A Beginner's Guide to the Internet

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HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH 900#S AND THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY. By M. Mathiesen - President Ligthhouse Productions Co-Founder, the Electronic Publishers Association. Founder, the NETCENTER. What you have found is Part One of the complete manual on how to make money with 900#s and the Internet. You can get Part Two by calling 800-664-9042 and have your credit card number ready to buy the final version at $49.95 Or you can send a check payable to Lighthouse Productions for $49.95 to Lighthouse Productions P.O. Box 7885 Santa Cruz, CA 95060 PART ONE You've made a wise choice in selecting us to learn about how to make money with 900#s and the Information Superhighway ... Because ... We are probably the only Publishing company who has experience with both the Computer Networks and the 900# Business. We did it because we needed a way for our books to make more profits. We distribute our books over the Bulletin Boards and over InterNet. We are the publishers of the INTERACTIVE YELLOW PAGES, THE ROADMAP TO THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY, AND THE PENETRATORS, A SCI-FI NOVEL. You can find these books in several places on the Network. If you're a Compuserve client you can find them in the WINSHARE FORUM, LIBRARY 10, (GEN WIN APPS.). I mention this so that you can check out our story if you are not already a customer or know all about us. In these publications, you will see that we get very wide distribution over the Nets. Some of our books have the potential to reach over 50 Million people. And it's all FREE. We don't spend a dime on advertising, but we sell advertising in our magazines. THIS BRINGS US TO RULE #1 OF 900# PROMOTION Don't waste money on advertising your 900#. It never pays off more than what you pay out. Now, you are probably amazed at this rule because you see 900#s advertised all the time. And obviously someone must be making money on this idea. And it's true in a way. The people making the money are the newspapers, television & radio stations who advertise the 900#s for their owners. The owners may make a few thousand bucks from their ads, but when they finish paying for their ads, there is little if anything left over for them. They almost all go under and you can prove this to yourself, by going to your local library. Go to the microfiche room and look for ads that were in your local newspaper over a year ago. Then, compare them to the ads you see today. Virtually none of the ads will be the same. Why? Because if the people promoting the older ads were making money from these ads, wouldn't they continue to run them? Of course they would. If you spent ten dollars on an ad that produced $15, you wouldn't cancel it would you? Of course not, and there's your proof that advertising doesn't pay with 900#s. Now, there will always be an exception to the rule and this is what the ad people are counting on. They expect that you will hear about a huge success story and try to duplicate it by spending money in their paper, TV station or whatever. In fact, they'll never discourage you in any way from advertising in their paper or TV station because that's how they eat. They don't care about how you eat. But they do care about how they eat, and so there's a sucker born every second and they'll be glad to take the next one. The exceptions to the rule, by the way are the Psychic ads you see on TV with the famous singers or actresses plugging them. These succeed for a couple reasons. They found the right 900# for TV. If you're home watching TV during the day or late at night, chances are you're the kind of person who would be lonely or confused, drunk, or just plain stupid enough to believe that a phone call with a `Psychic' is going to help get control of your life. Secondly, they have a celebrity endorser who tells them that she finds this service useful. They are not sophisticated enough to realize that the only reason she is saying these things and endorsing such a scam is because she is getting paid alot of money to say these things. And as long as they can't arrest her for fraud, she will go on saying these wonderful glowing things about these psychics. But if they were as good as they pretend to be, they would never waste their time with the viewer's trifling little problems about their wife or lover, they would be in Las Vegas, or in the Stock Market making Billions of dollars because they're psychic. So, this is an example of a near fraud that makes money because they are really stretching the truth and taking the suckers for everything they have to spend. If you think you're going to do this too, I don't want you to read any more. I don't need your business and I hope you will drop dead. Why? Because the 900# industry is already blemished by scams and schemes like this one that I'm pointing to and you all know who I'm talking about. The fact is, the 900# industry, if used conscientiously and properly can be a very valid way of selling information. I know because I do it every day. During the time you read the above, I have earned an average of $390 in commissions to me from my 900#, the National People's Poll. If you want to add to my income and see how a real 900# can work, CALL 900-CUT-BAIT, and you will hear how a real information provider, not a scam artist, can make money nice and easy. There are other people claiming to make thousands of dollars a day with their 900#s and some of these people aren't