Discover
the secrets of an Internet millionaire in this exclusive interview
with online marketing guru Corey Rudl. Corey is the author of the
#1 best-selling course, "The Insider Secrets
to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet" and is probably
one of the most recognized names in Internet marketing today.
In
the following
interview, Corey reveals how he grew his business from a one-man
show in his parents' basement to four online businesses that attract
over 1.8 million visitors per month and generated over $7.6 MILLION
in online sales last year. Corey reveals exactly how he did it,
and details precisely what entrepreneurs need to be doing TODAY
to be successful online.
Hi
Corey,
and thanks so much for agreeing to do this interview. Maybe the
best way for us to begin is for you to tell us a bit about yourself
and your company, The Internet Marketing Center.
Sure. Well, first off, I am the President
and CEO
of The Internet Marketing Center, which you can find online at www.marketingtips.com.
We specialize in showing people how they can drive tons of targeted
traffic to their web sites and how to turn that traffic into sales
and profits. We provide all the information you need to learn how
to market your business online, in the form of home-study courses,
books, video and audio tapes, and more.
What really sets us apart from all the
other marketing
courses, though, is that we give you the concepts AND the software
tools you need to promote and automate your business on the Internet.
And we do all of this based on our own real-world tests and experience,
not just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it BEFORE we
teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee your results.
Actually,
that brings up a good question: Why, exactly, is your "Insider
Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet" course
so successful? Aren’t you leading this market space?
Yes,
we are by far the leaders in educating our Small Office/Home Office
audience in how to make money on the Internet.
The
reason the
course is so successful is because we practice what we preach. We
generated about $7.6 million in business last year, all online.
And that's not to mention the tens of millions of dollars we have
helped our clients generate. We have over 70,000 affiliates and
we get over 1.8 million unique visitors to our sites every month,
all on a shoestring budget and all from scratch. So we are actually
using all the methods that we teach.
Would you hire
a poor stock broker? Of course not. If he cannot make himself rich,
how's he going to help you? Would you hire a personal trainer that
is not in good shape? No way! If they can’t do it themselves,
how can you be sure that what they are teaching you is not garbage?
People
know
our reputation and they know that the stuff we teach in the course
actually works. We walk people through every single step they need
to follow to be successful marketing their business on the Internet
-- even if they don't have an online business yet.
We
also have
a few big Fortune 500 corporate clients. They're attracted to us
because most of them are so caught up in red tape that they don’t
get to see the guerilla marketing tactics used to generate immediate
revenues like small businesses do. We're just now starting to see
the big corporations picking up some of the things we were recommending
two years ago!
So
the
key to your success is practicing what you preach?
Exactly.
Another
big reason we're so successful is that we take all the risk. Our
guarantee is simple -- if you don’t make money from what you've
learned in the course, then you pay nothing. You can return it anytime
for a full refund for any reason. Even if you decide you don't like
the paper it's printed on, we'll give you all of your money back.
And you know what? We get nearly zilch returns -- and that speaks
for itself.
Don’t
take my word for it, check
out the testimonials at our site. We
publish only one percent of the testimonials we receive, but you
can see that it's not people saying “Oh, it was great,”
but people saying they “Made an extra $70,000 already this
year," or “Traffic increased by 400% in 30 days.”
That's what counts -- results. That is the scoreboard at the end
of the day.
And
we really
do cover everything in the course you could ever imagine. We teach
you everything from A to Z; everything from starting up from scratch
with nothing to how to drive traffic to your site, right down to
setting up your site to convert visitors to more sales.
You'll
learn
how to maximize your exposure on the search engines, how to automate
your entire business, how to build pop-up boxes, and hundreds of
other things. We even give you templates and ideas to copy from
us to ensure that nothing will go wrong!
That
reminds me of a funny story... A couple of years back, I thought
of trying to get my course on the reading list for an Internet Marketing
program being offered by a top university. I had some meetings with
a few of their senior marketing professors, hoping to get "Insider Secrets"
into the hands of all their Internet Marketing students.
They
finally came back to me and said, basically, "Thanks, but no
thanks." Now, I was shocked! Why wouldn't they want their students
to have the #1 Internet Marketing course as part of their education?
I wouldn't let the professor leave my office until she told me.
