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 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. 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!
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! 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. 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
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. 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! 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on
the Internet - Learn from the best. The author of this site, Corey Rudl gets over
1.8 million visitors to his websites monthly, does 6.6 million dollars in sales online each year (yes, that is $6,600,000),
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. Click here to learn the most
efficient and fastest way to make money on the Internet now. He reveals all his unconventional tips, trick and techniques with
examples. I highly recommend it. |
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