No matter what kind of business you own or operate, this simple fact will make or break you. I don’t care what you’re selling, in the end it comes down to this one simple business building block. And most people never think of their business in this way!

You are in business to do one thing….buy money.

How cheaply you buy money determines how successful you will be.

I might spend $10 dollars to buy $20 dollars.

I might spend $200 dollars to buy $240 dollars.

I might spend $4,000 dollars to buy $5,000 dollars.

Investors understand this fact easier because it’s not abstract to them. They spend $1,000 dollars on stock in a company, they expect to be able to sell that stock for more than $1,000 dollars in the future. They’re buying money.

As a business owner you should look at everything you do this same way.

How many orders will I generate if I buy this ad space? If I spend $100 on advertising, will that generate more than $100 in income? If so you have a winner…you can then “buy money”.

Let’s say you spend $100 on advertising, and it generates $150 in income (for example). You’ve just bought $150 and it only cost you $100.

Every penny you spend on your business should be spent with one thought in mind…

“How much money/income will spending this penny generate?”

The Internet is great. You can monitor EVERYTHING. I can throw up a web site and buy ad space somewhere. Then I can watch my server logs and see exactly how many site visitors that ad generated, and how many sales those visitors generated.

I can then determine for every X number of people that visit the site, 1 person buys.

I can then determine for every X amount of dollars I spend on advertising, Y number of people will come to my site, resulting in $Z dollars in profit.

At this point I can pretty much buy money! All you do then is focus on spending more and more money on advertising because you know that whatever you spend on advertising, you’re going to make more than that amount of money from sales.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Welcome to part 4 of the step by step business creation guide. Part 1, 2, and 3 can be found in our archives.

It’s been another busy week for the project, and we’re just about ready to start promoting it and making some money.

First off, the web site is done and you can take a look at it here:
http://www.MakeMoneyOnline-Now.com

I’ve also finished writing the first letter of the automated backend follow-up system, which you can read here:

http://www.MakeMoneyOnline-Now.com/backend.txt

I wanted to finish writing all the backend follow-up letters last week, but I just didn’t get the time. I’ve decided there will be three letters initially (one sent per week starting a few days after a person initially orders), and then after that one letter every 3-4 weeks or so.

These letters will pitch various backend products to people who buy the eBook from the site and you will be able to read them all to see how I do it as soon as they are completed.

Remember, the backend is where you make the real money in any online business if you’re smart, that is!

So now, the only thing left to do is start promoting the web site and driving in some traffic, and hopefully sales.

I’d like to talk briefly this week about the whole promotion process.

First off, when promoting any web site I start out by submitting it to all the major search engines. I only bother with the main 15 or so search engines because any others simply don’t bring you any traffic. I mean not a single person.

So we need to submit our new site to the search engines and for this I will use my trusty Submission-Spider software (http://www.submission-Spider.com) I know I’m biased because I own the company that develops that software (in fact I’m the lead programmer that designed it), but it really is the best tool out there in my opinion.

I could write a whole course on using that software to drive in traffic, actually I already have and if you haven’t picked up your free copy of it do so today at:

Drive SEO traffic

So using it is the first step to promoting our site.

But it’ll take a few weeks to get good and listed at the search engines because that’s just how long it takes to get a site listed these days.

We’ll be taking a more direct role in the site’s promotion. So the next major thing we need to do is draw up a budget and start allocating funds.

For this product I’ve decided to start out with around $300 bucks for promotion, advertising, etc. Normally I would probably start out with more, but I want to show how it can be done with less – for anyone who doesn’t have a large startup budget.

Plus $300 is a small amount to risk in case this product is a complete failure! We only have to sell 15 of the eBooks at $19.99 each to break even.

To compensate for the small advertising startup budget, for the first couple of months ALL the profits we make will be reinvested back in and spent on additional advertising and promotion. Then once we’re well established and making good money, a percentage off all profit will be reinvested and used for ongoing advertising and promotion, forever.

That way we’ll keep earning money forever as opposed to earning a bunch of money at first then nothing in the future.

That’s the thing about Internet business, it’s direct marketing. If you stop spending money on advertising, you stop making sales…immediately. The trick is to make sure each sale you make costs less in advertising than the profit you make.

Or to put it another way, for each dollar you spend on advertising, you should make at least $1.01 in sales. If you make more in sales then you spend on advertising, you succeed.

There are cases where you can spend more on advertising than you earn in sales and still succeed. For instance, if I spend $1 dollar on advertising and that directly results in .50 cents worth of sales all is not necessarily lost. Remember, we’ll make a lot of money on the backend selling to those customers over and over again in the future.

