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 parent's basement to
four online businesses that generate over $6.6 MILLION in
online sales per year and attract over 1.8 million visitors
per month. 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 generate about $6.6 million in
business every year, all online. And that's not to mention
the tens of millions of dollars we have helped our clients
generate. We have over 60,000 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 2 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 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 3
months. Since then, it has been through three 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
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
close to 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 5 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 4 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 7 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 2 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 drops 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 - 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 "mortgage" on the most popular
pay-per-click search engine and you'll see that to get that
top listing, you'd need to pay $7 per click. That's WAY too
much. Instead, bid on lots of less popular terms like
"discount mortgage" at $0.51 per click or "Internet
mortgage" at $1.15 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 5 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 1 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 60,000
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 60,000 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 5 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.
There you will find over 50 pages of killer strategies and
ideas that will help you get your own affiliate program
started right away.
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 100 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 5 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 is the cost savings huge (one piece of
software can literally replace at least 1-2 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 2 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 that 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 that 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
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