stretching the truth at all. They just aren't telling you the rest of the story. And that rest of the story usually is that yes, they take in $5,000 per day in 900# income, but they are having to pay out $6,000 per day in Advertising to get it. Now, how long will it take to go bankrupt? It's a matter of how much money you had to start with. But when you use it all up and it's gone, whether you frittered it away trying to get a 900# going or whether you just lost it in a poker game, what difference does it make? It's gone either way. Now, some people will intentionally pull a credit scheme on the advertisers and keep some profits this way. They'll get an account with hundreds or thousands of advertisers and just never pay their bills. If you can stretch them out for a few months and in the meantime, take in a few hundred thousand in phone sales, you might come away a winner, because by the time they cut you off, you could be in Tahiti enjoying the profits and your lawyer is handling your bankruptcy. This happens alot and if you're one of these scammers, I hope you won't read any more and I also hope you drop dead, because you too make it difficult for clean, honest operators to make a living at this game. But if you are not any of the above, please continue to read. We are going to go into the basics of advertising on the InterNet. We don't give you the final information you need. You have to purchase this from us at $99.00 and this is the whole purpose of this book. We want to sell it to you. That's what we do mainly. We're publishers of electronic information. We have a proven track record with making money by NOT SPENDING A DIME ON ADVERTISING and that's obviously worth a great deal of money to the right kind of person. Hopefully, you're that kind of business person who sees the wisdom of spending $99 bucks right up front in order to save wasting thousands of dollars and tons of even more valuable time. CHAPTER TWO. Advertising Basics. So, what we will give you in our book that you have ordered and are reading the Free Portion of is the all the information you need to be successful and avoid the pitfalls. The really good stuff, our contacts, our step-by-step directions for advertising for free on the computer networks is locked up inside PART TWO of this book. You will need a credit card to unlock it. You will be instructed at the end of this Part One as to how exactly you do it, but for now, I need to tell you more about what it is we do and how I know what we do can make you money too. As I mentioned before, we are making hundreds of dollars on our 900#, while you are reading this book and we get to keep all of what we make because we don't advertise. The first thing people usually do when they get their 900# approved is they get the advertising going. They talk to the people we've already mentioned in Chapter One and they plan on spending X dollars per month. Your budget might be $100 / month or $10,000 per month or anywhere in between. Then, they sit back, run their ads and see if they are making money. Most of them are very excited at first because they get a few calls in the first few days or weeks. But when the end of the month comes, if you've got more money in the account from your 900# provider than you have committed to in advertising, you're very very lucky. Some do make money the first month or two because they have something unique, but do enough people see the value of calling the second month they see the ad? Usually not and so the profits if any continue to dwindle, but the cost of advertising doesn't. And somewhere along the line, the 900# line is no longer profitable, the guy who was very excited in the beginning is now very disappointed and he is out pounding the streets looking for a job, because his capital is all gone. And the worst part of this scenario is that it could have been completely avoided and reversed for many of you. What you have to do is find a gimmick you can put out in the Computer Networks that is self- sustaining and then, you place ads in there so that they don't cost you anything. Now, every phone call you get is pure profit and will always be profit and they will continue to grow for you. Our InterActive Yellow Pages is just such an idea of something that makes money on its own and the 900# part of our income is gravy. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to come up with something as time-consuming as this directory is. It's actually one of our main sources of income but employs several people to produce each month. You don't want to get into the publishing or TV business, just to get more favorable ad prices. It's not a bad idea, it works, but may not be in the cards for most of you. So, what else can you do? You can find little places on the Information Superhighway that accept FREE ADS. That's how. I know that was a long build-up, but you have to see the importance of doing this and nothing else at least in the beginning or you are courting disaster. What I just told you is the easy part. After you find a list of places that take Free Advertising on the Information Superhighway, and our book has a whole listing of hundreds of these. You need to take step two.. You have to have a 900# that people will want to call. Makes perfect logical sense doesn't it? If you have a Free way to reach millions of people and YOU ALSO have something they need or want, you have to be successful, don't you? And that's RULE NUMBER TWO. RULE NUMBER TWO. You will only make money with 900#s if your 900 # is relatively unique and has some