System Secrets - Maximum Money in Minimum Time

Citation preview

System Secrets

How to make more money online in less time with less hassle than you ever dreamed possible

by Ken McCarthy

©Ken McCarthy, MMXII All Rights Reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE THE SECRET CHAPTER TWO HOW TO FIND HUNGRY MARKETS CHAPTER THREE FIND THE MARKET FIRST, THEN FIGURE OUT HOW TO SERVE IT... CHAPTER FOUR WHAT TO SELL ON THE INTERNET CHAPTER FIVE THE THREE PATHS TO SUCCESS ONLINE CHAPTER SIX TRAFFIC, CONVERSION AND THE THIRD PATH TO PROFITS CHAPTER SEVEN THE REAL STORY BEHIND GOOGLE CHAPTER EIGHT EIGHT FUNDAMENTALS CHAPTER NINE THE BIG 'SECRET' OF INTERNET MARKETING CHAPTER TEN THE JOY OF GROWING THINGS

CHAPTER ELEVEN DIRECT MARKETING SECRETS CHAPTER TWELVE HARNESS EXISTING MARKETS CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE POWER OF FOCUS CHAPTER FOURTEEN TRIAL AND ERROR – OR A MAP CHAPTER FIFTEEN DECISION POINTS CHAPTER SIXTEEN FATAL MARKETING MISTAKES CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MULTIPLE CHANNELS CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE GOOD AND BAD NEWS CHAPTER NINETEEN WHAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT? CHAPTER TWENTY THE DREADED 'T' WORD CHAPTER TWENTY ONE HOW TO ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT PARTING WORDS... ABOUT KEN MCCARTHY RESOURCES

Introduction You’re probably reading this book because you’ve heard about an Internet marketing training called The System. With roots going back to talks I gave way back in 1993, it’s quite possibly the longest running Internet marketing training on earth. Our ideal student is someone who already knows the basics of marketing and wants to either improve an existing online business or start one off on the right foot. Surprisingly, a significant number of people who are already successful Internet marketers also attend our trainings. I think it’s because they like our no nonsense approach and the fact that System trainings are a consistently reliable source of up-to-date information on what works and what doesn’t work in Internet marketing. I wrote System Secrets for the many people who’ve asked me what the System is all about. Obviously, no amount of writing can equal the benefits of attending a live training, so these lessons are intended instead to give you a taste of what we’re up to. I especially urge people who are new to Internet marketing to study these lessons carefully, though many experienced business people have told me that they’ve found value in them too. You may be closer than you think Before each System Seminar, I always create a brand new pre-seminar course for registered attendees. A few years ago, I experimented with the 'crazy' idea of making the pre-seminar materials available to everyone who's interested in Internet marketing whether they come to the seminar or not. The results have been electrifying. People routinely write to tell me that these lessons have enabled them to add hundreds, thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars to their bank accounts. System Secrets is a collection of some of the most popular lessons from this series. They were originally sent to System students as e-mails. I first started sharing my online marketing experiences with others in 1993. A year later, in 1994, I organized and sponsored the first seminar on web marketing ever held. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, thought so highly of what we were doing that he took precious time away from the launch of his company’s first product to speak at this event.

Teaching people how to make money online has been one of my life’s passions and nothing makes my day like receiving a success story from one of my students. If this book helps you, I’d love to hear the details of your story. You can write me directly at [email protected] One last thought… The longer I teach, the more I become convinced that many people are a lot closer to Internet success than they realize. Right now, you may be just one idea, one insight, or one new perspective away from a major breakthrough and that’s exactly what System Secrets has been designed to provide you with.

Chapter One The Secret This could be the single most important secret you ever learn about marketing. I know it was for me. I probably heard this particular gem of wisdom a few dozen times over the course of several years before I finally 'got' it. And when I did, it changed my life. This one secret is at the root of all marketing success - and failure - whether online or off. Grasping it will greatly accelerate your progress and improve your financial status fast. Ignoring it will guarantee that you stay stuck in a rut. It's that powerful. And it's not what you think… Many people who are attracted to marketing start out by focusing all their energy on learning ‘techniques’. Now there's nothing wrong with learning marketing techniques. All the successful marketers I know continuously immerse themselves in learning new strategies and tactics. I know that I do. I'm always looking for new ways to improve my own marketing and - if I'm convinced of the value - I think nothing of jumping on a plane and flying half way around the world just to get that extra 'edge' that will make the difference. But technique alone is not enough. Not by a long shot. You can buy every eBook, purchase every home study course, attend every seminar, fill your home with books, hire the best consultants and coaches, but it's all for nothing if you ignore 'the secret.' In fact, knowing a lot of marketing techniques and not knowing 'the secret' can be downright dangerous to your financial, not to mention your mental health.

Are your curious what 'the secret' is? Good! Here it is and I hope you will burn it into your brain because it will serve you over and over for the rest of your life and it very well could burst the seams of your bank account some day... The most important decision you'll ever make when starting a new business is not what product to sell, not what headline to use, not which super-duper Internet marketing technique to employ...It's this: "The battle is won or lost on Day One...when you pick your MARKET." Successful marketing is not so much about WHAT you market or HOW you market as it is about WHO you choose to market to. If you get the WHO right, everything else will fall into place. If you don't, not even the greatest marketing in the world will help you. The 'WHO' is the market you choose to sell to. And here's the rest of 'the secret'... ‘Some markets are hard and some markets are easy’. If you want to make maximum money in minimum time go after 'easy' markets. What do I mean by an 'easy' market? 'Easy' markets defined 'Easy' markets have the following three characteristics. They are: 1) Easy to reach 2) Have a burning 'need' for what you've got, and 3) Have demonstrated through past behavior an ability and willingness to spend money on the kinds of things you plan to sell The closer the market you choose corresponds to this description, the easier your marketing life will be.

The wrong way Many entrepreneurs - beginners and experienced – get tripped up here. They create a product that they're sure the world will love... Or they hear that the Internet is a great marketing medium so they invest in creating a super web site... Both these approaches remind me of the old expression 'putting the cart before the horse.' The fanciest 'cart' on earth - the best product, the slickest web marketing campaign - won't get you anywhere without a good market 'horse' to pull it. In contrast, with the right horse, you don't have to worry too much about the cart. Nature will take care of itself. Richard Sears who started the famous Sears catalog and single-handedly kick-started the direct marketing and mail order industry over 100 years ago put it this way to a colleague once: "If it's the right offer to the right person at the right time, I can write it on the back of an old paper bag in crayon and it will sell." That's how important picking the right market is. Now I'm not suggesting that you do your advertising on the back of old paper bags in crayon, but I am suggesting that you radically change your FOCUS. By all means, continue to study marketing, but - starting today, right now - resolve to put at least half or more of your entrepreneurial time and energy into studying specific MARKETS. And while you're at it, look for 'easy' markets which means: Groups of people who you can easily reach...who have a burning 'need' for what you sell...and who have already demonstrated the willingness and ability to buy the kinds of things you plan to sell to them. I call it 'shooting fish in a barrel' marketing. It works.

Chapter Two How to Find Hungry Markets Knowing how to find hungry markets is the single most valuable skill you'll ever develop as an entrepreneur. The best ads, the best product, the best effort in the world won't mean a thing if you don't have access to a group of people ready, willing and able to buy what you have to sell. Do you remember the three criteria I listed in Chapter One for finding hungry markets? Take a second to recall them. If you don't remember them, make a special point to get them into your head today because they will be the best friends you'll ever have in business... The 'Three Musts' for finding a hungry market are: 1. You must be able to easily reach them 2. They must be hungry for what you have to sell 3. They must be proven buyers Whenever you hear about people who are enjoying spectacular success - and who achieved it relatively quickly - you're almost always seeing an example of someone who found a hungry market and worked it intelligently. Sure, you can build a business that's missing one or more of the 'Three Musts' I listed above, but why would you want to when the alternative is so much more lucrative? The fact is it's not that uncommon to find tiny one and two person businesses doing six and even seven figures annually from a modest, low overhead home office. I personally know dozens of such operations and have helped more than a few of them get started. You might call these people 'marketing geniuses' but they’re really just average folks who took the time to find a hungry market first and then went into business. And here's some great news... you can do it too. You just need to know how. Hungry Market Discovery Method #1: The Magazine Rack Technique

Every year, billions of dollars in sales take place between the covers of magazines. I'm not talking about big magazines like Time or Fortune - those are for Madison Avenue sized advertisers - but rather the hundreds of special interest magazines that cover practically every subject known to man. The existence of a magazine - especially one that has been around for years - is PROOF of the existence of a lively, hungry marketplace. Think about it... Anyone can throw up a web site, but to start and operate a magazine and get it distributed to stores and homes across the country costs a small fortune. Something's got to pay the bills and that something is: 1) subscribers and newsstand buyers and 2) advertisers Subscribers are buyers. They're activists. They don't just daydream about the things they're passionate about, they take action. They subscribe to magazines, they buy mail order products, they attend conferences and trade shows. So when you find a marketplace that supports one or more magazines, it’s a safe bet that you're on to something. But there's more to learn from a magazine than just the fact that it serves a particular market. Open it up, start paging through it and keep an eagle eye out for the mail order ads. Which ones are the mail order ads? They're the ads that are in black and white... and have lots and lots of text... and invite the reader to do something very specific like call an 800 number or clip a coupon and mail it in or visit a web site. They may not be pretty, but when you see the same mail order ad run in a magazine month after month (and sometimes year after year) you know you've stumbled across a money machine. Why? Because mail order marketers run their businesses on arithmetic. If they run an ad and it doesn't pay for itself, they don't run it again. On the other side of the coin, when you see the same mail order ad run over and over again, you know it's a little oil well pumping out monthly cash for its owner. Here's the take-away lesson from all this:

When you find a specialty magazine that has lots of mail order ads and you see the same ads running over and over, you've found a hungry market... the people in it can be reached, they are passionate about their interest, and they're buyers. Hungry Market Discovery Method #2: Cracking the SRDS 'SRDS' stands for the Standard Rate and Data Service. They publish huge, encyclopedia-sized volumes that list opportunities for advertisers. They can be found in the business section of many big city libraries. (You can also access them online for a fee.) The most interesting one for our purposes is the directory of mailing lists. Who's got mailings lists? Magazines, of course. And catalogs. At the magazine rack, you can hold a magazine in your hands and flip through it for mail order ads. In the SRDS, you can see how many subscribers a magazine has. Since subscribers are potential buyers, that's a pretty interesting number to know, wouldn't you agree? Catalog lists are even more amazing. After all, a catalog list is not just a list of potential buyers, it’s a list of proven buyers and that's what we, as smart marketers, are looking for. As an added bonus, with the SRDS you can see not only how many buyers a given catalog has on its list, you can also see the average amount of money a given catalog’s customers spend in a year. (Catalog companies track these things very carefully.) You never have to guess The beautiful thing about System-style marketing is that you never have to guess. Instead of being one of the thousands of people each year who start a business and then scramble for customers, you can start your business off on the right foot right away by finding a hot market first and then building your business around it. 'Shooting fish in a barrel' marketing. It can really be this easy... if you follow the three MUSTS of market selection. In the next lesson, I'm going to reveal the steps that smart marketers use to find hot Internet markets. The tools are different, but the basic strategy is the same one traditional direct marketers use. There is one important difference though.

Because you don't have to wait for magazine ads to run or incur the costs of direct mail, Internet marketing lets you get started making money much faster with a much, much smaller investment. The information in the next chapter is so powerful that many of you will be able to take it and start (or greatly expand) your Internet business right away.

