MILLION-DOLLAR INTERNET SUCCESS SECRETS

An e-book, on CD-ROM, published exclusively
for those who attend the Online Income Seminar

 

“This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.”

--From a declaration of principles jointly adopted by a committee of the American Bar Associations and committee of the Publisher’s Association.

 

 

 

A Special Thanks …

This booklet would not be possible without the generous input of highly successful entrepreneurs who have been kind enough to share their success secrets with us. We wish to extend a special thanks to the following:

 

Internet Marketing Strategies – Creating Fortunes on the Web

    A few years ago there was a television advertisement that showed the owners of a new small business gathered around a computer. They had just created a Web site to sell their products and the site was just seconds away from going live on the Internet’s World Wide Web. When the countdown hit zero the worried looks on their faces turned to joy as they watched the computer screen and saw the real-time counter that tracked the number online sales begin to click. One, two, 10, 50, 100 … wow! But as the counter began whirling up into the thousands and tens of thousands of sales in a matter of seconds, their looks of joy turned to anxiety as they wondered how they would possibly be able to produce and deliver those quantities.
    If you believe that you’ll get that kind of action simple by putting up a Web site, it’s time to get real. It simply doesn’t work that way. It never did. And it never will. There are well over a billion separate Web pages on the Internet and that number is growing fast. Just having a Web page of your own guarantees absolutely nothing when it comes to generating sales for your business.
    The challenge is marketing. And that’s what this booklet is about: how to get the right people to visit your site and buy what you are offering.
    Think of your Web site as an online store. If you had a regular brick-and-mortar store, would you fill it with products and then forget about it, hoping that people would somehow hear about it, go to it and spend a lot of money in it? Of course not. It takes marketing. It takes advertising. It takes work.
    Granted, your Web site has some compelling advantages when compared to a brick-and-mortar store. It’s open 24/7. It is accessible to anyone in the world. And you don’t have to hire people to be there to take care of the customers. But don’t make the tragic error of thinking that hordes of buyers will find it and place online orders just because it’s there. You have to drive people to your Web site just as you would have to lure them into a traditional store.
    How do you do that?
    That’s what this booklet is about.
    We interviewed several highly successful Web-based entrepreneurs to find out what works and what doesn’t work. In the process we uncovered some “million-dollar” techniques and methods that are making people wealthy as you read this. Depending on what you are offering and other distinguishing factors relating to you and your business, some of these strategies will work better than others. But you’ll never know until you digest this material and then explore them.
    Make no mistake – the strategies you are going to read about in this booklet are not just theories; they are proven winners. People like are creating fortunes with them at this very moment.
    Dive in. Learn what others are doing. Try the various strategies yourself. Be intense about it. This is no time for lukewarm efforts and half-measures. It is the time to carve out your niche in the landscape of limitless opportunity that the Internet has created.


Permission E-Mail

    No one likes “spam” (unsolicited e-mail messages). And no one likes spammers. In fact, spamming is one of the quickest ways not only to draw the wrath of people everywhere, but to actually get kicked off the Web.
    Sure, sending an e-mail to everybody on the Internet to drive them to your site would produce a lot of traffic – even if the e-mail only pulled in one in a million positive responses. But the millions of negative responses (very negative – you can count on it) would blister your ears and eyeballs, not to mention the fact that your Web hosting service would probably shut you down.
    So is there any place for e-mail campaigns in your online marketing? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” E-mail has become a powerful, fortune-creating marketing technique on the Web.
    The fact is, not all e-mails are spam. Most these days are sent by permission and carry simple and visible instructions on how the recipient can request to be taken off the e-mailing list or unsubscribe.
    This is called permission e-mail. It has been used by entrepreneurs like Aaron Gayle (www.all-ink.com, a Web-based inkjet cartridge and resell company) to build million-dollar Internet businesses.
    When you use this powerful tool, you send your e-mail message only to those individuals or organizations that have given you their permission to send them promotional messages and other information. It also means that you must clearly identify yourself or your company as the sender of the e-mail, and that the recipient has previously agreed to receive your message.
    Permission e-mail marketing protects the recipients’ rights by requiring that they agree to receive the e-mail before you send them any messages. This intentional agreement to receive e-mailed communications is typically done by signing up for the messages. This is commonly referred to as “opting-in.” The flip side of this is that the person or organization that opts-in can opt-out at any time. This option must be made available to them, and it must be able to be done quickly and simply.
    Gathering permission from as many people as possible is the name of the game. Perhaps the most common method for doing this is to collect your own e-mail recipient addresses and permissions. Start with your current customers and contacts. Make sure that every visitor to your Web site has a clear and compelling opportunity to “sign up” to receive valuable information via e-mail. Many Web-based businesses are using auto responders to build their permission e-mail lists. (Auto responders deliver documents via e-mail. They do this automatically and instantly in response to requests made via online forms or email.) They offer their Web sites’ visitors newsletters, reports or other information. The visitors then request that they send them this information immediately and give them their e-mail addresses and permission to do so.
    You can also rent lists of e-mail addresses from services that compile lists of people who have agreed that they want to receive certain types of information. This can be a profitable source, but care should be taken to make sure the type of information the people want to receive is in fact the kind you have to offer. If there is a gap between the two, the rental could be a waste of money.
    Permission e-mail campaigns offer a wealth of benefits. For one thing, they are fast. Conventional direct marketing campaigns typically take months to create, more time to test and analyze, and even more time to reap rewards. With permission e-mail, your marketing initiative can be executed in days or even hours and the results can be tracked in real-time. That means you’ll get immediate feedback – not to mention immediate sales in many cases. And if the results tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree, or that something in the message has to be tweaked, you can make the necessary changes in minutes rather than going back to the drawing board to produce a new brochure or flyer and starting the whole process again.
    Permission e-mail campaigns are relatively inexpensive. They avoid the high costs of producing and mailing printed materials and media advertising.
    Another benefit: you’re sending your message to an audience that has already expressed an interest in what you have to say. It’s not surprising that permission e-mail campaigns typically produce a higher response rate than other types of direct marketing and traditional direct marketing tools.


