Matt W. Kane

Multiple Streams of Internet Income

Robert Allen—2001.

Chapter 1: show me the E-Money: how to earn $24,000 in 24 hours.

Chapter 2: crossing the digital divide: how to guarantee your success on the Internet.

  • Would it be a more favorable location, higher-quality ingredients, the world’s best Advertising copy, or the most beautiful waitresses? Gary says he would only want one advantage: a starving crowd! Too often, people launch new products and then go searching for a market. You must reverse the process: Find a hungry market in search of a product. The most important marketing question is, “How can I identify a hungry group of people and then create a feeding frenzy?”
  • Any marketing campaign—especially on the Net—must answer three questions:
    • 1. Who is your target audience?
    • 2. What do they want?
    • 3. How can you motivate this target audience to act now?
  • For your message to be effective, it must hit the hot button of your target audience. Do you know what their hot buttons are? Don’t just guess what they want—or give them what you want hoping that they also want it. Ask them what they want!!
  • The power of this strategy is that it offers people a riskless action.

Chapter 3: Internet marketing 101: a few simple strategies can make you rich.

  • So, what is the “birdseed” of marketing? We learned a few of the secrets in the last chapter.
    • 1. Find a school of hungry fish!
      • Once you’ve either found a lake teeming with hungry fish (or developed your own lake), your very next critical task is to
    • 2. Discover what bait they’re biting on.
      • Given just these two advantages plus a plain-vanilla Web site, you’ll run circles around 10,000 other eye-popping, flash-enhanced, multimedia’d, Web sites.
      • In 1981. There, were 14.254 new products introduced in the United States, according to the reporting firm of Market Intelligence Service Ltd. By 1998, the number had grown to 25,118. To put that number in context, it means sixty-nine new products surfaced every day of the year.
    • 3. Convert your bait into superbait!
      • The third most important skill of a marketer is to make your bait stand out from all other bait.
  • In 1966, Peter Drucker defined leadership when he wrote: “The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it and establishing it, clearly and visibly.” Well, we’re now in a new millennium and an age of killer competition. We would change only one word in that definition to bring it up to date: “The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s difference, defining it and establishing it, clearly and visibly.
  • I’ll give you words to use as a hook to help you remember the three most important aspects of creating a powerful USP (unique selling position):
    • Ultimate advantage
    • Sensational offer
    • Powerful promise
  • The thing that clinches a deal is trust, and let’s face it, with your first time buyer you don’t have any. What is an instant way to gain trust? Offer a clear, unmistakable, no-questions-asked guarantee.
  • The three powerful bedrock principles of Internet marketing success are as follows:
    • Find a school of hungry fish.
    • Discover the bait that they’re biting on.
    • Supercharge your bait with a powerful USP.

Chapter 4: Internet marketing 201: 12 powerful principles for creating a feeding frenzy.

