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Interview
with Corey Rudl:
The Secrets of an Internet Millionaire
Discover
the secrets of an Internet millionaire in this exclusive interview
with online marketing guru Corey Rudl. Before he died in a racing accident in June 2005 at the age of 34, Corey was the author of the
#1 best-selling course, "The
Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet"
and is still one of the most recognized names in Internet marketing
today.
In the following interview, Corey reveals how he grew his
business from a one-man show in his parent's basement to four online
businesses that generate over $6.6 MILLION in online sales per year
and attract over 1.8 million visitors per month. Corey reveals exactly
how he did it, and details precisely what entrepreneurs need to
be doing TODAY to be successful online.
Hi Corey,
and thanks so much for agreeing to do this interview. Maybe the
best way for us to begin is for you to tell us a bit about yourself
and your company, The Internet Marketing Center.
Sure. Well, first off, I am the President and CEO of the
Internet Marketing Center, which you can find online at www.marketingtips.com.
We specialize in showing people how they can drive tons of targeted
traffic to their web sites and how to turn that traffic into sales
and profits. We provide all the information you need to learn how
to market your business online in the form of home-study courses,
books, video and audio tapes, and more.
What really sets us apart from all the other marketing
courses, though, is that we give you the concepts AND the software
tools you need to promote and automate your business on the Internet.
And we do all of this based on our own real-world tests and experience,
not just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it BEFORE we
teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee your results.
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Actually, that brings up a good question: Why,
exactly, is your "Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business
on the Internet" course so successful? Aren’t you leading
this market space?
Yes, we are
by far the leaders in educating our Small Office/Home Office audience
in how to make money on the Internet.
The reason the course is so successful is
because we practice what we preach. We generate about $6.6 million
in business every year, all online. And that's not to mention the
tens of millions of dollars we have helped our clients generate.
We have over 60,000 affiliates and we get over 1.8 million unique
visitors to our sites every month, all on a shoestring budget and
all from scratch. So we are actually using all the methods that
we teach.
Would you hire a poor stock broker? Of course not. If
he cannot make himself rich, how's he going to help you? Would you
hire a personal trainer that is not in good shape? No way! If they
can’t do it themselves, how can you be sure that what they
are teaching you is not garbage?
People know
our reputation and they know that the stuff we teach in the course
actually works. We walk people through every single step they need
to follow to be successful marketing their business on the Internet
-- even if they don't have an online business yet.
We also have a few big Fortune 500 corporate clients. They're
attracted to us because most of them are so caught up in red tape
that they don’t get to see the guerilla marketing tactics
used to generate immediate revenues like small businesses do. We're
just now starting to see the big corporations picking up some of
the things we were recommending 2 years ago!
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So the key to your success is practicing what you
preach?
Exactly. Another big reason we're so successful
is that we take all the risk. Our guarantee is simple -- if you
don’t make money from what you've learned in the course, then
you pay nothing. You can return it anytime for a full refund for
any reason. Even if you decide you don't like the paper it's printed
on, we'll give you all of your money back. And you know what? We
get nearly zilch returns -- and that speaks for itself.
Don’t
take my word for it, check out the testimonials at our site. We publish only one
percent of the testimonials we receive, but you can see that it's
not people saying “Oh, it was great,” but people saying
they “Made an extra $70,000 already this year," or “Traffic
increased by 400% in 30 days.” That's what counts -- results.
That is scoreboard at the end of the day.
And we really do cover everything in the course
you could ever imagine. We teach you everything from A to Z; everything
from starting up from scratch with nothing to how to drive traffic
to your site, right down to setting up your site to convert visitors
to more sales.
You'll learn
how to maximize your exposure on the search engines, how to automate
your entire business, how to build pop-up boxes, and hundreds of
other things. We even give you templates and ideas to copy from
us to ensure that nothing will go wrong!
That reminds me of a funny story... A couple of years back,
I thought of trying to get my course on the reading list for an
Internet Marketing program being offered by a top university. I
had some meetings with a few of their senior marketing professors,
hoping to get "Insider
Secrets" into the hands of all their Internet Marketing
students.
They finally came back to me and said, basically,
"Thanks, but no thanks." Now, I was shocked! Why wouldn't
they want their students to have the #1 Internet marketing course
as part of their education? I wouldn't let the professor leave my
office until she told me.
