There are two things that you must give to your customers and your prospects! If you don’t, you will be likely to lose out on many sales that you could have otherwise had!

The two things are credibility and believability. Let’s take a look at these two things a little closer...

Credibility
Everyone in business says that they are honest, trustworthy, and good. But, we all know that is not the actual case. It doesn’t take much to put on a smile and pretend that you care about your customers. But, what are you actually doing to prove to your customers that you are credible? What are you doing to let them see that you are worth doing business with?

Believability
Again, everyone says that you should believe what they say. But, not everyone is worth believing. What are you doing to make your customers believe what you say? Are you providing them with testimonials from other people who bought your product? Do you give them a money-back guarantee to prove that your product does everything you say it does? To a customer, these things are very important! They must know that you are worth putting their trust in.

In short, people must believe what you are saying before they will spend any money with you. If you told people that you had a way that could make them $1,000,000 CASH in less than 24 hours, but they had to send you $4,995.00 first, how many people would actually send you the money? Not very many. Why? Because you have no credibility. Your story is not believable. Add a page of testimonials from people who paid you “5 grand” and then within 24 hours had “1 million” in their pocket, then you might get some orders.

Remember that you must always provide the “how.” You must tell people how what you say is true. They must find out why what you say is true. Why should they spend their money with you? These are questions you must answer for them before they will ever agree to do business with you!

We know of a couple in Wyoming who are bringing in an incredible $600,000 a year - all through selling items over Internet auctions! Yes, you read right . . . SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!

What’s their secret? How were they able to make so much over the Internet auctions? The answer is task specialization!

One of the couple is the computer expert, responsible for placing things on the websites and such. The other person is the marketer - they create the offers, find the products, and get the ball rolling. With both of them able to fulfill their tasks, they end us saving time and ultimately bringing themselves even more success!

This is the $600,000 secret! If you’re good at marketing but don’t know much about the computer or Internet part of the equation, then have someone else handle that end until you do! This is how one couple makes over half-a-million dollars a year on just one Internet auction site - and it could do the same thing for you!

If you try to do it as a one-man or one-woman show, you have to average that half of your effort will go into dealing with the computer and Internet aspects of the business, while the other half of your efforts will go into finding products, marketing to the right groups and auction sites, etc.

This cuts the productivity of both tasks into 50%!

But, if you’re able to devote all of your time on the marketing angle of the business, while someone else handles all the computer-internet duties, you can put 100% into your sales! You’ll be doubling your own efficiency!

“But what about the other person?” you may be asking. “Won’t it cost me money to hire someone to handle the computer duties?”

Yes, it may cost you something . . . but the earnings you bring in this way should outweigh the difference!

You could hire a local student good with computers and the Internet to handle that side of the business for you, or you could cut a deal with someone else. You could employ someone to handle it, and pay them an hourly wage. You could offer a percentage of the sales, or perhaps split the profits fifty/fifty.

No matter how you deal with the situation, if you play your cards right, you stand to bring in more money than you ever could if you tried to do it all on your own!

Banner ads - a banner is just a link to your Website that takes people to a Web address. The only difference is, it’s like a little graphic picture that advertises your Website. 70% of your website sales can come from this single source! Will you use it?

It has your logo in it and a brief message like, “Make More Money at Home!” and your logo, click here for free details on the Y2K problem or whatever free report you’ve got . . . whatever.

You can create these or you can, very inexpensively, have someone do them for you. For example, you can create one for say $50, by a graphic designer. They’re a very small, tiny graphic that you then just attach to your e-mail that you send to someone saying, “Hey, would you like to display my banner ad?” In return, they provide you with a graphic and their Web address and you can place these on your Website. In return you get FREE advertising on dozens and dozens of Websites that have a lot of traffic.

This is a tradition among many Website owners. You’ll get some guys that say no, but it’s well worth asking! It’s just a matter of spending a little time while you’re browsing the Web on your computer. You find a Site that’s interesting to you - you know it is to others - trade a link to it!

The idea is buying “whole collections,” and then splitting them up.

We have a friend who used to collect sports cards with his son. After a few years, they gathered together quite a substantial collection. As the son grew out of it, so did his father. They ended up leaving the collection idle, just sitting around.

Baseball suffered the massive players’ strike in the mid-nineties, which consequently led to very strong disappointment in fans. This led to a severe depression as far as professional baseball merchandise was concerned, and the popularity of sports cards - baseball cards in particular - really fell into the abyss.

He didn’t really want to deal with the hassle of selling the cards individually at the time, so he decided to sell the whole collection - and found himself accepting a pretty small amount of money for the whole collection. It was definitely a substantially lower price than the actual worth when the market value of each individual card was considered in contrast. Whoever bought those cards got a really good bargain per card.

We have another friend who had two children, one nine years old, the other seven. Both of them were really into this Pokeman collectable card game, where you buy a deck of cards, and then you keep buying packs of cards in the hopes of getting more powerful cards to help you win easier.

His son eventually lost interest in Pokeman, and began to sell off his cards. He told us the other day that his son - only nine years old, remember - came to him and said, “Dad, you know what? These cards are worth a lot more if you sell them one by one than if I sell them as groups!”

It’s true . . . If you break up a collection and sell the pieces individually, you really will be able to make more money! It’s how you can buy one product for one price - then split it up and sell each piece for huge profits!

There are lots of collector sets out there. Toys, salt and pepper shakers, games and gamepieces, some jewelry, antiques - and they will always bring more money separate than if they’re sold as a group.

Not many people have realized this, though . . . and you’re able to cash in on this fact!

When you see a collection of something for sale, you can pick it up and put the individual pieces for sale on Internet auctions.

Sometimes you’ll even run across whole collections for sale on the Internet auctions - you could buy up that collection, then turn around and resell its components on the same auction site and potentially make even more money! It sounds incredible, but if you’re smart about what you offer, it could very well work for you!

The “Hottest” type of merchandise you can sell is “Information.” Informational products are the “hottest” type of merchandise that will sell like crazy!

The “How To” guides and manuals written generally by people with expertise in a particular field are the best sellers. These books tell the reader “How To” succeed in the topic of their choice. This is how to use two words – “How To” - that are guaranteed to double your money!

Why are “How To” products the hottest products you can sell? First of all, the profit margin is incredibly high. Informational products have high perceived value because of the information presented in the product. Many informational products, such as books, manuals, and reports, are very cheap to have produced.

For an example, let’s take a look at books. You can have them printed usually for, in most cases, under a dollar each! But, one thing that you have to remember is the fact that it isn’t the physical materials that make books and other informational products so profitable. It is the information in the book that makes it so profitable!

It is that information that the customer is buying, not the paper, cardboard, and ink that make up the book. Therefore, you can give your informational product a high profit margin and charge many times more than the cost you put out to produce the product and potentially bring in gigantic profits!

Also, information is always in demand. People want to know how to do certain things. They want to know more about their topic of interest. They want to know ways to make their tasks and jobs easier. They want to learn ways to make more money or start their own businesses.

You could sell on the Internet in digital format because websites are already on the Internet. You could actually create a digital book that lists all of these websites and had their sales letters in digital format. People call them e-books. You could deliver it right over the Internet via e-mail.

You could also print it and sell it as a physical product. There are many things you could do with it once you had it all together. I’ve seen it. I know it firsthand. There are a lot of people out there that are interested in seeing what is working on the Internet. I think a book on this kind of subject would do extremely well.

In the last few years, many companies have figured out that Internet marketing will definitely become important in the future. Thus, they’ve started their own Internet campaigns. Look at advertisements for products in magazines and on television. Chances are, if you look towards the bottom of the ad, you’ll eventually come across a web page address (also known as a URL) you can call up on the Internet to check out the company’s products.

Most of these companies aren’t utilizing Internet marketing to its maximum productivity, though. The technology is new, the market is evolving fast, new applications need to be developed for old marketing techniques, and large companies are somewhat reluctant and sluggish when it comes to fully developing their Internet marketing structure.

And so, what we typically find is a company web site that advertises products, usually with the option of ordering.