information that is very hard to find elsewhere. In other words, if you're thinking you'll start a 900# that talks about sports, forget it. There are already lots of other places where a person interested in sports can get this same information, the newspapers and TV to be exact. Why should they pay you Ten Bucks for what they're going to see on their TV sets that night? That's a key issue and you have to realize that most people are not wasteful of their money and they will think like this before they finish your preamble. Oh we need to talk about the Preamble. The phone companies who you must do business with, either AT&T or MCI or whoever, all require because it's also an FCC rule that you put a preamble of 30 seconds or more that warns your customer that they are about to spend x dollars per minute and that the total of the call will average x dollars and that if they wish to avoid these charges they can hang up now. This means that unless you have something really good, you might get a few folks to listen to the preamble, but you don't make a dime if they hang up after hearing this warning which by law you must include. If you don't include it your service provider will. Or they will cut you off. There is no getting around it. It's a shame, but it's there. They don't make you tell people buying a car that the car could run out of control and kill the driver and his family and that this happens to over 40,000 people per year in America, and if he wants to avoid the risk of death by auto injury he can cancel the sale. But they do the same thing in effect in our industry. It might change some day, after all the hucksters have been run out of town or thrown in jail, but until then, it serves a purpose. So, if you want to make money in the 900# business, you have to have information that people need so badly that they will listen to the government trying to crash your sale and they will still go ahead and buy it anyway! It's got to be fabulous, in other words. Now, what kind of 900#s am I talking about? Well, the datelines are one example of a good 900# to have because there are millions of single people in this country looking for a little action and the datelines provide it in a way you can't find anywhere else. So, a large enough portion, will ignore the government warning and go on to listen to your message. You get paid for each minute they hang on the line, so the more girls you offer to the guys or the more guys you can offer to the gals, the more money you make. Do you see that? Try to find a dating service as easy and convenient to use as this in our society. There just aren't any. Most of the ones I know of require you to drive several miles, fill out a ton of questionnaires, they want hundreds of dollars and they don't even guarantee you're going to get laid. Picking up the phone and talking to someone who is looking for someone like you is a great use of the 900# concept and it usually works and pays even with a little advertising. So, you may think I've contradicted myself, but I haven't because even most of these datelines don't make enough to pay for the advertising, but if you're very clever about not spending your money foolishly, it can be done because this is such a hot idea. In other words, if you were to publish a 900# dateline in a magazine like SINGLES NEWSLETTER that reaches 100,000 singles and they only charge say $10 per issue, you're probably going to come out ahead on that, but if you try to advertise in the classifieds of your local newspaper, you're not going to make it. And EVEN IF YOU'RE IN THE SINGLES NEWSLETTER, how many others are already in there taking the market share from you? You see the problem? Wherever the good advertising opportunities are for your 900#, chances are they are already being over-exploited. It's the same thing that happened to the Herring catch in the Atlantic ocean. A few fishermen found that Herring were easy to catch in the Atlantic ocean a few years ago, so they went out in big boats and caught billions of pound of them every year. Then, the guy down the quay from them sees all these fish and so he gets a big boat and goes out and catches tons of Herring and so on and so on until there were suddenly thousands of big boats out there in the ocean trying to catch Herring. Pretty soon, most of the Herring has been caught and it will take years for the few that are left to procreate enough to get back to the numbers where it was profitable to fish for them again. Same thing with advertising. Once it's discovered where the fish, are the fishermen come into your pond and take the lion's share of the market and you're left hold the mortgage on a big boat FOR ALL THESE REASONS YOU WANT TO STICK TO RULE NUMBER THREE. ONLY ADVERTISE IN FRESH PONDS WHERE THERE'S LOTS OF FISH. Now, that's primarily what the Information Superhighway is all about. It was started by the government after World War II as a way to get Defense contractors and research facilities to communicate with one another and share files and news. This expanded to a point where private companies wanted to do the same kinds of things and now, the Government is completely out of it. So, advertising has become the Number One concern of the Information Superhighway. Everyone is trying to get into it. How do I know? Because we do that for a living too. We sell advertising services on the Nets and it's very easy to sell because there's nobody doing it right now and that means there's very little competition for anything. But a 900# is perfect for this kind of advertising