It turns out they were actually
scared that if their students read my course and found out that
it cost less than two hundred dollars, they would feel ripped off
by the school, which was basically charging them thousands of dollars
for the same information!
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That's quite a story! It just goes
to show that "traditional" education isn't always the
best way to get the BEST information.
Corey, could you tell us a little bit about your own history and background?
How did you get started marketing online?
Well, I won't
go too far back as I don’t want to bore you, but my first
online venture was way back in 1994. I had written a book called
"Car Secrets Revealed" and had been trying to market it
offline. After wasting a lot of money on magazine and print ads,
I took a friend's advice and decided to try selling it over the
Internet. Those magazine ads had eaten up most of my cash, but I
did manage to scrape together enough to get my first web site up
and running.
I did everything
myself -- built the site in HTML 1.0, learned how to use FTP programs,
figured out how to build a banner, and things like that. Those were
the days when Netscape 1.0 had just come out and there was no such
thing as secure real-time online ordering. It was all so new and
exciting!
I was glued
to my computer 24 hours a day testing all kinds of wild and crazy
marketing ideas to see which ones worked. And I can tell you that
95 out of 100 ideas failed, but the ones that did work, worked like
crazy! Within 18 months I had the #1 best-selling car book online...
and it's been #1 ever since!
When people
started seeing that my counter had logged over 1,000,000 visitors
at CarSecrets.com,
they started asking how I was marketing it. They wanted to know
how such a simple and basic site was generating so much traffic,
and if I could teach them how to do it. Before too long I realized
that I wasn't able to teach people everything I knew during a one-week
consulting contract.
So I decided
to "brain dump" everything I knew into a course, which
I called "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on
the Internet." It taught just about everything I knew with
real-life examples of exactly what I had tested, what worked, and
what didn't. That was what set my course apart from every other
Internet marketing course out there -- that I had actually tested
and proven my techniques. Other courses were just teaching fluff
and theory.
By promoting
the course with the exact same techniques I was teaching, it became
the #1 best-selling Internet marketing course online within 3 months.
Since then, it has been through three new versions -- it needs to
be updated regularly as the Internet changes so fast! But through
all this time, it continues to be the #1 best-selling Internet marketing
course online.
Because we're
so far out in front of the curve as to what's working and what isn't,
we have also been able to develop some of the world’s leading
Internet promotional and automation software .Basically, we developed
software that we needed for our own business. We made sure it was
the best and then made it available to our clients. This has helped
us become one of world’s leading Internet Marketing companies
helping small to medium businesses drive traffic and make more sales.
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So,
what specific suggestions do you have for someone interested in
getting started marketing on the Web?
Wow! That's
a huge question and, to be blunt, there's no way I could answer
it in just a few minutes. In fact, that's why I wrote a 1,000-page
course in the first place... There are literally hundreds of tips
and suggestions for building a successful presence online. There
is just so much to know if you want to do it right the first time.
However, there is one tip that is more important than any other...
Get educated.
Don’t think you can put up a web site and have traffic appear
from out of nowhere. It does not work that way. Spend the time to
educate yourself about how everything works. Research your market
or idea and learn how to identify a niche market on the Internet.
Create or market products that solve other people’s problems.
Another thing
to look at is your competition. How big are they? What are they
doing right and wrong?
Learn from people
who practice what they preach -- find people that you KNOW are successful
on the Internet and model yourself after them. Don’t try to
re-invent the wheel and don't listen to people who cannot prove
that they have done what you are trying to do.
There are so
many "wannabes" out there who write books on web site
promotion but don't even have a successful Internet business themselves.
Find someone who you know is successful and use them as a mentor
-- that's what I did. I had mentors, too.
Why
do you feel that so many people who attempt to create an income
on the Internet fail to do so?
Whoa, another
loaded question! There are so many reasons, but here are the main
ones. Bear with me, this will be a long answer:
Deciding on
a product before finding a market is a big one. This is probably
the most common mistake. If you are asking “What is a good
product to sell online?” you are making this mistake right
now! You need to decide on a market first.
The Internet
makes it very easy to find people interested in a specific category
like gardening, hunting, aeronautics, accountants, or any other
interest group. Just about any group is easy to locate and target
online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, e-zines
(electronic magazines), etc.