Word-of-Mouth Advertising

    For all its high-tech overlays, marketing a business on the Internet shares many of the same fundamental principles with other traditional marketing venues. One of those principles says that word-of-mouth advertising is perhaps the least expensive and most powerful marketing tool available.
    Word-of-mouth advertising is when someone tells someone else about your Web site, your products or your services. You don’t pay for this. That’s why it is inexpensive. And when someone tells someone else about you, it comes as a recommendation or a personal endorsement. That’s why it’s powerful. Ask any movie studio executive about word-of-mouth advertising. No matter how much money is spent on advance publicity for a movie, if people don’t like it, the negative “buzz” will spread everywhere after the first weekend and the long lines of people funneling in to see the film will dwindle down to a trickle.
    Internet marketers ignore this prime promotional tool at their own peril. Even though the overall universe of online visitors is immense, the Web has become a conglomeration of smaller online communities, whose members talk amongst themselves as they do in other communities, passing on their opinions about what is good and what is not.
    Consequently, by taking advantage of word-of-mouth advertising within your particular online community, you can get a positive buzz going that will stimulate sales. But beware, you can also get a negative buzz going that will warn people away from your site if you blow it.
    “To tell you the truth, a lot of my traffic has come through word of mouth,” says Teresa Beach (www.polishpottery.com), owner of Florida-based Polish Pottery, Inc. Beach, who spent years in Europe with her military husband, began buying and selling Polish pottery while stationed overseas. Today her business, which she conducts via her Web site, has become a busy, highly profitable enterprise.
    “Initially,” she explains, “we worked with various companies that said they would tweak our Web site and get us placed higher with search engines, but I don’t really think that did a lot for us. What has worked is word-of-mouth advertising.”
    And what makes word-of-mouth advertising work? For Beach, the answer is simple: excellent customer service.
    “I lived in Europe for six years where customer service is almost nonexistent,” she laughs. “In our business, we try really hard to respond to people quickly, whether it be a question or an order. As soon as they place an order, we thank them for the order. As soon as we ship an order, we let them know their order has been shipped. After the order has been delivered, we ask them if everything is okay. People appreciate that. I get comments on that a lot.
    “It’s very important to listen to what the people who visit your site tell you,” adds Beach. “Because there’s a veil of anonymity about the Web, people are more apt to give you feedback – positive or negative – than they are if you had a store and were standing face-to-face with them. If you had a store and you didn’t have good customer service, they would probably leave and never come back. But on the Internet, they’ll probably drop you a note and tell you what you did wrong. So you get a lot more truth on the Web. Pay attention to it!”
    Kerrie Baughman (www.thinrich.com) agrees that good customer service means positive word-of-mouth advertising … and that means good business. Baughman is a successful independent distributor for E’ola, a company that manufactures and distributes weight-loss and nutritional products via network marketing.
    “I rely heavily on word-of-mouth,” she admits. “In the weight-loss products business, it seems to be pretty effective. People need a lot of information about weight-loss products before they buy them, plus support. It’s crucial for me to be able to communicate with them and help them along via my Web site and e-mails. They appreciate the personal attention and the way I follow up on their requests and questions. It’s all about good customer service. That’s why they tell other people to go to my Web site. That’s mainly how I have built up my business. The Internet offers the perfect tools to provide good customer service.”
    In order to generate profit-generating word-of-mouth advertising, good customer service must be the order of the day in every interaction you have with the people who keep you in business. Chuck and Lynn Cross (www.expeditioncruises.com) take their customers in small groups to some of the world’s most unique and exciting destinations. The way the treat their customers makes them want to come back for more. It also makes them want to tell their friends about these friendly, outgoing tour guides and travel arrangers – professionals who know how to create unforgettable adventures for the people they serve and bring them back smiling.
    Jim Singleton (www.birdenthusiast.com) buys and sells exotic and game birds via the Internet. Bird enthusiasts and those who buy and sell them comprise an active community on the Web. Jim began as a hobbyist. But his hobby grew rapidly into a full-blown business with customers throughout the United States and Canada.
    How did he do it? “It was word-of-mouth,” he states. “If I don’t have what they want, I try to find it for them. I ship promptly. I answer their questions quickly. In short, I take care of them. And because I do, they tell a friend, who tells a friend … and it spreads out from there.”