It turns out they were actually scared that if their students read
my course and found out that it cost less than two hundred dollars,
they would feel ripped off by the school, which was basically charging
them thousands of dollars for the same information!
That's
quite a story! It just goes to show that "traditional"
education isn't always the best way to get the BEST information.
Corey,
could you tell us a little bit about your own history and background?
How did you get started marketing online?
Well,
I won't
go too far back as I don’t want to bore you, but my first
online venture was way back in 1994. I had written a book called
"Car Secrets Revealed" and had been trying to market it
offline. After wasting a lot of money on magazine and print ads,
I took a friend's advice and decided to try selling it over the
Internet. Those magazine ads had eaten up most of my cash, but I
did manage to scrape together enough to get my first web site up
and running.
I did everything myself -- built the site
in HTML
1.0, learned how to use FTP programs, figured out how to build a
banner, and things like that. Those were the days when Netscape
1.0 had just come out and there was no such thing as secure real-time
online ordering. It was all so new and exciting!
I was glued to my computer 24 hours a
day testing
all kinds of wild and crazy marketing ideas to see which ones worked.
And I can tell you that 95 out of 100 ideas failed, but the ones
that did work, worked like crazy! Within 18 months I had the #1
best-selling car book online... and it's been #1 ever since!
When people started seeing that my counter
had logged
over 1,000,000 visitors at CarSecrets.com,
they started asking how I was marketing it. They wanted to know
how such a simple and basic site was generating so much traffic,
and if I could teach them how to do it. Before too long I realized
that I wasn't able to teach people everything I knew during a one-week
consulting contract.
So I decided to "brain dump"
everything
I knew into a course, which I called "The Insider Secrets to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet." It taught just about
everything I knew with real-life examples of exactly what I had
tested, what worked, and what didn't. That was what set my course
apart from every other Internet marketing course out there -- that
I had actually tested and proven my techniques. Other courses were
just teaching fluff and theory.
By promoting the course with the exact
same techniques
I was teaching, it became the #1 best-selling Internet marketing
course online within three months. Since then, it has been through
four new versions -- it needs to be updated regularly as the Internet
changes so fast! But through all this time, it continues to be the
#1 best-selling Internet marketing course online.
Because we're so far out in front of
the curve
as to what's working and what isn't, we have also been able to develop
some of the world’s leading Internet promotional and automation
software. Basically, we developed software that we needed for our
own business. We made sure it was the best and then made it available
to our clients. This has helped us become one of the world’s
leading Internet marketing companies helping small to medium businesses
drive traffic and make more sales.
So, what specific suggestions
do you have
for someone interested in getting started marketing on the Web?
Wow! That's a huge question and, to be
blunt, there's
no way I could answer it in just a few minutes. In fact, that's
why I wrote a 1,000-page course in the first place... There are
literally hundreds of tips and suggestions for building a successful
presence online. There is just so much to know if you want to do
it right the first time. However, there is one tip that is more
important than any other...
Get educated. Don’t think you
can put up a
web site and have traffic appear from out of nowhere. It does not
work that way. Spend the time to educate yourself about how everything
works. Research your market or idea and learn how to identify a
niche market on the Internet. Create or market products that solve
other people’s problems.
Another thing to look at is your competition.
How
big are they? What are they doing right and wrong?
Learn from people who practice what they
preach
-- find people that you KNOW are successful on the Internet and
model yourself after them. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel
and don't listen to people who cannot prove that they have done
what you are trying to do.
There are so many "wannabes"
out there
who write books on web site promotion but don't even have a successful
Internet business themselves. Find someone who you know is successful
and use them as a mentor -- that's what I did. I had mentors, too.
Why do you feel that so
many people who
attempt to create an income on the Internet fail to do so?
Whoa, another loaded question! There are
so many
reasons, but here are the main ones. Bear with me, this will be
a long answer:
Deciding on a product before finding a
market is
a big one. This is probably the most common mistake. If you are
asking “What is a good product to sell online?” you
are making this mistake right now! You need to decide on a market
first.
The Internet makes it very easy to find
people interested
in a specific category like gardening, hunting, aeronautics, accountants,
or any other interest group. Just about any group is easy to locate
and target online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion
lists, e-zines (electronic magazines), etc.
You have to make sure you have a captive
audience,
then find out what they are having a common problem with. If you
can come up with a product or service to solve that problem, you
have a guaranteed successful business. It's really that easy --
that's how all my businesses were built.