  • This is probably a good time to mention that your marketing campaign can be either a one-step or two-step process. In a one-step process, you try to go from an ad to a paid order in one step. For example, suppose you are an attorney trying to attract new business. You run a television ad that tells about your services and gives your telephone number. You are trying to go from an ad to an order in one step. This approach attracts only serious customers. It’s like walking up to a total stranger and proposing marriage. This approach can work—if you talk to enough strangers, you’re bound to find someone who is in the market for a spouse—but be prepared for a lot of rejection.
  • A two-step ad offers the reader a free taste. Your ad doesn’t sell your attorney services… but instead offers to let someone come in for a free one hour consultation. You get people to raise their hand and indicate their interest in talking to an attorney. This approach attracts interested people while at the same time giving you a chance to talk to a more qualified group of people. Certainly, in a group of interested people, there must be some serious customers. In the marketing business, this is called lead generation, or getting people to raise their hands. To use one analogy, it’s the dating approach. In our over communicated world, the two-step approach takes more time, but it is the best long-term approach.
  • In lay terms, reciprocity means giving gifts. When you give gifts, people feel a subtle obligation to return the favor (to reciprocate). The entire internet is based on reciprocity. Almost everything is free. But have you noticed that there are always options to pay for more personalized service?
  • A person will take a baby step or make a small commitment toward a goal, he or she will be much more likely to continue. If you can motivate someone to take even a miniscule action, it is much more likely that he or she will continue to move in that same direction.
  • Other principles are equally as powerful. Here is my expanded checklist of 12 powerful persuaders, translated into simplified language:
    • Principle 1: Giving gifts
    • Principle 2 :steps
    • Principle 3 Popularity
    • Principle 4 Credibility
    • Principle 5 Scarcity
    • Principle 6 Honesty
    • Principle 7 Rapport
    • Principle 8 Urgency
    • Principle 9 Greed (pleasure)
    • Principle 10 Fear of loss (pain)
    • Principle 11 Belonging
    • Principle 12 Curiosity
  • Once again, the acronym USP appears.
    • Urgency
    • Scarcity
    • Popularity
  • By now, you’re beginning to see a pattern in the advance e-mails. They are building anticipation for the final day—May 24. A powerful motivator is curiosity. People are becoming curious to find out just what the final message is going to look like. I’ve been told that dozens of people stayed home from work that day; just to make sure that they didn’t miss the final e-mail.
  • This last principle, curiosity, is very useful as a bonus motivator. Once you’ve applied the other principles, adding curiosity acts like salt and pepper – it seasons your offer to give it just the right taste.

Chapter 5: Internet marketing 301: going deep – the secret to online streams of income.

  • There is only one way you will be able to compete and create lifetime streams of cash flow for yourself: go deep. What does that mean? It means that you anoint yourself as the in-depth expert on what your starving crowd wants and create a deepening relationship with them—a lifetime relationship. As the relationship deepens, they will pull from you more and more products, services, and information (PSI) at increasingly higher and higher prices – because price will not be the issue.
  • Go to www.freemarketingbook.com and download this powerful” 246-page PDF-format book directly to your hard drive. (Jay Abraham’s )

Chapter 6: Netpreneurs, start your search engines! Six powerful ways to drive traffic to your site.

  • Six major ways to attract traffic to your lonely site:
    • Building your Web presence
    • Search engines
    • Free and paid ads in the online world
    • Free PR in the online and offline worlds
    • Paid advertising offline
    • Word of mouse
  • If you’re going to play online, and act like your life depended on it. Tell everyone you know about it.
  • In addition to these obvious ways of getting your message out, here are five more ways to make your Web presence known.
    • Go to www.usenet.com and join any newsgroups related to your subject. Post messages in appropriate places.
    • Become an opinionated expert at epinions.com
    • Lurk in chat rooms.
    • Participate in bulletin board discussions.
    • Register your freebies at a “free stuff” site. Look around the Net for sites that promote free stuff. Contact these sites and offer some of your own promotional goodies.
  • “Here is a cardinal rule of marketing: Inbound marketing is much easier than outbound marketing. In other words, it is much easier to make sales when customers are calling you then when you are calling them.
  • Before you make your final decision, don’t you think you should do a little free testing first? Place 20 or 30 free classified ads with various headlines to see which one seemed to pull the most leads? Before you rolled the dice, wouldn’t you try to refine your offer, add some bonuses, give a great guarantee—and then bounce that message off several thou- ^ sand people to see if they would be willing to vote with their wallets?
  • An excellent software product that will help you write both online and offline marketing letters is found at www.instantsalesletters.com. *

Chapter 7: online marketing! Six major ways to make money from your site.