Search Engine Listings

    A bevy of Web search engines, indexes and directories are available to help people look for information, products and services on the Internet. But of the various types of information-grabbing tools used by Web visitors, the search engine has gained supremacy.
    According to Forrester’s March 28, 2001 report entitled Driving Customers, Not Just Site Traffic, “Search engines are the top way consumers find new Web sites online, used by 73.4 percent of those surveyed.”
    The Consumer Daily Question Study (Fall 2000) pointed out: “Search engines are the top information resource Americans use when seeking answers, used 32 percent of the time, more than any other option.”
    But how valuable are search engine listings as a marketing tool for small online businesses? It depends. Some swear by them. Others say they are a waste of time.
    One of the big problems with search engine listings is that the search engines list so many Web sites that most sites are lost in the clutter. Let’s say you want to find a good deal on a lawn mower, plus some information about what you should look for and stay away from when you make a purchase. You go to one of the major search engines and search for “lawn mowers.” If you had searched for that phrase on AltaVista (a popular search engine) on the day this booklet was written, 790,110 separate Web sites listings would have come back to you from the search. If you had searched in Google, it would have returned about 91,000 listings on that particular topic. (FYI: AltaVista gets approximately 50 million search queries a day at the time of writing; Google gets about 100 million search requests daily – 50 million are through Google itself, the rest through partners such as Yahoo and Netscape Search.)
    This phenomenon has given birth to what Web surfers call “information overload.” It has become a problem for those who go to the Web in search of fast, clear information.
    Information overload is also a problem for Web site owners who want prospective customers and clients to find their sites when they search for the products or services they sell. How many other total Web pages on the Internet are you competing with for viewers’ attention? The number is skyrocketing daily, but here’s one indication: at the time of writing, 1.39 billion Web pages could be accessed through Google.
    Here are some other interesting facts: experts say that most people only look through the first page of returned search results before losing interest. And according the Web Top Search Rage Study (August 2000), Americans experience “search rage” if they fail to find what they want within an average of 12 minutes.
    So the question must be asked again: given the fact that your Web site will be competing with over a billion other Web pages, how valuable are search engine listings? And is it possible to get listed near the top of the lists?
    Jim Singleton says, “I do get some traffic from the search engines. But there are so many pages on the Internet that the chances of somebody finding me are pretty slim.”
    Bruce MacNaughton, owner of Prince Edward Island Preserve Company (www.preservecompany.com) has been lucky. He blends traditional retail operations at his Prince Edward Island, Canada, brick-and-mortar store with online merchandising through his Web site. “So far I haven’t spent any time getting listed on the search engines, nor have I hired anyone to do it for me,” he says. “That’s probably going to be one of those things that will be on my list of things to get done. And yet the last time I checked, when you go online and search for preserves or something related to them, my site usually comes near the top of the search results list.”
    Getting a top-of-the-list listing is not usually easy unless your Web site deals with something unique and different. For example, a Web site offering authentic shrunken heads from a specific tribe of cannibals in the Amazon forest is going to come up a lot closer to the top of any search for that particular item than a Web site selling vacation travel on a general search for travel opportunities. It’s a question of sheer numbers.
    But there are ways to stack the cards in your favor, regardless of how many direct competitors you have on the Internet. You can submit and resubmit your Web site information to the search engines, directories and indexes regularly. (Or you can pay someone to do it for you – there are many services that do this for a fee.) This involves following an often complex set of instructions involving submitting meta tags and other information, and then doing it again and again on a regular basis. By taking advantage of certain “tricks,” you supposedly give your site a better chance of coming closer to the top. This will help, but it all takes time and patience.
    Even if you don’t do this, there are mysterious forces at work on the Web (including “spiders” and other entities that only a techno-geek would understand) that will find your Web site and eventually get it listed – though probably not near the top of the search return list.
    Every company will have a slightly different experience with search engine placement and results. “Search engines and word-of-mouth advertising are what work best for my business. The company for which I’m an independent distributor has done some national marketing,” explains Kerrie Baughman, “and so if you do a search for E’ola, hopefully I will come up in the search engines.
    “I have employed a company that lists me on search engines regularly. That’s an ongoing process. They resubmit my site to the search engines all the time. It doesn’t cost very much. I pay $50 dollars every six months, which I think is very inexpensive to have that kind of service. If it cost a lot I wouldn’t use them. I don’t like to spend a lot of money on marketing.
    “My listings in the search engines pay off for me. I get regular responses from them – people who are subscribing to my newsletter and people who are asking for more information. That’s what I’m looking for. Then it’s up to me to turn those responses into sales. Because of the nature of this business, people don’t just order products without having a discussion with me first, so I can tell them how to use it and give them support.
    “Getting listed with search engines takes time. You can’t expect immediate results. In some cases it takes about six months for the submission to go through and actually show up. It’s a long-term process.”
    It should also be a regular process. Cynthia McKay (www.legift.com), owner of Le Gourmet Gift Basket, Inc. and author of The Business of Gift Baskets – A Guide for Survival, points out that a Web site’s placement in the search engines should be “chronically monitored.” She says, “As a business grows and changes you need to change the way you’re listed in the search engines to guide people back to you. I make sure that we monitor this regularly as our business grows and diversifies. We hire professionals to handle our search engine placement.”
    Teresa Beach’s Polish pottery Web site addresses a narrowly focused niche of the market, which means she should get better results from search engine listings than a more generic product offering would. “At first I found a search engine placement service that promised to get my site into all the search engines for a certain amount of money,” she says. “I don’t know if that really paid off.”
    Beach didn’t leave it there. She took another step forward by buying her way to the top via a “pay-per-click” site. “We signed up with GoTo™ (www.goto.com) and did the pay-per-click thing,” she explains. “It’s basically like an auction for people who have Web sites who want to get clicked. So you say, ‘Okay, in order to be listed first in your directory, I will pay six cents a click or 12 cents a click or whatever.’ You then choose your search words – in my case they would be ‘dinner plates’ or ‘coffee mugs’ or phrases like that. So if you agreed to pay more than anyone else to be first on the search return list, any time anyone goes to GoTo™ and searches for dinner plates, your site will be at the top of the list. And if they click on your site you will be charged the number of cents you agreed to for that click.
    “You can be on GoTo™ without paying, but you won’t be on the top of the list. And they say you have to be on the first page of any search return list or people are probably going to lose interest. The higher you are to the top, the more likely people are to click on your site.”
    GoTo™ – the Internet’s leading pay-for-performance search provider – claims that its performance-based model has proven to be much more effective than banner impressions. According to GoTo™, “companies bid for priority placement in the search results that then appear on tens of thousands of Web sites across the Internet. GoTo’s™ paid search results appear ranked in descending order of bid price. Because each advertiser pays GoTo™ the amount of its bid only when a consumer clicks on the advertiser’s listing, it provides advertisers with one of the most cost effective ways to drive targeted customer leads to their sites.”
    The company currently has more than 45,000 advertisers and reaches 75 percent of Internet users through its affiliate partnerships, including America Online (AOL), Terra Lycos, Alta Vista and Microsoft.
    Says Beach, “GoTo™ brought a lot of traffic to my site.” But do these people buy her products? “Well,” she laughs, “the people who actually end up buying represent a pretty small percentage of those who visit the site. I get an average of about 1,600 visits to my site each week, but I might only get 50 orders out of that. Still, that’s very profitable.”
    GoTo™ has approximately 7 million paid listings, according to one report, and roughly 37,000 advertisers. Obviously, many other Web-preneurs believe, like Beach, that pay-per-click marketing is a great investment – a million-dollar marketing strategy!


