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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. Read my review
of this
product here.
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.
Ken: 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.
CORY: Sure. Well, first off, I am the President
and CEO of The
Internet Marketing Center. We specialize in showing
people how they can start their own Internet business
and 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.
KEN: 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?
CORY: 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!
KEN: So the key to your
success is practicing what you
preach?
CORY: 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. 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!
KEN: 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?
CORY: 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, 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.
KEN:
So, what specific suggestions do you
have for someone interested in getting started marketing
on the Web?
CORY: 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 "wanna-bes" 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.
KEN:
Why do you feel that so many people
who attempt to create an income on the Internet fail to
do so?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
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.
KEN:
What are some of the big
psychological obstacles for online
entrepreneurs?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
Speaking of results, what kind of
results should people expect when they are just starting
out?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
If you could tell someone just one
thing about how to be a success in marketing on the Web,
what would it be?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
So simply attracting lots of general
traffic isn't necessarily a good
thing?
CORY: 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 our
newsletter site, Secrets to Their Success 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!
KEN:
Corey, I wanted to ask you about
search engines. How important are they to the marketing
beginner?
CORY: 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!
KEN:
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?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
What is the most important thing
someone needs to do when starting out with a marketing
project?
CORY: 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?
KEN:
Can you give an example of
this?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
Based on your experience, testing
probably thousands of different strategies, what are the
two most powerful ways to market your business on the
Internet?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
That sounds great. But managing a
large affiliate program is a huge job, isn't
it?
CORY: 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 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 AssocTrac 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 this AssocTracsoftware 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 this
website.
KEN:
Could you tell us a little about the
second strategy you mentioned: opt-in e-mail
marketing?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
What are some things that people
should keep in mind when sending e-mail
promotions?
CORY: 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 Mailoop
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
our
website
KEN:
Rapid growth and expansion can be a
“good” problem for businesses. How can you handle your
company's growth?
CORY: 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 car secrets 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.
KEN:
How do you stay up-to-date on an
industry that is constantly
changing?
CORY: 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.
KEN:
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?
CORY: 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!
KEN:
Any last
words?
CORY: 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
our
website and
enter your first name and e-mail address to receive
it. | 
