Don Lapre and Visions of Canals on Mars
By Brandon Adamson
I used to watch those late night infomercials back in the 90s when I was growing up. They were very inspirational for me. Don’s positive attitude and imaginative ideas about maximizing one’s potential really motivated me to pursue my dreams. When I was down and out more than once, I often thought back to those commercials and how Don, a high school dropout started with nothing “from his ONE bedroom apartment” but never gave up dreaming.
He sold these people some products and ideas. It’s not his fault if the people who bought it couldn’t make it work or if the business plan they purchased was flawed or outdated. The secret to making money with these sorts of multi-level marketing ideas has always been to sell multi-level marketing ideas. The reality is that one never needed to actually buy any of Don’s brochures or products in order to benefit. He tells you exactly how to do everything in the commercial. Of course, it’s after he’s already done it(presumably,) so the tricks won’t work as well anymore once everyone is using them. However, as a teenager who watched his original “tiny classified ads” cable infomercials in the long gone late night hours of summers past, flipping channels while waiting for some Shannon Whirry erotic thriller to start on Cinemax…I was able to learn some valuable marketing ideas without ever purchasing any of Don Lapre’s pamphlets. The days of classified print advertising have pretty much long been eclipsed by the internet. The principles though are still valid. You experiment with a few test ads using what little money you have(or no money if they are free,) and when you find one that works even just slightly, you duplicate it a thousand times over in as many similar venues as you can find. It’s the old “I don’t know how to make a million dollars, but I can tell you how to make $1 a million times.” Of course, 1-900 lines and such were already on their way out by the time Don started offering them. Once everybody has a 900 line and is placing thousands of classified ads, then suddenly the market is saturated and nobody will see the ads. To benefit from Don’s advice, is not to sell the same products he is promoting and magically be successful, but to apply the principles he advocates to your own ideas and products.
Back in the golden days of the internet and the dot com bubble, these techniques were easy to apply to internet search engines to generate traffic through creation of doorway pages etc. You would find one page that was able to rank high for a certain keyword, and then make hundreds of similar pages based around other keywords and direct them all to the same site. I still today make use of the basic guerrilla marketing tactics I learned from watching Don Lapre’s commercials whether it’s for promoting youtube videos/music/ books through craigslist and backpage or building up my social media networks and finding new fans. Everything that works in marketing only works until too many people are doing it, and then those holes begin to close. Then you need to pack up your methods and search for a road less traveled where you can begin to forge yourself a new path to success.
Anyway…nobody made these people purchase Don’s making money packages. These “fraud” charges are an abomination and actually a reflection of the mindset of those who always need to find a scapegoat in society. They can’t handle taking responsibility for their own bad business decisions. Really Don Lapre should be pardoned. Of course, being an mlm marketer and infotainment figure, he represents the perfect easy target for the demagogues in the media and their allies, the “lynch mob lemmings” known to Ayn Rand as the parasitic collective masses. No elected official would have the balls to pardon someone in that industry even though it would be the right thing to do.
Don Lapre helped a lot of people. Even if his money making ideas were flawed and many individuals were unable to capitalize on them literally…… just like visions of canals on mars or Erich Von Daniken’s ancient astronaut theories, Don set fire to the imaginations of people and inspired them to get off their asses and seek out new frontiers.
You would never see this many people bothering to show support for a guy who sold “making money packages” and so called “get rich quick” schemes unless he was a genuinely great guy with a heart of gold. It’s a testament to his character and the positive impression he has left on those he has known or in my case, never known. Good luck, Don!
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ July 20, 2011 5:53 pm
Tags: don lapre, get rich quick, infomercials, tiny classified ads