With the help of a good Samaritan, Knoxville, TN Police arrested a man who crashed into another car and fled the scene.

Police said Larry Bashears crashed his 2004 Nissan Titan pick up into the car of Mary Johnson of Lexington on Wednesday on the 9000 block of Kingston Pike. And he never stopped.

Peter Bolton witnessed the crash and after checking on Johnson followed Bashears down Kingston Pike and Concord Rd.

“I wanted to find out why he was running,” Bolton said. “And then one thing lead to another.”

Bolton said Bashears’ drove as far as he could on three tires until his engine blew out. That’s when the two men confronted one another and Bolton pepper sprayed him.

“Eventually he came to the floor and I managed to get his right arm around the stop sign. He eventually stopped trying to escape,” said Bolton who held Bashears down until the police showed up.

Just remember, if he hadn’t been carrying pepper spray, he may have done the same thing but would have been in greater danger.

Always be selling.

Sell every day.

Every day you should be doing something to make money. Making money can become a habit, just like not making money. Make sure you cultivate the making money habit.

If you have a list, sell to that list.

If you are creating content to get links back to your website, create it every day. Do something — an article, a press release, a video, a blog post or comment. Do it everyday.

If you pay for traffic, pay for it every day.

Do something every day to bring in money.

Get obsessed and addicted to making money. Put your focus on making money, not TV. Sleep less.

Sacrifice your normal time that’s dedicated to other things, and shift that time and focus to cash flow.

Sell stuff.

Start with where you are right now, start with the knowledge you have right now. Start with the resources and assets you have right now. Don’t wait until you know it all.

Your income is going to come from how much you sell. You have to change your focus and time. Full time marketers (or those who want to be full time marketers) focus their time and attention on “making money”… they focus on selling stuff.

Too many distributors spend their time on making changes to their website, changes that will have little effect on sales. Don’t get caught up in this. You focus on those things that will make you money like driving traffic to your website, building your list and selling to your list.

What is something I can sell to my list today?

How can I get more traffic (leads) today to my web site?

You have to sell stuff. Sell more stuff. Get more reach. Get more traffic. And do it everyday!

Increase your conversions. Do whatever you can to get visitors to sign up on your list. Give your list members free stuff like reports, videos on using the products, surveys…anything that bonds them to you. You give people helpful information and they will reciprocate by giving your orders.

Many people are afraid to sell. They hate being sold to, so they refrain from selling. They think they’ll upset people by selling stuff. They are not aggressive enough to put themselves out there and sell stuff. They may never have sold anything before, or maybe they believe they are terrible at sales, and this attitude transfers over to the marketing of their web site business.

In fact, many people choose to sell on the Internet because they feel they don’t really have to sell if they have a website. This just isn’t true. You need to sell and you need to sell every day.

If don’t sell stuff you won’t make money. Sell stuff!

If you are not making the money you want, is it really a mystery?

I’ve mentioned in the last few days that a standard markup for wholesaling a product is 25-30% (depending on the product) and you want to make sure a retailer can make at least 40%. This has confused some distributors because they do not know how to figure a percentage markup.

There is a simple formula for figuring this out.

Let’s say your cost for a product is $5.00. You want to sell it at a 30% markup. You subtract the .30 from 1.00 and get .70. You then divide the $5.00 by .70 and get $7.15. You can test this by subtracting 30% from $7.15 which is $2.15 and you get $5.00.

$7.15 X 30% = $2.15 then $7.15 – $2.15 = $5.00 or simpler $7.15 X .70 = $5.00

If you are selling the product at $7.15 and the retailer wants to make 40%, then he would divide $7.15 by .60 (1.00 – .40 = .60). That means the retailer would sell the product for $11.92. To prove the accuracy of this, subtract 40% from $11.92 which is $4.77 and you get $7.15.