You don’t even really have to
“sell”
it, because you already know they want it before you launch your
web site. And since you already know exactly where your customers
are, it's easy to target them. I mean, it’s a no-brainer once
you think about it.
Now, let’s turn that situation
around for
a second. Say scientists had found a cure for the common cold. You'd
become a millionaire selling it online, right? Well, not necessarily!
How do you find people that are sick online? You would have to market
to the general Internet community to try and find the 1 out of 10,000
people that are sick that day. It would cost a ton of money to market
to 10,000 people just to find one qualified buyer!
And to make matters worse, if you are
selling this
over the Internet, by the time you ship them the pill through the
mail, they'd probably be over their cold! So by choosing the product
instead of the market, you can actually fail no matter how great
your product is.
Your course has a lot of
information about
generating traffic. Is that a big hurdle for online businesses?
Many people think they can build a web
site, submit
it to the search engines, and the buyers will come. The logic is
that there are hundreds of millions of people online surfing around
and that some of them are bound to stumble onto your product. Wrong!
Search engine ranking is more competitive than ever.
Yes, there are secret ways to get high
rankings
in the search engines and we spend more than 40 pages in our course
showing you how to do it. It is probably one of the most complex
marketing techniques out there. There are lots of different options
for grabbing high rankings. You can do it all yourself, or you can
buy really good positioning software, or even hire specialized companies
to do it for you.
The course even recommends which positioning
software
you should be using, as there is a lot of junk out there! The same
with Search Engine Optimization companies -- most have no idea what
they're doing. So my course shows you how to tell the good guys
from the bad guys.
The real key is to know what your potential
buyers
do online. Are they searching online for a specific term? Are they
visiting specific web sites all the time? Are they subscribed to
topic-specific e-mail lists or e-zines? In other words, you need
to know where your target market is “hanging out” online.
If you can find where your potential buyers are, this is where you
should spend your marketing and advertising money.
That
is why I said before, spend your time getting educated, learning
everything, and researching your market and product or service.
Spend your time and money driving them to your site and then show
them how your product solves a problem they have. Marketing is everything
online! You could have the best product in the world selling for
half of your competitor's price, but if you cannot get the word
out, you don't stand a chance.
What
are some of the big psychological obstacles for online entrepreneurs?
Number
one in
that department is definitely procrastination. I cannot tell you
how many people I've met who have really great ideas and plans,
but so few of them actually do what they say they are going to do.
So turn off the TV, stop using your new baby as an excuse, stop
going for drinks after work with friends, and take the time to get
serious about your business! You will have plenty of time for all
the rest when the big income starts rolling in.
Let's
be honest
here... We're all good at justifying excuses to ourselves. I've
even done it a few times myself! But there really is no excuse for
not following your dream. You're only hurting yourself.
The second biggest psychological obstacle
is fear
of failure. Never fear failure. Heck, we fail every day. The key
is to fail small. In fact, your ticket to success is failing regularly!
Every time you fail, you're eliminating bad ideas and getting closer
to the things that work.
If you aren't failing, you are not learning.
We
test new ideas, new prices, new marketing strategies, new looks,
new products every month! Most of them fail, and we expect that.
And we don't call it failure, we call it testing.
We are just looking for the five winners
out of
every 100 small failures we have, because what we learn from the
winners we apply to everything we have. Here's a perfect example:
We don’t even send out an e-mail to our opt-in list without
testing at least four versions of the e-mail to see which one performs
the best -- that is how much you have to test. Some pull in 200%
better results than others with small changes, so it's definitely
worth it.
Speaking of results, what
kind of results
should people expect when they are just starting out?
Don't get discouraged if you don't see
immediate
results. This is another huge psychological barrier faced by many
new entrepreneurs. Some people expect their business to be successful
immediately and their dreams to come true overnight. It usually
doesn't happen that way.
An Internet business is like any other
business
-- it takes work. The only difference on the Internet is that you
can automate a lot of repetitive chores... and you can test and
roll things out WAY faster than an offline business could.
Things generally start slow -- that is
to be expected.
But when it snowballs, it snowballs VERY fast! And you really have
to be prepared, because the Internet moves at seven times the speed
of offline business. If you do things right, you can easily grow
700% faster than any offline business just due to the speed of business
on the Internet.