for several technical reasons, I'll tell you about in CHAPTER THREE. CHAPTER THREE, the Technical basis of what you need to do. The Internet is now a very boring place where people are setting up to do great things, like us, but not really doing great things yet. Why? Because the InterNet is still too difficult to use. Being a government and scientific tool for many decades, there was never the intent of making it something easy and smooth that the consumer could use. That's all changed today. Nowadays, everyone is talking about it because the potential is so great. Just the fact that you got the ad about this book on your computer, should convince you of this fact. It's exactly like the TELEVISION INDUSTRY IN THE FIFTIES. Very few people could afford a TV set and it was only Black and White pictures and very difficult to understand and there was only one or two Shows on a day. Nowadays most homes have two or three sets, color, stereo sound, another one in the kitchen for Mom, one Big Screen in the Family room. And they spend average of 7 hours a day in front of the machine. The Information Superhighway will someday replace TV as we know it because it's interactive and not just passive entertainment although all the passive stuff will be there too if you want it, so that's why they talk about 500 or even 1,000 separate channels. This is coming. And it's coming very fast. But today, the best way to take advantage of all these changes is to get something like a great 900# idea and build your business acumen slowly with no risk, by putting out feelers in the Internet. If you do it the way, we suggest, you'll do fine. But there are some things you need to know about the technical aspects of what we're going to give you. 1. You need a computer, we already knew that but have to state it here. 2. You have to have a modem. 3. You have to know where on the InterNet and BBS and OnLine Service to go to get free advertising.. 4. You have to make as much of your daily routine as automated as you can so that you don't waste your time. 5. You have to have a great 900# that provides information that people on the InterNet want enough to pay for and can't find for free already. SO, for all these reasons, you will need to experiment with several ideas that we have for you in Part Two, yes, that's the part you have to pay for, until you come up with the right combination of things that will finally work for you. You then, take our list of Electronic Newstands that will carry your vehicle and you methodically go about uploading and downloading files to see how you're doing. So, therefore number 6. 6. You will spend time learning about the computer Networks and this means that you will have to become very familiar with your computer, some more of the software that's out there, etc. 7. If you're not already that good, I advise your postponing this purchase until you or someone in your organization is good enough with a computer to do all these things. Once you have all of these things, in General here's what you do to make it all come together. CHAPTER FIVE - MAKING IT ALL COME TOGETHER. You need a publication or a vehicle of some kind to offer to people so that you're not offering just a 900#. The reason for this is because too many people will see your messages on the Net as pure advertising and they don't like this, and so they will do something to hurt you. This is something we haven't talked about, but there are many vindictive and sick people on the InterNet who don't believe that you should be allowed to make money on the InterNet. We don't need to go into why there are so many of these people out there, but there are still enough of them out there to frustrate all your efforts if you are not clever enough to beat them at their own game. This is how we evolved our publications. We put out something very useful to everyone with a computer and so the Commies can't kill us. You want to have something like this. It all has to do with the fact that someone is paying for your messages to be sent. It's unclear as to who because when you deal with the InterNet you literally go through hundreds of different computer networks to get to the person who wants to read your message. This computer message of yours takes a fraction of a second to transmit and it therefore is costing somebody a fraction of a second on their computers. Most people don't bother to tell you about all this, but I am to help you understand why there are many people who consider themselves to be part of the Network Police and they will send you nasty messages, like, "I think I'll get the FBI after you." Now, this could scare you unless you had knowledge that this is just a threat. There is nothing illegal about sending messages across the nets, but it might scare you enough into giving up on certain things, if we hadn't told you about it. There is nothing legally anyone can do to you for sending advertising over the INTERNET, because there are no laws written about it YET. Congress is going to be introducing some legislation if they can ever quit arguing about who gets the most women in bed with them, but that's another story. They will soon have laws into effect that may make it tighter on advertising, but at present there are NONE. So, you just ignore the Net Police for now, but someday, there probably will be a set of laws or policies and ways to block your messages on the nets and this is why you have to learn how to do things correctly now, so that it doesn't put you out of business when these changes come about. So, you should