But that’s getting a little advanced for this project. For now we’ll focus only on making a profit on the front end :)

So how should we spend our $300? I think we should split it between conventional ezine advertising and pay per click search engines like overture as well as the pay per click google ad words program (which I’ve haven’t used yet but am anxious to test out).

I’d say 50/50 between the ezine advertising and the pay per click search engines. For $150 we should be able to buy 3, maybe 4 small advertisements in several decent sized ezines.

I’ll spend the rest of the week creating ads and picking which ezines to advertise in, and setting up our pay per click accounts. Next week I’ll discuss this all in more detail, show exactly where we spend our money and show you the ads we’ll be running. Hopefully I can also show you the results of our pay per click campaign.

I’ve been thinking about selling 6 or 7 distributor licenses for this product and wonder what you think about that. The licenses would give a person complete rights to sell this product themselves and keep all the profit. I don’t want to sell many of these licenses because I don’t want to flood the market like most reseller programs do..

Since I’ll be showing you exactly how I sell this product, it would seem that a distributor would be able to use the same techniques and rake in a fortune.

Like I said, I’d restrict it to only 6 or 7 individuals, and the license would cost at least a thousand dollars (I’d accept monthly payments of $99 per month for 10 months). To earn back the cost of the license a person would only have to sell 50 copies of the eBook (less than 2 per day for one month!).

And I’d offer to help the distributors sell at least that many. I’m just not sure if I want to go this route with the project. Email me if you are interested in purchasing a distributor license and if the demand is there I will consider doing it.

I think it’d be really neat to end this ezine article series with a couple of issues about how well those 6 or 7 distributors did too! So email me if you’re interested but email me quickly because I’m only going to offer 6 or 7 licenses (if I offer any at all!) and they’ll go to those who email me first. First come first serve.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Let me ask you one question.

What is the most important part of your online business?

If you guessed writing good sales copy, you guessed correctly.

Your web site must do all the selling for you, therefore what you write on your web site must totally convince a person to buy your product.

It’s this sales writing (or copywriting) that will make or break your business.

You can have the best product in the world, but if you can’t convince a person to try it, it won’t sell.

How do you write copy that sells? That’s the hard part.

The secret is to know “who” you are writing to.

We call this targeting. You target a certain group of people, and write directly to them.

For instance, if you’re selling vanity dog collars, you would speak to (target) dog owners. You would talk to them like a dog owner talks about their dog.

So what do dog owners want to hear? If you know that, you can tell them exactly what they want to hear through your sales copy.

And that will make all the difference in the world. It can mean the difference between a sale and outright rejection!

Throughout all your business life, you’ll be doing nothing more than convincing people to buy things. Therefore, the more you know about different types of people, the easier it will be for you to sell whatever it is you’re selling.

What makes different people want to buy things? What Turns them away no matter what the product is or how amazing it is? How can you get into their heads and really tell them what they want to hear, and what they need to know in order to decide to purchase?

I’ve just uncovered an amazing resource that will help you with this very problem.

With 20 years of psychological research containing over 12,000 interviews from various groups of people, The Brooks Group has put together a set of sales profiles of over 32 group occupations.

These profiles let you dig into the heads of 32 different groups of people. You’ll learn what makes them tick, what psychological words and phrases make them buy as well as turn them away.

Entrepreneurs, CEO’s, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, the list goes on and on. You’ll learn to think like they think in order to sell them whatever you want.

Imagine the incredible power you will have when you own these reports.

The first profile I bought was the one on Entrepreneurs. Being an Entrepreneur myself, I thought it would be a good one to test out.

As I was reading the report, it was like someone was sitting next to me describing myself in intimate detail. This report described me to a T. It was creepy, let me tell you. But I will say, anyone using that information to try to sell me something would have no problem at all getting me to buy.

The report TELLS you how to sell to each group. It shows exact phrases that create emotional triggers that cause a person to buy. More, it makes you NEED to buy.

These are great no-nonsense practical tools that you should buy right away and devour instantly. Read them over and over again.

Each group profile is short and to the point, so you won’t waste any of your valuable time. They pack so much information into 20-30 pages it’s amazing.

Each group profile costs just $28 bucks. I can’t believe they charge so little for these. They’re worth their weight in gold yet cost less than a couple of pizzas.

Head over and take a look, I promise you that you’ll thank me! Check them out at:

http://www.WebPromotion-Weekly.com/triggers.cgi

Curious? You should be, I used some of the tips I learned in one of the reports to write this letter! I used some of the psychological triggers to motivate you to check it out.

