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Be Your Own Boss - Make a Six Figure Income with Online Sales

Introduction

This manual is not intended to be long-winded or overly detailed.  Too often, the reader gets lost in a jumble of technical jargon and specific facts that are completely irrelevant to the application of the general theory and strategy.  In this handbook, I will sketch out the secrets of online sales and provide you with all the information you need to get started making a very comfortable living online.  I will not bore you with the obvious or lead you into a maze of abstract ideas.  What I will do is simply, clearly, and efficiently teach you how to start your own profitable internet business and pass on the online marketing strategies that I have used with incredible success.  Once the key is in your hand, opening the door will be up to you.

Getting Started

What You Need

A computer. Without a computer, you won't be able to do anything, and shouldn't even be reading this manual.  If you don't have a computer, you can't play the online marketing game.  Beyond that, you will need an internet connection (also called an ISP) other than
AOL, Compuserv, or Prodigy.  Trying to use AOL for internet marketing is like stepping up to the plate in a baseball game with a broken bat.  Unless you live in Antartica, you should be able to find a real internet service provider in your local phonebook.  Service will cost about $20.00 per month - remember that, as it becomes part of your overhead.
     You may also need a digital camera, depending on what types of products you choose to sell.  If you sell information, services, or software, you probably won't need such a camera, but if you sell physical items such as antiques, collectibles, clothes, and other general merchandise you will need to purchase a cheap digital camera just to get started.

What You Need to Know

     I've met some stupid people who are ok at online sales.   I've also met some smart people who are very, very good at online sales.  And I've met some brilliant people who are millionaires because of the internet.  You don't need to be a genius to make a living selling goods online, but you do need to be fairly intelligent.  Chances are, if you're reading this manual, you're pre-qualified for that trait already.  We'll discuss what that means in a little while - it is one reason I love the internet.

     To make a six figure income online requires no specialized computer knowledge whatsoever.  You don't need to be a whiz at programming in C++ or even HTML.  You don't even need to know what C++ and HTML are.  But you DO need to be familiar with the basic fuctions of a personal computer and you need to be comfortable surfing the web.    The myth of the fuzzy-haired MIT graduate student with broad rimmed glasses pouring over computer printouts and raking in millions just isn't true.  More often than not, those computer whiz kids are working for us businessmen who apply the same common-sense economic principles we use in the real world to online sales.

The Basics of Internet Marketing

     The basic theory is very simple.  The internet reaches billions of potential customers every day - your potential customers, if you play your cards right. Consider how much a real-life shopping mall charges a small retail storefront each month for rent; $20,000, $30,000, sometimes as much as $50,000.  About 1000 consumers probably pass through the store each day, most of them leaving empty handed. Now consider how much it costs for you to advertise your product to billions of potential customers in a 24 hour period online.  By putting up a website and paying a total of perhaps $50.00 in hosting fees, you can do just that.  The trick is knowing what internet users want to buy, finding a market, and making a successful sales pitch.
     In fact, the sales pitch is the key to online marketing and the primary difference between an internet website and a retail storefront.  At the local Radio Shack consumers can see, feel, and test out the merchandise.  The sales pitch is the merchandise itself.  When you buys something online, you doesn't have the benefit of inspecting the item beforehand, so the consumer must rely on the description of the merchandise - the SALES PITCH - to convince him or her to make the purchase sight unseen.  In fact, you wouldn't be reading this manual right now if not for my successful sales pitch.
     The general theory of successful internet marketing goes something like this; choose a product -  any product, as long as you are mildly interested in it - and make a successful sales pitch to internet users.  Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well, it's not as easy as 1 2 3, but it ain't rocket science either. In the next few sections, I'll give you some practical advice on how to get started.

What Sells and What Doesn't

     Almost anything sells - as long as you are enthusiastic about selling it.  Before starting your internet company, you first need to choose a product (or service) to market online.
Look no further than yourself; what interests you?  The answer to that question usually makes a great product to sell online.  I've known a few "wheelers and dealers" who could feign enthusiasm about almost anything and pass on that enthusiasm successfully to potential customers.  But they were more skilled than Hollywood actors, so if you aren't much for theatrics then I advise you to carefully select a product to sell based on your own interests.  As I've said, the most important internet marketing tool is the sales pitch.  And you can't make a successful sales pitch if you're not truly enthused about what you're selling.
     Almost anything sells - but some things sell better than others.   Today the hot trends are jewelry, health and beauty products, software, and electronics.  The two most profitable types of products to sell online are information and software because internet users are pre-qualified for those products; in other words, the fact that they use the internet (and thus a computer) means that they are always searching for new software and seeking after information.  We don't call it the information superhighway for nothing!
     The markup on information, in particular, can really be obscene.   After all, who can put a premium on quality information?  I've seen many information products online selling for a one thousand percent markup.  Don't believe me?  You just bought a product, namely this manual, at a 1000 percent markup price.   You valued the information at $10.00 or more, and the fact the disk cost only 50 cents and I spent less than 10 hours writing it makes no difference to you.  What you're paying for is my dozens of years of experience in online sales, not the 3.5 inch floppy disk.  The same theory applies to books, magazines, and other information media.  Computer users are willing to pay extremely high prices for valuable information - if you can obtain the information cheaply, then you can make a real killing online.
     Once you have chosen a product to sell, the fun stuff begins.   But you still need to use the wholesale directory on this disk (or any other wholesale directory you purchase) to find a supplier for your merchandise.  Call them to set up an account and you're ready to start selling online.