Because of this old-fashioned, sluggish method of Internet marketing that so many companies are utilizing, you’re left an opening to stand apart from them and make customers much happier . . . and much more willing to spend their money with you . . . and happy to keep coming back and keep spending money with you!

Most of these old-guard companies simply hire someone to put up a web page and forget about it. If people come, they come. If they don’t, they don’t. The point is to have that picture on the ‘net more than anything . . . little more than an Internet billboard if you will.

However, the companies that are really serious about using the Internet as a real marketing tool realize that it has to be utilized just like any other marketing plan you might come up with.

For example, many web sites have guestbooks that surfers can sign with comments about a site. Typically, companies will create a form for the guestbook that asks the surfer to fill in their name and e-mail address. With this information, the company is able to build a mailing list of names and e-mail addresses. Then, they can respond back to those people with e-mail, simply to drop a “thank you” note for visiting the site or buying a product. The “thank you” e-mail usually contains a link back to the company’s web site and maybe a couple of their best running offers.

This personal touch has helped many mail-order and direct mail companies over the years, and the concept is no different. The MEDIA is the only thing that has changed. Solid marketing techniques are always solid – the challenge is in finding new ways to utilize them!

Sending back a “thank you” and responding to prospects and customers in such a way shows them that you do care about them, that they’re important to you. Therefore, they’re much more open to doing business with you.

A LOT of companies with web promotions have dropped the ball on this concept. They’re using the Internet more or less as a computerized billboard. But, by using it to its full capabilities is the only way to reach its full potential. After you’ve done this for a while, customers and prospects won’t even remember ever going to those other web sites from companies that didn’t respond or do anything special. You, on the other hand, will not only be remembered, but will have very high chances of getting repeat hits on your web site and gaining confident long-term customers. It’s simple, and it’s how you gain an unfair advantage over other web site owners in your market!

All four of these methods have sold thousands and thousands of books for companies over the years - and they can do the same for you!

Sales Letters: In your sales letter, give the potential customers enough information so that they will want to buy your book. Tell them how they can benefit from the book. Be enthusiastic about your book in natural and simple language without overexaggerating. Begin the letter with a headline to catch their attention, and keep them reading. Conclude the letter with your signature. If you can include the words benefit or guarantee, your letter will have a stronger impact.

Circulars: This promotional literature accompanies your sales letter. The letter catches the buyers’ attention, while the circular presents the most important selling points of your book and closes with an ORDER FORM. Start your circular with a headline also. Illustrations or artwork can be used here as well, but they should only enhance the sale. They are not for looks only! Get a little fancier with the circular borders, colors, etc. and always strive to maintain the buyers’ interest in your book. Close with a direct appeal for the customers to order today without delay. The order form at the end of a circular should be convenient, easy to read, and simple to complete.

Testimonials: After you have received letters or comments that praise your book from individuals or dealers, compile them into an attractive page. Include this sheet in your sales package.

Return Envelopes: Make buying your book as convenient as possible for the customers. If you supply a return envelope, filling out and mailing your order form will be that much easier. Business-reply envelopes are available through your Post Office, and are considered by wholesalers as a valuable part of the sales package. Colored envelopes are also recommended for creating an impression with the buyers.

Writing a book doesn’t have to be hard. Here is our easy six-step method for publishing and selling huge amounts of your book or other informational product:

1. Pick a title that will sell well to your market. Make it something the people in your market really want.
2. Write your advertisement about the benefits around the subject you are covering.
3. Make the advertising super powerful. Include everything. Push the biggest benefits. Add all the things you think will make it sell.
4. Now your advertisement is written. This will show you what your book needs to have in it.
5. Make a list of all the benefits you can possibly think of. Come up with as many as you can... 50... or 70... or even 100.
6. Then, write a page or two around all of these benefits. These pages add up to a BIG BOOK that is completely focused on helping your reader get the things they want the most.

Listen closely: Most people make the mistake of writing the book first and then trying to create the sales material to sell it. This is not a good strategy. YOU SHOULD DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE: Writing your ad first lets you focus on the selling of your book or informational product. It puts all your focus on the group of people you are trying to reach. This will make your informational product more powerful to that group of people. Writing your sales material first will get you off to a powerful head-start. It will motivate you... Your advertising message will be created and developed while you’re full of enthusiasm for your product. This is the secret to making more sales and profits.