  • Don’t forget the main purpose of your site! All of your traffic-generating activities have one purpose in mind—to entice your visitors to sign your guest book and give you permission to contact them again. If you don’t accomplish this simple goal, you have failed to build up an asset that will generate your prime source of long-term wealth.
  • Once you have obtained permission, you should send an immediate auto responder e-mail congratulating your prospects on their wise decision and rewarding them with special goodies for reading your first message to them. I call this an ethical bribe. You are rewarding them for granting you permission to contact them. In other words, you are paying / them for paying attention.
  • You should design a first-time buyer’s reward—a package of incentives that tip the scales toward a yes rather than a no, as in the Chapter 3 example of discount airline tickets. If all the tickets are priced about the same, I’ll go for the one that gives me the extra discount.
  • Businesses these days spend up to 50 percent of the price of their goods for advertising and marketing expenses. Instead of sending these advertising dollars to wealthy newspapers, magazines, and television stations, several smart businesses have begun to share this money with their best customers. Every time one of their best customers influences someone to buy products, they send this loyal customer a check as a sort of referral fee.
  • No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives. Each of your regular e-mail newsletters should be designed to continue the education process. Therefore, each e-zine becomes content that goes into your archives. Each detailed question you answer in your e-mail becomes a template for the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of your site. Eventually, the content from your FAQs and e-zines will end up as a series of special reports (which can be combined into a full-length hook), which you can either sell or offer as a premium bonus in your marketing efforts.
  • What should you offer in your bookstore? The following four major items:
    • Your own special reports
    • Your own books
    • Resource materials from joint-venture partners
    • Your own selection of traditionally published books
  • A more profitable alternative is to research self-published authors online who have created information content that would be suitable for your visitors and arrange to buy their information products on consignment. The price you can charge for such content is generally higher, with correspondingly higher profit margins, and you don’t have to lose the traffic to Amazon.com.
  • More Than $1,000,000 Writing, Commissioning, Publishing and Selling now-To” Information, reveals that one of his most powerful profit centers is the creation of five-page special reports. He sells each special report for $6 (three of them for $14). Rarely does anyone order fewer than three at a time. In the back of his book he lists over 100 of these special reports . . . and I defy you to read through the list and not end up wanting a half a dozen for yourself.
  • What is so incredible about these reports is that they can be created from recycled material such as your FAQs and newsletter articles, thus providing an ongoing cash infusion to your business. Here is what Lant says about profitability.
  • Let me share a secret with you. Special Reports actually have two names. I call them Special Reports when I sell them to individual buyers. And I call them articles when I offer them without charge to editors and publishers for immediate publication. Nothing else is different; you need make no changes in the actual title or content for the different markets.
  • These special reports can become the basis of your PR campaign. Submit them as is to newspapers, magazines, and e-zines to help spread your message.

Chapter 8: beyond picking this: nine magnetic ways to keep them coming back for more.

  • The technical Internet word for enticing surfers to hang around your Web page is stickiness. Stickiness is usually associated with three factors:
    • Duration: How long do your visitors spend at your site?
    • Depth: How deep will they go exploring?
    • Frequency: How often do your visitors return?
  • Your primarily concerned with quickness – the speed at which people agree to give you their email addresses.