You have to
make sure you have a captive audience, then find out what they are
having a common problem with. If you can come up with a product
or service to solve that problem, you have a guaranteed successful
business. It's really that easy -- that's how all my businesses
were built.
You don’t
even really have to “sell” it, because you already know
they want it before you launch your web site. And since you already
know exactly where your customers are, it's easy to target them.
I mean, it’s a no-brainer once you think about it.
Now, let’s
turn that situation around for a second. Say scientists had found
a cure for the common cold. You'd become a millionaire selling it
online, right? Well, not necessarily! How do you find people that
are sick online? You would have to market to the general Internet
community to try and find the 1 out of 10,000 people that are sick
that day. It would cost a ton of money to market to 10,000 people
just to find one qualified buyer!
And to make
matters worse, if you are selling this over the Internet, by the
time you ship them the pill through the mail, they'd probably be
over their cold! So by choosing the product instead of the market,
you can actually fail no matter how great your product is.
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Your
course has a lot of information about generating traffic. Is that
a big hurdle for online businesses?
Many people
think they can build a web site, submit it to the search engines,
and the buyers will come. The logic is that there are hundreds of
millions of people online surfing around and that some of them are
bound to stumble onto your product. Wrong! Search engine ranking
is more competitive than ever.
Yes, there are
secret ways to get high rankings in the search engines and we spend
close to 40 pages in our course showing you how to do it. It is
probably one of the most complex marketing techniques out there.
There are lots of different options for grabbing high rankings.
You can do it all yourself, or you can buy really good positioning
software, or even hire specialized companies to do it for you.
The course even
recommends which positioning software you should be using, as there
is a lot of junk out there! The same with Search Engine Optimization
companies -- most have no idea what they're doing. So my course
shows you how to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
The real key
is to know what your potential buyers do online. Are they searching
online for a specific term? Are they visiting specific web sites
all the time? Are they subscribed to topic-specific e-mail lists
or e-zines? In other words, you need to know where your target market
is “hanging out” online. If you can find where your
potential buyers are, this is where you should spend your marketing
and advertising money.
That is
why I said before, spend your time getting educated, learning everything,
and researching your market and product or service. Spend your time
and money driving them to your site and then show them how your
product solves a problem they have. Marketing is everything online!
You could have the best product in the world selling for half of
your competitor's price, but if you cannot get the word out, you
don't stand a chance.
What are some of the big psychological
obstacles for online entrepreneurs?
Number one in
that department is definitely procrastination. I cannot tell you
how many people I've met who have really great ideas and plans,
but so few of them actually do what they say they are going to do.
So turn off the TV, stop using your new baby as an excuse, stop
going for drinks after work with friends, and take the time to get
serious about your business! You will have plenty of time for all
the rest when the big income starts rolling in.
Let's be honest here... We're all
good at justifying excuses to ourselves. I've even done it a few
times myself! But there really is no excuse for not following your
dream. You're only hurting yourself.
The second biggest psychological obstacle is fear of failure. Never
fear failure. Heck, we fail every day. The key is to fail small.
In fact, your ticket to success is failing regularly! Every time
you fail, you're eliminating bad ideas and getting closer to the
things that work.
If you aren't failing, you are not learning. We test new ideas, new
prices, new marketing strategies, new looks, new products every
month! Most of them fail, and we expect that. And we don't call
it failure, we call it testing.
We are just looking for the 5 winners out of every 100 small failures
we have, because what we learn from the winners we apply to everything
we have. Here's a perfect example: We don’t even send out
an e-mail to our opt-in list without testing at least 4 versions
of the e-mail to see which one performs the best -- that is how
much you have to test. Some pull in 200% better results than others
with small changes, so it's definitely worth it.
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Speaking of results, what kind of results should people expect
when they are just starting out?
Don't get discouraged if you don't see immediate results. This is
another huge psychological barrier faced by many new entrepreneurs.
Some people expect their business to be successful immediately and
their dreams to come true overnight. It usually doesn't happen that
way.
An Internet business is like any other business -- it takes work.
The only difference on the Internet is that you can automate a lot
of repetitive chores... and you can test and roll things out WAY
faster than an offline business could.
Things generally start slow -- that is to be expected. But when it
snowballs, it snowballs VERY fast! And you really have to be prepared,
because the Internet moves at 7 times the speed of offline business.