Oftentimes when we have seminars or other events our customers attend, we ask them if they’ve ever bought from companies other than us. Most of them say yes, but that they don’t anymore.

We ask them why they don’t buy from those other companies anymore, and we almost always get the same answer . . . “It didn’t seem I could ever get a hold of someone at their company. And when I finally would get someone they wouldn’t know what was going on. It was frustrating.”

It’s sad to say, but it’s true - as many companies become more successful and larger, it becomes more and more difficult for customers to contact them and communicate efficiently. The company bureaucracy grows, messages have to travel through more levels, and it can become very frustrating for customers.

Eventually the customer gets tired of the aggravation of only talking to machines or waiting for calls that never come or speaking to employees that have nothing to do with their particular situation . . . and that company will lose a customer.

We cannot stress to you enough how important it is that you give you customers good access to communication to you and your company. It is through communication that the customer will get what he or she wants, and will remain satisfied with you.

So give them plenty of ways to get in contact with you! Telephone, Fax machines, e-mail, voice mail, postal service . . . this is how to give your customers more ways to contact you and order more products!

Keep the lines of communication open, and you’ll keep a lot more customers happy - and therefore receive more orders!

The people who grow with their profits are the people who will find the most success with mail-order.

Profits are a sign that you’re doing something right. Luck can always be a factor, and it will always smile upon the people who refuse to quit and keep coming up with new ideas.

They say luck comes when preparation meets opportunity. The truth is, if you’re using the profits of your business to grow, and you stay flexible to new ideas and new things, you will always be able to do well.

Always keep that cash flow moving, and use your profits to expand to get more business. When you do, you’ll find the success you’re looking for.

There are three basic rules you must understand and follow before you can make millions of dollars in direct-marketing. These rules are simple and easy-to-follow. If you use these three rules, you can potentially make millions of dollars!

These three simple rules are:

1) Market Research
Market Research is simply finding out what the people in your market are buying, why they are buying it, who they are buying it from, and what they are paying for it, etc. Market research is studying your market to learn about their buying habits. Market research is an exciting part of making money! Many times it can give you a new marketing idea or approach!

2) Accumulating Effective Mailing Lists
Your mailing list is the most vital, important part of the offer. A business could create a spectacular offer brimming over with benefits and value, but if the business had a bad mailing list, it will get very few of the sales it could have had. The flip side is sometimes true as well, though. You could have a mediocre offer, but mail it to an excellent mailing list, and do extremely well!

An efficient, excellently received mailing list is a boon to the business that knows how to use it. Good lists are extremely valuable, due to the amount of sales they pull. Good mailing lists are made up of the best customers or prospects you sell your products or services to.

3). Customer Follow-Up
All this means is going back to your customers again and again. When many people get into business, they think that all they have to do is sit back and wait for the phone to ring. They wait for business to happen, rather than making it happen.

Customer follow-up, then, is keeping in touch with customers by sending them other mailings. The business always is trying to sell its customers other things related to the first purchase!

So, again, the three things you must do in order to make money in this business are:
1. Market Research
2. Accumulate Effective Mailing Lists
3. Customer Follow-Up!
If you will make sure you do each of these things, you will be well on your way to increasing your profits!

News releases are really the king of publicity - they are THE #1 way to get it.

There’s a web site on the Internet called Edcals.com. It’s made up of editorial calendars - that’s why they call it Edcals. It’s an editorial calendar search engine.

Search engines are programs located on remote servers Internet surfers use to search for things on the Internet. Typically, they type a word or two naming or describing what they’re looking for and the search engine goes out and locates all of the web sites within its reach or databanks that features information about that topic.

Well, Edcals studies a database of more then one hundred thousand upcoming stories and special issues from just about every leading U.S. magazine and newspaper in America. It not sound true, it may seem incredible, but it’s true . . . almost all the newspapers and magazines in the United States have loaded their editorial calendar into this computer data base to make it easier for people who want to submit a story.