  • In all of your marketing you should offer people an ethical bribe (a special report or some other goodie) to persuade them to take a peek at your site. When people hit your site, you only have three to five seconds to get them to stick. So you’d better make sure that the promised “free bonus” is immediately accessible. Spend a few short, enticing sentences reselling them on the value of your free gift.
  • Everything on your site should point toward the bundle of goodies your visitors receive for leaving their e-mail address and their permission to let you contact them again. When these maybes leave their e-mail address, you begin to stock your Maybe Lake. It is critical to the long-term survival of your online business. In order to entice them to leave their e-mail address you must design a “welcome” basket filled with all kinds of wonderful free goodies. They should feel that they are completely crazy not to take advantage of your generosity. You want to access their greed button. Here are a few things you could offer your visitors for the privilege of giving you permission to .prove what a peach of a person you are:
    • Free newsletter
    • Free special reports
    • Free book
    • Free coupons
    • Free access to private information vault
    • Free checklists
    • Free quotes
    • Free samples
    • Free access to past newsletters
    • Free links to other great sites
    • Anything else you can think of
  • How can you make your brand stand out? Here are some ways to differentiate your messages:
    • Be brief but valuable. You want to make your message valuable enough to induce people to read it immediately, yet short enough so they don’t save it to study later. If they save it they will probably never read it.
    • Reward people for reading your e-mails. Reward those who take the time to read your message immediately. These rewards could be a coupon for a future discount or a hot tip about some free information that you’ve uncovered especially for them. You could offer a special surprise from time to time.
    • Add a human touch. You could also make your e-mail messages valuable by including a humorous segment, a great quote, the useful idea or a tip, a super bargain, a moneymaking idea, and something personal to humanize your messages.
  • My definition of marketing is setting up automatic, repeatable systems that create the environment where people want to buy from you instead of you having to sell them. The basic marketing model is lead generation. Get people to raise their hands. Then you’ve got too repetitively, continuously, never-endingly, unceasingly, dependably, predictably, naggingly, and annoyingly follow up with those people, follow up with those people, and follow up with those people. Unfortunately, most businesspeople just won’t do that. They will not follow up with leads and they will not follow up with customers. And the amount of money that they cost themselves is enough to buy a few vacation homes and retire ten years early. The craziest thing is to go out and find new people when you’ve got all these interested leads that will eventually do business with you.
  • The more and the faster your visitors can interact with real people, the Stickier and “quicker” your site will become. This plays to the strengths of the Internet—speed and interactivity. If you can connect with your customers during their feeding frenzy, the more likely you are to make the sale. Unfortunately, this may go against the nature of the ideal hands-off, money-while-you-sleep kind of business that you’d like to create. As you design your business, you’ll have to balance these two competing demands. Do you want to make money fast? Or do you want to make money without hassle? I’ll bet you answered both, didn’t you?
  • Let’s review our list of ways to make your site stickier and quicker. Study this list. Let the concepts roll around in your brain as you contemplate your marketing activities. From this list will come most of your breakthrough ideas.
    • Become an expert on instant gratification.
    • Transform your site into a treasure trove.
    • Give your visitors a rich experience.
    • Make your e-mail communications valuable, but not too valuable.
    • Get permission to gather more information to serve them faster.
    • Design a frequent-visitor and/or frequent-purchaser program.
    • Reduce the distance between your visitors and a live person.
    • Get people together, and they’ll reward you for it.
    • Study the laws of epidemics and the principles of contagiousness.

