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 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 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 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 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 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 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 www.marketingtips.com and enter your first name and e-mail
address to receive it. |
If you've been searching for information
about how to sell products or services online,
then you've probably come across Corey Rudl's name at least
a few times. And, if you're like me, you've probably wondered
what the story is behind his best-selling marketing course.