Chapter Three Find the market first, then figure out how to serve it... When you take this approach to marketing online, life goes a lot smoother. Most entrepreneurs start ass-backwards. They try to figure out what to sell first before they've figured out the market to sell it to. Here's a secret about successful selling that I bet you've never seen before. Read it carefully. It could help make you a fortune some day. "If you focus on SELLING, you're going to hit resistance. If you focus on SERVING, you're going to enjoy smooth sailing - and a fat bank account." Passion for markets Gurus often recommend that you get involved in things that you're passionate about. That's great advice, but if your goal is to make money, here's what you want to become passionately interested in: Finding and serving hot markets In later lessons, I'll talk about how to serve markets profitably. Right now, let's focus on finding markets to profit from. The method is always the same. Whether you sell in person, by mail, through magazines, or on the Internet, the method for finding hot markets is always the same... * Mail order marketers start by looking through special interest magazines. * Direct mail marketers look through the SRDS (the catalog of readily available mailing lists for rent.) * Catalog marketers get ideas from catalogs Guess where smart Internet marketers find hot Internet markets? Unlocking the secret to Internet marketing Entrepreneurs sell lots of different things on the Internet, but it all boils down to one of two things:

1. Information or 2. Physical Products (what I like to call 'real stuff') Information can come in the form of downloadable eBooks or it can come in physical forms like CDs and DVDs. Physical products includes everything else you can imagine: computer peripherals, cameras, batteries, MP3 players, garden equipment, fishing gear, kitchen utensils etc. Selling physical products is one of the biggest opportunities online as you'll see in later lessons. But first let's look at a 'traditional' Internet product that lots of people are interested in selling these days... The downloadable eBook Where can you go to find out what eBook topics people are interested in and what they're actually buying right now? I've heard some gurus answer this question by saying ‘Amazon’, but that's off the mark. Amazon will show you what physical books people are buying, but it won't tell you a thing about the downloadable marketplace. A good rule of thumb is that when you're looking for hot markets you want information that is as specific and relevant as possible. The 'secret' place to find out where the action is when it comes to downloadable eBooks is ClickBank's web site. When you go there later, you'll see that the very first button on the home page (it's called 'Go Shopping') takes you to the complete catalog of all 10,000 downloadable products that ClickBank sells. The first thing you'll learn when you go to that page is - based on extensive sales experience ClickBank has identified nine general eBook categories that they consider 'hot.' These include 'Business to Business', 'Home and Family' and 'Computing & Internet.' The ClickBank catalog then drills down and breaks each category down even further for you. Interested in selling 'Home and Family' info?

Here are the eBook topics ClickBank believes are 'hot' based on the eBooks people have actually paid money for on their very active site: 'Cooking and Recipes', 'Garden', 'Marriage', 'Family Tree', and 'Home Improvement.' To drill down one more level and get even more specific information, you can use ClickBank's catalog to see what exact titles are ‘hot’ right this minute in each category. (They list them by sales with the #1 seller listed first, #2 listed second and so on.) Here's the key... ClickBank sells a ton of Ebooks, more than any other outlet. So they are the best 'store' to check out when you want to see what's hot and what's not. Each category and each best selling title proves that there is a market that is ready, willing and able to spend money on information on a particular topic. If you have a downloadable eBook idea and you can't find anyone successfully selling something in that category on ClickBank, that's a flashing red light. On the other hand, a market that will support one eBook on a particular subject will support others too, especially if they are well done and approach the subject from a fresh angle. I am not saying you should base your Internet business on selling things on ClickBank, but if you're looking for a way to 'read' the market for downloadable eBooks, ClickBank is a super place to start. By the way, the fact that a category does well on ClickBank is also an indication it could do well beyond eBook sales. For example, I have seen people and companies build six and seven figure sales (sometimes even more) selling information on the Home and Family topics I listed above: 'Cooking and Recipes', 'Garden', 'Marriage', 'Family Tree', and 'Home Improvement.' ClickBank contains a gold mine of market ideas you can draw on any time you need inspiration and ideas. Researching Physical Products ('Real Stuff') One of the things I laugh about from time to time is all the Internet 'gurus' who act as if eBooks and information are the only things you can make money with online. Not only is this dead wrong, but in reality more than 95% of everything sold online is not information. Instead it's some kind of tangible product ('real stuff.') This is a huge area of untapped opportunity that only the System teaches. But if you want to start getting a 'feel' for the online market in physical products right now you can do it easily just by going to Yahoo Shopping.

Just like at ClickBank, you'll see all the products that are selling on Yahoo. The difference is that instead of seeing what's 'hot' in downloadable information, you'll see what's 'hot' in physical products. Again, every category on that site represents a real live marketplace of active buyers – exactly what you're looking for. If your physical product idea 'fits' into one of these existing marketplaces, then you're in business. If it doesn't, it's flashing red light time. You never have to guess This is the most important - and sometimes the hardest - lesson for marketers to grasp: If you want to make maximum money with minimum hassle, sell only to markets that other people have already figured out how to reach. Don't even dream of going into business with a product until you've figured out in advance exactly what market you're going to offer it to and exactly how you're going to reach the people in that market. The great thing about marketing the System Way is that if you do your research in advance, you never have to guess. Instead of wondering and worrying and spinning your wheels like so many people do, you can focus on taking immediate, practical action steps. 'Step One' is always answering the question: 'Is there a market for what I want to sell?' If you can find one, move forward and get to know the market better so you can tailor your offer exactly to what that market wants. This is how fortunes are made online. If you can't find a market for your product idea, then go back to the drawing board. Browse through ClickBank, Yahoo's Stores site and some other resources I'll talk about in future lessons and see what people are actually buying online right now today...and then figure out how to join the party. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about how to do this more specifically.

Chapter Four What to Sell On the Internet In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to what is potentially the most valuable strategy you're ever going to learn about Internet marketing, or even business in general. Once you grasp this concept and make it your own, your marketing life will never be the same again. And, you're going to wonder why this simple idea, which is so incredibly powerful and immediately useful, is not taught as part of every Internet seminar, home study course and eBook. What works and what doesn't If you've been in the market for Internet advice and guidance for any length of time, you've probably noticed that things can get complicated and confusing fast. Every 'guru' seems to have his own technique and says you have to buy his method and sign up for his software if you're going to succeed. The truth is, if you bought every eBook, attended every tele-seminar and bought every home study course, you'd never make any money because you'd be so tied up in knots trying to figure out which way to go, you'd have trouble picking a direction and getting started. At the System, we take a totally different approach. Building an income stream is like building a house... it starts with a blueprint In the System, we focus on what matters, not on selling you a bunch of tools and tricks. And that's the main reason why System grads have such an extraordinary success rate. Once you have the blueprint, the 'tools' part falls into place, but tools without a plan are useless. Here's a concrete example of why the System approach works so much better than other Internet marketing programs. Let's say you decided you want to go into the house building business. So, like any intelligent person, you do some research. You buy some books and take some courses. So far, so good. But what would you think if you went to a course or bought a book and instead of learning how to actually build houses, you were given a 'rah rah' speech and pitched on saws and hammers and twoby-fours?

No instruction on what matters when it comes to building a house. Nothing about picking a good location, laying a solid foundation, or designing a good layout. Just a series not-so-thinly disguised sales pitches for overpriced hammers and nails. I'm sure you see the problem and yet what I just described is how much Internet marketing ‘education’ works. No insight, no real guidance. Just 'Do what I say, give me your money and everything will work out fine.' There is a better way. Products are EASY when you do it right Here's the #1 most commonly asked question about Internet marketing. "What should I sell online?" Now that you've read a part of the System Secrets, you realize that this question is completely backwards. The most important question you need to ask about marketing anything on the Internet or elsewhere is not 'what' should I sell, but 'whom' should I sell to. In other words, pick the market first. Here's why this is so life-and-death important. Without a market in mind, it's practically impossible to create a product that will sell. On the other hand, when you have a market in mind, coming up with product ideas is as easy as falling off a log. There's literally nothing to it. Now, I ask you, what situation would you rather be in? The person on the sidelines going round and round in circles trying to figure out what to sell and how to get started... Or the person who is in the game, putting points up on the scoreboard, and having fun. (Yes, business, when it’s done right, is fun.) You can be the person in the game if you'll follow this simple method...

The McCarthy 'Road Repair' Method of Product Development The most successful marketers in the world are all good at one thing: observing the obvious. In fact, coming up with winning product ideas is no more complicated than fixing holes in a road. Here's how road repair works... You walk the road. Every time you find a hole, you fill it. 'The road' is the marketplace. It's where your customers are. ‘Walking the road' is market research, doing things like talking to customers. ‘Finding the holes’ is discovering what customers in a particular marketplace like and don't like. 'Filling the holes' is creating products that satisfy the specific needs of specific marketplaces. If you want to succeed on the Internet, focus on filling the holes in the road. In other words, focus on a specific market, find out what's missing and then develop a product that fills 'the hole.' That way, instead of trying to create a product from thin air, your knowledge of the market and what's missing from it becomes a clear blueprint that tells you exactly what to build. How do you find out what's missing? Simple. You listen. And then you fill the hole with exactly what's needed. A concrete example of the 'road repair' method at work A lot of people want to break into the Internet marketing seminar business. As markets go, it's one of the toughest ones on earth. The market is limited, there's a ton of competition, and many of the people in it have no problem making fake claims and giving false promises. This is definitely not an easy market and under normal circumstances, it's one I'd stay far away from. However, I produced the very first seminar on web marketing way back in 1994 in San Francisco. I've been involved in every step of the industry's development from infancy to the present day. I've had the pleasure of seeing hundreds of people go from zero to successful careers and businesses on

the Internet as the result of my help. So, for me teaching Internet marketing is not a 'get rich quick' scheme, it's a lifelong commitment. But committed or not, I still had to deal with the realities of the marketplace. Step one for me was getting to know the marketplace. Yes, even though I've been around online marketing since the beginning, I still had to do my homework. What did this 'homework' involve? Nothing too complicated... I just walked the road and looked for holes. Specifically, I talked to lots of beginning and intermediate Internet marketers and asked them what they needed. And here's the amazing thing. They told me :-) Seriously, if you want to receive a flood of useful information, just talk to your prospects and listen to them. They will tell you everything you need to know. They'll show you exactly where the holes are and once you see them, it's pretty obvious how to fill them. Because I did my homework, when it came time to design the System training and the marketing for it, I was filling real holes in a real road and my customers experienced the difference between the System and other seminars right away. Instead of hitting bump after bump, they had a smooth ride. Instead of spinning their wheels in potholes, they went out and built businesses and changed their lives. Every successful business works this way. There's an existing market, there's a lack in that market, and someone comes along and provides what's missing. When these three elements are working for you everything falls into place and you get to declare yourself a 'marketing genius.' In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about the three major ways people make money on the Internet. Contrary to what you've heard, it's not all eBooks and affiliate programs. In fact, as you'll learn in the next lesson, of all the things you can do to make money on the Internet, eBooks and affiliate programs are small potatoes.

Chapter Five The Three Paths to Success Online Here's what the most successful Internet marketers will often tell you when you ask them what they sell on the Internet: "I sell what people are buying." When you first hear an answer like this, you might be tempted to think that it's some kind of a joke or a non-answer. But wait. Don't jump to any conclusions. Here's why... They're giving you a perfectly honest, sincere and very useful answer. Successful Internet marketers always start by analyzing what people are buying online first and then start a business. A strange truth Here's a statement that may shock you at first, but once you understand it, you'll never look at Internet marketing the same way again. Here it is: "No one makes money on the Internet." This is an absolutely true statement and I will swear to its accuracy. No one makes money 'on the Internet.' Instead, people make money and sometimes very substantial money by doing very specific things on the Internet. The reality is Internet know-how alone has never made anyone a dime. On the other hand, applying Internet know-how to certain special situations has made many people wealthy and secure. There's more than one way to skin a cat Over the last twelve years that I've been active in online marketing, I've had the chance to see countless real Internet success stories upfront...from Netscape and Yahoo in their early days right up to the latest System grad to break six figures in annual sales.

Contrary to popular belief, selling eBooks is far from the biggest, best or most lucrative opportunity in Internet marketing. There's nothing wrong with eBooks, but it's only one very small part of the Internet opportunity. In the real world, people make serious money online one of three ways: 1. They sell real, physical products 2. They sell information in all its forms 3. They sell advice and/or provide services to existing businesses that need help with their Internet marketing When I tell folks this, a common question I get back is this: 'Which opportunity is the best?' Here's the answer: They're ALL good. I have seen System grads build fast fortunes in all three areas. What makes the difference is YOU. The most important thing in Internet marketing is avoiding what I call 'the square peg in the round hole' syndrome. That's what happens when people hear about an opportunity and then jump on it without any thought as to whether it is the right opportunity for them. By the way, this is a perfectly natural reaction. Whenever I hear about something that's doing well, my first thought is always 'I wonder how I can get in on that?' But when I evaluate opportunities for myself one of the first questions I ask is 'Is this a good fit for me?" Whenever I see System grads who have achieved spectacular success, the story is always the same: it’s an entrepreneur who has picked a real-world opportunity that’s in line with his or her talents, experience, and natural interests. How to pick the Internet opportunity that's right for YOU After you learn the Internet marketing ABCs, the most profitable thing you can do for yourself is evaluate the three paths to success online and pick the one that's best for you. Ignore the noise from the latest Internet 'fad of the month' and focus on where YOU fit in best. Let's take a closer look at the three big opportunities online:

Opportunity #1 - Info marketing If you like to teach, enjoying writing and write well, and have or can get access to a body of knowledge that other people are willing to pay good money for, then you could be best served by getting into the information marketing business. Notice the three qualities you need to have for the info marketing business to work for you... Quality #1 - 'You like to teach'. This doesn't mean you have to have had formal, professional experience as a teacher, but it does mean that you're the kind of person who enjoys taking the time to break difficult information down so people who are new to the subject can learn it too. Quality #2 - 'You enjoy writing and write well'. The info marketing business is about generating words... lots and lots of words. Content, ads, articles, reports, books, home study course, seminars. You don't have to be Shakespeare and you don't have to write everything you need all at once, but to make the big bucks in info marketing, you've got to be on a friendly basis with your word processor. Don't let people tell you that you can 'hire' out the writing part of an info product business. First of all, in the beginning, there's no way you can afford to hire people to create worthwhile content that will bring you repeat business. Second, if you look at many of the most consistently successful info marketers, you'll find that they write their own ad copy even though they can easily afford to hire freelancers. Here’s why this matters so much. Quality. Most freelance copywriters I've worked with - and I've tried many of them - are inconsistent at best. Some day I hope to be surprised, but I've never found one that I'd be comfortable letting write a sales letter to represent my business when the stakes are high. I'm not alone in this. Dan Kennedy who is arguably the best trainer of info marketers in the world, always writes his own ad copy when it matters. Quality #3 - 'You have or can get access to a body of knowledge that people are willing to pay good money for' The good news about being an info marketer is you don't need to be the ultimate expert about the information you sell. You can always partner with another person who has the subject expertise. This can work very well if you pick the right partner. The thing you need to know is that partnerships are difficult at best. The right one can transform your destiny, but the wrong one can cause you endless headaches.