Think of it this way: if you had just
30 people
a day sign up for a newsletter, that adds up to over 10,000 subscribers
in a year. This means that your company now has a database of 10,000
highly targeted leads to market your products to. If you were to
purchase a list of 10,000 targeted leads (who have never even heard
of you before and may not be receptive to your product), it could
easily cost you up to $5 per lead.
So just by attracting 30 new people a
day, you've
created an asset that is worth around $50,000. Sometimes, even if
it seems like things are moving slowly, you're actually building
something great! I hope that makes sense.
If you could tell someone
just one thing
about how to be a success in marketing on the Web, what would it
be?
That’s easy! Learn how to drive
targeted traffic
to your site inexpensively and the rest will all come. Once you've
got the traffic, you can change the design of your site, you can
test different prices, and you can even change products if your
product isn't selling well. Without traffic, nothing you do will
make your online business a success.
Now, don't get me wrong! You still have
to sell
a real product to real people for real money. You can't just build
a site, promote it, and try to think of a way to make money after
the traffic comes. That was what killed all of the so-called "dot-bombs"
a couple of years ago.
So simply attracting lots
of general traffic
isn't necessarily a good thing?
General traffic is fine, but traffic targeted
to
your specific niche market is much, MUCH better. In my experience,
finding a niche and selling to it is the single easiest route to
profitability online. If you are trying to sell books or CDs online,
forget it -- Amazon.com will crush you. Those markets are gone.
However, if you target your market to
a specific
interest -- say gardening, hunting, cars, or whatever -- it's easy
to find people online with an interest in those things. All you
have to do is find what that market wants and give it to them. I
have a lot of clients that make hundreds of thousands of dollars
a year who just started their businesses a short time ago and almost
all of them make their money by having specific products that go
over well in a very targeted niche market.
Check out a newsletter I have called
www.SecretsToTheirSuccess.com
-- your readers have got to check this site out. It is cool because
it shows how people that were in low-paying or dead-end jobs are
now making it huge online now, working their own hours and making
profits they couldn't even dream of before. We interview two new
people every month that are making between $30,000 and $2 million
in profit online each year.
Check out the site and you'll see what
I mean. You
can learn so much by reading about how they started their businesses
from scratch not too long ago and made them successful by targeting
a specific niche market. For example, one interviewee makes over
$1,500 a day selling a plan to bald guys on how to regrow
their hair. And another guy sells tools to make wire jewelry and
makes $40,000 a month!
These products would be a flop if you
sold them
at a local storefront because the market in a local area is way
too small to support them. But on the Internet, you have access
to a global market that can support extremely obscure products and
ideas… and be very profitable!
Corey,
I wanted to ask you about search engines. How important are they
to the marketing beginner?
When
you are starting out on the Internet, search engines are a very
cost-effective way to drive traffic to your site. But as your business
grows, a good advertising campaign, joint venture, or affiliate
program will outperform your search engine rankings every time --
guaranteed.
To
start with,
you have to make sure that people are actually looking for your
product or service online. I hate to see people starting out on
the Web who automatically put all of their time and resources into
search engine submission when, in reality, their target market isn’t
even looking for what they have to offer in the search engines.
If
you want
to find out if the search engines will be worth the effort, there
are a few great services online that I show you in my course that
will actually tell you approximately how many visitors you will
get if you have a top ranking under your keywords in the major search
engines.
I
tell people
to type five of their top keywords into one of these keyword popularity
services, and if your keywords are not getting more than at least
1,000 searches every single month, it is probably not worth your
time.
Also,
you should
never make the mistake of relying on just the search engines to
drive traffic to your site. Although they can be an extremely valuable
source of traffic, they are constantly changing their rules. If
you get into a situation where you rely solely on a couple of good
rankings in the search engines for all of your traffic, and then
one day the search engines drop your ranking, you could be out of
business literally overnight. Believe me, I've seen it happen more
than a few times.
Make
sure you
have multiple sources of traffic to your web site so that if you
lose one, you are not out of business!
Pay-per-click
search engines seem to be a great place to test market products
on the 'Net. What should people know about using a pay-per-click
strategy for their site or product?
