Internet gurus who claim

(Article taken from Magazine)


Over the years I’ve been taken in by the Internet gurus who claim they will make you rich in the Internet game. I’ve tried all the tricks to make money on the Internet. Unlike his father, my son actually does make money on the Internet and guess who advised him and helped him get going? I learned during his startup and we are still growing his business. Here is what you can do to be successful:

1. Build a Community. My son came to the house one day and said, "Dad, I want to set up a website." I said okay and in less than two hours we were up and running, shopping cart and all. I checked his site a couple of days later and he had 20,000 hits on his counter. I couldn’t believe it. Many of my sites don’t have that many visitors in a year. He was selling, I was not.

The reason he has been successful is that he is a member of a community. He has been selling to this community for years. When he set up his Internet store, his community friends blogged the Internet saying that he had a new store. He was immediately in business.

What was the important thing that my son had that I did not? It was a long list of email addresses of friends in his community. He mailed a note to them saying that he had a new Internet store. They, in turn, blogged the world.

Define your interest, contact and gain email addresses of friends in your community, join chat rooms and forums of those that have your same interest, and communicate constantly with the friends on your list. Your friends will introduce you to their friends. Expand your community.
2. Start a Newsletter. Everyone has a special interest in life. For the Internet, the more esoteric it is, the better. A newsletter title might be, Coffee Grounds: The Worm Grower’s Journal. You tell your community about your newsletters and help folks to join. More on that later. You accept ads on your newsletter after it grows to a favorable size. This will be a source of extra income. You place your ads in the newsletter. Perhaps it’s an ebook on growing worms called, How I Make Thousands Each Year Growing Earthworms.
3. Build Your Website. To start your website you will need a domain name. I suggest that you use a .com domain or a .org domain. Choose a domain name. Go to Godaddy.com or a similar site and search to see if your domain name is available. For example, earthworm.com is taken but you can patent earthwormstore.com. Godaddy will make other suggestions.

Once you have your domain name, have it hosted. I suggest Godaddy.com because it is an easy site to negotiate and it has many tools. Besides, beginners need customer service and I have found Godaddy very helpful 24/7.

Build your site. I use Coffeecup.com because it is so easy to use. They also have excellent customer service. The software is free if you host with Coffeecup. I have not used Godaddy’s software, but it is available.

Building a website is very easy. You don’t need to know HTML with the above software. There are many other software options too.

If you have a newsletter, put a link at the top of the page allowing others to sign up for your newsletter. You can use Godaddy’s service. I use Aweber.com.
4. Add a Shopping Cart. For beginners, I suggest PayPal.com. Godaddy has a shopping cart too. Bizland.com will host your site and has an excellent shopping cart. There are others.
5. Take Credit Cards. I currently use PayPal for payments. They offer a number of ways for your customer to pay and your customer does not have to be a member of PayPal. I used epay.com for my credit card customers for a number of years. Their customer service was excellent and they do not charge excessive processing fees.
6. Build Your List. Keep building your list. The newsletter is a great way to do this. You will need an autoresponder to process your list. Godaddy provides this service. I use Aweber. My son uses Godaddy. An autoresponder will send an email to your new subscribers. It will send out your newsletter. It will send out a series of emails to your list. Who writes these emails? You do. How often does it send out your emails? You decide but once every two weeks is adequate.
7. Work Your List. When a guru says, "I made $38,833 in 34 hours, he is not giving you the old B.S. He really did. But how? He simply sent an offer to his gigantic mailing list. My son has just expanded his business by simply following my advice to "Expand and Work Your List." He sends out little notes like, "Guess what arrived at my store today?"
8. Build Your Links. Search engines are important. You will get a higher ranking in the search engines if many other sites are linked to your site. That is one of the reasons we writers write for the Internet. I often write as Taylor Jones, the Hack Writer. I just put that into the Google search box and there were over 900,000 entries. I put in John T. Jones, Ph.D. and I got almost 2 million entries but they were not all mine. The reason I have so many links is because I write. You should too. Write about your specialty. Don’t be like me. I write on everything in sight.
9. Sell on Ebay. Take an item from your store and sell it on Ebay. Why? Because you can mention the name of your store in the ad copy as long as you don’t write it as a domain name. For example, I sell flagpoles. I can say, "AAA Flagpoles guarantees all products sold." I can not say, "AAAFlagpoles.com guarantees all products sold." However, I could give my email address as john@aaaflagpoles.com if I were inclined to do so. In other words, Ebay is a profitable way to advertise.
10. Build Your Name. In the past I have used ads in Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine to bring buyers to my book sites. After sales, the ads were essentially free. I made a little more than the cost of the ads but new customers came to my sites. I don’t do it now, but it is something to consider.

Does it say, "EarthwormStore.com" on your bumper?

Don’t hide your light under a rock.


(Article taken from Magazine)