Chapter 9: ready. Set. Launch. How fast can you go from zero to cash?

  • We can narrow your marketing options down to a few focused activities.
    • Use one of the paid placement search engines and bid for the top spot in your category.
    • Place an ad in an online e-zine or a group of e-zines targeted to your audience.
    • Rent a list of e-mail names of people who have a specific interest in your subject.
  • Another idea is to go to all the top search engines and, using the keywords that describe your product, find the top three Web sites that fit. They have already won the battle of top search engine placement. Contact the Webmaster of each high-ranking listing and offer to pay for an endorsed mailing to that site’s list of satisfied customers. There are dozens of major search engines, so you have dozens of top sites to contact. Someone may take you up on your offer, which could generate some quick sales to beat the deadline.
  • Here are some guidelines for getting the best deal from your e-zine advertising:
    • Subscribe to the e-zine before you buy an ad in it so you can see what you’re getting.
    • Make sure that there are no more than five ads in the e-zine. Any more and the effectiveness of your add drops.
    • . Look for e-zines that have excellent content.
    • Bigger is not better. A small e-zine sent to 2,000 highly qualified subscribers can sometimes outperform a large e-zine with 50,000 poorly qualified subscribers.
    • . Find out how the e-zine builds its subscriber list. Make sure it is 100 percent opt-in.

Chapter 10: Online Stream #1. Joint Ventures: High leverage ways to make a fortune online.

  • People making a purchase prefer to buy from someone they trust and who is treated them fairly in the past.
  • However, if you go to the owner of that same list and structure a deal where the owner writes or presents the very same offer to the very same people, you will see a response rate that is so much higher it boggles the mind.
  • “If I show you how to properly utilize an asset you are overlooking and make you look like the knight in shining armor, would you be willing to share 50 percent of the newfound profits with me?’
  • As I said earlier, you need to educate one side regarding the lifetime value of gaining new customers in order to get the best deal. You can often get as much as 100 percent of the profit of the sales made by your endorser by simply explaining this misunderstood marketing principle.
  • If I were starting from scratch I would seek out companies with products to sell as opposed to service businesses. These deals are the easiest to get. When you work with attorneys, accountants, and other service businesses, the money trickles in slowly. With product sales, the money comes in over a two- to three-week period.
  • You just give away a free e-book available at www.enlow.com/freebook. Here is what I say on my Web site about the free book:

Chapter 11: online Stream #2. Affiliate programs: cash in by selling other People’s stuff.