If you do things right, you can easily grow 700% faster than any
offline business just due to the speed of business on the Internet.
Think of it this way: if you had just 30 people a day sign up for
a newsletter, that adds up to over 10,000 subscribers in a year.
This means that your company now has a database of 10,000 highly
targeted leads to market your products to. If you were to purchase
a list of 10,000 targeted leads (who have never even heard of you
before and may not be receptive to your product), it could easily
cost you up to $5 per lead.
So just by attracting 30 new people a day, you've created an asset
that is worth around $50,000. Sometimes, even if it seems like things
are moving slowly, you're actually building something great! I hope
that makes sense.
If you could tell someone just one thing about how to be a
success in marketing on the Web, what would it be?
That’s easy! Learn how to drive targeted traffic to your site
inexpensively and the rest will all come. Once you've got the traffic,
you can change the design of your site, you can test different prices,
and you can even change products if your product isn't selling well.
Without traffic, nothing you do will make your online business a
success.
Now, don't get me wrong! You still have to sell a real product to
real people for real money. You can't just build a site, promote
it, and try to think of a way to make money after the traffic comes.
That was what killed all of the so-called "dot-bombs"
a couple of years ago.
So simply attracting lots of general traffic isn't necessarily
a good thing?
General traffic is fine, but traffic targeted to your specific niche
market is much, MUCH better. In my experience, finding a niche and
selling to it is the single easiest route to profitability online.
If you are trying to sell books or CDs online, forget it -- Amazon.com
will crush you. Those markets are gone.
However, if you target your market to a specific interest -- say
gardening, hunting, cars, or whatever -- it's easy to find people
online with an interest in those things. All you have to do is find
what that market wants and give it to them. I have a lot of clients
that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who just started
their businesses a short time ago and almost all of them make their
money by having specific products that go over well in a very targeted
niche market.
Check out a newsletter I have called www.SecretsToTheirSuccess.com
-- your readers have got to check this site out. It is cool because
it shows how people that were in low-paying or dead-end jobs are
now making it huge online now, working their own hours and making
profits they couldn't even dream of before. We interview 2 new people
every month that are making between $30,000 and $2 million in profit
online each year.
Check out the site and you'll see what I mean. You can learn so much
by reading about how they started their businesses from scratch
not too long ago and made them successful by targeting a specific
niche market. For example, one interviewee makes over $1,500 a
day selling a plan to bald guys on how to regrow their hair.
And another guy sells tools to make wire jewelry and makes $40,000
a month!
These products would be a flop if you sold them at a local storefront
because the market in a local area is way too small to support them.
But on the Internet, you have access to a global market that can
support extremely obscure products and ideas… and be very
profitable!
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Corey, I wanted to ask you about search engines. How important
are they to the marketing beginner?
When you are starting out on the Internet, search engines are a very
cost-effective way to drive traffic to your site. But as your business
grows, a good advertising campaign, joint venture, or affiliate
program will outperform your search engine rankings every time --
guaranteed.
To start with, you have to make sure
that people are actually looking for your product or service online.
I hate to see people starting out on the Web who automatically put
all of their time and resources into search engine submission when,
in reality, their target market isn’t even looking for what
they have to offer in the search engines.
If you want to find out if the search engines will be worth
the effort, there are a few great services online that I show you
in my course that will actually tell you approximately how many
visitors you will get if you have a top ranking under your keywords
in the major search engines.
I tell people to type five of their top keywords into one
of these keyword popularity services and if your keywords are not
getting more than at least 1,000 searches every single month, it
is probably not worth your time.
Also, you should never make the mistake of relying on just
the search engines to drive traffic to your site. Although they
can be an extremely valuable source of traffic, they are constantly
changing their rules. If you get into a situation where you rely
solely on a couple of good rankings in the search engines for all
of your traffic, and then one day the search engines drops your
ranking, you could be out of business literally overnight. Believe
me, I've seen it happen more than a few times.
Make sure you have multiple sources
of traffic to your web site so that if you lose one, you are not
out of business!
Pay-per-click search engines seem
to be a great place to test market products on the 'Net.
What should people know about using a pay-per-click strategy for
their site or product?
