How to Get on QVC

1. QVC is free and can expose your product to potentially 89 million homes in the United States.
2. A successful appearance on QVC can open new distribution channels for your product in stores and online.
3. Having your product marked “As seen on TV” validates your product and helps promote sales in other venues.
4. Featured products on QVC (TSV’s) commonly sell in excess of $2 Million in one day.
5. Earning a spot on a top home shopping show like QVC can help your product be first and fastest to the market.

1. When you’re starting out and you wear all the hats and have limited resources, it is important to utilize leverage in your marketing efforts. One of the top uses of leverage is selling your product via a home shopping show like QVC. Selling through QVC is akin to having a staff of thousands promoting your product in thousands of locations.
2. Get performance based individuals to promote your product for you. Once you get paid, they get paid. Manufacturer’s Representatives is one name for them. Agents is another commonly used term to describe this type of salesperson, albeit closely associated with representatives that bring product to the home shopping channels on behalf of a company or inventor.
3. Publicity via the internet, newspapers and magazines is an excellent use of leverage in that many people tend to see the coverage and as a result, has the ability to perform like hundreds of people on the street promoting your product.
4. Piggyback your product with other company’s successful products via co-ventures and capitalize on their experience and distribution. This is like having a sales force promoting your product without the expense - an excellent form of leverage.
5. Use free online video websites to promote your product visually. Some simple home-spun videos of new products have yielded millions of views on popular sites like Youtube.com.

1. Find or develop a product that solves a common problem
2. Find or develop a product that has mass appeal
3. Create a “better mousetrap”
4. Make sure your product is highly demonstrable
5. Align yourself with people that understand and have worked with QVC

In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he tells a story of a man who stopped digging for gold and sold his mine to a junk dealer. Soon after, the junk dealer made an enormous discovery. Three feet past where the digging had stopped by the previous owner, he unearthed the world’s largest vein of gold. Great for him, not so great for the previous owner.

It makes me wonder how many people are three feet short of getting their product or million dollar idea off the ground.

For many people that I have met, the problem is marketing. Where to start, what to do, the question of financial resources, and so on. And no matter what scale your business marketing budget revolves in, whether small or large, you have to look at the most effective methods of marketing and this often entails the effective use of leverage.

Leverage is when you get maximum results for minimal effort. In other words, if you only had one opportunity to market your product, what could you do that would give you the greatest exposure and opportunity for your product with the least amount of effort.

Leverage is the secret of all great businesses and below is my list of high leverage activities that you can incorporate into your marketing efforts:

1. Get your product on one of the shopping channels (QVC or HSN) - one exposure here is the equivalent of having a sales force of hundreds pounding the pavement for your product.
2. Participate in a trade show - hundreds of buyers attend industry tradeshows - having a booth in one of these gains great exposure for your products.
3. Find a qualified manufacturer’s representative to pitch your product to the major stores. Leveraging the work of others gives you the time you need to focus on things within your strength.
4. Create a viral word of mouth video campaign using the internet. Many videos on Youtube that have gotten millions of hits are produced with nothing more than a consumer video camera. Creativity and humor are just a few keys to going viral, so place your creative inventive mind to work for you in the area of video ideas and you’ll be surprised what you can come up with.
5. License your product or idea - quite often licensing provides the product creator with phenomenal leverage. Yes, you’re missing out on profit, but you’re also not doing the day to day work and marketing of your product. The key to going the licensing route is to of course have great ideas, but also to have many of them working for you. If you’re focusing on day to day business activities you won’t have as much time for idea creation and thus the power of licensing when it comes to leverage.