Offering Online Information

    The Internet was about information long before it ever became involved in commerce. Today, information is still the Web’s driving force, although e-commerce is now challenging that position.
    Thanks to the power of the Internet, Jim Singleton has been able to turn his hobby of buying and selling birds through his Web site from a pleasurable pastime into a fun and profitable business. He owes much of his success to the fact that he offers his target market valuable online information.
    “I try to help people and answer their questions and supply information,” he points out. “A lot of people who are interested in buying or selling birds haven’t had experience with them. They want to get more information about the birds, see what they look like and so forth. So people refer them to my Web page to see what a specific breed is and learn about it. They often make a purchase and then tell other people about my site.”
    It is a well-established fact that Web sites that offer current, valuable information draw more visitors and sell more products and services than those which are nothing more than virtual storefronts. In the first place, more people are drawn to these sites. Plus, they return more often to get more information. Good information builds credibility for a site and its owner. Singleton, for example, has established himself as a trusted and credible expert in his field thanks to his information-rich Web site. Countless other Web-preneurs have done the same in their respective fields, industries or niches.
    If you offer information on your Web site, make sure that you regularly add new information or update existing information to make it new. Visitors will not keep coming back to your site for information if they find the same old tired stuff time after time.
    There are a number of ways to use your Web site to deliver information to your market. Buttons or banners announcing special reports and other types of information can be placed on your site’s home page or other appropriate pages. When visitors click them they go to the information or an index of information that you have made available to them. This information can then be brought to the screen or printed out. Or it may be in the form of an e-mail that they request which contains the information in the e-mail’s body or in an attachment to the e-mail.
    Depending on how involved you want to get, you might want to consider offering nicely formatted reports in PDF format. To do this you will need to create a report using your word processing program or a graphics or layout program. (Today’s word processing programs are powerful enough to handle some fairly sophisticated formatting and even graphic functions, so you probably won’t need to use a page layout or graphics program.) Once the report looks exactly how you want it to look, convert it to PDF format using Adobe Acrobat software.
    Why? Because PDF files will look and print exactly the way you originally format them regardless of what computer platform your readers are using. If you just send them a regular file created, say, in Microsoft Word for Windows, that file could look very different when someone brings it up for reading or printing on his Mac or using WordPerfect or some other program. Once you get it in PDF format, it will look just the way you want it to no matter where it goes.
    The Acrobat Reader that your site’s visitors will need to read the document can be downloaded free from www.adobe.com. Most people have it already. But to create the PDF files in the first place, you will need the full Adobe Acrobat program. Depending on where you buy this, it will cost around $200 to $300. (Shop around for the best deal.) If you’re serious about your Web site, you should have this program. It’s easy to install and easier still to use. Another nice thing about Adobe Acrobat is that it compresses large files so that they can be sent faster over the Internet. A file that is 700 KB in Microsoft Word might be half that size once it is converted to PDF format.
    Image is important. If you make PDF reports or information in any other format available via your Web site, make sure that it doesn’t embarrass you with typos, misspelled words, grammatical errors and other problems. How would you feel if you opened the next issue of Time magazine and found dozens of misspelled words, poor grammar and generally low-quality writing? Would you trust the information the magazine offered? Would you ever want to buy another issue? Probably not. If you’re like most people, you would immediately and permanently lose trust in the magazine and its information. Interestingly, it wouldn’t really matter if all the information were accurate. Right or wrong, we do judge a book by its cover.
    Remember this when you offer your market information on your Web site. Go to the extra trouble of proofing it and re-proofing it. In fact, it makes sense to pay a professional writer to write it or to hire a qualified writer or editor to “massage” it once you’ve had a crack at it.
    Make sure the your visitors can quickly and easily see and get to the information offered on your Web site. And give them ample opportunity to give you feedback about it. Ask them what they liked about it and what they didn’t like. Especially ask them what other information they would like to see on your site. People are more apt to respond honestly in an e-mail than they would in person. This kind of feedback is extremely valuable. Don’t take negative comments personally. Use them to do better next time. Remember, this isn’t a high school essay contest. It’s a business, and in business your customers and potential customers are king. Always ask them to tell you how to please them better!
    One last note about offering information on your Web site: the information you provide doesn’t have to be on the Internet. The company for which Kerrie Baughman serves as an independent distributor publishes a nice printed newsletter. People who visit her Web site can subscribe to this newsletter while at the site. She then mails the newsletter to them via regular mail.


Web-Based Newsletters and E-Zines

    Have you ever thought of yourself as the publisher of an internationally distributed magazine or newsletter? Not likely. But believe it or not, becoming one is easier than you think. And it might be the best thing you could do to market your online business.
    One of the most effective ways to provide your target audience with information is in the form of online newsletters and online magazines, also known as “e-zines.” Both of these tools can drastically increase sales by increasing traffic to your Web site and keep them coming back for more.
    Because of the nature of the Web, there is a much finer line between what constitutes a newsletter and what constitutes a magazine than there is in the traditional print world. On the Web, many publications that consider themselves to be newsletters are more packed with information and often more professionally presented than other publications that claim to be e-zines. For our purposes, we will lump them both together under the term “e-zine.”
    In either case we are referring to online publications that are published regularly (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or on some other fixed schedule) and which typically target a specific interest group. New issues of most good e-zines today are announced to subscribers via permission-based e-mails which offer teasers about what the issue contains, plus links that take the e-mail recipients directly to the Web site on which the e-zine resides.
    E-zines are generally distributed free. Compensation to the e-zine publisher comes from individuals or organizations that advertise on the publication’s virtual pages or from sales of products or services the publisher is offering. In many cases, revenue comes from both sources.
    An excellent example of an e-zine that has done miracles for its founder is called WritersWeekly (www.writersweekly.com). In June 1997, Angela Adair-Hoy published her first issue of The Write Markets Report, a newsletter for writers. She began selling the print magazine for $39 per year (12 issues). “I was doing all the work,” she recalls, “including interviewing editors, writing, hiring freelancers, processing subscriptions, maintaining the subscriber database and the accounting software, all without too much trouble.
    “In early 1998, I wrote, formatted, and printed my first book, How to Be a Syndicated Newspaper Columnist. I began selling the book accompanied by a disk of 6,000+ newspaper markets. I ran ads for my own book in The Write Markets Report. My subscribers knew I provided a quality magazine, so they trusted me to provide a quality book as well. The book sold very well at $14.95 per copy.
    “Then, another idea hit me,” says Adair-Hoy. “What if I offered a free, abbreviated electronic sample (teaser issue) of my magazine each month? I could build a new subscriber database for that one and readers would see my ads over and over again. It would be free, so thousands would sign up. Hey! I was onto something here!”
    She quickly formatted the first issue of National Writer’s Monthly (now called Writers Weekly.com). She filled it with quality market information along with plenty of ads for her products. Sales increased and so did the number of subscribers.
    “The more subscribers I attracted to the free e-zine, the more sales I processed,” she points out. “And pretty soon I had enough subscribers to be attractive to advertisers.”
    Adair-Hoy stresses the importance of being sure that the primary topic of your e-zine is a good fit for what you are selling on your Web site. “Think of ideas for related products you can produce and sell – products the readers would naturally be interested in,” she urges. “For example, I sell e-books and media directories for writers and sponsor a profitable quarterly 24-hour short story contest. Remember, your e-zine will be your selling vehicle for all future products. Another hint is to continue to look for other products that target your already existing audience.”
    Quality editorial content is the secret to attracting readers to your e-zine and keeping them, according to Adair-Hoy. “Listen to your readers to find out what they really need,” she says. Her readers told her that they wanted to be alerted to unscrupulous firms and greedy publishers. She now does this regularly, and her Web site has become (among many other things) the place where writers can go to look for people and organizations not to write for.
    “Imagine being able to place free ads in a magazine that has thousands of subscribers who are specifically interested in reading about the topic of your book [product] on a weekly or monthly basis. Imagine being able to run unlimited ads for your book [product] targeting this highly effective and buying list of subscribers. Imagine. . . owning your own magazine and doing whatever the heck you want for shameless self-promotion!
    “A consumer must see your ad many times to respond. If you publish an e-zine, your readers will see your ad on a regular basis. Will sales increase? You bet they will!
    Adair-Hoy’s e-zine, Writers Weekly, is distributed to more than 56,000 writers every Wednesday. Total readership exceeds 65,000. She places advertisements for her own products in each issue. At the time of writing, Adair-Hoy generates over $5,000 per month selling her books through her Web site – not to mention the revenue Writers Weekly generates from advertisers.