If you go the partner route, choose wisely. The second part of this equation is you need 'a body of knowledge that other people are willing to pay good money for' I'm talking here about making real money. If you just want to make a few hundred extra dollars a month selling an eBook, fine. But if your goal is to end up with a business that pays your mortgage, makes the car payment, and puts the kids through school, then you're going to want to take a more serious approach. When it comes to making a living selling information, there are two things that matter: picking the right kind of 'deep pockets' market and serving the market you pick like crazy. There are all kinds of info categories where people are willing to spend serious money...and those are the kind of markets you want to go after. But here's the price of admission: you've got to be able to consistently produce serious, high quality content that's worth big money. The 'smoke and mirrors' guys like to gloss over this reality. 'It's easy,' they say. 'Just put up any old eBook and you'll be rolling in it.' Wrong. The reality is most eBook publishers who are making real money sell a lot more than just eBooks. They sell home study courses, seminars, coaching programs etc. And none of those things are cheap. If writing, researching, teaching and high level promotion are your life passions, you can do this too, but if they're not, be easy on yourself and take a look at one of the two other paths to online success... 'Selling Physical Products' and 'Consulting and partnering with existing businesses that need online help' The obvious opportunity Some things are so obvious that everyone overlooks them. Right now, while countless thousands of hard working entrepreneurs are knocking themselves out trying to figure out how to sell information, a quiet army of regular folks are making good livings and sometimes killings - selling physical products online. Quick question: In the real world, what's more common?

People who make money as writers and publishers or people who make money selling stuff like batteries, office supplies, electronics, clothes, specialty foods, and hobby supplies? As a young teenager, I used to be a caddy which means I carried golf clubs for golfers. I happened to be a caddy at the most exclusive private club in the area and everyone I caddied for had big bucks. What's interesting is that the entire time I was caddying, I don't think I ever met a single writer or publisher. Instead I met guys who sold real stuff: sporting goods, pizzas, cars, construction services, clothing, jewelry. One guy even owned a department store. Several of the people I caddied for made their money moving stuff for other people, trucking and overseas shipping. The moral of this story? Selling real 'stuff' is where it's at for many, many, many people. And this applies online too. In fact, according to the magazine Internet Retailer, of the top 500 eCommerce companies in the world only 5% sell information and they sell it in the form of books and CDs. Amazon, which a lot of people think of as a bookseller, actually sells all kinds of stuff from electronics to home appliances. Industry professionals who study and write about eCommerce for a living list Amazon in the 'general merchandise' category, not as a bookseller. What does it take to join the legions of people who profitably sell physical products online? The same skills it takes to run a store in the real world. Are you consistent? Are you detail oriented? Are you good at customer service? Are you organized? Millions of people run stores in the real world, so clearly this is not a skill set that is very rare. The key, of course, to this and any other business you might consider going into is your personal flair which boils down to how much you care about your customers and making sure they get the best 'stuff.' Online store owners who care about their customers thrive. The truth is, all other things being equal, it is much easier to start, ramp up and expand an online business that sells physical products than it is to do the same thing with an information business. As evidence of this, online physical products businesses that do one million a year or more in sales are common. In contrast, in the info marketing world, sales at that level are only enjoyed by a very small number of people.

The challenge with getting into the physical side of the Internet business is finding good instruction. That's why the System launched a multi-year search several years back to find and partner with top online physical products sellers who are also willing and able to teach. As part of our preparation for the System Seminar, the System offered a special, high-level seminar on selling physical products online which was attended by several students who were already selling over one million dollars a year worth of products on the Internet. I put on this special high level, intensive course because I wanted to make sure that my faculty's knowledge was so solid that it would not only be useful to beginners, but it would also meet the high standards of real-world, non-guru online entrepreneurs too. It did and if you'd like to explore the opportunities in selling physical products online, you can find out more by going to: http://www.TheSystemSeminar.com/products In the next lesson, I'm going to take a close look at the third path to online success. In some ways, it's the most flexible and it's an especially good opportunity if you want to make a good income, but don't want the day-to-day hassles of operating a business.

Chapter Six Traffic, Conversion and the Third Path to Profits You're probably aware of the First Law of Internet Marketing as taught by the System Seminar: Traffic + Conversion = Profits It's a simple formula, but believe it or not before the System Seminar came along, few people thought about the Internet this way. Instead, Internet marketing was all about chasing the latest 'fad-of-the-month.' When System students focused on the core fundamentals of traffic and conversion, amazing things happened. You've probably heard some of the stories... * The guy who was working 80 hours and seven days a week on his online business who cut his hours back to a normal 40 and increased his income. * The online retailer who was struggling to net $2,000 a month with a staff. After the System, he increased his take home to over $30,000 a month working part time with zero employees. * The Internet 'newbie' who marketed his System expertise to local businesses and was able to quit his job as a graphic designer and now nets over a million dollars a year. How did they do it? It really is simple. They ignored the noise from the gurus and all the 'get rich quick' schemes and focused on the two things that really matter: traffic and conversion. Traffic and conversion... Traffic + Conversion = Profits You might write this on a piece of paper and post it over your computer. It will be gold to you some day. Traffic means getting people to see your offer whether on the web or through e-mail. Conversion means leading people to take a measurable action, for example buying something or requesting more information.

Traffic and conversion. That's it. When you put these two together, money flows. As I said at the very first System Seminar, if you master one or both of these two aspects of Internet marketing, you're on your way to a fortune. And it doesn't have to take a long time. Can you really get away with mastering just one of these skills and still make a lot of money? Sure. Here's why. If you're good at getting traffic, you can easily find people with good products and sales processes (conversion) to partner with to turn your traffic into cash. And if you're good at creating sales processes (conversion again), you'll be able to find people with lots of traffic who will gladly partner with you and share their traffic wealth. But here's the deal... you've got to become good at least one thing, getting traffic or converting it. Everything else... EVERYTHING else is just nonsense and hot air. Few Internet gurus are willing to share this simple fact with you They'd rather pump you up with false hope and tell you Internet marketing is all about 'secrets' that you can only learn at an expensive seminar and take advantage of with their latest, fancy-pants new tool. The good news is Internet marketing is a trade, just like being a plumber or an electrician. You learn which wires go where and - boom - you're an electrical 'genius.' It's the same thing with Internet marketing. If you're willing to invest in learning the business - not wallowing in the dream - but rolling up your sleeves and learning the business, you too can be an Internet marketing 'genius' and make money just like one. How hard is it to learn the Internet marketing 'trade?' Part of it depends on you. What skills and experiences you come to the party with. How hard you're willing to work in the beginning. If you’ve ever done any selling, you've got a huge advantage. If you've ever done any real world direct marketing, you've got a massive advantage. If you're a geeky guy or gal (come on, admit it), you've got a lot of potential if you're willing to direct

that fine geeky mind of yours towards learning the art of direct marketing. By the way, contrary to popular belief, 'engineering types' often make superb direct marketers once they 'get' that direct marketing is a system-based approach to selling. There are few things in life more formidable than a geek turned marketer :-) Now, all that being said, a surprisingly large amount of what successful Internet marketers do to shake the old money tree is incredibly simple. It only looks hard from the outside. It's as easy as tying your shoes Remember learning to tie your shoes? I do because I was literally the last kid in my Kindergarten class to figure it out. It looked HARD! Then, with the gentle persuasion of my kindly teacher who was pretty tired of tying the shoes of fifty kids all year, I learned. And low and behold, it was EASY! OK. Let's get into some 'advanced' Internet marketing... As I said before, all Internet marketing boils down to one of two things, traffic or conversion. There are three ways to get traffic. Two of them work. Method #1 - Hope for it (that's the method that doesn't work) Method #2 - Partner with someone who already has traffic (that works like gang busters) Method #3 - Just buy it (that works too and it's fast, easy and sure.) Buying traffic The big revolution in Internet marketing in the last five years was pay-per-click advertising. It means exactly what it says: you pay for each click (each person who clicks on your ad.) The System was the first, and still may be the only, place you can go to get a comprehensive training on how to use pay-per-click advertising to make money. Lots of people talk about it, but few get into the practical details. That being said, be encouraged that a little 'know how' in this area goes a long way - and most of your would be competitors won't even have a little bit of knowledge which means, with some effort on your part, you can turn their prospects and customers into yours.

There are two major - and countless minor - services where you can buy pay-per-click advertising: Google and Overture are the two that count. Learn those two and you're 95% of the way home. One service, Overture, lets you see what your competitors are paying for clicks. Is that cool or what? Let's see what 'sophisticated' Internet marketers are doing with Overture and see if we can learn anything from them. I entered the search term 'online marketing' in Overture and here were the results that came up... The names of the companies were changed. You'll soon see why. ABC Marketing Our clients are in #1 and Top 10 major search engine positions, and make lots of money. Does your e-business have the Net visibility it needs? We make it happen. Money-back guarantee. (Advertiser's Max Bid: $5.00) ACME Marketing Stay ahead of the curve with MSN Advertising. Full of solutions for every marketing budget, case studies, industry articles, tips and trends, and much more. advertising.msn.com (Advertiser's Max Bid: $4.01) Jones & Company Marketing Experienced in all aspects of Web marketing, our team repeatedly executes successful PPC, SEO and all inclusive e-media campaigns. (Advertiser's Max Bid: $4.00) Ace Online Marketing We use emerging Web-enabled technologies to design comprehensive, cost-effective marketing programs. Capabilities include Web design/development, hosting and optimization. (Advertiser's Max Bid: $3.02) Mail Marketing - Online Marketing Specializing in opt-in e-mail marketing, Mail Marketing Solutions manages a database of over 60 million verified opt-in e-mail addresses. (Advertiser's Max Bid: $3.01) Zenith Online Marketing Zenith powers performance-based online marketing, driving desired sales and actions while meeting a marketer's need for a measurable return. (Advertiser's Max Bid: $2.15) See the numbers at the bottom of each listing? $5.00, $4.01, $4.00 etc. That's how much each advertiser pays each time someone clicks on their ad. An observation... $5 is lot to pay for a click. Is it too much?

Smart direct marketers will hold their tongues. The correct answer is: "I don't know until I look at their numbers." What numbers am I talking about? Conversion. (Remember traffic and conversion, conversion and traffic. ALL Internet marketing questions boil down to these two words.) What if this company is selling a $15,000 web development package that they net $10,000 on? Is $5 per click a good deal then? We still don't know. We need more a little more info. Can you guess what that info would be? What percentage of people who visit the site - from this source - buy the package? What if only one out of 1,000 people buy the package? Is that a good deal for the advertiser? Answer: Yes! Let's do the math. 1,000 visitors at $5 each = $5,000 1,000 visitors generates one sale (net profit) = $10,000 Yes, this is a very good deal - if that's what they're doing. I have no idea what their actual business is. They may be doing much better - or a lot worse. In reality, we are not in the Internet marketing business or even the direct marketing business. We're in the arithmetic business. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide, you can become a GREAT marketer. I'm not kidding. Honestly. I'm not even joking a little. Note: Overture pros will probably notice that with the 'Auto Bid' feature, the advertisers in this example can probably get their clicks for even less. Point well taken. But this is a lesson primarily on the arithmetic of Internet marketing. We'll get into the fine points of using Overture and other pay-per-click search engines in later lessons. Most routine questions about Overture and how to use it are available right on the overture.com web

site. Click "Advertiser Center" - then click "FAQ" (in the left column.) - then click "Bidding" .

