* Note: this article is satire *

I have a confession: I love watching late night infomercials. It’s like seeing the aftermath of a train wreck; it’s terrible to witness but you just can’t turn your head away from it. After many nights of watching these infomercials, I believe I have come up with the perfect how-to guide to make your inferior product and/or service into a cash cow! Here’s how it’s done:

Diversify Your Paid Actors
The key to making your inferior product and/or service reach the largest demographic of idiots with too much money is to diversify the ethnicities and stereotypes of your paid actors. Simply having the attractive and successful type actors isn’t enough. You need to employ actors who can portray underachievers, wishful thinkers, deadbeats, and many other typical stereotypes that will often be your main customers! Remember: Your product provides absolutely no real value to anyone. Most logical people can spot this immediately, so you want to cater to that special 1 in 100 person who is naive enough to believe your lies.

Use An Orange Host
Make sure that the actor playing the host of your infomercial has a nice and healthy bright orange tan. This has long been a secret of successful infomercials. This subtle trick will help push the idea that with your inferior product and/or service, you too can become rich, beautiful, and orange.

Explain As Little As Possible About What You’re Offering
Information about your inferior product and/or service isn’t necessary to sell it. In fact, the less information you give the better. Your customers are naive, so keeping them in the dark about how useless and inferior your product and/or service is is the best method to ensure you make a sale. Otherwise they might wise up and actually realize your product is a scam. Remember: It is crucial to ensure that customers don’t realize your inferior product and/or service is a scam until after they hand you their money.

Reiterate How Much Money You Can Make As Much As Possible
This is absolutely crucial. We live in America, buddy! We don’t care about hard work, having discipline, and saving for retirement, we want large amounts of money now! As a general rule, you should devote about 85% of your air time to telling your potential customers about how much money they can make, followed by how quickly it can be made! Notice: In combination with telling your customers as little information as possible about your inferior product and/or service, you have basically filtered out the logical people who have already changed the channel to watch something with actual value. Now your real customer base is tuned in and ready to tell you their credit card numbers!

Use Small Prints For Big Truths
‘Your actual results may vary.’ is the buzz kill of the party that is your sales pitch. Whenever you’ve got important information that could let your customers realize that you are clearly scamming them, you should use the smallest size font that is legally allowed. Remember: You’re only promising for the idea of a better life for your customers, not delivering it.

Finally, and most importantly, Deceive and Use Half-Truths As Much As Legally Possible
No explanation needed on this one. Just lie through your teeth as much as legally possible. Sales are sure to come flying in. With all of these techniques you too can promise and fail to deliver on the hopes of thousands!

Now go out there and lie to your fellow man for a buck!