realize next that the InterNet is broken up into several major parts. There are first the Bulletin Boards. There are about 50,000 of these around the country today. They are run by big companies in support of their products or they are run by small hobbyists who just like to be a center of attention and have thousands of people log onto his computer each day. Most of these hobbyists try to make money by selling subscriptions to their Bulletin Boards, but most of these never make a profit either. These people don't know how to advertise their boards for Free either, or else more of them would be successful too. But there's about 30 Million people who call up BBS'es with their modems to find new files. And this too is growing by millions of people a month. With the BBS'es you are dealing with thousands of little collectors of files. So, you approach these people with Files only. They must also be useful so that they will put them on their boards and as soon as they do, their competitors come in and copy them to their boards and this is how you get propagation of your messages without any cost. If you have a good message, it will travel far and wide without any more effort from you. 2nd, there's the InterNet itself. This is like one Huge BBS put up by the Government, which is based on Unix and therefore very hard to learn, but not impossible. It's getting easier to move around in because of some people who provide Windows Access to the InterNet and because of other people providing cheaper and faster modems, and dial up services. There's about 20 Million people involved with the INTERNET and you need to know how to send files to the right places and how to address the Newsgroups and mailing lists that inhabit this portion of the Information Superhighway. Thirdly, there is the OnLine Services like Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy, Delphi, and new ones on the way like the one from Apple Computer called E-world. Soon to be followed by another one from Microsoft. And there are others planned from Ziff/Davis and AT&T just to name a few. These will eventually account for about 10% of the market or about 5 Million people and will also continue to grow at extraordinary rates. They each have their own character and policies that you need to know about, but are each very good places to advertise. Not free, in this case, because they each charge a monthly fee to belong to their service, of about $10 - $15/mo. But they are usually worth it because you're going to get lots of your business in here. Whenever you can reach a potential audience of 2 Million people as we do on Compuserve alone, for only $9 mo., there is a terrific opportunity to make money and with little risk. If you placed an ad in a newspaper's classified section it would cost you at least $9 and you would only reach a small percentage of readers who look at classifieds. For the same $9, you can place several hundred ads or even thousands and you are potentially reaching all 2 Million readers. There are ways to do this, that we teach you, again in Part II. (Well if we gave it all away for free, it wouldn't be worth telling you about and you never would have found about the truth in here, right?) Now, some of all three groups overlap each other. In other words, of the 2 Million people using Compuserve, probably half at least also use the Internet, and/or the BBS system and can't be counted twice, but it's easy to say that there are at least 50 Million people around the world connected to either one or the other kind of phone service. How do I know, because they sell 50 Million computers per year and at least ten percent of them are including modems, so 5 Million computers over ten years is 50 Million and it's growing at such a rate today that the next 50 Million people will be online within a few months! It's all true. SO, no matter who's numbers you want to believe, there are enough people involved in the Info Superhighway that you should be able to make money. It's certainly bigger than the New York Times and the LA Times circulation of about 10 Million and it's certainly growing at ten times the rate of growth of any print publication, so there's your starting point. By the time you really get going, there will be more potential than you or I or anyone can handle. CHAPTER SIX. BASIC 900# CONCEPTS Now, let's talk some more about the kinds of 900#s that you should be looking for. No, I don't think I will because that's the kind of information that I'm trying to get you to buy. So, we will discuss with you in Part II how to think of a 900# concept that most people, when they see it will want to jump all over. We've already given you two examples. One is our National People's Poll and the second is a Dateline. But you need a Dateline that has thousands of members already, and these do exist and they are national so you just plug into one of these. The basic rule is that YOUR 900# HAS TO HAVE INFORMATION OR ENTERTAINMENT THAT THE USER CANNOT GET ANYWHERE ELSE. Now, whether you know it or not, this is a pretty tall order and almost impossible when you think of all the tens of thousands perhaps millions of publishers of information in this world. Almost anything is covered by some publication. Even if you believe in UFO's and want to know more about them, there are probably 100's of UFO newsletters, books, magazines, etc. in existence today. So, what do you do to find an original information idea? You don't. There are no completely original ideas. We got the idea for our National People's Poll because Prodigy has a