Chapter Seven The Real Story Behind Google Google is in the news a lot these days and it makes sense that it is. It's one of the most successful Internet companies of all time. The company which is owned by two guys in their early thirties, made 64 million dollars just in the first quarter of this year alone.(2004) It kind of puts the Internet 'gurus' in perspective, doesn't it? The real story behind Google Most Internet marketers know about Google AdWords and what a lucrative source of traffic it can be. What's not so well known is that Google AdWords has a secret side. Even if you don't use pay-per-click advertising in your business, you can still profit mightily from learning the Google AdWords system for testing new advertising ideas. Testing is the key to profits 'Testing' has been at the core of the System curriculum since the very first System training. Why? Because it's the 'secret weapon' that lets savvy Internet marketers get the most out of every penny they spend on advertising. If you spend even a nickel on advertising, knowing how to use the 'secret' side of Google AdWords could be worth a fortune to you. Google AdWords... While Overture has been relatively stagnant of late, Google AdWords has been the star of the payper-click world. Why? Three obvious reasons... It can generate lots and lots of qualified visitors to your site. You can set up an account and start getting traffic in minutes and hours, not days. If you know how to 'play' Google AdWords - and the rules are very different from Overture's - you can, in many cases, get better quality traffic for less. But Google AdWords is important for another reason. It is, in the words of Perry Marshall, who first discovered and articulated this less obvious aspect of AdWords, "The greatest direct response advertising testing device ever created."

Given that direct response advertising is well over 100 years old and some of the brightest minds in marketing have developed testing strategies and tools over that time, Perry is making quite a big claim. But you know what? He's dead right. Especially if you're a small business and can't afford an in-house staff of data entry clerks and statistical analysts to crunch your numbers for you. Google AdWords lets you find out quickly and inexpensively exactly what words, phrases, offers, benefits and features your target audience responds to best. What the heck is testing? In 1991, I wrote a short book called "Testing: The Key to Direct Marketing Profits." I gave a copy of it to all the attendees at the very first System training because I wanted to drive home the point of how important testing is in advertising. I believe that at the time we were the only Internet marketing seminar that placed emphasis on testing and tracking. Other seminars, if they mentioned these subjects at all, glossed over them. Since my book on testing was written in the pre-Internet days, it covered media like space ads, classifieds, direct mail, radio and TV - but the principle is the same and it's one of the most revolutionary insights in all of business. The principle is this: It's possible, with a little effort, to track the effectiveness of every penny you spend on advertising. Surprisingly, few businesses, large or small, take advantage of this. Many just flat out don't know it's possible. Others are vaguely aware they could be tracking their results. Here's what businesses that don't track are missing out on... Imagine you've found two ezines to run an ad for your business. Each ad costs $100. Is that a lot of money? If you remember the point I made about pay-per-click advertising in the previous lesson, there's only one way to answer that question: Run the ad in the two ezines and see. If you track the results of each ad, you can determine to the penny exactly how productive your $100 investment was for you. In some cases a $100 ad may be the biggest bargain in the world because it brings back all the money you spent with lots of interest. That's a winner and that's something you want to do over and over

again - until it stops working. Tracking will let you know when it's had it's day. In other cases, the $100 may be a total waste. Only advertisers who track will know for sure. Many direct response and Internet marketing fortunes come from the simple fact that the owner tracks his ads. Tracking lets him deploy his assets where they do the most good while simultaneously protecting him from wasting money. In contrast, advertisers who don't track have no clue. They're like pilots flying in the fog without navigational instruments. They might land safely. Then again, they might fly into a mountain. If you've read this far, you've got a great shot at becoming a successful Internet marketer simply by knowing this one aspect of the business.

Chapter Eight Eight Fundamentals Because you've made it this far, I know that you're serious about Internet marketing which is a good predictor of your future success. The truth is most people just don't have the 'stick-to-it-ness' to work something all the way through to the end, but I know you do because you've kept working through the lessons. Now that you've absorbed the foundation lessons, it's time to get into what I consider the good stuff... But before we do that, let's take a quick break and go over the fundamentals of the System Method of Internet marketing and make sure we haven't overlooked anything important... 1. The most important skill in Internet marketing is knowing how to find 'hot' markets - 'research.' 2. Research is like detective work. You look for evidence, follow the clues and draw conclusions. 3. As an Internet marketer, your first job is to find a 'hot' online market to sell to. Product selection and advertising come later. 4. A 'hot' online market is a market that is already actively buying products in a particular category. For example: * Health 'nuts' actively buy vitamins. * Martial arts fanatics actively buy training videos. * Fishermen actively buy fishing gear and lures. * Golfers actively buy new equipment and instructional courses. * Brides-to-be actively buy all kinds of supplies and services for weddings. There are literally hundreds of 'hot' markets online. The trick to success is to pick the market that you're naturally excited about serving. 5. If you're not able to define a market and describe exactly how you will deliver your sales message to the people in it, then it's not a market. 6. The best places to find 'hot' markets are in the obvious places. Do you want to sell downloadable eBooks? Then ClickBank’s catalog is the best research tool for you. Do you want to sell 'real stuff?' Then visit Yahoo Stores and see what product categories are generating the most action.

Another good market research technique is to think of search terms you might use if you were looking for a particular product on your favorite search engine. Then see what comes up. If you see a lot of action in a marketplace, that's a good indication demand is high. If demand is high, then there is probably room for your business, especially if you offer something 'new.' 7. Once you've selected the market you want to sell to, now is the time to figure out what to sell. Note that this is the method every experienced Internet marketing pro I know uses to start new Internet-based businesses. Market research first, then products. In contrast, beginners often get hung up on the details of their product idea. 8. The most successful products are products of quality that bring something new to an existing marketplace. "New" can mean many different things: Sometimes "new" means a new product that no one has ever seen before. "New" can also mean an improvement of an already well known product. "New" might even be an old product advertised in a new and imaginative way. This last example is the most interesting to me personally. Here's why: Most products are advertised very badly. Sometimes all it takes to transform a failing product into a very successful one is better advertising. For example, I have a friend who once bought a web site that sold loose diamonds. (Loose diamonds are stones that are not yet in a ring or necklace.) Now, there is absolutely nothing new about selling loose diamonds. People have been selling diamonds for thousands of years and at the end of the day, a diamond is a diamond. There's no such thing as 'new' in the diamond world. In spite of this, my friend was very successful in transforming the money losing site he bought into a big winner. In fact, he once sold the largest diamond ever sold online (a record he may or may not

still have.) What made the difference? He simply built a better site with a clearer, more helpful and more persuasive sales message. His product wasn't "new" but his advertising was. What this means is that you may not need to invent or create your own product in order to succeed on the Internet. You can just as easily find an existing product, improve the way it's advertised and make your fortune that way.

Chapter Nine The Big 'Secret' of Internet Marketing Ever wonder what the one big 'secret' of Internet marketing is? The one that makes the difference... Direct Marketing. It's a term you'll hear a lot at System trainings. But what the heck does it mean? As far as I know, I was the first to publicly state that the people who were going to make money online were the ones who learned to use the Internet like a direct marketing medium. The year was 1993... CompuServe was king and BBSs (computer bulletin board services) ruled the roost. AOL was so small you could write Steve Case and he'd actually write you back. Marc Andreessen's 'toy', the web browser, was still just for geeks. How did I know that direct marketing was going to be the key to conquering the online world? Because direct marketing, in every medium, has always been the 'secret sauce' that puts money in the bank accounts of marketers smart enough to use it. Making money in the real world You don't read a lot about direct marketing in the business press or hear about it on financial TV shows. Business moguls prefer to attribute their success to their natural brilliance or their financial acumen. The truth is often a little bit different. For example, take CNN. Today it's a global powerhouse and it's made Ted Turner into a billionaire many times over. Guess how old Ted paid the electric bill in the early lean years of CNN when corporate advertisers wouldn't spend a dime on it? He sold Ginsu knives and Elvis Presley commemorative plates. TV-based direct marketers knew that - at the right price - they could convert air time on CNN into dollars so they bought all the cheap air time CNN would sell them and made a bundle for themselves. At the same time, it was these same savvy direct marketers who kept CNN solvent until the big time, big money advertisers came onboard. Remember that the next time you're watching CNN. Direct marketing paid the bills when nothing else would. Not only that, but in good times and bad, especially bad times, direct marketing is often the only thing that makes money. I could give example after example of this, but let's forget history for a second and look at recent news.

Direct marketing pays the bills and makes regular folks rich One of my favorite daily reads is the Financial Times of London. It's that pumpkin colored newspaper that you see these days along with the Wall Street Journal and Barron's. I remember when the only place you could find this paper was on select newsstands in the Wall Street area itself, so I get a kick out of being able to buy it in my little rural village (population 1,300) far from any big city. In the May 5th, 2004 issue, I read a special insert on the state of the printing industry. Here are some excerpts... "Generally, there are a lot of printing companies that are underperforming (translation into US English: 'losing their shirts.') The only ones who are doing quite well are the niche players, who are focused on sub-sectors, like direct marketing." A few pages later, there's an article entitled "Unglamorous subsidiary that brings in the money." It's about a company called Aravato, which is a subsidiary of the giant publisher Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann is famous for the sexy music labels it owns, but guess what's making them all their bankable money? Here's what the article says, straight from the Financial Times: "This unglamorous subsidiary, whose activities range from printing to mail order...generate much of Bertelsmann's cash flow." Unglamorous. That's a good word for direct marketing. As a successful direct marketer, you'll probably never be invited to attend the Oscars on the arm of a Hollywood starlet... but you might make as much money as a rock star or a heart surgeon -with a lot less hassle and a lot more stability. So what's my point? It's this: If you want real, solid, money-in-the-bank business success that will let you live your life on your own terms, learn direct marketing. It's the 'quiet' way that money is made in good economies and bad. Every single successful Internet marketer I know is, in reality, a direct marketer who just happens to deliver his sales messages via web sites and e-mail. So how do you get a fast education in direct marketing? Internet Marketing is Direct Marketing

Here's some truth about Internet marketing you can use right now... In 1993, I gave a talk at a Dan Kennedy seminar in which I pointed out that the Internet and the online world was the perfect direct marketing medium. Very few people understood what I was talking about then and many people over the years have violently disagreed with me: “No, it's about interactivity. It's about banner ad impressions. It's about branding. It's about visitors. It's about market share. It's about a radical new way of doing business. It's about the next round of venture capital funding. It’s about business at the speed of light. It's about burn rate.” Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. But I stuck to my guns and as unglamorous and as unpopular as it was, I never told my clients and students anything different. Back then – and right up to today – when someone tells me they want to put their business on the Internet, I always ask them to tell me “why?” What do you hope to get from being on the Internet? Where do you plan to get your traffic? What methods are you going to use to convert your visitors to cash paying customers? It's remarkable, but in nearly every case when people have taken the time to answer these questions before they got online – they've enjoyed success. Internet marketing is not what you think it is “We are not in the Internet business. We are in the direct marketing business and we just happen to be using the Internet as a message delivery vehicle.” I've made this statement a few dozen times before audiences over the years. Normally, it would earn me blank stares. Then, the breakthrough came. The year was 2000. The place was Boulder, Colorado. In the audience were some of the top Internet marketers of our time: Declan Dunn, Corey Rudl, Jonathan Mizel, Patrick Anderson, Ola Edvardsson, Scott Covert and a lot of people you may never have heard of (including one couple that had just sold their online dating service to Lycos for $40,000,000). That audience understood what I was talking about. Every head nodded and no one looked confused, annoyed or bewildered as less experienced people have when I told them the Internet is a Direct Marketing medium. Let's look at some history. I'll name the Internet success story and you tell me what he was doing BEFORE the Internet:

* Corey Rudl (sold specialty auto parts via mail order) * Jonathan Mizel (sold insurance via mail order) * Ola Edvardsson (telemarketing) * Scott Covert (various mail order ventures) * Declan Dunn (serious direct marketing student) Do you see the pattern? This should be great news to people who have either studied or practiced direct marketing – even if you have not been successful yet. To these people I say: “Learn the Internet tools! You’re already well more than half way to making a TON of money.” Larry Trocha, a System grad, took his mail order sales from just $2,000 to over $10,000 per month in a matter of weeks. There’s another System grad, whose name I can’t mention, who came to us as an already superaccomplished online marketer. He said he found our System approach to be entirely compatible with the principles he used to take his personal electronic business from $100,000 a month in sales to selling as much as $100,000 a day. There is no reason on earth that other ‘old school’ mail order merchants can’t enjoy similar results on the Internet. What if you’re not already a mail order or direct marketing savvy guy? Then, it's great news for you too. Here's why: Unlike tens of thousands of would-be Internet entrepreneurs who are floundering and will continue to flounder without a clue, you now know exactly what you need to focus on in order to be a success. Here’s a short list of the books I recommend you get and read in order to give yourself a crash course in direct marketing: 1. “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude Hopkins 2. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples 3. “How to Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab 4. “The Robert Collier Letter Book” by Robert Collier 5. “The Secrets of Successful Direct Mail” by Dick Benson Write me at [email protected] for a more complete list.