$11.92 X 40% = $4.77 then $11.92 – $4.77 = $7.15 or simpler $11.92 X .60 = $7.15

I know that’s a lot of numbers and I don’t want to confuse you, so use the formulas below to make it easier to compute percentage markup. These are used with the starting costs — yours or the retailer you are selling to.

For a 15% margin, divide the cost price by 0.85
For a 20% margin, divide the cost price by 0.8
For a 25% margin, divide the cost price by 0.75
For a 30% margin, divide the cost price by 0.7
For a 40% margin, divide the cost price by 0.6
For a 50% margin, divide the cost price by 0.5

Happy wholesaling!

If this is the first you are hearing of this, I had a sales contest that started March 1, 2010 and ended February 28, 2011. A year to determine the Top 5 distributors. I then treated the Top 5 to a weekend in Las Vegas, all expenses paid, including plane fare, hotel rooms (at the fabulous Palazzo) and two dinners at great restaurants. We went this last weekend (March 18 and 19).

I remember telling a few business friends about what I was going to do for my Top 5 distributors and they let me know they thought it was over the top and completely unnecessary to spend that much money. They gave me several suggestions about what I could do that would still be appreciated but cost me a lot less money. I thanked them for their suggestions, and proceeded to plan the trip I wanted. After all, these 5 distributors spent over $928,000 with me in the 12 months the contest ran. I spent 2% of that on this fabulous trip. It was an easy decision to make this experience first class all the way for them and not cut any corners.

See, that was the point. To do something that Nancy and I would love and then share it with these very special distributors. So, I booked the rooms at the hotel Nancy and I would want to stay at, made reservations at the restaurants that Nancy and I would want to eat and even invited Tom Rich and his lovely wife Kelli because Tom Rich is a marketer that I take advice from (my distributors spent almost 4 hours with Tom going over their businesses in Las Vegas).

I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. I am so thankful that I not only had the money to pay for this trip but thankful that I actually enjoyed spending the money to show these distributors a good time and a little of my appreciation.

I’ve put up some photos of the trip. I will be getting more photos shortly from the distributors to add to what’s up, but you can see what’s there now at http://www.flickr.com/photos/safetytech/.

I hope this will inspire you to make greater effort this year. The new contest started March 1 and will end February 29, 2012. I’m not sure what the prize will be next year, but it will be good — that I can promise you.

This may not seem that important, but its important to a customer who is deciding if he should do business with you or not. This is just one more thing you can do to make your potential customer feel comfortable.  It shows stability and lets them feel you will be around down the road in case there’s a problem with a product they order.

If you have been in business for 1 year or 2 years or 10 years, make sure that is known and celebrated on your website.

You can get a freelancer at odesk.com to make you a nice anniversary image or look on istockphoto.com

The company was hired to work a movie called The Boost with James Woods and Sean Young. There a short scene in the movie where Sean Young and James Wood drive up to a party at some guy’s house.

You can see Nancy open the door for James Wood who is on the passenger side — Sean Young is driving. Here’s the scene. The blowup of Nancy at the end is my doing — wasn’t part of the movie

Wars are created by governments but fought by ordinary citizens. These warriors go where they’re told to go and fight when they’re told to fight. Some come home, some do not. Either way, they did their duty. Nothing more could be asked of any man or woman than they did their duty.

Whether we should be in Afghanistan or Iraq is a debate that should be taken up with your elected officials. If you don’t like the war, make sure your government knows about it. But, do not include the airmen, sailors and soldiers who are just doing their duty in your denouncement of the war.

For all those who’ve lost someone to a war, I salute you and them. I know we all look forward to the day when greed, religious fanaticism and pride are not reasons to send our young men and women to war. But, until that day comes, we will stand united in our support for all those who risk their lives and limbs just doing their duty.

I made a video last year when there seemed to be a lot of apologizing for the United States going on.

We’ve set up access for you to view these cameras over the Internet. This might have some curiosity value to you, but the greater value is in helping you sell cameras and DVR systems.