The pay-per-click search engines can be a
great way to get traffic to your web site but, once again, only
if your target market is actually looking for you in the search
engines. They're great for testing your offer, testing your site,
testing your price, even testing your product to see if it will
work.
Success through the pay-per-click search engines
is all about basic math. If the traffic they drive to your web site
makes you more money than it costs to buy those clicks, then they
are a great investment. Unfortunately, many beginners pay way too
much for keywords, never actually calculate how much they can afford
to spend, and end up losing lots of money.
I should also mention that you can't expect to enter a
couple of your top keywords into the pay-per-click search engines
and start making money -- that is very rare. To be successful, you
need a list of at least 100 - 500 keywords and phrases. You can
really make pay-per-click search engines pay off by bidding on lots
of less popular keywords that are actually more targeted than general
search terms.
For example, do a search for "mortgage"
on the most popular pay-per-click search engine and you'll see that
to get that top listing, you'd need to pay $7 per click. That's
WAY too much. Instead, bid on lots of less popular terms like "discount
mortgage" at $0.51 per click or "Internet mortgage"
at $1.15 per click.
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What is the most important thing someone needs
to do when starting out with a marketing project?
Test, test, and then test again. Never stop testing everything.
You want to test your advertising, styles, colors, etc. Test your
offer, test your price, test different types of advertising. The
key is to test small. If it works, apply it to everything you know.
Start small and test. It is pointless to spend all your
cash on a huge ad campaign when you have not proven that your web
site can sell a product. And you must be able to track what is going
on with your web site. I'm shocked by how many people don’t
know their "visitors-to-sales ratio" -- how many visitors
you get daily compared to how many sales. If you don’t know
this, how can you try different things to see what improves your
sales?
Can you give an example of this?
Sure. Let's say that your site gets an average of 500 visitors
a day and you sell an average of 5 products a day. Your "visitors-to-sales
ratio" would be 100 to 1. (In other words, for every 100 visitors,
you can expect to make 1 sale.)
Now that you know this, you can start testing different
things. Let's say that you decide to test a new headline and find
that you now sell one product for every 50 visitors to your site.
You've just doubled the profit potential for your site! And you
never would have known unless you had taken the time to track the
activity at your site. I teach this in much more depth in my "Insider
Secrets" course.
Listen to this: Back in the early days of marketing my
"Car Secrets Revealed" book online, I decided to try out
a couple of new slogans. I had a hunch that the one we had been
using wasn't targeting the right people. Anyway, after a couple
of days of testing, I discovered something that literally changed
my life.
I had been marketing the book to car owners, assuming that
most people who owned a car would be interested in the book. Well,
one of the slogans was targeted towards people who were thinking
of purchasing a new car, not to people who already owned one. I
just about hit the floor when I saw the results from the test on
that slogan! Our sales had literally increased 400% overnight!
If I hadn't always been testing things, even back in the
early days, I would never have realized this. That's the power of
testing. It has allowed me to build an incredibly successful business.
Based on your experience, testing probably thousands
of different strategies, what are the two most powerful ways to
market your business on the Internet?
The answer is very simple... affiliate programs and opt-in
e-mail marketing.
First off, affiliate programs are the single most cost-effective,
least risky way to do business on the 'Net. Affiliate programs are
like having an army of joint venture partners out there working
for you twenty-four hours a day.
With an affiliate program, it's easy to recruit hundreds,
thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people to promote your
product, and you do not pay them a penny unless they make you money!
I started one of the very first affiliate programs on the Internet,
even before Amazon.com, and I currently have over 60,000 affiliates,
so I'm speaking from experience here.
For those who don’t know what an affiliate program
is, this is how it works: Basically, you get other sites that share
your target audience to link to you. Those links are tracked by
special software so that if anyone clicks through the link and buys
your product, you give a commission to the referring site.
The great thing about affiliate programs is that they are
pure profit machines. Because you only pay your affiliates when
they send you a visitor who actually buys something, it's literally
impossible to lose money! Even if they drive 10,000 visitors to
your site, you don't pay them a dime unless someone buys.
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That sounds great. But managing a large affiliate
program is a huge job, isn't it?
The best part is that if you are using the right tools
you can completely automate the entire process. You can be running
a multi-million dollar company with only a few staff in the office.
