#5 What is direct response selling?

In the broadest term, direct response selling is someone selling directly to their customer and there's all sorts of ways to do it: direct mail, catalogs, the web of course, radio and my favorite TV.

In general if you are given the opportunity to order the product, or service you're looking at a direct response selling tool.

When people mention infomercials they usually don't classify them as a direct response selling tool, but they are. In fact, the infomercial is a subset called direct response television, or DRTV and as I keep saying over and over both here and in my book, DRTV is the king of the hill, both in sheer sales numbers and also as the fastest way to get a product into retail.

The infomercial is a half-hour commercial, while it's close cousin is called a "spot" meaning they are no longer than 2 minutes and can also be 60 or 90 seconds long.

One of the great things to come out of our slumping economy is the fact that the price for TV time has gone down significantly. That means projects that were not able to make money in the past, might have a serious shot at it now. Media costs and all the costs related to selling a product on TV, whether a spot, or an infomercial are covered in depth in "The Infomercial Goldmine".