Billy Mays found dead at Florida home

Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said linking Mays' death to the landing would "purely be speculation." She said Mays' family members didn't report any health issues with the pitchman, but said he was due to have hip replacement surgery in the coming weeks.

Laura Brown, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she did not know if Mays was wearing his seat belt on the flight because the FAA is not investigating his death.

U.S. Airways spokesman Jim Olson said there were no reports of serious injury due to the landing.

"If local authorities have any questions for us about yesterday's flight, we'll cooperate fully with them," he said.

Born William Mays in McKees Rocks, Pa., on July 20, 1958, Mays developed his style demonstrating knives, mops and other "As Seen on TV" gadgets on Atlantic City's boardwalk. For years he worked as a hired gun on the state fair and home show circuits, attracting crowds with his booming voice and genial manner.

AJ Khubani, founder and CEO of "As Seen on TV," said he first met Mays in the early 1990s when Mays was still pitching one of his early products, the Shammy absorbent cloth, at a trade fair. He said he most recently worked with Mays on the reality TV show "Pitchmen" on the Discovery Channel, which follows Mays and Anthony Sullivan in their marketing jobs.

"His innovative role and impact on the growth and wide acceptance of direct response television cannot be overestimated or easily replaced; he was truly one of a kind," Khubani said of Mays in a statement.

After meeting Orange Glo International founder Max Appel at a home show in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s, Mays was recruited to demonstrate the environmentally friendly line of cleaning products on the St. Petersburg-based Home Shopping Network.

Commercials and informercials followed, anchored by the high-energy Mays showing how it's done while tossing out kitschy phrases like, "Long live your laundry!"

Sarah Ellerstein worked closely with Mays when she was a buyer for the Home Shopping Network in the 1990s and he was pitching Orange Glo products.

"Billy was such a sweet guy, very lovable, very nice, always smiling, just a great, great guy," she said, adding that Mays met his future wife at the network. "Everybody thinks because he's loud and boisterous on the air that that's the way he is, but I always found him to be a quiet, down-to-earth person."

His ubiquitousness and thumbs-up, in-your-face pitches won Mays plenty of fans for his commercials on a wide variety of products. People lined up at his personal appearances for autographed color glossies, and strangers stopped him in airports to chat about the products.

"I enjoy what I do," Mays told The Associated Press in a 2002 interview. "I think it shows."

Mays liked to tell the story of giving bottles of OxiClean to the 300 guests at his wedding, and doing his ad spiel ("powered by the air we breathe!") on the dance floor at the reception. Visitors to his house typically got bottles of cleaner and housekeeping tips.

As part of "Pitchmen," Mays and Sullivan showed viewers new gadgets such as the Impact Gel shoe insert; the Tool Band-it, a magnetized armband that holds tools; and the Soft Buns portable seat cushion.

"One of the things that we hope to do with 'Pitchmen' is to give people an appreciation of what we do," Mays told The Tampa Tribune in an April interview. "I don't take on a product unless I believe in it. I use everything that I sell."

His former wife, Dolores "Dee Dee" Mays, of McKees Rocks, Pa., recalled that the first product he sold was the Wash-matik, a device for pumping water from a bucket to wash cars.

"I knew him since he was 15, and I always knew he had it in him," she said of Mays' success. "He'll live on forever because he always had the biggest heart in the world. He loved his friends and family and would do anything for them. He was a generous soul and a great father."

Michael Jackson dies at age 50

'King of Pop' dies in LA

Jackson was preparing for what was to be his greatest comeback: He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at a London arena, with the first set for July 13. He was in rehearsals in Los Angeles for the concert, an extravaganza that was to capture the classic Jackson magic: showstopping dance moves, elaborate staging and throbbing dance beats.

Singer Dionne Warwick said: "Michael was a friend and undoubtedly one of the world's greatest entertainers that I fortunately had the pleasure of working with. ... We have lost an icon in our industry."

Jackson's death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.

Michael Jackson, the sensationally gifted child star who rose to become the "King of Pop" and the biggest celebrity in the world only to fall from his throne in a freakish series of scandals, died Thursday. He was 50. Jackson died at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner for Los Angeles County, confirmed his office had been notified of the death and would handle the investigation.

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How to Get Others to Sell Your Info-Products for You

All authors and info-marketers would like to see more sales of their information products -- but too often, they lack the necessary marketing skills or the time to more effectively market their titles. Many emerging experts discover that it takes time to build up your own list of customers, prospects and subscribers.

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To begin with, there are three categories of businesses where you’ll find ideal joint venture partners -- (1) synergistic companies, (2) your competitors and (3) companies that are completely unrelated to you.

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Let’s look at synergistic businesses first.

(1) “Synergistic companies” or businesses are those that already sell complementary type of information. What they’re selling is similar or complementary to what you are offering.

Let’s say you’re selling a system for advertising accounting services and you do a joint-venture with a company that provides continuing education credits for CPAs. In the United States, accountants and other types of professional practitioners are required to maintain a certain level of competency and skills, so they take classes locally or at conferences and earn what are called CEUs or continuing education units.

If you have an information product to help these CPAs bring more clients in the door, perhaps you could locate a company that provides CEU classes but doesn’t offer advertising, marketing and practice-building information as you do.

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(2) The next big category of potential joint-venture partners is “competitive companies.” Think about it: At the same time your competitor is prospecting and selling new customers, some prospects are not buying anything. Similarly, customers who have already purchased everything your competitor has to offer may be no longer buying or subscribing.

If you can convince your competitor to promote your products to their non-converted leads or past customer names, that’s a phenomenal joint-venture opportunity for the both of you. You could make money, but also turn those names into revenue for your competitor who has most likely given up ever selling them something else.

(3) The last big category of company to look for is “completely unrelated companies.” These are situations to look for where the company isn’t providing anything similar to what you provide, but COULD provide it if you proved there would be value for their customers and prospects in doing so.

For example, perhaps you find a company who sells a money-making program that is vastly different from the income-generation training program you sell. You can still approach these companies to become a recommended second-income idea or an alternative to the one their prospects originally investigated.

To help you execute joint ventures with these three kinds of companies, start investigating professional schools, magazines, newsletters, corporations, speakers, radio talk shows, infomercial companies and other information outlets for possibilities.

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Janet Switzer is the marketing strategist behind some of the best known celebrity authors in the world: Jack Canfield of The Secret and Chicken Soup for the Soul, One Minute Millionaire author Mark Victor Hansen, personal finance guru David Bach, motivational speaker Les Brown and others. Subscribe to her FREE series of info-marketing special reports at Build Your Empire.