The
pay-per-click
search engines can be a great way to get traffic to your web site
but, once again, only if your target market is actually looking
for you in the search engines. They're great for testing your offer,
testing your site, testing your price, even testing your product
to see if it will work.
Success
through
the pay-per-click search engines is all about basic math. If the
traffic they drive to your web site makes you more money than it
costs to buy those clicks, then they are a great investment. Unfortunately,
many beginners pay way too much for keywords, never actually calculate
how much they can afford to spend, and end up losing lots of money.
I
should also
mention that you can't expect to enter a couple of your top keywords
into the pay-per-click search engines and start making money --
that is very rare. To be successful, you need a list of at least
100 to 500 keywords and phrases. You can really make pay-per-click
search engines pay off by bidding on lots of less popular keywords
that are actually more targeted than general search terms.
For
example,
do a search for "gift basket" on the most popular pay-per-click
search engine and you'll see that to get that top listing, you'd
need to pay $2.76 per click. That's just too much. Instead, bid
on lots of less popular terms like "discount gift basket"
at $0.36 per click or "Valentine gift basket" at $0.61
per click.
What is the most important
thing someone
needs to do when starting out with a marketing project?
Test, test, and then test again. Never
stop testing
everything. You want to test your advertising, styles, colors, etc.
Test your offer, test your price, test different types of advertising.
The key is to test small. If it works, apply it to everything you
know.
Start small and test. It is pointless
to spend all
your cash on a huge ad campaign when you have not proven that your
web site can sell a product. And you must be able to track what
is going on with your web site. I'm shocked by how many people don’t
know their "visitors-to-sales ratio" -- how many visitors
you get daily compared to how many sales. If you don’t know
this, how can you try different things to see what improves your
sales?
Can you give an example
of this?
Sure. Let's say that your site gets an
average of
500 visitors a day and you sell an average of five products a day.
Your "visitors-to-sales ratio" would be 100 to 1. (In
other words, for every 100 visitors, you can expect to make one
sale.)
Now that you know this, you can start
testing different
things. Let's say that you decide to test a new headline and find
that you now sell one product for every 50 visitors to your site.
You've just doubled the profit potential for your site! And you
never would have known unless you had taken the time to track the
activity at your site. I teach this in much more depth in my "Insider Secrets"
course.
Listen to this: Back in the early days
of marketing
my "Car Secrets Revealed" book online, I decided to try
out a couple of new slogans. I had a hunch that the one we had been
using wasn't targeting the right people. Anyway, after a couple
of days of testing, I discovered something that literally changed
my life.
I had been marketing the book to car owners,
assuming
that most people who owned a car would be interested in the book.
Well, one of the slogans was targeted towards people who were thinking
of purchasing a new car, not to people who already owned one. I
just about hit the floor when I saw the results from the test on
that slogan! Our sales had literally increased 400% overnight!
If I hadn't always been testing things,
even back
in the early days, I would never have realized this. That's the
power of testing. It has allowed me to build an incredibly successful
business.
Based on your experience,
testing probably
thousands of different strategies, what are the two most powerful
ways to market your business on the Internet?
The answer is very simple... affiliate
programs
and opt-in e-mail marketing.
First off, affiliate programs are the
single most
cost-effective, least risky way to do business on the 'Net. Affiliate
programs are like having an army of joint venture partners out there
working for you twenty-four hours a day.
With an affiliate program, it's easy to
recruit
hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people to
promote your product, and you do not pay them a penny unless they
make you money! I started one of the very first affiliate programs
on the Internet, even before Amazon.com, and I currently have over
70,000 affiliates, so I'm speaking from experience here.
For those who don’t know what
an affiliate
program is, this is how it works: Basically, you get other sites
that share your target audience to link to you. Those links are
tracked by special software so that if anyone clicks through the
link and buys your product, you give a commission to the referring
site.
The great thing about affiliate programs
is that
they are pure profit machines. Because you only pay your affiliates
when they send you a visitor who actually buys something, it's literally
impossible to lose money! Even if they drive 10,000 visitors to
your site, you don't pay them a dime unless someone buys.
That sounds great. But managing
a large
affiliate program is a huge job, isn't it?
The best part is that if you are using
the right
tools you can completely automate the entire process. You can be
running a multi-million dollar company with only a few staff in
the office. We have over 70,000 affiliates promoting our products
on the Internet and it literally only takes us a couple of hours
every month to manage our program using our AssocTRAC software. At the
end
of the month we hit a couple of keys, it prints out the commission
checks, and we mail them to the affiliates.