Chapter Ten The Joy of Growing Things The Art of Taking a Breather... I don't know about you, but right about now I can use a break. Maybe you can too. I wrote this a while back for my clients and it has proven to be one of my most popular ‘lessons.’ A surprising number of people have commented on it and some have even republished it and sent it to their clients. Just reading it is like taking a little vacation. We can get back to the heavy stuff in the next chapter. Strawberry Musings June 11 I've been told that life is not all strawberries and cream, but sometimes... Last year, I planted some strawberry plants in our garden. I decided it would be good to have some perennials, plants that come up every year on their own, instead of having to plant every bed from scratch each spring. The first crop, which came in last year, was small, very small, but we met each berry as a little miracle. From nothing to something with just sun, soil and occasional water. And what a something they were: soft, juicy, perfectly sweet with none of the chemical taste you get from store bought berries. It's strawberry season again here. This time the plants are booming, but I barely noticed them until today when I started picking them after I suddenly realized that if I didn't, they'd start to rot. What happened? These marvelous little plants were chugging along, producing exponentially more fruit than they did last season – fruit every bit as delicious – but until today, I had completely ignored them. Some people say that growing your own food is a very expensive proposition once you factor in the value of your own time. But these people have never tasted strawberries picked and eaten fresh. Not “fresh” as in a supermarket's idea of fresh, but fresh as in picked, washed and eaten as fast as you can read these words. You can't get strawberries this good anywhere at any price and best of all they're yours. No trip to the supermarket. No waiting at the checkout counter. No pushing your loaded shopping cart across a hot asphalt parking lot. Yours. They're worth the price of time.

When we first start a business our results are often, but not always, a lot less spectacular than our hopes. But regardless of early meager payouts, we know there is something miraculous about taking an idea, shaping it, working it into reality and seeing it start to generate money. So what if it only makes a dollar a day at first? It's alive and if the basic premise is sound that dollar can become ten or one hundred or one thousand dollars a day – or more. But how often, once the business has reached the stage that it is a business – it's paying rent and salaries and even paying us, the owner – do we forget about the fundamentally miraculous nature of money making? So many attempt to turn their ideas into money, so few succeed. In many cases, the fundamental idea – the seed – is flawed. In others, the soil – the market – is just not rich enough to support it. Or a lack of constant creative attention – water – chokes off its potential. The great irony of business is that once our businesses start producing, we often forget the wonder of their first fruit, sometimes going so far as to forget to water them or even pick what is obviously ripe. Momentum can only keep a neglected business going for so long, but eventually, even the greatest momentum is worn down. Attention and thinking are the remedy, but how much time to we give to ourselves for this? I once read an old book about the work habits of former captains of industry. One man took regular train rides across the country, partially to shut himself off from the day-to-day grind of being responsible for a business. Another would take off whole months at a time. I remember when I first read this, it seemed so self-indulgent and so impossible. Now, I'm not so sure. Ultimately, our businesses are an expression of the quality of our attention and thinking. Great thinking can take place when we are harried, overextended, and overtired, but it's hard to imagine how a condition of alternating adrenaline and fatigue can provide consistently fertile soil for fresh thinking. Ideas don't have to be new to be valuable, but they do have to be fresh. Like seeds, good ideas come with their own energy to help them take root and a clear vision of what they are to become. Ideas don't have to be grand to be productive. Sometimes the simplest observation - like the strawberries are ready and it's time to pick them - is more than enough to pull unexpected value out of thin air. Very often, we don't even have to reach too far. There's usually quite a bit of what we're seeking right underneath our own feet – literally

Chapter Eleven Direct Marketing Secrets Diagnosing Profit Problems I hope by now that everyone who has gotten to this point realizes that Internet marketing is in reality nothing more or less than direct marketing. We have gone over some of the intricacies of cutting-edge Internet marketing in this book, but it's important to have as firm a foundation in direct marketing as you can muster to really make the System work at full capacity. This lesson is about how to use direct marketing principles to diagnose marketing problems. The big marketing problem, of course, is not enough sales. Interestingly enough, the root cause or causes of the problem can usually be easily traced and once traced, fixed. The Direct Marketing Pyramid * ***** ********* The ad is the tip The “offer” is the body Market knowledge is the base Mistake #1: Most people start their marketing program based on little more than falling in love with their product. This approach almost always guarantees a marketing disaster. Solution: Instead of falling in love with your product, become obsessed with the potential market (or markets) for your product. No matter how good a product is, it can only be sold to an existing market. Mistake #2: The first thing the average – and poorly performing – marketer thinks about is the ads he or she will run. As important as ads are, they are the LAST thing that needs to be sorted out. Solution: After you've learned all you can about potential markets for you product, your next obsession should be media. What media vehicles are available to you? How effectively do they reach the target

audience? If you are using direct mail then mailing lists should become the focus of your obsession. On the Internet, the handiest way to do your media research is by becoming expert in or working with payper-click and search engine optimization experts. And not just any old experts, but individuals who understand and use direct marketing principles. Mistake #3: After you've mastered the market and the mediums that reach your market, you are almost ready to start writing your ad. Almost, but not quite. Rushing to write your ad before you have crafted an irresistible “offer” is one of the most common mistakes in direct marketing. Solution: Direct marketing is all about getting people to act and not just act, but act NOW! Therefore, it’s not enough to have a great product, a huge market and cost effective media that lets you reach your market, you also need a ‘hook,’ a way to offer your product that makes people act NOW! In direct marketing terminology this is called the offer. I could easily write twelve lessons on how to craft compelling offers, but for now, I'm simply going to leave you with this: Offers are hugely important. Study them. One of the most successful direct mail practitioners of all time, the late Dick Benson, wrote a book called “Secrets of Successful Direct Mail.” Though he doesn't mention the Internet once in his book, what he has to say about crafting offers is of critical importance to money making via the Internet or any other sales medium. Get Benson’s book and read it. It is a literal gold mine. You can get it at www.TheBensonBook.com Mistake #4: You've got a great product. You’ve familiarized yourself with the markets and the media to reach those markets. You’ve crafted an irresistible, stop-them-in-their-tracks offer. Now you're ready, at last, to start thinking about writing your ad. The ad is the least important part of the sales process and if you've done your homework well, it's amazing how far you can get – for a while – on a so-so ad. But, once you start running your ads, you’ll attract the attention of “copycats” and some of them may be very clever and experienced marketers. They’ll see that you've found a lucrative market and they’ll take a shot at it too. Now, the issue of powerful ad copy become critical. Solution: Hire the best copywriter you can afford or make a serious investment in learning how to write ad

copy. Even though the ad is the least important part of the marketing process, it's one of the key links in the success chain, especially when you have competitors breathing down your neck. Here’s a course I developed especially to help you with this important aspect of marketing: http://www.KensCopyClinic.com Mistake #5: You're trying to make progress in Internet marketing, but nothing you try seems to work as well as you'd like it to – or you just plain can't figure out how to get started. Only about 1% of the population will seek to remedy this problem by seeking established experts in the field. The rest will try to piece together a strategy with eBooks, magazine articles and hearsay. You can see the same thing in the stock market. People leave their financial futures up to stockbrokers and get their financial advice from useless rags like Money Magazine or CNBC. You can see where that gets them. That's why 99% of people don't ever attain much and 1% of the population seems to end up with all the goodies. It's a rare and courageous person who actually invests in learning how to succeed. Solution: Be that rare person. Start writing your own success story. Every success story whether in sports or business or the art of living always begins with a solid, relevant education.

Chapter Twelve Harness Existing Markets How I knew the Internet would be a big force back in 1993 Occasionally someone will ask me how I got started in the Internet business and how I ‘knew’ back in 1993 that it was going to be a big thing when no one else seemed to have a clue. First, I didn't exactly ‘know’ but I was aware of the following forces that were combining to create a major shift in the way people communicate: 1.PCs were becoming more and more powerful without going up in price. They were also becoming more common in both the workplace and in homes. 2. Modems were getting faster, cheaper, more reliable and easier to use. 3. The postal delivery system is for the most part effective, but it a very expensive and slow way to send personal messages. I reasoned that any reliable service that could cut the cost of routine communication would find a big market fast. 4. There were a number of creative, aggressive and well funded companies (Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe) actively promoting the benefits of online use. 5. There was a vibrant and extremely creative “underground” of people who were already using online media extensively. I reasoned that these five trends pointed to the eventual development of the online world as a MAJOR media. The thing that surprised me is how fast it happened. You can use the same ‘theory’ I used to predict the explosive growth of the Internet to create explosive growth in your bank account. The theory is this: “To succeed in marketing, harness EXISTING market forces. Don’t try to create demand.” This becomes crystal clear if you compare marketing to sailing. The successful sailor figures out which way the wind is blowing first and then configures his sails to take advantage of it. Then, as he sails, he makes constant adjustments using the wind as his guide. Amateur marketers or beginners (and some experienced marketers who have lost touch with reality) forget this principle and instead of sensing the wind (natural demand), attempt to force their will on the market.

Can you imagine anything more foolish than a sailor, arms crossed, stubbornly “pressing on” while the wind flutters his sails instead of driving them? Yet marketers do the same thing all the time. If you’re going to take your business beyond where it is today, you must change something. The thing that holds most business people back when they try to do business on the Internet is that they simply don’t know enough about the details of Internet marketing to succeed, so they ‘wing it.’ You can wing it if you want to, but experience has taught me that winging it on the Internet, or anywhere else, is a sure way to waste large amounts of time and money. Being educated about the realities of business, especially marketing, is the only real financial security I know of. Too many people wait passively to see what might ‘turn up’ for them. Well, in my experience, opportunity comes from definite action informed by real knowledge. It rarely just ‘turns up.’

Chapter Thirteen The Power of Focus I live within a relatively short drive of the Canadian border. In five hours, I can be in Montreal, Quebec. In roughly the same time, I can be in Kingston, Ontario. From Kingston, I'm two hours or less from Ottawa, Canada's capital to the north or Toronto, Canada's cosmopolitan megalopolis to the west. What's so striking about the drive is that, economically speaking, there is next to nothing between where I live and this, the most densely populated and prosperous part of Canada. Why is that? After all, the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, the waterways which link Montreal and Toronto have southern shores too. Why is it then that there are thriving, world class cities on the north shore, the Canadian side, and pleasant, but financially uninspiring towns and cities on the south shore, the American side? The geography is almost identical. The answer is simple: focus. To Americans, the St. Lawrence/Lake Ontario region is the “far north.” It's a fringe area so it gets very little creative attention. To Canadians, this same region is the “south.” They consider it prime real estate so they’ve put all their energy, investment and focus into it with predictable results. Belief and Profit Many of the lessons in this book have been about the overriding importance of testing, evaluating and measuring markets before you take the plunge. Doing this well helps you set up a “shooting fish in a barrel” marketing system. But there is another element which is important to marketing: belief. In Canada, people believe that the shoreline of the St. Lawrence/Lake Ontario waterway is a kind of “gold coast.” Because of their belief, they act accordingly. In the US, the St. Lawrence/Lake Ontario waterway is seen as a pleasant, but economically irrelevant backwater and the level of business activity along the southern shore reflects that belief. What do YOU believe about you and your market? Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that belief, positive thinking and focus alone are going to get

you where you want to go financially. Market selection, strategy and tactics such as we teach in the System are essential, but it is true that belief and the focus that comes from belief is the fuel that makes the whole engine run. Focus is the “secret” to making things work. Sustained positive intention. Once you've found the market that makes sense for you to pursue, it’s focus that is going to determine the size of your bank account. There's another lesson here. There are a lot of assets lying around – in good times and bad – that are completely underutilized because no one thinks they’re worth anything. Just like the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, all they need is a little focus to be transformed into solid money makers.

