Ted Nicholas

Many people in direct marketing consider Ted Nicholas the grandfather of traditional direct marketing.

Ted has literally been selling products offline for the last thirty years. If you pick up any magazine or newsletter you have a great chance of either seeing one of his original ads or at least one of his hardcore students using his techniques.

I like a lot of Ted's ideas and his materials. In his books over the years he has described hundreds of original direct marketing ideas that have (on some level) changed the way that every direct marketer on the planet views mail order.

That is probably the one problem with Ted Nicholas. He explains everything really well. (Almost too well.) I would call Ted a "Nuts and bolts writer". All I mean by that is he talks about how processes work but he doesn't always tell you why you should be doing things.

That is how I divide writers in my mind. The writers who tell people the theory behind things and the authors who tell people how to do something. I am sure that you can see the problems with both.

If you have a writer that just tells you the theory you don't know what to do to solve the problem. If you know how to solve the problem you won't really understand when to implement it. I have really tried to be both in my writings, which hasn't always been easy.

Ted's other flaw is the fact that he hasn't exactly entered the information age. There are quite a few marketers that haven't entered it either so Ted is not alone but I predict that will change for 99% of the marketers out there (if they want to keep selling stuff).

Some are just getting sites but the sites show they think slapping up a sales letter will do the trick. They really don't understand the power of the internet. My advice: Check out some of Ted's titles (available from Amazon.com) and see what he has to offer.

Just make sure that you have your internet marketing angle covered (that is where the new money is).

Matt Gagnon