There are no overhead costs, no employees,
and
no hassles. You only pay your affiliates when they bring you business,
and the software does all the work for you. And the whole thing
only costs about $45 a month to run! This would be absolutely impossible
offline, but the speed and scope of the Internet allows us to do
it at almost no cost.
When we built the second generation of
AssocTRAC software, we compiled
over five years of first-hand experience so that our customers could
apply this powerful strategy to their business without having to
spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time it
took us to develop it.
I could talk about affiliate programs
all day, as
it is a huge topic, but since we only have a limited amount of time,
I'm going to recommend that if you are interested in learning more
about how affiliate programs work and how you can start one of your
own, visit our AssocTRAC web site.
Could you tell us a little
about the second
strategy you mentioned: opt-in e-mail marketing?
The second marketing strategy that every
e-business
definitely needs to employ if they want to be successful is opt-in
e-mail marketing. And to get started building an opt-in e-mail list
you NEED to be collecting e-mail addresses at your site. I can't
stress this one enough. If you aren't doing this, you need to start
right now!
Here's how it works: You need to offer
every single
visitor to your site a reason to leave you their e-mail address.
It can be for a free newsletter, a free report, a demo version of
your software, a contest... Any reason you can think of to get people
to leave you their e-mail address.
If someone visits your web site and actually
takes
the time to subscribe to your newsletter by giving you their name
and e-mail address, this obviously means that they are interested
in what you have to offer. Congratulations! You have just captured
an incredibly hot sales lead!
By simply following up with these people
and e-mailing
them quality information and facts, you will instantly build your
credibility by developing the rapport that is needed to close sales.
The bottom line is this: Most people are
simply
not comfortable shelling out money the first time they visit your
web site. Unfortunately, the Internet is a big place, so the chances
of them finding you again once they leave your site are pretty slim.
By capturing their name and e-mail address, you can guarantee that
they will not forget about you.
What are some things that
people should
keep in mind when sending e-mail promotions?
First and foremost: The names and e-mail
addresses
you collect on your web site should be treated like gold and never
abused. If you constantly e-mail these people with blatant advertisements
and plugs for your products and never actually send them any valuable
information, you will ruin any chance you have to sell to them in
the future.
Also, opt-in e-mail is impossible to manage
unless
you have the right tools and information. In my "Insider Secrets"
course I have almost 200 pages of cutting-edge information on this
topic alone that will show you how to build an extremely responsive
opt-in list very quickly and then show you how to follow up and
sell to these targeted customers again and again and again.
We use a powerful e-mail automation tool
called
Mailloop that automates all
of
our e-mail promotions. I personally started using this software
over 6 years ago and it quickly became such an indispensable part
of my business that I actually bought the rights to it from the
developer so that my customers could benefit from all of its powerful
features.
This software is so cool… It
is like having
your own personal e-mail secretary -- but it does not take any breaks,
does not talk back, does not ask for vacation, and did I mention
that it works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
It handles almost all of your e-mail:
It subscribes
and unsubscribes people automatically from your opt-in lists, it
merges your orders into your customer database, it automatically
sends out your promotions, it automatically responds to your customers'
commonly asked questions, and much more.
It just leaves you with the e-mail that
you need
to handle personally -- it takes care of the rest. We use it every
day to automate our business and stay in contact with our clients;
it is solely responsible for generating over $100,000 a month in
new business for us. You can check it out at www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.
Rapid growth and expansion
can be a “good”
problem for businesses. How can you handle your company's growth?
You automate. That is the beauty of the
Internet.
It is the first environment where you can truly automate your entire
business. You can even run it from anywhere in the world -- as long
as you have a laptop and a phone line, you are in business.
I'll never forget the day I was on a beach
in Hawaii,
drinking a Corona, when I decided to log on to the 'Net for a few
minutes and check my sales. I discovered that I had made over $37,000
that day! This could only happen in today's online age!
When you are first starting out, keep
it simple
so that you can get up and running fast, but also realize that you'll
need to automate soon after you start. We use software to automate
most of the daily tasks like processing orders, managing e-mail,
and such. Not only are the cost savings huge (one piece of software
can literally replace at least one or two employees!), but the real
benefit is that you don’t get caught up working IN your business
instead of ON your business.