Internet Auctions

    Online auctions have become popular clearinghouses for people who want to buy and sell everything from cars to baseball cards. Their range is virtually worldwide. Some auctions, such as e-Bay, deal with almost every type of product imaginable. Others focus on a specific commodity or product category. Some auctions are little more than message boards on Web sites dealing with tightly defined niches.
    For savvy online entrepreneurs, auctions have also become a powerful way to promote Web sites. How? Let’s say you sell antique furniture, which you buy from all over the world. You have a Web site where you list your current inventory, along with photos and information about each piece. Buyers can come to your site, see what’s available, order and pay for the merchandise online, after which you ship it to them.
    The problem is, you need to get more people to come to your site and buy antiques. Your site is just one of a great many on the Web and you feel like a needle in a haystack. How do you make your site known to greater numbers of antique buyers?
    Try auctions. Browse the Web to find all the auction sites where antique furniture is bought and sold. Make a list of general auctions as well as auctions specific to antiques. Find out how popular these auctions are; i.e., how much traffic they get and how much trade they do. Also find out how they make their money. Do they charge a commission on what is sold through their sites? Do they levy a flat fee? Is their auction completely free?
    Once you have decided which auction or auctions you want to get involved with, select one or more antiques to submit to each of them. Make sure that everything you put up for auction refers people to your Web site.
    When you do this, you will enjoy two benefits. First, you might make a good profit on the items you sell at the auctions (most allow you to protect yourself by specifying a minimum price that has to be met). Second – and this offers the greatest long-term payoff – people who are interested in what you have to offer will see your Web site address and many will probably visit it.
    Auctions are an effective way to get your Web site address in front of people who are out looking for precisely what you offer. Best of all, it’s a strategy that typically doesn’t cost you anything, but instead puts money in your pocket!
    Jim Singleton has used auctions to build his success as an online bird merchant. “I get on three or four poultry auctions and game bird auctions,” he explains. “Everything I list refers people to my Web site to see the different birds that are available.
    “There’s a message board for game birds and waterfowl that allows people to list what they’re looking for or what they’re trying to sell. There’s also a worldwide pigeon auction on the Internet with four or five different auctions listed all around the world. You list birds there and they let you submit photos with the listing. They charge 5 to 10 percent of the sales price. There are also five or six online auctions that are free, and more are coming online all the time.
    Every time I list birds on the auctions, I refer people to my Web site to see pictures of the birds. I get hits from doing this from all other the place. Someone just contacted me from England. Another man called from here locally to see if I offered tours of my place to see the birds.”
    Teresa Beach used auctions to jump-start her Polish pottery business on the Web. “When I first started my Web site,” she recounts, “I went to E-Bay and listed a couple of products there for auction. I was able to put a link to my site on my auctions. I think that strategy brought my site to the attention of people who are in the market for Polish pottery.”
    In short, auctions are a great way to heat up the action.


URL Exposure

    If someone owned a traditional brick-and-mortar retail store, would she forget to put her store’s address and telephone number in her Yellow Pages ad or newspaper display ads? Would she fail to put it on her stationery and business cards? Of course she wouldn’t. Why then do so many people leave their Web site addresses off their advertisements and business papers? After all, an online merchant’s storefront is her Web site.
    “I make sure that my Web site address is on everything that is supplementary to supporting my brand,” says Canadian Bruce MacNaughton. “I sell preserves, so on the lid and/or on the package that the product is in, I make sure I have my Web site’s address listed. When customers in my brick-and-mortar store bring preserves to the counter to make a purchase, we wrap each one individually in tissue. We don’t have it yet, but next year the tissue will have our logo with our Web site address printed on it. It’s subtle, but it’s there. We then put that in a bag that has our company logo and our Web site address on it.
    “Most of our customers are from out of town – about 60 percent are from the States – so it’s very important for us to let them know that we are accessible via the Web. We make sure that our products not only taste good, but that they are packaged to look good, too. This is especially important because a lot of our customers buy our preserves to give them away as gifts. I’ve not yet heard from anyone who thinks that putting our Web site address on our packaging is crass or distasteful.”
    Cynthia McKay shares MacNaughton’s views on the matter. “I make sure,” she states, “that our Web site address is on every piece of literature, everything I use in correspondence, every business card and piece of stationery and every information card. We have gold labels that go on the front of our baskets. Our Web site is on those, too. Every time I do an interview or give a talk, I mention our Web site. When you call us and you’re holding on the line, you’ll hear our Web site address. Every time we buy a full-page ad in a magazine to promote the sales of our franchise, we make sure the Web site is on there so they can go there first. Just getting that around is a big help. The exposure is really valuable.”
    Kerrie Baughman also puts her Web site address on everything she possibly can, from business cards to fax transmission letters. “It’s a very effective strategy,” she explain, “because a lot of people out there are already looking for what I provide, and when they see my Web site address, they go to it and check it out.”