poll and even some TV stations have polls, so we knew that there was a demand for them and that people liked to take them. But here's the key. If you wanted to be in a poll, where would you go? You can't go to the local neighborhood polling place and ask them to take your ideas. They simply don't exist. There aren't very many books or magazines about them either. But there are from time to time polls about Gun Control or the Clinton Health Plan or Sex polls that you see published in magazines or on TV, but to look for one most people wouldn't do it. But if one is thrust in your face and you have nothing better to do, like a crossword puzzle, you might doodle around with it. So, that's how we pick `em. If there aren't lots and lots of ways to get the same information, don't do it. You'll lose your time and money you could have spent developing a real winner. If there are examples of the information so it's not completely new and you can see that people are interested in them, like the NBC polls we saw, gathered about 20,000 callers in one night, then, you know that people will call. If you have a talent or skill start there. What do you know that most other people don't. Even if you're a plumber by trade, you know something about plumbing and most people don't. Put that information into the National Plumber's Hotline. Maybe you have a supplier who will give you a great deal of Duck Tape you can sell anyone who calls? For as many of you who read this book, there are good ideas that have been tapped and that can work. You have to put your head to work on that one and we give you more guidance on this in PART II. CHAPTER SIX. - WHERE DO I GET MY 900#? Now, we're getting down to the nitty gritty. There are thousands of services that provide you with a 900#. But there are only a few you want to deal with. Here are the basic things to know. You have to deal with AT&T as the underlying service. MCI and all others do not give the service you need. AT & T, is more difficult to deal with in getting setup and more expensive, but they report all the income and that's the most important part. And they pay an honest check. The others may or may not depending on who you deal with in the middle. Don't call AT&T or MCI, they all go through brokers. Now, here's where we save you MUCH MORE THAN THE COST OF THIS REPORT ALONE. If we haven't save you $99 bucks already, if we don't save you $99 bucks in the rest of our secrets of Advertising for Free, this one area will indeed do that for you. There are only a handful of brokers who you want to deal with who are honest and really do a good job in setting you up and will pay you what you're due. We give you the list of six who we think are the best and then you pick the one more suited to your needs. But of these six, they are ones that we know are the least expensive and which give you a great service. This will save you hundreds of hours of research and thousands of dollars if you picked the wrong ones. Now, you must know too that there are two kinds of 900#s today. There are the automated kind that you buy for a couple hundred bucks and they are datelines or sports lines or psychic or jokes, or whatever. The point is you can tell what these will do for you because they are NOT INTERACTIVE. That means they are not able to take information from the user. They won't take their voice input and/or they won't take their input by telephone keypad. They usually last for five minutes and have a set fee of about $10 0r $20. You don't want to participate in these because they are of very limited value to the user and there will be millions of them out there if there aren't already. So, the competition for this kind of service is fierce. You also have a problem in collecting what little money you make from the providers of these numbers because most of them are dishonest or incompetent. Another problem is that this kind of number usually has an EXTENSION after it. In other words you might have to call 900-999-9999 and EXT 101. These are the numbers to avoid. We give you this amount of information for free and it alone may have already saved you in thousands of dollars in time and money. They don't work and if they do, you get cheated because the provider has this one 900# and he's farmed it out to 101 other people. He has to have very expensive equipment to tell where and when to pay the owner of EXT 101 and he might even sell this EXT to many people. Then, he arbitrarily divides up the income that you produce in that EXTension. RULE NUMBER FOUR. - NEVER, NEVER BUY A 900# WITH AN EXTENSION. YOU'RE JUST KIDDING YOURSELF. So, let's summarize. You want a 900# that is completely your own. You want to deal with a provider who in turn deals with AT&T, not MCI or anyone else. They are not good enough for our purposes. You want an IDEA for INFORMATION that is not provided as easily as the local phone book or TV news. FINALLY, you want your 900# to be INTERACTIVE. RULE NUMBER FIVE - YOU WANT AN INTERACTIVE NUMBER. This means a number in which the user can key in some information for you either with the keypad, his voice, or both. Now, why do you want him to do that? For several reasons. If a provider can give you an InterActive Account separates him from all the others who try to sell you pre-recorded, pre- packaged or automated 900#s. Don't fall for this junk. It's like trying to make money with baseball cards. They already have a publisher of baseball cards and all the kids know where to buy them and the manufacturers name and everything else they need to buy baseball