If you don’t automate soon,
you will find
that the mundane work will become overwhelming and you will be filling
orders and reading e-mail all day long instead of growing your business.
Be careful, because this is a real trap for so many people.
We teach a ton of ways to easily automate
your business
without a lot of work. We've tried a lot of things, and we show
you what works and what doesn't -- and where to spend your time
and money for the biggest growth and the biggest profits.
Unfortunately, we don’t really
have time
to go into this today during this short interview. But remember
that you need to automate so that your business can run automatically
whether you are there or not. It sounds complicated -- and it was
3 years ago -- but now there are inexpensive software programs and
simple techniques that allow anyone to do it easily. I go through
a lot of this in the course as it is a fundamental key to success.
You need to automate before you can really grow.
Just as an example, my CarSecrets.com
site practically runs itself. It automatically takes and fulfils
orders, deposits the money in my bank account, takes care of most
of the e-mail by autoresponding to customers, automatically promotes
its affiliate program, and so on.
It generates hundreds of thousands of
dollars in
yearly revenue, yet I have an employee who spends less than 10 minutes
a day running it. I have not looked at the site myself in over two
years and it still generates a ton of money. That is the kind of
business you want.
How do you stay up-to-date
on an industry
that is constantly changing?
We have a team of people who are cranked
up on coffee
at their desks, testing new ideas every day; we have to be ahead
of the curve. We have to update our information and products constantly
because the Internet changes so quickly.
The key to really exploiting marketing
techniques
is that you have to be using them before they become popular, because
once people know about them, your audience becomes saturated, and
they are not as effective anymore.
Pop-ups are a perfect example. We were
using pop-ups
way back before anyone else -- they were EXTREMELY profitable back
then. As soon as people found out how great they worked, everyone
started using them. Of course, as soon as every site had them, their
effectiveness fell off quickly. I should say that pop-ups are still
a great tool, but they are 50% less effective than they used to
be.
Our job is to find the hot marketing techniques
before everyone else picks up on them -- and let our customers know
so they can use them and profit.
So,
where do you see the Internet taking us in the future? How much
additional business will be conducted on the 'Net and how important
will the Internet be to the business ventures that our kids will
be involved with?
Here's
a fact: The Internet is becoming part of our lives more and more
each day. Just about everyone uses e-mail now. If you want to know
the weather, you check the 'Net. You check the 'Net for movie listings
in your city, you use it to pay bills, you can use it to educate
yourself on just about any subject.
Today
there
are university classes being held online for people around the world
who cannot get to a classroom. There are pay-per-view movies that
can be delivered to your computer in DVD quality anytime you want
through a broadband connection. I mean, it might not be too long
before we all say goodbye to the video store!
Nowadays,
your
sales force can access order and inventory data from their wireless
handheld computers while at a customer’s location. Your fridge
can automatically order your milk from the local grocery store for
delivery when you are low. (I've actually seen this -- it weighs
the area where the milk goes in your fridge and determines when
to order more.)
The
dot-com
days are over, but the Internet has just begun! It will become more
powerful and more useful as time goes on. It offers an entirely
new level of communication and convenience, which gives home businesses
the ability to compete with large corporations, not to mention the
ability to run a business from anywhere in the world with next to
no overhead or risk.
I
personally
know janitors and waiters who are making $100,000 a year now with
their Internet businesses, working only a few hours a day! If they
can do it, you can too -- no excuses!
Any
last words?
The
only thing
stopping you from making more money is YOU! You may read this interview
and say, “Wow, that sounds great!” But unless you actually
do something and take action -- at least get your feet wet -- you
will stay at the income level you are at today. Do you think my
first site looked great and worked perfectly? Of course not!
If you're thinking
about starting a small business, just do it! Get your feet wet,
make some mistakes -- once you've started, you'll never look back!
And you don’t have to be a computer geek to figure it all
out, you just need common sense and the determination to get it
done.
And
take the
time to educate yourself. Heck,
if nothing else, sign up for a copy of our free newsletter at our
site. Of course we save the best stuff for our course, but we still
reveal tons of killer tips in the free newsletter. We distribute
it every two weeks or so. Just go to www.marketingtips.com
and enter your first name and e-mail address to receive it. |