifts and so much more, limited only by the power of your imagination and the gift of image manipulation and text structure.
In short, it’s a veritable goldmine, a battleground for the soul, and a marketing opportunity that will get you into the Bodhisattva Mode a lot faster than sitting around clicking your keyboard or swiping your thumbs across a tiny iPhone screen.
Get off your ass, feel the thrill of getting into Work Mode, and enjoy the rest of your life!
Here’s a short list of some of the Chai Teas I’ll be offering:
- Satori Tea
- Tathagata Tea
- Sutra Tea
- Sangha Tea
- Samadhi Tea
- Prana Tea
There are tons more, but that’s just a hint of what’s to come. If you need help coming up with ideas, or you can’t figure out how to get into the sites, or you can’t manage for any other reason to make this work for you, GET IN TOUCH.
Don’t delay. Learn to accept help — that’s Lesson One of the ABD. Learn to accept help. It doesn’t mean you failed. Learn to accept help, gracefully and with ease.
Resistance is useless, but you’re welcome to try.
GET IN TOUCH!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby