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. Corey is the author of the #1 best-selling
course, "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your
Business on the Internet" and is probably one of the
most recognized names in Internet marketing today.
In
the following interview, Corey reveals how he grew his
business from a one-man show in his parents' basement to
four online businesses that attract over 1.8 million
visitors per month and generated over $7.6 MILLION in
online sales last year. 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 http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/820019/.
We specialize in showing people how they can drive tons
of targeted traffic to their web sites and how to turn
that traffic into sales and profits. We provide all the
information you need to learn how to market your
business online, in the form of home-study courses,
books, video and audio tapes, and more.
What really sets us apart from all the
other marketing courses, though, is that we give you the
concepts AND the software tools you need to promote and
automate your business on the Internet. And we do all of
this based on our own real-world tests and experience,
not just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it
BEFORE we teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee
your results.
Actually, that brings up a good question:
Why, exactly, is your "Insider Secrets to Marketing Your
Business on the Internet" course so successful? Aren’t
you leading this market
space?
Yes, we are by far the leaders in educating our
Small Office/Home Office audience in how to make money
on the Internet.
The
reason the course is so successful is because we
practice what we preach. We generated about $7.6 million
in business last year, all online. And that's not to
mention the tens of millions of dollars we have helped
our clients generate. We have over 70,000 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 two years ago!
So the key to your success is practicing
what you preach?
Exactly. Another big reason we're so successful
is that we take all the risk. Our guarantee is simple --
if you don’t make money from what you've learned in the
course, then you pay nothing. You can return it anytime
for a full refund for any reason. Even if you decide you
don't like the paper it's printed on, we'll give you all
of your money back. And you know what? We get nearly
zilch returns -- and that speaks for itself.
Don’t take my word for it, check out the testimonials at our
site. We publish
only one percent of the testimonials we receive, but you
can see that it's not people saying “Oh, it was great,”
but people saying they “Made an extra $70,000 already
this year," or “Traffic increased by 400% in 30 days.”
That's what counts -- results. That is the scoreboard at
the end of the day.
And
we really do cover everything in the course you could
ever imagine. We teach you everything from A to Z;
everything from starting up from scratch with nothing to
how to drive traffic to your site, right down to setting
up your site to convert visitors to more
sales.
You'll learn how to maximize your exposure on the
search engines, how to automate your entire business,
how to build pop-up boxes, and hundreds of other things.
We even give you templates and ideas to copy from us to
ensure that nothing will go wrong!
That reminds me of a funny story...
A couple of years back, I thought of trying to get my
course on the reading list for an Internet Marketing
program being offered by a top university. I had some
meetings with a few of their senior marketing
professors, hoping to get "Insider Secrets" into the hands of all
their Internet Marketing students.
They finally came back to me and
said, basically, "Thanks, but no thanks." Now, I was
shocked! Why wouldn't they want their students to have
the #1 Internet Marketing course as part of their
education? I wouldn't let the professor leave my office
until she told me.
It turns out they were actually
scared that if their students read my course and found
out that it cost less than two hundred dollars, they
would feel ripped off by the school, which was basically
charging them thousands of dollars for the same
information!
That's
quite a story! It just goes to show that "traditional"
education isn't always the best way to get the BEST
information.
Corey,
could you tell us a little bit about your own history
and background? How did you get started marketing
online?
Well, I won't go too far back as I don’t want to
bore you, but my first online venture was way back in
1994. I had written a book called "Car Secrets Revealed"
and had been trying to market it offline. After wasting
a lot of money on magazine and print ads, I took a
friend's advice and decided to try selling it over the
Internet. Those magazine ads had eaten up most of my
cash, but I did manage to scrape together enough to get
my first web site up and running.
I did everything myself -- built the
site in HTML 1.0, learned how to use FTP programs,
figured out how to build a banner, and things like that.
Those were the days when Netscape 1.0 had just come out
and there was no such thing as secure real-time online
ordering. It was all so new and exciting!
I was glued to my computer 24 hours a
day testing all kinds of wild and crazy marketing ideas
to see which ones worked. And I can tell you that 95 out
of 100 ideas failed, but the ones that did work, worked
like crazy! Within 18 months I had the #1 best-selling
car book online... and it's been #1 ever
since!
When people started seeing that my
counter had logged over 1,000,000 visitors at CarSecrets.com, they started asking
how I was marketing it. They wanted to know how such a
simple and basic site was generating so much traffic,
and if I could teach them how to do it. Before too long
I realized that I wasn't able to teach people everything
I knew during a one-week consulting contract.
So I decided to "brain dump" everything
I knew into a course, which I called "The Insider
Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet." It
taught just about everything I knew with real-life
examples of exactly what I had tested, what worked, and
what didn't. That was what set my course apart from
every other Internet marketing course out there -- that
I had actually tested and proven my techniques. Other
courses were just teaching fluff and theory.
By promoting the course with the exact
same techniques I was teaching, it became the #1
best-selling Internet marketing course online within
three months. Since then, it has been through four 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 the world’s leading Internet marketing companies
helping small to medium businesses drive traffic and
make more sales.
So, what specific suggestions do
you have for someone interested in getting started
marketing on the Web?
Wow! That's a huge question and, to be
blunt, there's no way I could answer it in just a few
minutes. In fact, that's why I wrote a 1,000-page course
in the first place... There are literally hundreds of
tips and suggestions for building a successful presence
online. There is just so much to know if you want to do
it right the first time. However, there is one tip that
is more important than any other...
Get educated. Don’t think you can put up
a web site and have traffic appear from out of nowhere.
It does not work that way. Spend the time to educate
yourself about how everything works. Research your
market or idea and learn how to identify a niche market
on the Internet. Create or market products that solve
other people’s problems.
Another thing to look at is your
competition. How big are they? What are they doing right
and wrong?
Learn from people who practice what they
preach -- find people that you KNOW are successful on
the Internet and model yourself after them. Don’t try to
re-invent the wheel and don't listen to people who
cannot prove that they have done what you are trying to
do.
There are so many "wannabes" out there
who write books on web site promotion but don't even
have a successful Internet business themselves. Find
someone who you know is successful and use them as a
mentor -- that's what I did. I had mentors,
too.
Why do you feel that so many
people who attempt to create an income on the Internet
fail to do so?
Whoa, another loaded question! There are
so many reasons, but here are the main ones. Bear with
me, this will be a long answer:
Deciding on a product before finding a
market is a big one. This is probably the most common
mistake. If you are asking “What is a good product to
sell online?” you are making this mistake right now! You
need to decide on a market first.
The Internet makes it very easy to find
people interested in a specific category like gardening,
hunting, aeronautics, accountants, or any other interest
group. Just about any group is easy to locate and target
online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion
lists, e-zines (electronic magazines), etc.
You have to make sure you have a captive
audience, then find out what they are having a common
problem with. If you can come up with a product or
service to solve that problem, you have a guaranteed
successful business. It's really that easy -- that's how
all my businesses were built.
You don’t even really have to “sell” it,
because you already know they want it before you launch
your web site. And since you already know exactly where
your customers are, it's easy to target them. I mean,
it’s a no-brainer once you think about it.
Now, let’s turn that situation around
for a second. Say scientists had found a cure for the
common cold. You'd become a millionaire selling it
online, right? Well, not necessarily! How do you find
people that are sick online? You would have to market to
the general Internet community to try and find the 1 out
of 10,000 people that are sick that day. It would cost a
ton of money to market to 10,000 people just to find one
qualified buyer!
And to make matters worse, if you are
selling this over the Internet, by the time you ship
them the pill through the mail, they'd probably be over
their cold! So by choosing the product instead of the
market, you can actually fail no matter how great your
product is.
Your course has a lot of
information about generating traffic. Is that a big
hurdle for online businesses?
Many people think they can build a web
site, submit it to the search engines, and the buyers
will come. The logic is that there are hundreds of
millions of people online surfing around and that some
of them are bound to stumble onto your product. Wrong!
Search engine ranking is more competitive than
ever.
Yes, there are secret ways to get high
rankings in the search engines and we spend more than 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 five 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 four
versions of the e-mail to see which one performs the
best -- that is how much you have to test. Some pull in
200% better results than others with small changes, so
it's definitely worth it.
Speaking of results, what kind
of results should people expect when they are just
starting out?
Don't get discouraged if you don't see
immediate results. This is another huge psychological
barrier faced by many new entrepreneurs. Some people
expect their business to be successful immediately and
their dreams to come true overnight. It usually doesn't
happen that way.
An Internet business is like any other
business -- it takes work. The only difference on the
Internet is that you can automate a lot of repetitive
chores... and you can test and roll things out WAY
faster than an offline business could.
Things generally start slow -- that is
to be expected. But when it snowballs, it snowballs VERY
fast! And you really have to be prepared, because the
Internet moves at seven 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 http://dynamic.secretstotheirsuccess.com/t.cgi/820019
-- 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 two new people every
month that are making between $30,000 and $2 million in
profit online each year.
Check out the site and you'll see what I
mean. You can learn so much by reading about how they
started their businesses from scratch not too long ago
and made them successful by targeting a specific niche
market. For example, one interviewee makes over $1,500
a day selling a plan to bald guys on how to
regrow their hair. And another guy sells tools to make
wire jewelry and makes $40,000 a month!
These products would be a flop if you
sold them at a local storefront because the market in a
local area is way too small to support them. But on the
Internet, you have access to a global market that can
support extremely obscure products and ideas… and be
very profitable!
Corey, I wanted to ask you about search
engines. How important are they to the marketing
beginner?
When you are starting out on the Internet, search
engines are a very cost-effective way to drive traffic
to your site. But as your business grows, a good
advertising campaign, joint venture, or affiliate
program will outperform your search engine rankings
every time -- guaranteed.
To
start with, you have to make sure that people are
actually looking for your product or service online. I
hate to see people starting out on the Web who
automatically put all of their time and resources into
search engine submission when, in reality, their target
market isn’t even looking for what they have to offer in
the search engines.
If
you want to find out if the search engines will be worth
the effort, there are a few great services online that I
show you in my course that will actually tell you
approximately how many visitors you will get if you have
a top ranking under your keywords in the major search
engines.
I
tell people to type five of their top keywords into one
of these keyword popularity services, and if your
keywords are not getting more than at least 1,000
searches every single month, it is probably not worth
your time.
Also, you should never make the mistake of
relying on just the search engines to drive traffic to
your site. Although they can be an extremely valuable
source of traffic, they are constantly changing their
rules. If you get into a situation where you rely solely
on a couple of good rankings in the search engines for
all of your traffic, and then one day the search engines
drop 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
to 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 "gift basket" on the most
popular pay-per-click search engine and you'll see that
to get that top listing, you'd need to pay $2.76 per
click. That's just too much. Instead, bid on lots of
less popular terms like "discount gift basket" at $0.36
per click or "Valentine gift basket" at $0.61 per
click.
What is the most important thing
someone needs to do when starting out with a marketing
project?
Test, test, and then test again. Never
stop testing everything. You want to test your
advertising, styles, colors, etc. Test your offer, test
your price, test different types of advertising. The key
is to test small. If it works, apply it to everything
you know.
Start small and test. It is pointless to
spend all your cash on a huge ad campaign when you have
not proven that your web site can sell a product. And
you must be able to track what is going on with your web
site. I'm shocked by how many people don’t know their
"visitors-to-sales ratio" -- how many visitors you get
daily compared to how many sales. If you don’t know
this, how can you try different things to see what
improves your sales?
Can you give an example of
this?
Sure. Let's say that your site gets an
average of 500 visitors a day and you sell an average of
five 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 one 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 70,000 affiliates, so I'm speaking from experience
here.
For those who don’t know what an
affiliate program is, this is how it works: Basically,
you get other sites that share your target audience to
link to you. Those links are tracked by special software
so that if anyone clicks through the link and buys your
product, you give a commission to the referring site.
The great thing about affiliate programs
is that they are pure profit machines. Because you only
pay your affiliates when they send you a visitor who
actually buys something, it's literally impossible to
lose money! Even if they drive 10,000 visitors to your
site, you don't pay them a dime unless someone
buys.
That sounds great. But managing
a large affiliate program is a huge job, isn't
it?
The best part is that if you are using
the right tools you can completely automate the entire
process. You can be running a multi-million dollar
company with only a few staff in the office. We have
over 70,000 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
five 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.
Could you tell us a little about
the second strategy you mentioned: opt-in e-mail
marketing?
The second marketing strategy that every
e-business definitely needs to employ if they want to be
successful is opt-in e-mail marketing. And to get
started building an opt-in e-mail list you NEED to be
collecting e-mail addresses at your site. I can't stress
this one enough. If you aren't doing this, you need to
start right now!
Here's how it works: You need to offer
every single visitor to your site a reason to leave you
their e-mail address. It can be for a free newsletter, a
free report, a demo version of your software, a
contest... Any reason you can think of to get people to
leave you their e-mail address.
If someone visits your web site and
actually takes the time to subscribe to your newsletter
by giving you their name and e-mail address, this
obviously means that they are interested in what you
have to offer. Congratulations! You have just captured
an incredibly hot sales lead!
By simply following up with these people
and e-mailing them quality information and facts, you
will instantly build your credibility by developing the
rapport that is needed to close sales.
The bottom line is this: Most people are
simply not comfortable shelling out money the first time
they visit your web site. Unfortunately, the Internet is
a big place, so the chances of them finding you again
once they leave your site are pretty slim. By capturing
their name and e-mail address, you can guarantee that
they will not forget about you.
What are some things that people
should keep in mind when sending e-mail
promotions?
First and foremost: The names and e-mail
addresses you collect on your web site should be treated
like gold and never abused. If you constantly e-mail
these people with blatant advertisements and plugs for
your products and never actually send them any valuable
information, you will ruin any chance you have to sell
to them in the future.
Also, opt-in e-mail is impossible to
manage unless you have the right tools and information.
In my "Insider Secrets" course I have almost
200 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 6 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 http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop/t.x/820019.
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 are the cost savings huge (one piece of
software can literally replace at least one or two
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 two years and it still
generates a ton of money. That is the kind of business
you want.
How do you stay up-to-date on an
industry that is constantly
changing?
We have a team of people who are cranked
up on coffee at their desks, testing new ideas every
day; we have to be ahead of the curve. We have to update
our information and products constantly because the
Internet changes so quickly.
The key to really exploiting marketing
techniques is that you have to be using them before they
become popular, because once people know about them,
your audience becomes saturated, and they are not as
effective anymore.
Pop-ups are a perfect example. We were
using pop-ups way back before anyone else -- they were
EXTREMELY profitable back then. As soon as people found
out how great they worked, everyone started using them.
Of course, as soon as every site had them, their
effectiveness fell off quickly. I should say that
pop-ups are still a great tool, but they are 50% less
effective than they used to be.
Our job is to find the hot marketing
techniques before everyone else picks up on them -- and
let our customers know so they can use them and profit.
So, where do you see the Internet taking
us in the future? How much additional business will be
conducted on the 'Net and how important will the
Internet be to the business ventures that our kids will
be involved with?
Here's a fact: The Internet is becoming part of
our lives more and more each day. Just about everyone
uses e-mail now. If you want to know the weather, you
check the 'Net. You check the 'Net for movie listings in
your city, you use it to pay bills, you can use it to
educate yourself on just about any subject.
Today there are university classes being held
online for people around the world who 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 who 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 http://www.marketingtips.com/subscr.html
and enter your first name and e-mail address to receive
it.
About The Author:
Corey Rudl gets over 1.8
million visitors to his web sites monthly, did more
than 7.6 million dollars in online sales last
year (yes, that is $7,600,000), and personally makes
hundreds of thousands of dollars from his online businesses...
all from his one small office.
So listen to what he
has to say, as he knows what he is talking about when it comes
to starting and promoting a business on the Internet. Visit
his site at The Internet Marketing Center®, where he
reveals all his unconventional tips, tricks and techniques
with examples so you can learn the fastest and
most efficient ways to make money on the
Internet.
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