Chapter Fourteen Trial and Error – Or a Map There are two kinds of people: People who blaze trails and people who get themselves a reliable map. While it can be glamorous and exciting – sometimes – to be a trail blazer, if it's money you're after, following a map is a better, more reliable way to go. Maps don't do the work for you. You still have to gas up the car, get behind the wheel and go, but it's a lot more efficient to get directions on how to drive from New York to San Francisco than it is to try to “discover” the path. Yet this is how many people try to learn business, which is probably why there are so many business failures. Many people I see who are not succeeding in business – or not getting started (which is almost the same thing) – are being held back because they haven't mastered the basics yet. I understand why this is. If you study the financial news media - most people's source of business info - you will quickly learn that it is 99% BS. The reporters and announcers don't know the first thing about running a business, but they “pose” as if they do and spread all kinds of misconceptions – like Enron is a progressive, well run company! Schools are even worse and I'm not just talking about grammar school, high school and college programs. I mean MBA programs as well. I have been a guest lecturer at Wharton, Columbia University, MIT and NYU's business schools and I've met the teachers and faculty and I can tell you I am less than impressed. Give me a hard core, ‘bootstrap’ entrepreneur any day of the week. They know far more about business than the products of MBA programs. So what can a person do who wants to go into business for themselves to get a practical education? Here are two “tried and true” methods: 1. Find someone who is successful and apprentice yourself to him or her. Be prepared to work long hours for low or no pay. I did this myself on one occasion and it was one of the best investments I ever made. In six months, I received a practical education that was far superior to anything I could have learned in an expensive four year program. 2. Buy and study everything you can about business and keep on the look out for consistently reliable sources of information. Actively resist being stampeded lemming-like by the latest fad-of-the-month. Instead look for teachers who are pros with years of verifiable experience behind them.

Whatever you decide to focus on in life, make sure that you get the best map you can possibly find. Identify who the top performers are in the field you want to succeed in and discover who among them is willing to teach. Then become a good student. If you want to make the most rapid progress possible, it really is this simple, yet, in my experience, only 1 of out of 100 people will do this which is why there is always room at the top.

Chapter Fifteen Decision Points Very, very, very few people understand what was behind the explosion of the Internet in the late 1990s. It's kind of odd if you think about it and it highlights something about human nature. You know the old saying: Some people make things happen. Other people watch things happen. Other people ask “Hey, what happened?” Actually, there is another group and they are the vast majority. They don't make things happen, they don't watch things happen, they don't even ask the question of what just happened, they just plug along oblivious to the world around them. This is not a recipe for success. Scratch a successful person and beneath the surface you will find someone who is inquisitive and observant. He’s someone who is really interested and curious about what is going on around him. We were all born this way. Unfortunately, some of us – too many of us – have allowed the naturally inquisitive part of ourselves to go into hibernation. I am constantly looking at things in my field – and beyond – and asking “How does that work? How do they do that? How did they put that together?” It’s where my money comes from. How the Web Was Born The web as we know it was created largely due to the efforts of one person, Marc Andreessen. It's useful to know this history because it is a demonstration of how things work in the real world. Success is created by a series decision points. Let’s look at a how one person’s decision points literally unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars of value and launched thousands of new businesses. The decision points of Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the web browser Decision point #1: Marc was working as a $6.48 assistant in the physics lab at the University of Illinois. In those days, only physicists used the web. It was text only and hard to use. Marc had the insight that if someone put a simple “point and click” interface on the web, it would be a lot easier to use. He could have just let this idea fly away. If he had you would not be reading these words today.

Instead he got his programming friends together and created Mosaic, the first web browser. Decision point #2: A lot of people invent things and then either lose interest in them or don't take the steps necessary to bring them to the larger world. Marc could have done this too. Instead he came up with the idea of giving away Mosaic and then providing free online support to anyone who had questions about it. The result? Mosaic went from zero to 1,000,000 users with an ad budget of zero dollars in less than twelve months. Decision point #3: After Mosaic became a success, the University of Illinois did what big organizations often do. They claimed credit for the invention and told Marc, the inventor, to take a hike. They said that since Marc and his friends created Mosaic and distributed it on University of Illinois computers, it belonged to the University. How discouraged would you feel if something like this happened to you? When Marc graduated from college, in spite of his unprecedented accomplishments, he was known only to a few people in the business world. When he moved to Silicon Valley, no one rolled out the red carpet for him. He got a modest job as a junior engineer for a non-profit trade organization. Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics heard about Marc and invited him over for a meeting. Clark was looking for a new business to start and he recognized Marc's talent and his accomplishments with Mosaic. The two hit if off and spent months talking about potential businesses. Initially, Marc had only one condition: “I don't want the new venture to have anything to do with web browsers.” Can you understand why he felt this way? The whole experience with the University of Illinois must have been a huge disappointment for him. But you know what? After talking for several weeks, it became clear to him and Clark, that his personal disappointments aside, a Mosaic-like product was their best chance for success. So Marc got over his reluctance and again stepped into the lion's den. The result? 18 months later, he was worth over $100,000,000. Study this story. Realize that it is made up of critical decision points. At any one of those points, Marc could have given up. He could have decided NOT to invest the time and effort in acting on his creative idea. He could have decided to abandon his creation and NOT invest in supporting it and building a following. He could have decided to permanently give up on Mosaic after it was stolen from him by greedy bureaucrats at the University of Illinois.

Those decisions NOT to do something would have been easy and logical and no one would have ever criticized him for making them. But luckily for us and the world and him, when Marc hit a decision point, he made the decision to ACT positively. . Fortunes and success do not come from deciding NOT to act. They come from action. From meeting a decision point and finding the way to go forward. The key decision points for starting any business Here are the seven things you MUST do to make money online, or anywhere else: 1. Select the right market 2. Master the media that reaches your market 3. Develop and test offers to your market 4. Develop/acquire products that answer the demands of your market 5. Create ads and sales pieces that tell your story powerfully 6. Develop a back end 7. Refine and improve

Chapter Sixteen Fatal Marketing Mistakes Someday, I plan to offer a course called 'Why your product isn't selling as well as you'd like - and seven things you can do to fix it instantly.' I'd base it on my experience helping turn around countless 'hopeless' business situations and creating brand new products from scratch that have knocked the ball out of the park on practically the first swing. But until the course is ready, let me share a supercharged, condensed version of how I do what I do. Here's the principle I follow: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." This is good advice on how to live your life. It also happens to be excellent advice for marketers. Here's why... Many would be entrepreneurs fall into one of these two closely related marketing traps that kill their chances for success - before they even get started: 1) Fatal mistake #1: The 'me too' trap They see something that appears to be successful and then try to copy it. The problem with this approach - and we see this on the Internet all the time - is 10,000 people end up selling the same basic product, the same way. The market gets flooded and no one makes any money. Bad plan. 2) Fatal mistake #2: Being all things to all people Here's a good rule of thumb: 'When everyone is your customer, no one is your customer.' Businesses, especially small businesses, thrive on providing specialized products and services to very well defined, reachable niches. Trying to reach the ‘world’ is an expensive, infrastructure intensive operation which means you'll need mountains of cash just to get to the starting gate. Bad plan. It's much better to start by focusing your service on a very clearly defined group (golfers, martial

artists, dog lovers, stock traders, gardeners etc.) So what's the cure for these two fatal marketing mistakes? It’s a word you rarely hear in Internet marketing circles (unless you're at a System Seminar) Positioning. Positioning is important because it's literally where the marketing battle is won or lost. Everything else - price, ad copy, headlines, bonuses, guarantees etc. - plays second fiddle. Positioning literally means 'to stand for something.' Here are some examples: * Apple Computer stands for innovation and cutting edge design. There is no confusing an Apple product with a Dell. * Mercedes stands for luxury, comfort, fine engineering and durability. There is no mistaking a Mercedes with a Ford Taurus. * Paris stands for art, romance, fantastic food. There is no confusing Paris with Bayonne, NJ. Not only do these 'products' have consistent, crystal clear identities, but notice that they are also oneof-a-kind. If you want Paris, only Paris will do. If you want an Apple, only an Apple will do. Note also that none of these products tries to appeal to everyone. They shoot for a very particular audience. How about you? What's your positioning? What makes you absolutely different from everyone else in the market? What do you do that no one else does? What exact group of people do you serve? These are the questions you need to answer before you spend your first nickel on advertising. I know a little bit about positioning... In a matter of just a few months, I took a seminar idea and rocketed it to the top of the heap in an insanely competitive marketplace populated by some of the most aggressive marketers on earth. How did I do it?

Positioning. You can do it too. Here's an example of a clear 'positioning statement.' It's a tool that can help you form a unique identity and keep your business position on track for maximum profits. Why we don't hold seminars in Las Vegas First let me say up front that I've got nothing personal against Las Vegas. It's true that it's not in the top ten places I like to spend time. It's not even in my top 500, but I understand some people actually like hanging out in a barren desert whose main attraction is that it has replicas of places somewhere else that are actually interesting. Me, if I want to go to New York, I'll go to New York. If I want to go to Paris, I'll go to Paris. I'm not really impressed with 'Genuine Imitation Leather' either :-) But that's not the reason System seminars are not held in Las Vegas. Here's the real reason... Our very first System seminar was held in the most down-to-earth, no frills, unglamorous city I could think of: Cincinnati, Ohio. Why? Because I wanted to make a point. I wanted to get as far away from the Las Vegas, slot machine mentality as possible: "Gee, if I put some money in this machine and pull this level, maybe I'll make some cash." Real business is not a gamble...and going to a seminar shouldn't be either Real business people know this. The whole point of business is to use tested, proven methods to bring value to the marketplace and extract profits. It's work and, frankly, it's not always glamorous, but let's face it, a well run business that churns out five and six figures every month beats picking cotton or digging coal or punching a time clock. Before the System came along, the Internet marketing seminar world had really hit rock bottom. Folks would pay for seminars, but what they'd get instead were shameless, multi-day pitchfests promising the moon...and delivering cottage cheese. Instead of the educational event they thought they'd signed up for, they'd be pounded by one unrelated, disjointed presentation after another - all

ending with the same thing... a sales pitch for the 'real' secrets for sale available at the back of the room at a special price. It was disgraceful. "I've had it and I'm not going to take it any more" As the person who actually started the legitimate web marketing education movement back in 1994, I was pretty pissed off by what certain people were doing to my industry and its reputation. Not to mention how they were wasting the time and literally stealing the potential of people who had put their trust in them. So I launched the System both as a direct assault on these phonies and to share the real deal with people who are sincerely interested in learning how to build businesses online. Not the fantasy of making money online, the bankable reality. The System raised the bar. The System completely changed the climate in Internet marketing education and woke people up to the fact that they didn't have to take 'the same bad old deal' from Internet seminar producers any more Unfortunately, the System also created a great sales letter that pitch-a-thon promoters 'borrow' from liberally. It's really amazing - a joke really - how many Internet marketing gurus have 'borrowed' headlines, guarantees, copy themes, and marketing strategies straight from the System and then tried to paste them over the same old thing. Can't these guys come up with any ideas of their own? It wouldn't be so bad if they actually intended to deliver on the promises they 'borrow' from System sales letters, but I'm afraid there's a lot more to creating a great learning experience than 'borrowing' someone else's ad ideas. A very simple quality test - and some advice Here's a very simple method for evaluating a seminar or any product or service: read the testimonials. Are there any? Is there more than one? Are they believable? Are they detailed? If someone has been teaching a subject 'for years' and can't point you to a significant collection of detailed success stories, something ain't right. On a related point... It's become popular for certain 'hit and run' 'get rich quick' Internet gurus to talk about how smart it is to 'steal' other people's ideas. "Why create, when you can steal" is how one of them puts it. For the record, appropriating the advertising of your competitors is considered a 'low life' thing to do in big league marketing circles. If you do it, you're condemning yourself to forever occupying the lowest rungs on the business world's ladder. If that's what you aspire for yourself, have at it, but there

is a better way. It's one thing to adapt marketing concepts from other industries and non-competing businesses, but to wholesale plunder the ideas and positioning of your direct competitors is cheesy at best. Take the high road Basing your business on making inferior replicas of someone else's hard work can make you some money - and that's why certain people do it - but it's the short money and ultimately, it leads no where. Real, not artificial, excellence is what produces lasting wealth and it's what makes the world a better place. (Imagine what life would be like if the only things available to you when you went shopping were shoddy imitations of the real thing) You've always got a very clear choice when you consider where to invest in your Internet marketing education. You can go with the seminar that sets and continues to set the standard, The System - or you can 'go to Las Vegas' and take your chances. Have you ever been to the System Seminar? If not, here’s how you can get started: http://www.TheSystemClub.com/testdrive

Chapter Seventeen Multiple Channels In this lesson, I'm going to describe a powerful marketing strategy that is new to most Internet marketers, even a lot of old pros... and then I'm going to demonstrate it so you can see exactly how it works. First, get ready for a brand new buzz word that will probably be all over the Internet in about a year, but because you're a System Secrets student, you’ll learn about it here first… Here it is: 'multiple channels.' Currently, there are a lot people who have pure Internet-only businesses... They get all their traffic from the Internet...they communicate with their prospects and customers via the Internet only... and all their products are 100% digital. Ideal? Maybe, but maybe not Is a pure Internet business the ideal? I'm not convinced that it is and even as one of the very earliest pioneers of selling things on the Internet, I've always kept at least a toe in the 'real world.' Here's why... When you're 100% virtual and everything you do is on the Internet and the Internet alone, you're leaving money on the table...and quite possibly a lot of it. The other thing about Internet-only marketing is that it leaves you vulnerable... vulnerable to decreasing e-mail response rates... vulnerable to changes in search engine position... vulnerable to Internet 'copy cats.' Don't get me wrong. The Internet is, in my opinion and experience, the world's greatest marketing and business building tool. It's fast, it's inexpensive, it gives you immediate feedback - and it's easy to put on auto-pilot. But it never makes sense in business - or in any other aspect of life - to put all your eggs in one basket. How to diversify There are several tools that, when used with skill, are almost as easy to automate as e-mail.