Affiliate Marketing Programs

    Affiliate marketing has been a key factor in making Aaron Gayle’s online inkjet cartridge and resale kit business a highly profitable enterprise.
    The term “affiliate marketing” refers a strategy that blends Internet technologies with the principals of direct marketing and franchising. In a general sense, here’s how affiliate marketing programs play out. Let’s say you have an online business, and your “storefront” is your Web site. You establish a Web-based network that consists of other sites (not direct competitors) that draw the kinds of visitors who would be interested in what you offer. These sites place your business’s banner, button or other linking device on their sites. When their visitors click on that link, they go directly to your Web site, where they will be exposed to your products or services and hopefully make a purchase then or in the future.
    The sites that carry your link are your affiliates – partners of sorts. They are basically sending you potential customers – people who they attracted to their own sites and are willing to send to yours. Rarely will they do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Sometimes they do it on a banner exchange basis. But in an affiliate marketing program, they receive financial compensation, usually in the form of a pre-negotiated commission on the purchases of anyone who comes to you via their Web sites. The commissions earned by affiliate marketers vary. A typical range is in the 5 percent to 25 percent neighborhood. It goes without speaking that online merchants whose products have higher profit margins can afford to pay higher commissions.
    These sorts of arrangements would be virtually impossible without the technology available on the Internet. Software tools are used to track who sends traffic to whom, who buys what for how much, and how much commission should be paid to the referring affiliates. This process is immediate, clean and virtually effortless for the parties involved.
    If affiliate marketing is done right – that is, if you choose the right affiliates and give them enough incentive to make your link compelling to their sites’ visitors – it is also very effective. And you can’t beat the benefits. If you’re the online entrepreneur to whom the affiliates are sending traffic, you’ll enjoy increased exposure to people who are likely to be interesting in your offering and (presumably) a resulting jump in sales – all without incurring marketing costs and advertising expenses. If you’re the affiliate who is sending the traffic to another site, you have the opportunity to earn commissions without the hassles of maintaining inventory or providing follow-up customer service. And all this comes from merely giving away a bit of your Web site’s landscape.
    One note of caution: many Web-preneurs will not put links to other sites on their Web pages. They work hard to get people to visit their sites and don’t want those people to be distracted while they’re there or to be lured off to another site before they otherwise would leave. Be sure to carefully weigh these potential disadvantages with the comparative benefits of receiving commissions from affiliate programs.
    Another caveat: be careful who you get involved with. Also do your homework and thoroughly check out any site you are considering making an affiliate. On the other side of the coin, don’t put a link to another site on your own site unless you’re sure you want to be associated with that site and what it offers.
    “I’ve been approached by a few lingerie businesses that want to put my links on their site and take a percent of sales,” says Bruce MacNaughton. “I’m not interested in being associated with that type of product, so I said no.”


Banners, Boxes and other Online Advertisements

    Click on any high-traffic commercial Web site and you will see a lot of advertisements. These typically consist of banners, boxes and recommendations accompanied by live links that lead people to the advertisers’ Web sites. Like newspapers, magazines and television, the Web has become a major advertising medium that commands big bucks.
    Fortunately, it is generally (though certainly not in all cases) more economical to place advertisements on the Web than to put them in high-circulation newspapers and magazines or on television or the radio.
    Web sites that sell advertising typically have two ways of charging advertisers. One way is to simply charge the advertiser a flat fee. This fee will be based on any of a number of factors, including the size of the ad, where it is placed on the site, the number of page impressions visitors will see, the number of click-throughs they will make to the advertiser’s site, the number of times the ad runs, etc.
    Another fairly common way Web sites charge other sites for advertising is to take a percentage of the sales they sent their way. Bruce MacNaughton likes this option.
    “I don’t pay for advertising on other Web sites or e-zines or anything like that,” he says. “Because I’m part Scottish, I don’t like spending my money, and I want to get a lot of bang for my buck. I’d rather work with companies that ask for a percentage of the sale rather than money up front. If you came to me and said, ‘We can bring you 20,000 people a month,’ I’d say, ‘Big deal. All that does is raise my server charges.’ What’s important is sales. So I’m more apt to work with a company that wants to take a percentage of the sales.”
    How are these sales tracked? “It’s programming,” says MacNaughton. “It can all be programmed so that once a sale is made a copy is e-mailed to us and another is e-mailed to them. We know where the order came from because of the code numbers.
    “We’re working with a few of these companies right now – a few of the major credit card companies – but they’re not really driving much business,” he adds. “It does give us good exposure, though, as well as a sort of credibility because they are fussy about who they work with and people know that.”
    There is yet another option for compensation. You might be able to work out an ad exchange with a promising Web site. However, if that site has tons and traffic and you have little, chances are a straight-across exchange won’t work out. You might be able to negotiate a weighted exchange, though, in which the more heavily visited site gets more advertising on your site than you do on its site in order to compensate for the difference in visitor volume.
    Jim Singleton uses this technique often and profitably. “I’ve made a lot of contacts in my bird business, and I have included links to their Web sites on my site, and they put links to my site on theirs,” he explains. “It’s a small world. Everybody advertises for everybody. It’s important to note that I’m not putting links to direct competitors on my site. These are people who offer different things than I do. I don’t send people to my competition.”
    Link exchange groups are always an option. Teresa Beach has tried her luck with these groups. “They have tools on their site to make banners,” she says. “You sign up to trade banner ads with other people in your chosen category. It’s a rotating thing. Depending on how many people are involved, you might come up only every hundred or thousand page views. Each time a banner that you’ve allowed on your site gets clicked, you get a point, which means you get to have a banner on someone else’s site. It’s pretty vague. I don’t know that this has produced much for me.”
    If you decide to pay for advertising on the Web, start by finding sites that attract the kinds of people who would be likely to purchase your products or services. This is common sense. You wouldn’t put your camouflage hunting clothes advertisement on a quilting goods Web site, but a site that sells rifles would be a good bet.
    Thoroughly check out sites that appear to be good fits. Do they look like the kinds of sites that would produce not just visitors but sales for you? If they look promising, look for a link that says “Advertising” or something similar. If that doesn’t exist, send the company an e-mail and request advertising rates and information. One way or another, find out how much traffic the site gets. If a site still looks like a good candidate for your ad placements, get into the nitty-gritty regarding the options it makes available and the costs.
    Online advertising does not appeal to everyone. Kerrie Baughman doesn’t participate in advertising other online businesses on her Web site or advertising her business on other sites simply because she does not like the idea of the possible distractions advertisements can create on Web pages.
    “I know a lot of people do banner ads,” she admits, “But frankly, if people get to my site, I don’t want to distract them and have them click on someone else’s banner and go away. And I find that when I visit other Web sites, banner ads distract me. So I don’t have other people’s ads on my site and I don’t put my banner ads on other sites. Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I don’t get involved in them.”
    Many individuals and companies do get involved, however. If you doubt that, get on the Web and look around. Ads are everywhere.
    What should you know about maximizing the effectiveness of your online advertising? For starters, be aware that experts claim that it takes the typical Web site visitor six or seven exposures to the same ad before he will pay attention to it and remember it. So don’t think you can pay for a one-shot ad and get much benefit from it. Plan on exposing people to it at least seven times and preferably more.
    Because of the nature of the Web, your ad must be designed in a way that grabs the viewer’s attention fast. Get a professional Web ad designer to create it. It will be money well spent. Give her the go-ahead to be bold, using whatever color, copy, graphics or animation it takes to get attention (without jeopardizing the image you want to create, of course). And make sure the designer knows all the specifications regarding the size of your ad. Speaking of design, don’t make the mistake of cramming too much copy into your ad. To do so, you typically sacrifice visual impact and/or readability. Also, consider taking advantage of animation. Ad banners or boxes that are animated leap out from the screen and give you the opportunity to present more information than static ads.
    When creating the concept for your ad, use proven ad principles, such as addressing suffering points, including free offers, etc. Numerous books have been written on this subject. Consider paying a good advertising copywriter for a few hours of his time to help you out. Develop at least two or three advertisements and then test each to find out which pulls more sales.