  • www.associate-it.com (directory of Associate programs)
  • Affiliate programs are probably the fastest, easiest, and most profitable way to make money on the Internet! An affiliate program is nothing more than a joint venture between someone like you, a marketer, and a company that want to promote a product.
  • These sites are worth researching:
  • That is using affiliate programs to build a huge customer list.
  • Many times people forget that these customers could actually be good future customers for other products.
  • You see, many marketing gurus state that the secret to successful marketing is to follow up with prospects and remind them of the offer. In filter-feeder marketing there is no follow-up by the marketer. If they could somehow capture the leads before they send them on to the company affiliate site, then they could keep in touch with these prospects and help them make the decision to purchase.
  • Therefore, the more advanced marketer will do this:
    • 1. Run the ad.
    • 2. Direct the prospect to contact the marketer (that’s you).
    • 3. The marketer captures the e-mail and name.
    • 4. The marketer sends the prospect to the affiliate link.
    • 5. The customer may or may not purchase anything.
    • 6. The marketer follows up and continues to pitch the product.
    • 7. More customers will buy.
  • Since the Internet is all about automation and using technology to make our lives simpler, we recommend a system that uses a specialized Internet marketing tool called a sequential or automatic follow-up auto responder. Basically, it’s a way to put all of your follow-up on autopilot.
  • Some of these special autoresponders are available free or at a very low cost per month. Here are some that I recommend:
  • The optimal system would work as follows:
    • Run ads.
    • Prospect replies to the autoresponder.
    • Autoresponder sends out sales letter directing prospect to the affiliate link.
    • Autoresponder will follow up for you automatically.
    • Autoresponder captures e-mail address and name, which can be downloaded to a database.
    • System can run in your sleep or while you are out—hands off!
  • Besides the obvious futility of banners, I’ve spotted another major error: selling instead of preselling. Picture this: A visitor arrives at an affiliate’s site that is really just one big sales site. Put yourself in these visitors’ shoes for a moment. They don’t see inspiring, editorial content—they see a sales effort. But they were searching for content! People resist sales efforts, so your click-through rate actually goes down. Result? Poor conversion rate. If your site is basically a bunch of sales letters, you have not yet built your credibility and likability with this visitor. Your visitors end up feeling “pitched to.” And then they feel “double-pitched” (f they click through to your merchant’s site.
  • Pre-selling is really all about selling yourself to your customer every step of the way. You reach the right folks in a proper fashion; you deliver valuable, appropriate editorial content; and you recommend visitors to your merchant after they have come to respect and like you. Your CR will soar.
  • You also weave relevant, in-context text links into the content as appropriate. Links to
    • Books about the topic (e.g., concrete statues if that’s what the page was about)
    • A garden supplier for concrete molds and trowels
    • Naturally, a concrete supplier!
    • Almost anything concrete-related
  • See what’s happening? By providing great content, you presell your reader, increasing your click-through traffic to your merchants and your conversion rate (sales). And by diversifying your affiliate programs among several related and excellent merchants, you develop multiple streams of income from one site. This is the way to go.
  • Don’t forget to look right under your nose. . . . What special body of knowledge have you learned from your job? What do you do day after day without even thinking about it (e.g., child rearing, taking care of sick parents, renovation contractor, and customs inspector)? Think about what you do in a typical day and what you’ve learned from it. What sections of a bookstore or a magazine shop do you automatically gravitate toward? What kind of TV shows or movies do you like most? What do you most enjoy about your current occupation? Is it research? Helping customers achieve their goals? Managing other people? Teaching or explaining things to others? Talking/selling on the phone? Organizing things? Making a process easier? Discovering or creating new products or services? Marketing products? Problems are also a good source of ideas because problems need solutions! What bugs you? What’s tedious? What does not work? We all encounter obstacles, problems, and nasty people in the course of whatever it is that we do every day. What are the three biggest problems in your workplace? What are your biggest pains as a parent, as a stepparent as a gardener?
  • When you’re ready to create your site, start with the keywords that have the best combination of high demand and low supply. This is a fairly subjective process, but spending a few hours in this kind of exercise can help you brainstorm the kind of affiliate programs you want to focus on.
  • Here is how you can prune out the dogs before they cause problems: Find the good programs and eliminate the dogs by considering the following plus signs (+), minus signs (-), and red flags. Let’s start with the plus signs to look for, in the approximate order of their importance:
    • + High quality product or service. Remember, it’s your reputation that is on the line (and online!). Don’t recommend products that under deliver.
    • + Merchant has a good site that sells effectively.
    • + Ability for affiliate to link straight to individual products rather than just to the home page. (If the visitor has to find the product that you recommend, your conversion rate plummets.)
    • + Type of payment model. Pay-per-sale and pay-per-lead models are good.
    • + Affiliate Support
      • Accurate, reliable, real-time online accounting, preferably with some kind of ability to audit by spot-checking
      • Detailed traffic and linking stats
      • Notification by e-mail when a sale is made
      • Useful marketing assistance, providing traffic building and sales getting tools
      • High-quality newsletter that educates, trains, and accounts for amounts earned
      • Professional marketing materials available
      • Affiliate discount on products
    • + Pays good commission. Hard goods have lower margins than digital ones, so their commissions will be lower. Still, you should earn a commission of at least 10 percent (hard good) or 20 percent (digital)
  • What should you sell in an online store? Here are three ideas:
    • Products from other merchants via affiliate programs.
    • Products that you source from suppliers. Build a conventional online store that receives traffic from your content site! People who start their stores first simply die from a lack of traffic. Not you.
    • Your own products, especially digital ones like e-books or software. You don’t have to worry about physical inventory, and fulfillment is so easy. Writing an e-book about your area of expertise establishes you as the expert and adds another income stream. For more information about creating and selling info products, check out the following: http://myks.sitesell.com/ken.html