We have over 60,000 affiliates promoting our products on the Internet
and it literally only takes us a couple of hours every month to
manage our program using our AssocTRAC
software. At the end of the month we hit a couple of keys, it
prints out the commission checks, and we mail them to the affiliates.
There are no overhead costs, no employees, and no hassles.
You only pay your affiliates when they bring you business, and the
software does all the work for you. And the whole thing only costs
about $45 a month to run! This would be absolutely impossible offline,
but the speed and scope of the Internet allows us to do it at almost
no cost.
When we built the second generation of AssocTRAC
software, we compiled over 5 years of first-hand experience
so that our customers could apply this powerful strategy to their
business without having to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars
and months of time it took us to develop it.
I could talk about affiliate programs all day as it is
a huge topic but since we only have a limited amount of time, I'm
going to recommend that if you are interested in learning more about
how affiliate programs work and how you can start one of your own,
visit our AssocTRAC
web site. There you will find over 50 pages of killer strategies
and ideas that will help you get your own affiliate program started
right away.
Could you tell us a little about the second strategy
you mentioned: opt-in e-mail marketing?
The second marketing strategy that every e-business definitely
needs to employ if they want to be successful is opt-in e-mail marketing.
And to get started building an opt-in e-mail list you NEED to be
collecting e-mail addresses at your site. I can't stress this one
enough. If you aren't doing this, you need to start right now!
Here's how it works: You need to offer every single visitor
to your site a reason to leave you their e-mail address. It can
be for a free newsletter, a free report, a demo version of your
software, a contest... Any reason you can think of to get people
to leave you their e-mail address.
If someone visits your web site and actually takes the
time to subscribe to your newsletter by giving you their name and
e-mail address, this obviously means that they are interested in
what you have to offer. Congratulations! You have just captured
an incredibly hot sales lead!
By simply following up with these people and e-mailing
them quality information and facts, you will instantly build your
credibility by developing the rapport that is needed to close sales.
The bottom line is this: Most people are simply not comfortable
shelling out money the first time they visit your web site. Unfortunately,
the Internet is a big place, so the chances of them finding you
again once they leave your site are pretty slim. By capturing their
name and e-mail address, you can guarantee that they will not forget
about you.
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What are some things that people should keep in
mind when sending e-mail promotions?
First and foremost: The names and e-mail addresses you
collect on your web site should be treated like gold and never abused.
If you constantly e-mail these people with blatant advertisements
and plugs for your products and never actually send them any valuable
information, you will ruin any chance you have to sell to them in
the future.
Also, opt-in e-mail is impossible to manage unless you
have the right tools and information. In my "Insider
Secrets" course I have almost 100 pages of cutting-edge
information on this topic alone that will show you how to build
an extremely responsive opt-in list very quickly and then show you
how to follow up and sell to these targeted customers again and
again and again.
We use a powerful e-mail automation tool called Mailloop
that automates all of our e-mail promotions. I personally started
using this software over 5 years ago and it quickly became such
an indispensable part of my business that I actually bought the
rights to it from the developer so that my customers could benefit
from all of its powerful features.
This software is so cool… It is like having your
own personal e-mail secretary -- but it does not take any breaks,
does not talk back, does not ask for vacation, and did I mention
that it works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
It handles almost all of your e-mail: It subscribes and
unsubscribes people automatically from your opt-in lists, it merges
your orders into your customer database, it automatically sends
out your promotions, it automatically responds to your customers'
commonly asked questions, and much more.
It just leaves you with the e-mail that you need to handle
personally -- it takes care of the rest. We use it every day to
automate our business and stay in contact with our clients; it is
solely responsible for generating over $100,000 a month in new business
for us. You can check it out at www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.
Rapid growth and expansion can be a “good”
problem for businesses. How can you handle your company's growth?
You automate. That is the beauty of the Internet. It is
the first environment where you can truly automate your entire business.
You can even run it from anywhere in the world -- as long as you
have a laptop and a phone line, you are in business.
I'll never forget the day I was on a beach in Hawaii, drinking
a Corona, when I decided to log on to the 'Net for a few minutes
and check my sales. I discovered that I had made over $37,000 that
day! This could only happen in today's online age!
When you are first starting out, keep it simple so that
you can get up and running fast, but also realize that you'll need
to automate soon after you start. We use software to automate most
of the daily tasks like processing orders, managing e-mail, and
such. Not only is the cost savings huge (one piece of software can
literally replace at least 1-2 employees!), but the real benefit
is that you don’t get caught up working IN your business instead
of ON your business.