Online Discussion Groups

    One of the nicest things about the World Wide Web is that there are numerous ways to promote your business online that are entirely free. One way is to participate in the various types of online discussion groups, including chat rooms, newsgroups or Usenet groups, message boards and others.
    “Find them and get involved,” urges Teresa Beach. By “them,” she is referring to the groups that relate to what you’re selling. There are groups, chat rooms and message boards that relate to almost every imaginable type of product or service. Finding them is not hard. Search for them using the Internet’s search engines, directories and indexes. Sites like Dejanews (www.dejanews.com – a site where you can search for newsgroups by topic or name) make finding specific types of online discussion groups easy.
    When you become an active participant in these groups and offer valuable information or answers to questions, you can quickly become an expert in your niche. Most groups or boards allow you to include your Web site in your signature or profile, and perhaps a very brief promotional phrase. This tells people how to get to your site for more information or for helpful products or services. Don’t make the mistake of using this medium to promote yourself. You will not make friends or influence people that way. Simply help out, impress people with your knowledge and experience, and include your Web site address so they can come to you.
    Kerrie Baughman generated a lot of sales using this method. “I generating a lot of new business just by participating in chat rooms and discussion groups,” she says. “My name, ‘Thinrich’ is attractive. Everyone wants to be thin and rich. If you’re in a chat room, they can click and see your profile. My profile has some information about my Web site and invites people to go there to become more familiar with me and the products I’m offering. My profile says things like, ‘Do you want to lose weight? and ‘Ask for a free sample.’ I think the profile is very effective. I get e-mails all the time that don’t have anything to do with my Web site, but they have to do with my profile. I’m on AOL, and anyone on AOL – which is about 15 million people – can do a search for anyone who has ‘weight-loss’ on their profile. That brings me inquiries.”
    Jim Singleton has had excellent exposure from participating on message boards. “There are quite a few message boards out there for almost anything you can think of,” he says. “There are a lot of message boards for birds – pigeons, pheasants and other species. The more of these message boards you can get on, the more exposure you’ll have. But you have to list your Web site address and e-mail address as part of your signature or it won’t do you any good. I don’t include my telephone number, by the way – just my Web site address. If you get involved with message boards and other types of online promotion you’ll develop contacts that will help you in your business. I’ve got contacts throughout the United States and Canada.”
    Some of these contacts have been very profitable for Singleton’s bird business. “A lot of people are in it as a business, but don’t advertise or promote,” says Singleton. “I do a lot of brokering for these types of people. They’ll raise a dozen Mandarin ducks, for example, and then find someone like me to sell them to. They know my money’s good and they know I pay immediately. I’ll buy all 12 for, say, $15 a bird and then turn around and resell them for $50 a bird.”
    When it comes to online marketing, it pays to talk around.


Online Coupons and Discounts

    Money-saving coupons and discounts have long been high-power promotional tools in print and other conventional media. Their money-making properties can also be applied to online marketing. Here’s how one Web merchant does it:
    “I have had 20,000 postcards printed that I hand out to everyone who comes to our store,” says preserve mogul Bruce MacNaughton. “The postcards show me in my kilt (I am of Scottish descent) standing in front of the store’s flower garden showing the store’s signage. On the back of the postcard is a list of some of our products with prices and product code numbers listed. The postcard actually serves as a coupon to use online, complete with a number. Once they register on our Web site, they can enter that number and receive $5 off their purchase. For people who come to our brick-and-mortar store, this ties them into our Web site and gives them another incentive to continue to order from us.
    “As soon as the programming is finished, we’ll have it set up so that once a customer makes a purchase from us, he will receive confirmation from our server that says, ‘Thank you for your order.’ At the same time he’ll receive a number for a $5 coupon that he can forward to a friend of his. This is a number that he cannot personally use – it’s only good if he forwards it on to someone new.
    “So if, for instance, you get one and send it to your mother, and your mother comes to our site and chooses to register and use that $5 coupon toward a purchase, then we send you a ‘Thank you’ e-mail with a $5 coupon for a $5 credit on your account to use at your discretion. In turn, we send your mother another $5 coupon to send to her sister or whoever. So the thing will hopefully spin out from there.
    “You could place, say, five orders at my site next year. If you do, you’ll receive five coupons, which means that you could have a $25 credit on your account. I haven’t quite decided how far we’re going to go with this, however. We might stop it at $100. We haven’t quite worked it all out yet. I do know that the credit won’t be able to be used toward shipping.”