Chapter 12: online Stream #3. Selling information: turn your ideas into steady stream of cash flow.

  • First I needed to know the subject material of the e-zine. No sense advertising a fishing lure in a food/wine newsletter! Then I needed to find out about the circulation. Paying $20.00 for a three-line ad or $20.00 for up to 10 lines was within my means, but it really didn’t mean much without a look at the circulation numbers. If the circulation is 2,000 and the ad costs $20.00, that’s $.01 per subscriber. However, if the circulation is 500 and the ad costs $20.00, I’m paying $.04 for each subscriber to see my ad Publication and ad deadlines are important if you want to balance the amount of advertising that you have out each week. I didn’t want one week of feast followed by one week of famine.
  • First, countless people have asked me how in the world I ever came up with the idea. Now, you know. But, more important, I want you to know that you can find your niche, too. Take a look around you. Think about the problems, frustrations, or aggravations you may be faced with. Is there something you can do about it? Can you possibly come up with a solution? Can you turn that solution into a business that benefits not only yourself but others as well? It certainly can’t hurt to take a close look at your situation. Who knows, you might be the next Internet success story! With passion, determination, and commitment, you can be, do, and have anything you want. Go get ‘em!
  • The breakthrough idea was to offer a free but very valuable learning-styles questionnaire. If you go to my site at www.howtolearn.com, you’ll see the free offer right in the center of the page. That one single idea has accounted for a lot of the success of this site because many of my competitors were charging for this same information. This Learning Style Inventory is currently being used by NASA, Penn State University, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Motorola University, Bose, hundreds of corporations, and thousands of parents, teachers, and students in schools and universities throughout the world. People use it to help boost their grades in school or perform better at work. From the beginning, so many people asked for the scoring key to the questionnaire (so they could administer the Learning Style Inventory to their corporations, schools, etc.) that we also set up an electronically delivered scoring key for $9.95. This generates thousands of dollars of income and costs us nothing.
  • Visitors to the site also have an opt-in choice to join my e-mail newsletter, which tells you how to use the proper learning style for each task at hand, raising your grades and improving your learning abilities. Our subscriber base is now up to 70,000 a month. People really enjoy it, and if we’re a few days late in sending it out we get e-mails asking where it is.
  • In our online newsletter, I do a combination of marketing and information. Depending on the month, we do anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 in sales. We also electronically deliver a paying newsletter called School Smart Kids (seven issues via e-mail for $19.95 or in paper for $49.95). The newsletters are set up on an autoresponder for the electronic version. When people enter their credit card numbers and e-mail addresses, the program automatically sends the newsletters to their e-mail, which they then read via Adobe Acrobat Reader. Included in each of these newsletters are specific learning strategies for all subject areas and a page of additional products that people can order. We also send my online book of natural remedies for learning disabilities via a password that allows you to read the book on the Web
  • When I first offered to send people the free e-zine, the notice was hidden on my Web site. I was getting three sign-ups a day. Then I added a special sign-up page and my sign-ups jumped to seven or eight a day. Then I put it on the front page in a prominent spot and sign-ups went to 12 to 14 a day. Then I put it on every page on my site and sign-ups again doubled. Then I offered a bonus for people to subscribe to the newsletter (four free special reports on how to start your own jewelry business plus the chance to win one of my videos) and sign-ups doubled yet again! Finally, three months ago, we added one of those irritating pop-up windows and sign-ups increased by a good 40 percent. You should go to my site and see it (www.wire-sculpture.com). And while you’re there, check out my jewelry. I promise that you’ll be impressed, and if you’re looking for that something special.
  • I used two specific marketing techniques to dramatically improve the percentage of people who sign up for one of my programs. First, I give an unconditional 90-day money-back guarantee. I worried that this would cause me a lot of refund problems, but exactly the opposite has happened. It increased my sales by 30 to 40 percent, and I’ve had only two refund requests. It’s a no-brainer.
  • The second idea was to set time limits on customer decision making. I state clearly that my best-price offer is good for only 48 hours—so there isn’t time to get a check in the mail.
  • You must build a mailing list. Otherwise, you’re just throwing away money. Your list doesn’t have to be big. You just have to use it effectively. When you start researching e-zines for your advertising purposes, you’ll find that most have only a few thousand subscribers.
  • You’ll use three different methods to build your mailing list:
    • Getting subscribers from your traffic
    • Getting subscribers from free e-zine directories
    • Buying subscribers
  • If you want people to take action now, you must give them an incentive! Since this is a free newsletter, you want to give them something that costs you nothing. Often, this is a free report with information they feel is valuable enough to warrant joining your list now. Some people provide access to members-only Web pages after visitors subscribe.
  • To get articles for your newsletter, you can use several methods. The first is to list your newsletter in all the e-zine directories in the appropriate categories. A lot of people who want to have articles published will be looking in these directories for e-zines that accept articles. They will write and e-mail completed articles that are formatted to your requirements. All you have to do is include a four- to six-line ad, sometimes called a resource box, immediately following the article when you publish it. Another way to obtain material is to visit sites that post articles for I newsletter editors to use. Here are some good places to start:
  • In addition, you can post your articles at some of these sites for use by Other newsletter editors. When they use your article, they’ll include your resource box so you get some traffic. Another good site for learning how to create an e-zine is www.ezineuniversity.com. I hope this information has been useful to you. I wish you well. If you’d like to contact me, you can always find me at www.shawncasey.com.

Chapter 13: online Stream #4. Eyeballs for sale: making advertising pay.