They cost more to use than e-mail, but they have a lot more sales impact and when it comes to communicating with your clients and most promising prospects, you'll want to use them. They are: * the telephone (inbound and voice broadcast) * the fax machine (fax broadcast) * the mail and other live courier delivery systems * physical products like CDs, DVDs, books etc. Now realize that you don't have to integrate all these mediums into your marketing all at once, but if you want to maximize your income and add stability to your business, I recommend you start with one soon, master it and then go to the next one. An easy project to get started Here's a business nightmare... You've cultivated a nice list of big buyers... you conceive a great offer that's perfect for them... you press 'send' on your e-mail program... and nothing happens or response is a lot lower than you expected. What happened? Is it the letter? Is it the offer? Is it the time of year? It may be something this simple: your customers never read the e-mail because their mailboxes were full. But in any event, keep in mind that people have a second mailbox, the one that the post office delivers to. Here’s a simple project you can do to make the leap from being an e-mail only marketer to a marketer who uses multiple channels: First, take one of your digital products and put it on a CD with a nice looking package. Don't go crazy with expense. Just make it look 'good enough.' (Putting a CD in a DVD case is the way to go.) Second, offer the CD for free – or for free if the customer pays just shipping and handling. (Video Professor does this and it works very well for them.) Here's what this does... 1. It gets you in the practice of making physical rather than digital only products 2. It surprises your customers. (People love new stuff.) 3. It inspires you to find a fulfillment house (a company that will mail physical products) because you will quickly learn you don't want to personally ship things yourself

4. It identifies the members of your list who like to receive things by 'snail mail' 5. It gives you the opportunity to embed an offer in the CD for another product or upsell at no extra cost to you 6. Your physical CD is much more likely to be listened to than a downloadable audio file 7. Your physical CD will have a bigger impact on your relationship with your customers then a file sitting on their crowded hard drives. They can listen to it in the car, on the beach, they can lend it to friends... it can travel anywhere they go... easily. Tying physical products like this in with your Internet promotions is a very powerful thing to do. Take this book, for example. It started as a series of e-mails and now the vast majority of those e-mails have either been deleted or filed away deep in the bowels of people’s computers. In contrast, people don’t delete books. In fact, very often keep them in prominent places in their homes and offices.

Chapter Eighteen The Good and Bad News About Marketing Over three days... for over six hours on the telephone... I took a steady stream of questions from business owners, new and experienced, in a dizzying variety of businesses... A maker of educational toys... a well known marketer of cruise trips... a software development company with a staff of engineers in India ... a traditional book publisher... a tax advisor... a hypnotist... a guitar teacher... a floorings specialist...you name it, they called in - and got answers. I wasn't stumped once and I was able - on the spot and with no preparation - to give immediately actionable, breakthrough advice to every caller. How do I do it? Time and experience. There's no substitute for it. That's both the good news and the bad news about marketing. The good news is that, like anything else, marketing and advertising does get easier the more you do it (assuming you're getting good advice.) The bad news is there is no 'instant pill' you can take that will suddenly transform you into an expert marketer overnight. However, there are three things you can do to greatly accelerate your progress: 1. Study Read a lot, especially the classics of direct marketing. If you haven't already signed up for my book list, send an e-mail to [email protected] and get my top picks. There's no need to mortgage the farm to get a solid, first class education in direct marketing (Internet marketing is just direct marketing on the Internet.) Many of the very best books written by real marketing experts (not fly-by-night gurus) are available for less than $20. 2. Do As soon as you learn something, find ways to start applying it to something real. You don't necessarily have to start a full fledged business right out of the gate. You can help a friend or relative with theirs, or help a local non-profit or community organization. The key thing is to DO. The feedback you’ll get from real action will be worth all the guru - provided advice in the world.

3. Network Find other people who are interested in marketing and advertising and share notes and experiences with them. You can network online through various discussion boards, but frankly I find most online marketing boards to be a ridiculous waste of time - 'the blind leading the blind.' Money and reality There has never been a successful business venture in history that did not require hard work and the application of special skills. Anyone - and I don't care who it is - who claims that they have a secret way of entirely avoiding the hard work of business-building is a fraud... and yes that includes a lot of the 'famous' gurus. There are techniques that will save you time, that will automate your business, and that will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of practically everything you do, particularly marketing, but they all require work. There's no substitute for it. If the idea of work, of sacrificing leisure time, of spending money to build your business instead of on consumer items is a turn off to you, let me do you a big service and tell you right now - you are not cut out for starting and running a business of your own. On the other hand, if you are a person who understands that you have to put something in to get something worthwhile out, then, by all means, pursue your dream of owning your own business. Just remember to 'study, do and network'... If you're not making the progress you want to be making, odds are you're missing one or more of those three elements. Advice from a mail order master Here's some old and very good advice from one of my earliest mentors in mail order, the late Cecil Hoge, Sr. who I had the privilege of meeting and working with: "Beware of mail order quack 'expert' advice. Any specific advice to select a certain article, sell it at a certain price, use certain 'sure thing' forms of advertising, create advertising in a certain 'foolproof' way, almost any simple and certain advice to make money almost automatically disappoints a newcomer in mail order." - Cecil Hoge, Sr. In other words, there is no, fool-proof, effortless recipe for making money. On the Internet, be particularly wary of people who offer expensive 'reprint rights' deals, especially if

you’re a beginner. Good content is relatively easy to find and license. What's not easy is finding prospects and customers. If you already have a lot of qualified customers, you can sell other people's products to them on an entirely risk-free basis. You don't need to front thousands of dollars for 'rights.' On the other hand, if you don't have a good sized customer list, buying resale or reprint rights won't do you any good. Here’s something else Cecil said that is worth paying attention to: "Avoid simplistic, get-rich-quick mail order courses, books or schemes of any kind. Their trademark is the absence of any difficulty. They take advantage of those least qualified. They give even those who would otherwise have a chance advice that can often be a recipe for losing money in mail order. Rather than being professionals in mail order, they are professionals in getting people into mail order the wrong way with the least chance." - Cecil Hoge, Sr. Cecil hits the nail on the head with this statement. It sums up what really pisses me off about the ever expanding flock of bogus marketing gurus. First, they take money from people based on false promises. Second, as if that weren't bad enough, they sometimes ruin the chances of people who could have been successful had they been given good advice in the first place. That's the reason why I give away so much free information before every System Seminar. First, e-mail makes it affordable. Second, I want to make sure that the many thousands of people who are attracted to our promotions don't end up in the wrong hands later. Not all Internet seminars are created equal. Not all marketing gurus are dealing from a clean deck of cards. There is good advice out there - a lot of it - but you have to be a wary consumer, especially when large amounts of money are at stake. There's one final thing every would-be entrepreneur needs to know. It's this... running your own business is one of the most satisfying, exhilarating things you can possibly do. It's also one of the most challenging. Count on this... you will get knocked down many times. It won't all be 'strawberries and cream.' If you're the kind of person who bounces back from setbacks and rises to the occasion, you've got a very good chance of making it work. The truth is, things don't get easier. Instead we get stronger, smarter, more resilient and more resourceful by sticking to it.

The absolute best description of the reality of business and career building I ever heard came from the late TV host and comedian Johnny Carson, a man who certainly attained the absolute pinnacle of success in his 'niche.' Johnny Carson said this: "The road to success is always under construction." If you can live with that, you have a good shot at achieving great things with your life.

Chapter Nineteen What Makes You Different? Very often it's issued as a challenge: "What makes YOU so different?" The fact is if you plan to succeed in business - online or off - this is one question you really need to have an answer to. This lesson will be useful to everyone who does business online, whether you're looking for a new business to start or are trying to find ways to explode your profits with a big sales breakthrough. The Challenge One of the baseline facts of life for your prospects and customers today is OVERLOAD. Too much to do, too much to learn, too much to take care of... and too little time. I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about. Believe me, it's the same for everybody. And not only do your prospects and customers have a shortage of time, they have a drastic shortage of attention span. By the way, this is not because they have ADD or they're dumb. It's because there are so many competing ideas and images banging on their heads all day. You've read the statistics. DM News, the weekly newspaper of the direct marketing industry, put it best: "Today, the average person sees more ads in one year than people of 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime." And that's a quote from 1997. My guess is that since the advent of the Internet, things have gotten much worse. The Solution So what are we as advertisers to do? Should we scream and shout? Should we end every sentence in our sales letters with eighteen

exclamation points? Should we pile on bonuses and rebates? No. The answer is much simpler, much more elegant - and much more powerful. Strangely, not 1 in 100 advertisers on the Internet or elsewhere bother to use it. It's this: "Be different." You've probably heard this a million times. Let me tell you what this commonly repeated advice really means and how to use it in your business. Your nervous system... That's right, your nervous system. Your brain, your brain chemicals, your spinal cord and all the nerves in your body. They all work together like a grand symphony and they do basically one or two things: or 2. They're paying attention Here's an example of automatic pilot... You jump in the car and drive to the store to get a gallon of milk. Nothing new, nothing unusual. You can practically do it in your sleep. Being on auto-pilot is reality for most people most of the time. It has to be, otherwise we'd go nuts trying to sort out all kinds of new and unusual things all day long. But in addition to 'automatic pilot' mode, people are also capable of going into 'paying attention' mode... 'It's fourth down...Eight seconds are left on the clock...Your home team is down by four points...They've got the ball on the three yard line.' Are you paying attention? You bet you are!

Here's how this applies to marketing. Unless your prospect is in 'paying attention' mode, you can't sell to him. I know this sounds blazingly obvious, but failing to put your customer into 'paying attention' mode has been such a big problem for so many advertisers for so long that the great adman David Ogilvy had to make up a Rule for it: "You cannot bore your customers into buying." The short cut To succeed in your marketplace, people need to notice you, listen to you and remember you. It sounds like a tall order, but fortunately there's a shortcut you can use that takes care of all three. Here it is: Be new. By definition, anything that is 'new' is automatically different. And anything that's different is automatically memorable. Why? Because of the nervous system. The nervous system is programmed to ignore the usual (the trip to the store for milk) and pay close attention to what's new. It only makes sense. Think back to caveman times. Survival was tough. Finding the basics like food, water and shelter was a big deal. Danger in the form of saber-tooth tigers was everywhere. In order to survive, our ancestors the cavemen learned to pay attention to any changes in the status quo. 'What was that sound in the bush?' 'Hey, I found a new water hole!'

‘Here's a new spear point that works much better than the old one.' Progress and safety came from being attuned to the new. It still does. (Notice how progress and safety correspond to the old 'fear and greed' formula of marketing motivators. The reason these motivators are so powerful is they are deeply wired into and the reason they are so deeply wired is they're about staying alive - way up on the 'important things to do today list' of every creature!) 'But how the heck do I make my product new?' Let me be straight up with you about this: It's an art. It's not one of these 'three easy steps' kinds of things. On the other hand, it's an art that you can learn and I daresay it could well be the most valuable thing you ever learn when it comes to marketing and advertising. First, start with the understanding that you MUST make your product 'new.' It's not an option. It's either that or marketing death. Second, take lessons from the experts. No, not the Internet marketing 'gurus.' The real pros. Ever heard of a little industry called the news media? All day long, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they have to come up with strategies for turning more of the same old thing into news. If you expand your vision a little bit and include supermarket checkout magazines like Cosmopolitan, you'll see that they have the same challenge too. How do you take the same old thing and make it new enough for people to buy the latest issue month after month? In the case of Cosmo, they're only working with a handful of themes: dating, sex, losing weight and looking better. And yet every month, they come up with something new to say that catches their prospects’ fancy. Notice that I said 'something new to say.'

And therein lies the clue. People like novelty. In fact, their brains depend on it to figure out what among all the zillions of things that are going on are worth paying attention to. To succeed at selling, you need to be developing new things to say about your product all the time. Luckily, we're not in the news business so we don't need to create new things 24/7, but my strongest recommendation to you as a marketer is to come up with something brand new to say about your product at least once a month. Have you ever heard this advice before? Well, if you're in the info marketing business you have and it goes like this: "Put out a newsletter every month." Note the word 'news' in newsletter. Newsletter doesn't mean 'send some junk out every now and then with a pitch for something.' Folks get tired of that real fast. Don't you? Newsletter means 'new' and if you want your readers to pay attention to what you're sending them, there better be something new in it every time. The Big Myth shattered Some copywriting 'gurus' like to talk about how important the sales letter is. And they're right - partially. Unfortunately, they leave out one huge piece of the puzzle: The sales letter is just the first step in building a business. They like to sell the idea that if you give them a big check to write a 'killer' sales letter then all your marketing problems will be solved forever. Wrong! To keep your customers interested and coming back for more (the secret of success on the Internet), you need to create and distribute a never-ending stream of new ideas about your products. 'Hot shot' copywriters can't and won't do this for you.