Virtual Classrooms

    “Another very effective marketing technique is to teach a class online – an ongoing class,” states Kerrie Baughman. “I’m a teacher by profession. So it comes natural to me. Some time ago I found a book that I really loved and taught it here in my home to local people. But I wanted to teach other people around the country about the principles in this book. So I started out with a database of people who were already in my network marketing organization. I wrote a nice e-mail and sent it out to everyone in my organization. I also sent it out to all my friends online and everyone in my address book. And I asked them to forward it, forward it, forward it! You see, when you receive a forwarded e-mail, that’s an endorsement. It goes back to the word of mouth thing.
    “On AOL and elsewhere you can have a private chat room where you can invite a certain number of people in,” Baughman continues. “So I could prepare ahead of time everything that I wanted to say and send it one statement at a time. Everyone could read it and respond, as they wanted to. I asked them to hold their responses until I asked if anyone had any questions – just like when you’re teaching a live class. It was basically a virtual classroom.
    “When you’re offering a free class, be sure to announce it and promote it on your Web site. A simple, ‘Ask me about my free class’ invitation may be all you need to fill the class up. The whole idea here is that you’re teaching and coaching and supporting people, which makes you an expert whom they trust. It’s a great way to build up your customer base and generate more sales.”


Buyer-Friendly Web Site Design

    An inviting, well-designed Web site is one of the most powerful weapons any online businessperson can wield in the war for sales.
    “A lot of people comment that they love my site – that it is very easy to maneuver through,” says Teresa Beach. “This is something that I really focused on when I had my Web site designed. I wanted it to be easy. You go to some Web sites and windows start popping up all over and you don’t know where you were, where you are or how you got there. I’ve tried to keep my Web site as simple as possible. And from the comments I get I know people appreciate that.”
    Bruce MacNaughton agrees: “When you’re designing your Web site, or having it done for you, make sure that people don’t have to work hard to get the information and prices on the products. If you make people work too hard, they’ll just leave.”
    According to Kerrie Baughman, certain marketing tools should be built into the site. “One marketing strategy,” she states, “is to have a button on your Web site that says, ‘Recommend this site to a friend.’ When visitors click on the button, a link to your site is forwarded to the people they want to see it. Remember, when it is forwarded by someone they know, it is a recommendation. It’s an online word-of-mouth tool.”
    And don’t forget to make it easy for visitors to your Web site to send you e-mail.


Marketing Your Online Business Offline

      How many television, radio, newspaper and magazine ads – not to mention direct mail pieces – do you see these days that don’t list the advertiser’s Web site? Not many. The fact is, offline forms of advertising and promotion are being used more and more to drive customers to the Web where they can get more information and make purchases.
      Cynthia McKay promotes the sales of her franchises by purchasing full-page ads in specific magazines and designing them to get interested people to visit her gift basket Web site. “The full-page ads give us instant credibility,” she points out. “Numerous people have said, ‘Well, if they can afford a full-page ad, they must be pretty solvent.’ You have to look at the psychology of the buyer.”
      Printed catalogs that are sent through the mail also work well as online business drivers. Teresa Beach sends customers and prospective buyers printed catalogs that feature her Polish pottery selection. They request the catalogs from her Web site. “Some people prefer to see a regular printed catalog and order from it,” she says. “I think the catalog has helped us a lot. Every time we get an order we send a catalog with the products we send.” The catalog lists her Web site, inviting readers to visit it, where they can get additional and updated information.
      Giving live speeches and presenting seminars to groups of people who are likely to buy what you offer on the Internet is another excellent offline sales strategy. If you have something to say about anything related to your Web site, consider saying it in a speech to a group of people or in a seminar presentation.
      Cynthia McKay has increased her Web site traffic by mentioning her gift basket site in speeches she makes and seminars she gives all over the country. As an entrepreneur and author, she speaks on a variety of subjects, including how to build a business empire from home and how to make a career change. (She knows all about career changes – she was a backup singer for Tiny Tim and then an attorney before launching Le Gourmet Gift Basket, Inc.).
      “Although they don’t like you to overtly market your Web site at these events,” she says, “I will mention the address of my Web site during my presentation as a source for ideas on how to market. When you have a room filled with a couple hundred people or a thousand people, and you give out your Web site address, everybody pulls out their pens and writes it down. Also, whenever I’m speaking and I hand out an agenda or brochure, I make sure my Web site is listed at the top.”
      Free publicity in newspapers, magazines and on television news programs and television and radio talk shows is worth its weight in gold. “I don’t pay for advertising,” admits Jim Singleton, “but a newspaper writer did an article about me and my bird business which has generated a lot of contacts for me. The article came out in the Salt Lake Tribune and the Ogden Standard Examiner. And I don’t know how it got around – I didn’t think it was on the wires like the Associated Press – but a fellow in Nebraska e-mailed me and said he saw it in their local newspaper. They listed my Web site address in the article and it brought me a lot of hits. All the information and promotion I can get out there in front of people helps.”
      Another time-proven success strategy is to write press releases and distribute them to newspapers, magazines, trade journals and any other news medium that hits your target market. Hire a freelance writer to help you, or learn how to write a good press release yourself. Many books and articles are available on the subject. Beyond making sure that the press release is properly formatted and well written, it is important to make sure that your press releases have a “news hook.” A news hook is something that makes your press release newsworthy, such as the release of a new product, the winning of an award or recognition, or anything else that an editor would feel good about presenting to his or her readers.


Creative New Strategies – Your Key to a Bright Future

      We have discussed several million-dollar Internet success secrets in this booklet. These proven techniques deserve the “million-dollar” epithet because they have made, are making, and will continue to create wealth for Web-based entrepreneurs who are willing to put them to work.
      But they are not the only high-powered strategies you can use. The phenomenon of Internet commerce is in its infancy. That means things are happening quickly. Changes are constant. Innovations are the rule – not the exception.
      To stay ahead of your competition you must be creative. Tweak the strategies mentioned in this booklet for your particular circumstances and goals. Innovate entirely new ones. Constantly think of new and better ways to make your Web-based business more productive, more efficient and more profitable.
      Generations from now, history books will point out that the years we are living through right now marked the beginning of a bright new era of commerce and prosperity, thanks to the Internet and the many possibilities it brings. Will history list you as one of the innovative entrepreneurs who contributed to this exciting new world and created a fortune in the process? Believe it or not, such could be your destiny. It is certainly within your reach. You have the opportunity – right here and right now – to achieve a level of success that that would have been almost impossible just a decade ago.
      Ride the Internet to your dreams! Good luck.

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A publication of
American Home Business Association
© 2001 American Home Business Association
All rights reserved. Duplication prohibited.