You do this by giving access to the cameras to potential customers. Once they see how cool it is to be able to access cameras over the Internet, the odds of them buying increase.

One of the cameras is a pan/tilt/zoom camera and they have full control over it. They can zoom in, zoom out, pan left, right, up and down. Cool stuff.

One issue you need to know about. Only one person can login at a time. So, to make sure that no one hogs the connection or forgets to log out, we set it up so the connection wll disconnect after 60 seconds. That means you or your customer will have 60 seconds to look around. They can log back in if they want.

Here are the instructions for logging in:

If you don’t have Active X controls enabled you will need to do the following:

• Open Internet Explorer (does not work with Firefox)
• Click on Tools
• Click on Internet Options
• Click on the Security Tab at the top of the window
• Click on Custom Level
• Turn all active X controls to Enable if you have the option you can select prompt

When this is done log in:

• Open Internet Explorer and type this IP address 216.176.238.90 (no www, just the numbers) in the address bar and press enter.
• Enter the user name:  guest
• Enter the password:  coach
• You will be prompted to install Active X…click ok
• You will be able to view the cameras by clicking open all.
• To operate the PTZ camera click on camera 3 labeled PTZ-DOME and use the controls on the right to move and zoom the camera.

As a way of giving back to some of my top distributors, I would like to treat them to a weekend in Las Vegas with me and Nancy. In fact, I think it is something that I would like to do every year.

I want to keep the group small so we can have dinner in private rooms at the best restaurants and get to know each other better. Maybe even share some marketing secrets. So, from March 1, 2010 through February 28, 2011 we will track everyone’s orders from Safety Technology. The top 4 distributors will be invited to a weekend in Las Vegas. They can bring one person with them. I will pay for the round trip plane fare for 2 and two nights stay a major hotel on the strip. I don’t know the hotel yet. I’m going to let Nancy choose that. Plus, dinner at two of our favorite restaurants. All on me.

I want to invite 5 distributors, so the 5th will be chosen, not based on sales, but some other criteria that I haven’t come up with. So, there will be 5 distributors, plus their guest and me and Nancy. Twelve of us. We will probably do this at the end of March or the first of April, 2011.

More details will be given as we get closer to the event next year. For now, focus on building your business.

I hope this is something that will be fun for you to look forward to. I’m definitely looking forward to it. It will be a lot of fun.

As it happens, one of the most reliable ways to obtain wholesale products for a retail business is through a provider that offers their clients a wholesale drop ship service. A wholesale drop shipper is a third party that takes care of you (the retailer) by sending wholesale products out as they are ordered by your customers through a special drop ship service. What this means is that retailers can contact the drop shipping company and order only as many stock items as they need, and only when they need them. These products are sent out immediately by the drop shipping company, so business people have no need for keeping large amounts of back stock. They also don’t need to pay for and maintain storage space for huge amounts of items.

With this ability, retailers can simply contact the drop shipping company and tell them exactly what they need – and they can avoid many of the headaches that go along with keeping large amounts of stock (as mentioned above). In addition, retailers with an online Internet presence are able to allow customers to order their products (and a far broader array of products, overall!) directly from the drop ship provider.

Obtaining wholesale products directly from a wholesale drop shipper can completely alter and improve the foundation of a retail business. In fact, it improves things for both the business person and the customers! First of all, it is possible to avoid the issue of storing stock once and for all. Secondly, it allows the retailer more time, energy and resources to focus on other aspects of the business aside from shipping and maintaining a stock of wholesale products to sell. Finally, the retailer can offer a broad array of items for sale, far more than they could usually fit into one store front property.

For the customers, there is also an upside to wholesale products from a drop shipper. They receive a selection of more goods to choose from, which is always an added benefit. In addition, the items are sent directly to the customers, which can be especially handy for those individuals who do their purchasing online.

The Internet makes it possible for the average person to take advantage of selling wholesale products through drop shipping, even when starting without a retail business!

www.SafetyTechnology.com