If you don’t automate soon, you will find that the
mundane work will become overwhelming and you will be filling orders
and reading e-mail all day long instead of growing your business.
Be careful, because this is a real trap for so many people.
We teach a ton of ways to easily automate your business
without a lot of work. We've tried a lot of things, and we show
you what works and what doesn't -- and where to spend your time
and money for the biggest growth and the biggest profits.
Unfortunately, we don’t really have time to go into
this today during this short interview. But remember that you need
to automate so that your business can run automatically whether
you are there or not. It sounds complicated -- and it was 3 years
ago -- but now there are inexpensive software programs and simple
techniques that allow anyone to do it easily. I go through a lot
of this in the course as it is a fundamental key to success. You
need to automate before you can really grow.
Just as an example, my CarSecrets.com
site practically runs itself. It automatically takes and fulfils
orders, deposits the money in my bank account, takes care of most
of the e-mail by autoresponding to customers, automatically promotes
its affiliate program, and so on.
It generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly
revenue, yet I have an employee who spends less than 10 minutes
a day running it. I have not looked at the site myself in over 2
years and it still generates a ton of money. That is the kind of
business you want.
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How do you stay up-to-date on an industry that
is constantly changing?
We have a team of people who are cranked up on coffee at
their desks, testing new ideas every day; we have to be ahead of
the curve. We have to update our information and products constantly
because the Internet changes so quickly.
The key to really exploiting marketing techniques is that
you have to be using them before they become popular, because once
people know about them, your audience becomes saturated, and they
are not as effective anymore.
Pop-ups are a perfect example. We were using pop-ups way
back before anyone else -- they were EXTREMELY profitable back then.
As soon as people found out how great they worked, everyone started
using them. Of course, as soon as every site had them, their effectiveness
fell off quickly. I should say that pop-ups are still a great tool,
but they are 50% less effective than they used to be.
Our job is to find the hot marketing techniques before
everyone else picks up on them -- and let our customers know so
they can use them and profit.
So, where do you see the Internet taking us in
the future? How much additional business will be conducted on the
'Net and how important will the Internet be to the business ventures
that our kids will be involved with?
Here's a fact: The Internet is becoming part of our lives more and
more each day. Just about everyone uses e-mail now. If you want
to know the weather, you check the 'Net. You check the 'Net for
movie listings in your city, you use it to pay bills, you can use
it to educate yourself on just about any subject.
Today there are university classes being held online for
people around the world that cannot get to a classroom. There are
pay-per-view movies that can be delivered to your computer in DVD
quality anytime you want through a broadband connection. I mean,
it might not be too long before we all say goodbye to the video
store!
Nowadays, your sales force can access order
and inventory data from their wireless handheld computers while
at a customer’s location. Your fridge can automatically order
your milk from the local grocery store for delivery when you are
low. (I've actually seen this -- it weighs the area where the milk
goes in your fridge and determines when to order more.)
The dot-com days are over, but the Internet has just begun!
It will become more powerful and more useful as time goes on. It
offers an entirely new level of communication and convenience, which
gives home businesses the ability to compete with large corporations,
not to mention the ability to run a business from anywhere in the
world with next to no overhead or risk.
I personally
know janitors and waiters that are making $100,000 a year now with
their Internet businesses working only a few hours a day! If they
can do it, you can too -- no excuses!
Any last words?
The only thing
stopping you from making more money is YOU! You may read this interview
and say, “Wow, that sounds great!” But unless you actually
do something and take action -- at least get your feet wet -- you
will stay at the income level you are at today. Do you think my
first site looked great and worked perfectly? Of course not!
If you're thinking about starting a small
business, just do it! Get your feet wet, make some mistakes -- once
you've started, you'll never look back! And you don’t have
to be a computer geek to figure it all out, you just need common
sense and the determination to get it done.
And take the time to educate yourself.
Heck, if nothing else, sign up for a copy of our free newsletter at our
site. Of course we save the best stuff for our course, but we still
reveal tons of killer tips in the free newsletter. We distribute
it every two weeks or so. Just go to www.marketingtips.com and enter your first name and e-mail
to receive it.
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