Start Making Money - Fast!

     Ok, so you're impatient.  You don't want to wait around until you have a website up and running or until your advertising starts paying off.   You don't even want to finish this manual before you start bringing in revenues from your new internet business.  I understand impatience, so I'm going to tell you how to start making money right now, even without an internet website!
     I will assume that by now you have already ordered your product from the supplier and you're ready to begin selling it.  You can make a very good living by reading no further than this one section, but you probably won't become a multi-millionaire.  The easiest way to start making profits on your item is to sell the product on internet auction websites. Such auctions are the latest craze and sites such as Ebay, Amazon, and Yahoo are leading the way.  Ebay, the largest and by far the best internet auction site, gets 1.5 billion page views per month.  That's 1.5 billion potential customers for your product every 30 days!
     Best of all, taking advantage of the online auctions is not very difficult and requires little to no computer literacy.  Use your digital camera to photograph your product(s) and become familiar with the Ebay interface.  List your product(s) for sale and make sure that you can continually re-order it from the manufacturer.  Each week, relist the item(s) on the auction websites and you will start making very easy money.  The key to your success at online auctioning is, you guessed it, the SALES PITCH!  Make the product attractive to potential customers and let your enthusiasm fill the description.  The more products you sell on Ebay, the better.  YOU CANNOT LOSE WITH ONLINE AUCTIONS.  However, if you want to make millions, you will have to broaden your horizens a bit.
Online auctions are a good way to start in the marketing game and will bring in the needed venture capital to expand your sales program.
 
Choosing a Venue & Target Audience

     Ok, so you've got a product in mind and you're ready to start selling. But to whom, and where?  Deciding on a product is the first step, but unless it makes gold fall from the sky it won't sell itself.  You have to choose a venue, or point of sale, and find a target audience that would be interested in buying your merchandise.
      Your overral venue is the Internet, but you will need to pinpoint exactly where on the internet you plan to sell your product. Will you use online auction sites, put up a website, use classifieds, or sell exclusively through bulk email marketing?  Your specific venues of sale depend entirely on your target audience, so let's discuss that matter first.
     If you have a product, any product at all, chances are millions of internet users everyday will be interested in it.  But your first task is to decide which types of surfers will want to buy your merchandise.  For example, if you're selling health products then you need to come up with a complete consumer analysis of the classic "health product consumer".  To illustrate the point, let's brainstorm a few typical traits of that type of consumer; all ages, middle to upper class, intelligent, seeking herbal remedies, probably new-age oriented, likely to follow trends, yuppy / preppy inclinations, etc.  Now you have a profile of your target audience.   The next step is to figure out where to find that type of person on the internet - what internet sites would health product consumers visit and what services would they use?   The answer to that question is one of the major secrets to selling online.   But we'll make the foray into advertising in a later section.