It’s just incredible. It’s almost too good to be true. They tell you in advance what they’re going to write about next month, next week, and the rest of the year, all of next year. It’s a year ‘round collection of editorial calendars!

For example, let’s say a business magazine is going to run a story about how people are making money with CD-ROMS. You would suddenly know, three months in advance, that they were about to run this story about CD-ROMs, let’s say, in INC magazine. If you had a CD-ROM product or a web site that offered CD-ROMs, that would give you a chance to create a news release and send it to this person who’s an editor, by name, at that publication and say, “I saw on edcals.com, on your editorial calendar, that you’re doing a story on the CD-ROM. I wanted to send this news release to you, and if you have any questions, give me a call.”

The next stage would be the news release the way Russ described it. You would be positioning yourself, and you’d get a slant or an angle on your story because it would piggyback on what they’re already going to do. It’s a scientific new way to get thousands of dollars in free advertising for you web site!

Scientific, you ask? Very much so! There’s nothing random about this - with Edcals, you know when they’re going to run the stories that will have the most in common with what you’re offering . . . and you’re able to prepare beforehand!

Think of it as a window - just as the space shuttle has to approach earth through a “window” of calm, this too is a window - it is that point when what you have to offer will be most readily accepted. And since it’s a news release, when and if it finds a home in a publication, it will be totally free . . . because the editor WANTS to run it! You’ll be saving money that you’d have had to spend on ad space in the very same publication - which could be thousands and thousands of dollars in a national publication!

You don’t have to go to them and say “Wouldn’t it be great to do a story on CD-ROMs and include some information about my web site.” They are already doing the story. The same goes for just about anything.

Whatever you’re selling (if you have a variety of items on your web site - which is a good idea - or if you have more than one web site - which is also a good idea), you can position these to fit in with these editorial calendars. When you start reading them, all of a sudden, your mind is just brimming over with ideas. You see that here’s one about working at home. Here’s one about moms who are able to quit their job and stay home. Here’s another one about people who are moving back to the country because now that they’re hooked to the Internet, they don’t have to commute and sit in traffic. They can work over the computer.

Here’s another one about Internet auctions. Here’s a story about home gardening. Maybe you have something that would relate to that. Here’s one about health. Here’s one about the changing dietary habits. Maybe you have a diet book.

Another great thing you can use to your advantage is the fact that all of the scheduling is done so far in advance. If a story idea isn’t going to appear for a few months up to a year, then you might well have enough time to CREATE product that deals with that same topic!

Free publicity is one of the most powerful tools a marketer can have on his or her side - and now, with resources like Edcals out there, the process has become even simpler and more scientific than ever before!

When you are hit by inspirational ideas, write them down. Usually, they will hit at the strangest moments. They sometimes hit when you’re doing something completely unrelated.

Sometimes, our best ideas will come to us while we’re having troubles with our business. We might have low sales. We might have a great-selling product suddenly bottom out, or any number of problems. Then, suddenly, we’ll be hit by an idea, we’ll go with it, and we’re alright . . . But usually the idea deals with a different product than we were having trouble with.

They say that "necessity is the mother of invention." Sometimes, when your "back’s against the wall" and you have problems you have to solve somehow, you will be presented with an opportunity that will offer a solution to the problem.

Inspiration comes fast, and you have to seize the moments when they come. Take advantage of it. Get it down on paper while you’re excited and while it’s still fresh in your mind. Why not wait? Because it won’t last very long. It will go away. It’s better to have them written down; otherwise, you won’t remember everything.

There are three different ways that I see (there may be more) to use this CD-ROM to make money for yourself.

First of all, you can simply sell it yourself. You can slap a price tag on it that is virtually any price - CD-ROMs are cheap to duplicate now. If you find the right supplier, you can get them done in quantities for as little as a dollar, or sometimes even as little as fifty cents if you duplicate enough of them at a time.

You could sell them anywhere from $19.95 if they don’t have a lot of information on them. You could even sell it for up to $99, $150, or $200 if it has a lot of high quality information on it and is a real value to your customers.

Another way you can sell it is to create a distributorship and let your customers sell it for you. In our business people like to sell products. If you have a customer base, you could set up a simple distributorship and let them buy the CD’s from you in small quantities for two, three, four, five, or six dollars a piece.