They're in the business of writing the BIG letter, getting the big check and going their merry way. The good ones - the rare ones - are worth their weight in gold and can help your business enormously, but they can't carry the business for you no matter how good their sales letters are and it's a fatal mistake to believe they can. Bottom line: YOU are the one who has got to become the expert on continuously figuring out the 'news' element in your products and getting the word out. How to make old things new Your product is 'old' to you, isn't it? You know everything about it. How it came to be created...What went into developing it... All its features... How it compares to competing products in the market... Special ingredients etc. But how much of this do your prospects know? My guess is very, very little. Here's your task: Collect facts and stories about your product and use them on a regular basis in your ads and communication with your customers. It's amazing how powerful even 'old news' can be when it's told to people for the first time. For example, in one celebrated case, copywriting legend Claude Hopkins skyrocketed the sales of Schlitz Beer by doing nothing more than describing how the beer was brewed. It was the same old beer and it was brewed the same exact way every other beer at the time was brewed - with deep well water and specially selected hops - but learning the details of how it was made was brand new to beer drinkers. What impact did this campaign have on Schlitz' sales? Schlitz went from fifth to tie for first in a very lucrative and competitive marketplace. New = different = memorable = your product is front and center... which is what it's all about.

Are there other tricks for finding news where none seems to exist? There sure are. Here's a good one: Case studies of people who've purchased your product and used it successfully make for great 'news.' Mercedes Benz ran a successful ad series once that featured people who'd gotten tremendous mileage out of their cars: 200,000, 300,000, even 400,000 miles. That's new and different and memorable (I think I saw that series of ads 35 years ago, and I still remember them.) For anyone interested in buying a tough car that lasts a long time, those ads were real deal closers. The take-away from all this: 1. Including the 'news' element in your ads is essential. If it isn't new, it's dead. 2. There are lots of great models you can study for ideas on how to inject the 'news' element into your advertising. See how the news media does it. Study the supermarket checkout tabloids. 3. Injecting the 'news' element into your ads does not have to be a matter of cooking up something fancy or outrageous or even over-the-top. Just change your perspective a bit. Practice looking at your product through fresh eyes, see it from all angles as if it were the first time and then tell your story.

Chapter Twenty The Dreaded 'T' Word 'Trust' It's a word that isn't used much in Internet marketing guru circles. Instead the emphasis is on what I call 'look-how-smart-I-am' marketing. Some marketers seem to think that selling is about tricking people into taking action. Or if that fails, bribing them. This kind of marketer likes to say: 'The product doesn't matter. It's all about the marketing.' I don't know who started this particular nonsense, but they deserve a special seat in the hot place down below. The truth is the quality of what you offer matters and it matters a lot. Here's why: * Quality motivates repeat sales * Quality reduces returns * Quality stimulates positive word of mouth In other words, offering quality makes you money because it does the one thing your advertising, no matter how clever, can never do: It earns the trust of your customers. I can almost hear the 'fly-by-night' gurus snickering. "Trust? Who needs that? I'm raking it in and I only need to have people believe me long enough to separate them from their money." These folks have no faith in their products, in their customers or in the marketplace. Instead they base their businesses on gimmicks. Businesses based on gimmicks have a very short life. The reality is that trust is the most important ingredient in building a business. A radical notion, I know :-) How trust works Actually, you already know how trust works in a buying situation.

You experience it every day when you're a buyer. If you have two sources for a product, one you trust and the other you don't trust, which one are you going to buy from? That one was easy. How about this example: What if the company you don't trust has a celebrity as its spokesman and the one you do trust doesn't? Would that make a difference to you? The answer is no. Celebrities generate attention but they can't overcome a perceived lack of trustworthiness. Prospects are MUCH smarter than the gurus give them credit for. They know when someone's being paid to pitch a schlock product. Now imagine that the company you don't trust offers you a discount. How big does that discount need to be to overcome the fact you have no faith in their product? Pretty big. After all, who in their right mind would care about getting a 'good deal’ on a product that doesn't work? For example, how much would you pay for a TV that plays nothing but commercials? Less than zero, right? What about bonuses? In the Internet marketing world, bonuses are as common as grass, aren't they? Here's the reality about bonuses: You can stack them as high as you want, but if your prospect doesn't believe you, he won't believe your bonuses either. Bonuses work on prospects who believe your offer, but need an extra nudge to say 'yes.' Bonuses can't overcome a dubious offer or reputation. So what's the 'secret?' When it comes to earning trust, the secret is there is no secret. Trust is something you earn, not with clever tricks, but by delivering on your claims and promises.

If you'd like a formula for earning the trust of your customers, here's a good one to follow: 1. Source or create the best product you can 2. Present it in a provocative and believable way, and 3. Deliver what you promise 4. Repeat It's so simple and yet this one 'trick' - more than anything else - will make you a 'marketing genius' overnight.

Chapter Twenty One How to Achieve Anything You Want In addition to their skills in various aspects of Internet marketing, our System faculty members and guest speakers are practical experts on what I call “sustained positive attention.” I'm not talking about “positive thinking” or motivational “pep talks.” I'm talking about a scientific approach to achievement. We can and do give students at System trainings the state-of-the-art in Internet marketing, but we also want to make sure they have the “inner” technology needed to absorb the material and use it. Lest you think I’m talking about vague, pie-in-the-sky voodoo, let me assure you that our students have used this technology to make a ton of money. One System grad used it to smash the $100,000 a month barrier in sales – a significant number for a one-man company. Another used it to go from knowing nothing about Internet marketing to becoming a recognized expert in the field in less than two years – based on the pile of money he made while he was learning. A third took his online sales from $2,000 to over $30,000 a month in just three months. There are pages of similar success stories at http://www.TheSystemSeminar.com Inspiration vs. Desperation We all hit plateaus and get into ruts. You may be in one right now. Everyone knows it takes energy to get out of a rut and go on to the next level. But what kind of energy and where do you get it? I can answer both these questions. It's been said that the motivation people need to make big changes in their lives comes from one of only two sources: desperation or inspiration. Having been in desperate straits more than once in my life, I know there is nothing like “do or die” to focus the mind. But let's face it, desperation is not the most pleasant energy to work with. What about inspiration? Inspiration works too, but unlike desperation which falls on you like a ton of bricks, inspiration lifts you up. From a strictly practical point of view, inspiration will take you a lot further than desperation. Desperation is about survival and as powerful as the survival instinct is, it’s ultimately a limited force. Inspiration, on the other hand, is about harnessing the wide-ranging, unlimited powers of the human imagination and spirit. Inspiration will also take you to much more interesting and satisfying life destinations than the survival instinct alone. (If you’ve ever met a financially ‘successful’ person who wasn’t happy or well balanced, you’ve encountered someone who is mentally locked into survival mode.)

Finally, in practical terms, while desperation may get you going, it’s inspiration that will keep you going and it’s ‘keeping on’ that’s the real secret of success.

Engineering your happiness Another major advantage of inspiration over desperation is that you can learn how to provide yourself with inspiration whenever you need it. I've been a serious student of various “positive thinking” and “motivational” methods since I was a teenager. Of all the material I've worked with, the two programs I most highly recommend are: “The Science of Personal Achievement” by Napoleon Hill and “The NEW Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy. Both these programs are available and very affordable and can be purchased from NightingaleConant. I suggest these two programs above all others because: 1 - They are time-proven (thousands, if not millions, of people have used the material from Hill and Maltz successfully) and 2 - They present what you need to know to work with your mind in a very thorough and systematic way. It’s nothing short of miraculous how far techniques like those written about by Hill and Maltz can take you. Vision and Inspiration I don't like the word “motivation.” The reason I don't like it is that it sounds like work. I also don't like the idea of someone using motivation like a club to “make” me do something I don't want to do. I infinitely prefer inspiration because inspiration comes from within and YOU choose what to be inspired about. Inspiration is the natural result of your own vision of things, not someone else's program that you are forcing yourself, or being forced, to follow. The key to inspiration is self-knowledge, first knowing what it is that you want and second, working with yourself – your strengths and your weaknesses – to get it. Think of yourself as an army with many divisions. The divisions are your abilities. You probably have one or two ‘divisions’ that are naturally very strong. If you are like most people, you may have several that are weak. So what would you do if you were a general and put in charge of an army with mixed abilities? If you were smart and serious about winning, you'd use your strong divisions to the fullest and ally

yourself with other forces in areas where you are weak. I realize that this may sound simplistic, but it is truly a road to riches. The “do it yourself” attitude is a great place to start because it forces you to learn all the aspects of your business, but to achieve maximum success, you’ll want to spend your day doing mostly what you are good at and enjoy doing and organize things so that others (partners, employees, vendors, etc.) do the things you're not so good at. It sounds easy and when it's working, it is, but it takes thinking, planning and “sustained positive attention” to create your own personal success system and get it up and running. The good news is that not only is it within your power to do so, but also there’s literally nothing that can stop you once you clearly see what needs to be done.

Parting Words... I realize that not everyone is going to become a System student and that Internet marketing may prove not to be your business path. But whatever you decide to do in life, I urge you to take the time to discover what it is that really inspires you. Don't “borrow” your motivation from someone else. Personal goals are just that, personal, and they don't exist to make sense, impress or satisfy anyone else. Once you discover personally meaningful goals, take them seriously. They are, after all, as important as your life. Define what your personal “winner’s circle” will look like. Take stock of what you have now – your assets and liabilities – and figure out how you can leverage your assets to collect more tools and resources and how you can neutralize your weaknesses by forming alliances with others. If you were planning on taking a long hike in the mountains, you'd know that certain things are essential to getting to the top (good shoes, ample food and water, a map etc.) Attaining business or life goals is no different – but you are the only one who can figure out what mountain you want to climb and what YOU need to get to the top. One last bit... I first heard this when I really needed it and it struck me like a thunderbolt: “Everyone has problems. Everyone. But successful people figure out how to solve theirs. That's the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.” Don't be the sum of your “problems.” Figure out how to rise above them. And the very best way to do that is to find a personally inspiring mountain to climb, get your gear together and start climbing. Put one foot after another. It will change your life. In this, and every endeavor, success is up for grabs and goes to the people who are willing to intelligently and persistently work for it. If you are that kind of person, I sincerely hope that we meet some day.

About Ken McCarthy Ken McCarthy was one of the original pioneers of the movement to commercialize the Internet. He sponsored the first conference on the subject of the Web’s commercial potential in 1994 with the co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreessen. That same year Ken wrote the first article on e-mail advertising that was published in a legitimate marketing industry trade journal. Rick Boyce, who is widely credited with popularizing the banner ad, credits Ken with introducing him to the idea that the Internet could be used as an advertising medium. Ken’s book “The Internet Business Manual” was the first book on Internet entrepreneurship published in Japan and for many years he served as a consultant to NEC, the Japanese equivalent to IBM, advising them on Internet matters. Since 1993, Ken has developed numerous cutting edge training programs that have not only helped his clients make more money, but have also served to advance the state-of-the-art in Internet marketing practice. Ken’s System Seminar is now recognized as the foremost Internet marketing training in the world. Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted him the exclusive right to use the phrase “The System” to describe Internet marketing education products. Before entering the Internet field, Ken produced concerts and radio programs; taught advanced learning strategies at MIT and Columbia University; worked on Wall Street; founded a direct marketing consulting company; and helped start an audio post production studio in New York City that was involved in the making of an Academy Award winning film and one of the highest grossing foreign language films of all time. Ken’s work both on and off the Internet has been acknowledged in a number of books including The Complete Guide to Internet Publicity by Steve O’Keefe, Peak Learning by Ron Gross, and How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan Kennedy.

For more information about Ken McCarthy http://www.KenMcCarthy.com

RESOURCES About the System Club The System Club is one of the oldest Internet marketing mastermind groups on the planet. To learn more about the Club and how to join: http://www.TheSystemClub.com/testdrive.html System Home Study Courses: System Smart Beginners – The foundations course for people who are new to Internet marketing and want to get the benefits of a System training without the expense of attending the live seminar: http://www.SmartBeginners.com Advanced Copywriting and Info Marketing Strategies – Learn exactly what it takes to build a six and seven figure a year information marketing business by someone who’s done it and helped many others do it too. http://www.KensCopyClinic.com

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