"The Website" - It Won't Bite

     You need a website.  If you don't have one, you won't make millions online. It's just that simple. Bill Gates once said that there will be two types of companies in the Twentieth Century; those with a website and those no longer in business.
     You have two choices when setting up a website; either learn how to use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment such as Netscape Page Composer or Microsoft Frontpage, or if the thought of website design gives you sweaty palms you can simply pay someone to make the site for you.  That can be quite expensive, and I fully believe in the old addage: "If you want something done right, do it yourself". I highly recommend that you learn how to make your own websites.  It is not difficult at all and the payoff will be tremendous.
     Using your digital camera, you can put pictures of your merchandise on your website so customers see what they are buying.  Can you guess what the key to webpage sales is?  You got it - the sales pitch!  Your website should be brimming with exciting information and hype about the product.  Remember that I advised you earlier in this manual to choose a product that you are enthusiastic about - that enthusiasm will be passed on to your customers through the medium of the website and make potential consumers buy your product again and again and again.  If you're not excited about your product, either fake it real well or choose a new product to sell!  You won't sell anything with a boring website - there is too much to choose from online and your competitors will suck up all your business.
     I'm not going to tell you how to create a website because that isn't the purpose of this manual.  However, I will give you an important tip about making a good sales pitch.  When designing your site (or when telling someone else how to design it), think of your home page as a retail storefront window.  Offer something for free, or offer a free service, and always run some sort of "sale" or "special".  You should use words like "blowout pricing", "unbeatable bargains", "the best deals on the internet", "#1 in online sales", "will beat any competitor by 25%", "guaranteed quality", "money back guarantee", "closeout prices", "stupendeous savings", etc.  The average internet user views each site for approximately 45 seconds while surfing the web.  When that consumer clicks on your page, you need to make sure he STAYS THERE and becomes ENTHUSED about your product, convinced that he is getting a good deal.  Make sure to have high-quality and alluring pictures of your merchandise on the front page of your site to accompany your hyped-up sales pitch.  A picture is worth a thousand words - maybe a million words when it comes to online sales.
     The final advice I can give you on setting up a website is to make sure it is configured for E-commerce.  E-commerce stands for "electronic commerce" and it provides the ability to take credit card orders online.  If you can't accept Visa or Mastercard, your website is already doomed to failure.  Credit card orders will account for over 90% of your online sales.  You can easily set up an E-commerce account for free by visiting the website www.quickcommerce.net .  There are no setup fees and the monthly fee is only $59.99.  Feel free to hunt around on the 'net for a better deal, but so far I haven't found one.

Advertising and Promoting

     I'll assume you now have a product to sell and website online equipped with E-commerce. I will also assume that you know something about the basics of internet sales if you have read this far in the manual.  You must have your target audience in mind and decide upon a venue before starting the real work of advertising and promoting your merchandise.  Remember that having a product and a website is not enough - you need to direct the billions of internet users that long on each day to your site rather than the hundreds of other similar sites online!
     After reading through the section entitled "choosing a venue and target audience", you should have a basic profile of your ideal customer in mind.   Using that profile, you must now brainstorm where to find such a customer on the internet - what sites will they frequent and what services will they use?  Let's return to the health product consumer.  Based on the profile we already developed, the we can brainstorm the types of websites that a health product customer is likely to visit; health product sites (obviously), medical sites, pharmaceutical sites, herbology sites, natural healing sites, new age sites, self-help sites, spiritual fulfillment sites, etc.  Now that we know where to find our customers, we start advertising!  The types of advertisements are listed and explained below:

Banner Ads

No one clicks on those annoying banner ads, right?  Not exactly, as banner advertising is the most popular and most common form of publicizing a website on the internet.  Here's how it works; first you create a banner ad for your page which embodies your SALES PITCH and looks visually appealing to the customers.  I recommend paying a professional to create the ad for you, as it is much more difficult than website design.  I use Buy-A-Banner (www.buyabanner.com) and they usually charge about $100.00 for the service. Believe me, it is well worth it.  Next, you pay a high-traffic website such as Excite to display your banner ad on their webpage.  Most banner ad programs charge by the number of impressions, or times your banner was displayed to users.  Some programs, called campaigns, charge by click-thrus, which is the number of times users click on your banner ad to visit your site.  Click thru programs are much more expensive and often cost five times regular banner ad impression programs.  The standard for most banner programs is $10-20 per 1000 impressions.
     Important: Banner advertisements only work if you advertise on a site that fits the profile of your target audience or if your merchandise is classified as a "trend".  Advertising finely crafted wooden tables with a banner ad on Yahoo will not be successful; advertising those same tables on a popular carpentry website could result in hundreds or even thousands of extra orders for your merchandise each week.
     When running a banner campaign, you measure success by the click-thru percentage.  This number is the percentage of actual visits to your webpage as a result of your banner ad impressions.  For example, if you order 1000 impressions and get 10 visits to your webpage as a result, the click-thru percentage is 1%.  As a general rule, a click-thru percentage of anything over .05% is profitable and anything under .05% is unprofitable.
The key to your banner campaign is the SALES PITCH you make with your banner ad and the type of website you advertise on!  When choosing a site on which to run a banner ad, you must take into account the profile of your target audience.  If I were selling camping supplies, for example, I would advertise on survivalist webpages, hunting webpages, camping and hiking webpages (obviously), mountaineering sites, etc.  I would not advertise on yahoo or excite because camping supplies is not that popular. Health products might fit the "trend" category necessary for ad campaigns on such sites, but even that is borderline and determined by your niche market.  When running banner campaigns, use trial and error to find out what sites work and what sites don't!