cards. They don't need yours. That need is filled. That niche is taken. So for you to compete would take millions of dollars in advertising just to get your first sale. And after that it would still be a struggle. Now, if you had baseball cards with pre- recorded messages from each player on the card, you would have something very different, and you wouldn't have to do much but get your cards into enough hands and let word of mouth take over. Soon, all the kids on the block would have to have the new cards where the players give them batting tips or fielding tips or just talk about why they spit so much. Something different is the answer, but not too different. If you had spacemen who talked on the cards, it might not work, because space people are not baseball heroes. Know what I mean? You can be very different with an INTERACTIVE 900#. You can ask the user to listen to a recipe for Fat Free Cheesecake, as an example, then, you ask them to key in on their keypad how old they are. Or their cholesterol count or their weight. Then, you lead them to another message about Fat Free doughnuts as well. By getting them interactively participating with your number, you'll make more money and you'll last a lot longer, because you'll learn enough about your users to give them what they want better and better. So, the best interactive number is like our poll because we can ask the caller information about his or her family and his or her likes and dislikes on many subjects, then, after a while we have a magnificent mailing list of thousands of people who all like Cheese Cake. So, we can send them a mailer someday that is a special offer on Cheese Cake, whatever we find out is marketable information. Or we could start a new 900# that just concentrates on Fat Free Recipes. You see how it goes? An InterActive Number is a long term relationship with your customers and this is the time-tested and proven way to market any product. Find out what your customers want and give it to them. This formula can make you wealthy. And it applies to all forms of business, not just 900#s, that's how you know it works. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? If you've read all of the above and you still want to get a 900# going for you and your family, you need to buy Part II of this book. To do so now, just call 1-800-SOFTLOCK. Then be prepared to give them the SOFTLOCK ID you will find at your DOS prompt when you type SOFTLOCK. And the product Number. Then, you will receive a password. Type in this PASSWORD and Part II of this book will de-code for you and you may read the rest. IN PART TWO - WE GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED 1. You will receive the phone number of the best 900# service providers who can get you started with an INTERACTIVE 900# FOR the same as you'd pay for a pre-recorded Non-Interactive 900#. 2. You will receive the list of all our electronic Newsstands where you must upload a file to advertise your 900#. Complete instructions on how to do this. 3. We will give you examples of files that we use and how we use them. All you have to do is change the subject to fit your 900# and upload them the same way we do. 4. We will give you ideas about what we think would make good 900#s and how to brainstorm for better ones. 5. We will show you how to use the Internet to find out what it is that people will pay for. 6. We will give you everything you need to learn how to use the Information Superhighway so that you never have to pay for an ad for your 900#. What we've told you so far, probably has saved you more than the cost of this book already. We do it as a public service and we have written this First Part, so that if you're not a 900# type provider, you won't waste your time and energy on this. If you are serious, however, we urge you to go on and call the SOFTLOCK NUMBER TO UNLOCK THE REST OF THIS REPORT. If you do and if you are serious and have the time and patience to put into this, it could mean financial independence for you and your family. You can make thousands and thousands of dollars every month, whether you do anything or not, but simply doing what we told you to do in Part One and with the tools we provide for you in Part Two. THE UPLOADING of files to the Information Superhighway, is not guaranteed to make you successful, either. They are a way that we have used to be successful, but this doesn't necessarily mean that you will be successful. It takes a lot of work and creativity to put it all together. You have to really enjoy working with computers and finding out what's new every day. Because the new things that come out will help you do your job more efficiently. But just know one thing. If you do everything we tell you to do and if you have a great idea for a 900#, it will work and you will make a small fortune and with less effort than any other kind of business. When it works it's just like having a money tree. The money just falls in out of the sky. It's so thrilling to get your monthly statement from your service provider and instead of being a bill, it's a check for hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars, every month! END OF PART ONE What you have found is Part One of the complete manual on how to make money with 900#s and the Internet. You can get Part Two by calling 800-664-9042 and have your credit card number ready to buy the final version at $49.95 Or you can send a check payable to Lighthouse Productions for $49.95 to Lighthouse Productions P.O. Box 7885 Santa Cruz, CA 95060 Thanks and Good Luck. The Publishers.