You can make a profit on each CD-ROM that your customers sell for you. Then, they can go ahead and sell them for you, and they can keep a nice profit on each one they sell.

Another way is to sell master rights to your CD. Maybe you’ve got other people who are interested in your CD. It’s taking off like wildfire. You’re getting a lot of sales. You can find people who would actually pay you $500, $1,000, $2,000, or maybe even as much as $5,000 to be able to have the rights to duplicate your CD-ROM, just like you do.

That’s three ways you can use this CD-ROM. You could also give it away as a premium if you wanted to, since they cost fifty cents to a dollar apiece to have copies made.

You can give it away to people who buy another package that you have, if you’ve got other products. There are lots of things you can do with a CD-ROM. Create a CD-ROM that has something to do with the Internet, or is on a hot topic that you know of or you’re interested in. I think that that’s a good way to create a product and you can do it fast, in one day or less!

I would like to talk about how to make lots of money as a web site matchmaker. When most of us build a site, our entire concern and focus is on the site. We worry about our domain name, giving that right. We worry about our search engine placement. Are we going to be high in the search engine? Can people find us? We worry about the right headlines, the layout, how the site looks, if the order form works, and whether or not we have a good shopping cart.

The very last consideration we get to are the links from other web sites to ours. The truth is, links from other web sites are extremely important. Most visitors get to your sites from other sites. More visitors will find you from other sites than from search engines. Those links have to exist before they can work for you!

This is the way people surf: they go to a site of interest, look at the links, see other sites that relate to the same subject, and travel there via those links. That’s how they move through the Internet. Therefore, links are very important!

When you are designing and putting up a site, links are always the very last thing thought of. You can always look at a new site and there’ll be one, two, or maybe three links, and they’re usually seriously lacking.

When the search engines now rate sites, one of the things that moves you up in the rankings is the number of links to your site. Links are not only necessary to bring traffic to your site, they’re also necessary to get you up in the search engine rankings. The logic the search engines use is very realistic. They say, “If there are a lot of links to the site, then there must be a lot of people who think this site is useful, and so, therefore, it deserves a higher ranking.”

What I am suggesting is you form a match making service. Go out and Find sites that need links and provide additional links to that site for a fee.

This would be a very simple service. It would be easy to sell and easy for someone to understand. You could give it a name like linkmakers.com, linkgetters.com, or, linksource .com, and you solicit other web sites to solicit and set up links for them from other sites.

They’ll have to be reciprocal links. The site will have to agree to give a link back to the other site... but that’s fine! That helps everyone, and it also helps in the search engine ratings. This is a very valuable service!

If you’ve ever sat down and started establishing links to your site, you’ll know it is a very time consuming job, and people don’t know much about how to get started. People tend to be a little shy when it comes to asking for links.

You can do it! You can systemize it, and you can make some good money doing it! It is a very valuable service! You begin by charging a base fee. Then you charge so much per link that you add to the site. Of course, your client would probably want to be able to set a limit so it wouldn’t be open-ended, but you can get a respectable fee, and then you can continue to build over time by getting paid every time you add a link.

You work out a system. If you’re experienced in direct response marketing, you can easily create a series of approach letters that can make a good case for someone allowing a link to the site that you’re working for. You can systemize this whole process and hire someone to do the work for you.

You contract a bunch of college students who are looking for part-time work to actually go out and establish the links for you. This way they get paid for doing something they enjoy - and they enjoy surfing the net! Then you split the link charge with them. You make the base fee for the set-up, then you give the student half of what you make for each link they add.

If they add a link, they just look at the site, see what the requirements are in terms of what it relates to, and then go out and search. Then they use the letters you’ve provided to contact those other sites and offer to establish the links.

It’s a very easy business to manage! You can devote your time to soliciting sites, and your college students can do the work for you by establishing the links. It can be a repeat business because you can come back to the same customers over and over every few months, and add a few links to help keep their site fresh and new traffic on the way.

It’s a very simple business to start! It doesn’t take a large investment, and it really is a valuable service that can make you money and be of use to web site owners.