  • The story is submitted by Corey Rudl, one of the Internet’s leading marketing gurus. You can visit Corey at his famous Web site at http://www.marketingtips.com/freebook. I strongly encourage you to sign up for his free newsletter. It’s full of fabulous information.
  • Next, Chris approached all of the big car sites saying, “Why link to places that make you pay for car-pricing information? They charge $15 and I’m giving it away for free! Link to me!” The logic proved irresistible: They all started linking to him. These links generated hundreds of thousands of visitors to Chris’s site every month! Big sites like Road & Track and Motor Trend began funneling traffic into his site because he offers such a great service. Instead of linking to Michael, they link to Chris. Now they can say to their customers, “Look! We’re great because we’re telling all of our clients where they can get this great free information!” They even published editorials about his site in their magazines.
  • After SIX months, Michael just couldn’t compete. His income dropped from $ 100,000 a year to barely $ 15,000, and he lost his business. However, Chris wasn’t making any money, either! He still had to find a way earn a living. The database was costing him $2,000 a month in rental fees, and basic necessities such as rent and food cost another $1,500, for total monthly expenses of about $3,500. Chris had only about six months’ worth of cash in the bank! Now what?
  • Imagine what a powerful site this could be! The traffic Chris generates is very specific: people in the market to buy a vehicle. Even better, after six months his site was generating high-volume traffic—300,000 people every month! Guess what Chris did?
  • He called companies like Toyota and Honda and said, “Hey guys. Would you like to advertise on my site? I’ll only charge you $35,000 a month each.”
  • Honda said, “We pay $30,000 a month to put a one-page ad in Car and Driver. You’re going to let 300,000 people that have a direct interest in buying a car see our ad? That’s a great deal! Of course we’ll advertise with you!” Talk about a target market! And $35,000 is a bargain! In his first month Chris made over $100,000 in revenue. Why? Because he was willing to lose money in the beginning to offer a valuable service (the portal model) so he could make the money on the back end. Chris created a portal Web site: He drove traffic to his site and then converted it to a profit model –after six months.

Chapter 14: online Stream #5. Picks and shovels: making money from the infrastructure of the web.

  • Neither will there be easy pickings in product services. The real opportunity is in the area of marketing services. By becoming a marketing expert for hire, you will have a steady supply of new clients while gaining experience to expand your own Internet business. Now more than ever, the fundamental principles of marketing are desperately needed by millions of newly launched Internet businesses.
  • In other words, I’m going to encourage you to learn the principles of marketing, to become one of the best – a pro. It is the most business subject you’ll ever learn. The best products in the world gather dust in the warehouse without good marketing.
  • I am very excited about this project. The new site (at http://www.newfreshstart.com/) is laser-focused to she her main program. A separate site, Cathi Graham’s Private Members only, is where all the goodies are hidden. This is going to be an enormous win-win situation for both of US.

Chapter 15: online Stream #6. Treasure hunting: turning junk into cash with auctions.

  • Each week, the Bumbacas lists about 2,000 items on eBay. Auctions typically last a week, letting people around the globe compete to be high bidder. Only about 40% of the goods sell on the first try, but duds usually can be remarketed at lower prices. When a listing catches fire, the Bumbacas can watch as prices soar, minute by minute.
  • I listed the phonographs one at a time, starting at $3.99 plus shipping and handling of $1.50. The shipping and handling fee covered nearly our entire cost, so the bid price would be pure profit. Much to our amazement, many people bid on the sharpeners, driving the price as high as $22.00 on a few of them! At this point I was nervous. What if they received their purchase and weren’t happy? What if they found out I paid only a dollar for them? What if everyone wanted to return them? We used my husband’s account to test these items so that at least my feedback wasn’t in jeopardy. I shipped the sharpeners and waited for complaints. Instead of complaints, I received positive feedback. I also received e-mail from the bidders thanking me and saying what a great addition they made to their collection! The most popular sellers seemed to be sharpeners shaped like musical instruments, so we purchased more of these. I targeted my ads not only to pencil sharpener collectors, but also to people) who played musical instruments.
  • Make sure your auction ad states what your shipping policy is, how much the shipping charges will be, and whether there are additional handling charges. For instance, if an item is being shipped Priority Mail and you know it will cost $3.20 to ship but you also want to cover costs of the special packaging materials, you might charge $4.50. Just make sure you clarify this for your purchaser (e.g., “Shipping and handling via Priority Mail will be $4.50 in addition to the bid amount”). That way your bidder knows exactly what the item will cost, including shipping, and won’t be surprised by additional charges when the package arrives. State what method of shipping you will use. It helps when a bidder knows whether it’s coming UPS, USPS, or by another delivery method. Bidders may prefer to use one address for USPS and another for UPS.