Let me tell you a bit about myself before we get started. I started off doing cold calling and it absolutely did not work for me. I would target local business mailing list owners in my area and call them to see if they needed help with their marketing. Needless to say, this didn't work out well for me. In their opinion, I was simply just this random guy who was looking for a way to make money fast.
So obviously, I got shut down by the secretary/gatekeeper every time. Because of these experiences, I left cold calling for someone else mailing list to use. There were still a big sum of money to be made in my business - I just didn't know where to look. So after I used cold calling, I did direct mail. I did so much direct mail that the people at the post office knew my name by heart.
They thought I was involved in some sort of pyramid scheme - because of the number of letters that I was mailing out. But I was still trying to make money using the principle of direct marketing. My biggest flaw with using direct mail is that I didn't have mailing list a good list. I would mail to business owners in my city hoping to score some sales because they were right in my area - but it simply didn't work out for me.