Email Advertising

     We've all had the unpleasant experience of checking our email and finding dozens of unwanted spam advertisements.  Do you think anywhere ever reads those things?  You bet they do, and spam email accounts for a billion dollar internet industry.
     There are two types of email advertising; bulk email and targeted email lists.  Bulk email is what we call "spam", unsolicited advertisements that just seem to magically appear in your mailbox.  Very similar to mail order campaigns, spam generates a very low percentage of responses and orders.  But it does generate some, and the return often outweighs the very low cost of obtaining huge email lists of tens of thousands of names.
Consider this scenario; you buy a bulk email list of 10,000 names for 1 cent per name. Your total investment is $100.00.  You then make a posting to that email list with a fantastic SALES PITCH advertising your product and a catcy subject header such as "Best Bargains on the 'Net!!".  If .002 percent place an order for your product as a result, that's 20 extra orders.  If your average profit is $40.00 per order, then you net $700 profit on the spam campaign!  If you buy 20,000 names instead of 10,000, your profit doubles to $1400. If you buy 40,000, it doubles to $2800. You get the picture.
     An even more effective advertising tool is targeted email lists.   Many websites and services ask you to fill out a survey about your interests and hobbies. Trust me, they are not interested in your personal life, but they do want to compose a targeted email list and sell it for big money.  For example, when signing up for a free geocities homepage you might click on "reading" as one of your hobbies.  Your email address might then appear on a targeted email list under the topic of "books".  Such lists generally cost much more than bulk lists (for good reason), but the response rate is correspondingly higher.  I've seen targeted lists sell for as little as 10 cents per email address to 50 cents per address depending on the popularity of the topic.  If you're selling health products, you would buy a health oriented list composed of internet users who have specifically chosen "health" as one of their interests.  Everyone on the list should be interested in what you are selling, so once again the key to making the big money is a successful SALES PITCH!!
     I know I'm being repetitious, but I can't emphasize the importance of the sales pitch enough.  It makes the difference between success or failure in online sales.

Classified Ads

Many sites, including yahoo and excite, offer huge sections of free classified ads. Posting is free and so is buying, but the return on these types of advertisements is very low.  I have used them for years with little success and I cannot recommend them to you in good conscience.  If you are selling a highly popular product, such as computer software, you might enjoy some success with free classifieds.  You might argue that since they are free they are worth a try, but that isn't necessarily true.   Nothing is free, particularly when it comes to online sales. The most costly part of internet marketing is your time that you invest, translated as your opportunity cost in economic terms, or the value of sacrificed opportunities.  Posting classified ads takes a lot of time and provides a low return, so unless you've got a popular product, I don't recommend that form of advertising.

Email Newsletter & Magazine Ads

     Many online companies have compiled huge mailing lists over the years and publish very popular email news magazines.  These are a great way to advertise your product because they are pre-targeted and interest-specific.  For example, you could generate a huge number of orders by advertising health products in a new age or self-help email newsletter.  It isn't the cheapest form of advertising, but it is one of the easiest and most effective.  Can you guess the secret to this type of ad?  You got it - the SALES PITCH.
     Your success with email newsletter advertising is determined by your sales pitch and the relevancy of the newsletter to the products you are selling. Don't bother advertising health products on a computer software newsletter.  Most online marketing is common sense.  If you take the time to search out the most popular online magazine related to your product, you will enjoy success with this type of advertising.

Offline Advertising

Offline advertising is another great way to boost hits to your website and increase your profits.  The most successful internet businesses are the ones that combine traditional forms of advertising accompanied by online advertising.  Just as you would run an ad for health products in a health-oriented online publication, you should run the same type of ad including your website in an offline magazine devoted to that special interest.  The ads cost a little more, but the return can be unebelieveable.

To Sum It Up

     The most important thing to remember about online marketing is that your product will not sell unless you pass on your own enthusiasm to your customers.   The way to do this is through a successful sales pitch, the key to advertising both online and offline.  Contrary to popular opinion internet users are not itching to throw their money at your PO Box - you have to convince them that your product beats all similar products that they find online.  Another important point to remember is to carefully select your target audience; you can't sell baseballs to a hockey player.   Before you even begin advertising your merchandise you should know everything there is to know about your potential consumers.  Know them better than they know themselves.  Know where they shop, what sites they visit, what magazines they read, and how much they are willing to spend.
     If you follow the advice contained in this manual, you will be making money online very soon.  How much money you make is directly proportional to how carefully you have read the manual, how intelligent you are, how much time you put into the business, and how much more you read up on internet marketing.  Once you are comfortable selling merchandise online, we also publish another manual entitled "Expert Tips for Online Entrepreneurs" which sells for $9.99.  More advanced tips are included in the sequel and are designed for entrepreneurs who already own internet home-based businesses but who want to make even more fantastic profits.   Good luck wheeling and dealing in the topsy-turvy world of internet marketing!