Even if you don’t buy any of the reports yourself, go check out the web site. Study the sales letter, it’s very hypnotic – you can learn a thing or two just from studying it.

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Well, I’m officially back from my vacation. I hope you are having as good a summer as I am!

This week, since it’s my first day back, I wanted to dive back into things with an article about marketing books.

Knowledge is the greatest weapon any Internet Marketer can wield. It’s also one of the hardest to obtain.

With so many “gurus” out there who claim to be experts in marketing, it’s easy to fall in with someone who either doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or is simply spouting marketing dogma that they heard someone else say (but themselves have never practiced).

So what are you to do? You need knowledge, but you don’t want to waste money and time on useless crap.

I suggest you start with the classics. In order to learn Internet Marketing, you really ought to first learn regular marketing.

More specifically, direct marketing and direct advertising.

After all, selling on the Internet is really only a form of direct marketing.

So read and learn from the classic direct marketers. People who have earned millions of dollars in the field and who are widely respected.

These are a few of the authors in my own personal library. You won’t be disappointed with any of them.

* John Caples

* Joe Sugarman

* David Ogilvy

* Claude Hopkins

* Ben Suarez

* Gary Halbert

* Jay Abraham

These guys are the real deal. They are the pro’s. Some like Ogilvy and Hopkins spent their entire stunning careers, heck their whole lives doing this stuff.

But where to start? Here’s a breakdown of books you will want to read, they can all be found at amazon.com:

-My Life In Advertising By Claude Hopkins ($11)

-Ogilvy on Advertising By David Ogilvy ($17)

-Tested Advertising Methods By John Caples ($13)

-Advertising Secrets of the Written Word By Joe Sugarman ($40)

-7 Steps To Freedom II How To Escape The American Rat Race By Ben Suarez ($2 used, $20 new)

-The Gary Halbert Letter (free newsletter archive) http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/

-Jay Abraham’s web site: http://abraham.com/

These books should more than get you started. Buy one or two and start reading. They’re not expensive books but they’re filled with priceless information. You’ll get more out of them than the $1,000 guru packages that sell online these days!

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

I’ve officially extended my vacation by another week (hey it’s summer!). So I’ve asked my friend Larry Dotson to write this weeks article for you. I think you’ll enjoy it. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski

10 Tips For Writing An Unforgettable Ad!

by Larry Dotson

1. Publish a picture of yourself in your ad. This will show people that you’re not hiding behind your web site and you’re not afraid to backup your product.

2. List how many famous or respected people have purchased your product in your ad. These people should be fairly known by your target audience.

3. Publish the results of any tests your product has passed in your ad. Your product may have passed a durability test, safety test, quality test, etc.

4. Publish the results of any positive surveys you’ve taken from your customers in your ad. Just survey your current customers and list the results.

5. List any publications that have written about your business in your ad. It could be a product review, on a top ten list, an article, etc.

6. List any related books that you’ve written in your ad. When you list a book(s) you’ve wrote, it gives you credibility because it shows you’re an expert.

7. Have a professional looking web site to publish your ad on. When people visit your site and it looks unprofessional, they’ll relate that to your product.

8. Publish any endorsements from famous people in your ad. Some people will think if a famous person,
enjoys your product, so will they.

9. Use a money back guarantee in your ad. This will remove the risk from your potential customers and show them that you stand behind your product.

10. Provide testimonials from satisfied customers in your ad. The testimonials should include specific and believable results your customers have received.
—-
50,000 FREE eBooks, Web Books, Courses And
More! Visit: http://www.ldpublishing.com

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

Hello,

This week we’ll be departing from the normal article as I want to introduce you to something a little different that I think you’ll find very interesting.

Today I want to tell you about Semiotics (or Semiology), which is the study of signs, symbols, and signification. Yes, this relates to online business…think advertising….

Huh?

Signs and Symbols are the kinds of things you use in your advertising which draw people to your products.

Semiotics is the study of those signs and their significance. It’s all a little new to me too, but it’s very interesting stuff that you can directly apply to all of your advertising to make your ads more effective.

And since we all know that advertising is the cornerstone of online business (whether it be in print, or in ezines or banners on web sites) anything we can learn that will increase the effectiveness of our advertising is a very good thing…

A buddy of mine showed me this free online course on Semiotics created by Tom Streeter, for his students in Survey of Mass Media at the University of Vermont.

It’s all about Semiotics and its application to modern advertising.

It’s very interesting and in depth…and free, so this week all I’m going to do is point you to that free course and suggest you give it a read.

The course is located here:

http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/index.html

It’s kind of like an online slide show that you can read from your web browser…and did I mention it’s free?

So check it out!

That’s all for this week. See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski