Hello,

Welcome to part 5 of the step by step business creation guide. Part 1-4 can be found in our archives.

I have a confession to make. I’d hoped to be able to tell you that I had started promoting the site and sales were pouring in…but the fact of the matter is I didn’t have time to do a single thing with the project this last week.

I didn’t even get a chance to finish writing the backend follow-up letters or open our overture.com or google adwords accounts.

I do apologize for the lapse, I just had too much other work to take care of. It was a busy week. :-)

I did decide to re-write the copy of the web page yet again (I still just don’t quite like the copy that I’ve already written). And I’ve already pounded most of it out in my head, I just need to put it to paper and then upload it to the site.

I think it will be pretty good.

So this week I would like to talk about setting up the overture.com account. As you probably know, Overture.com is the worlds leading pay per click search engine.

That means you can buy targeted “clicks” or visitors to your site. You bid against other people for any specific keyword or phrase that you think best targets your web site.

Overture can be tricky. You don’t want to bid too much for a keyword. You need to really calculate how much each visitor to your site is worth.

To do that you have to calculate your visitor to sales ratio.

This is basically a number that says “For every X number of people that visit my site, 1 person buys my product”.

So if 1 person out of 100 site visitors buys your product, your visitor to sales ration is 100 to 1 (100:1).

Next we would calculate how much those 100 visitors are worth.

Let’s say you sell a $20 product. If 1 out of every 100 people that visits your site buys your $20 product, then each visitor is worth about .20 cents.

Or to put it another way, you should be willing to pay up to .20 cents per visitor. Why? Because if you pay .20 cents per visitor for 100 visitors that equals $20 (.20 times 100).

You pay $20 for the visitors, 1 out of 100 of them buys your product for $20, you have just broke even.

The trick then, is simply to find a way to pay less than .20 cents per visitors. If you can do this, you make a profit (not even taking into consideration back-end sales of course!).

For our project, we don’t know what each visitor is worth yet because we have no site traffic yet, and no sales. So it’s going to be a little tricky at first determining how much to spend at overture.com

I’ll try to spend as little as possible at first until we get a steady stream of site visitors and sales so that I can determine our visitor to sales ratio.

Determining your visitor to sales ratio is not only useful for using overture.com, but for any advertising you
do.

If you don’t know your own ratio, I highly urge you to calculate it. You’ll need to watch your server logs to analyze your site traffic (or use some type of counter to count the number of visitors that come to your site).

Spend a few weeks watching your site traffic and corresponding orders to get as accurate a visitor to sales ratio as possible.

Your ratio will always fluctuate. It won’t always stay exactly the same. If your rate is 250:1 there’s no absolute guarantee that for EVERY SINGLE 250 people that come to your site, one will buy. Sometimes it might be 300:1 sometimes 205:1 sometimes 244:1 but you’ll get a good idea of what the number is generally.

Knowing this ratio number is not just useful for buying advertising. It’s always essential for testing the site itself.

You should always test your site to see if you can tweak it to pull more sales. You might change the headline of your site. Did the change result in more sales? How would you know that if you didn’t know your visitor to sales ratio?

A good business person always tests everything. So knowing this number is one of the most necessary steps of running an online business of any sort.

On another note… I’ve decided to go ahead with selling distributor licenses based on the response I received when I mentioned it last week. There are still 2 licenses left and they’re selling for $1,000 if you’re interested email me at (email removed) before they get snapped up.

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,

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

The project is moving right along and by next week’s issue I hope to begin openly promoting the site and making some money.

I wanted to be able to show you the completed web site today but I haven’t finished the sales copy for the site. I wrote the sales letter and posted it on the site but it’s just not quite right so I’m re-writing it. You can take a look at the site without the copy though if you want to at least get an idea of what it looks like. I’ll give you the URL below.

This was a busy week for the project. I picked the domain name of our site (which I’ll explain below) and picked the price that I will be selling the book for, I also created a “bump” (otherwise known as an upsell – see webpromotion-weekly.com past issues to learn more about bumps) and I picked the freebies that I will be giving away with the book.

I also created the affiliate program for the site and did the programming that goes along with it. I also tweaked the site graphics a bit and picked the headline from my brainstormed list.

I’m going to talk about most of those things this week. It’s going to be a little longer than usual, I hope you don’t mind!

First I’ll talk about picking the domain name. Now initially I was just going to post the site on a sub directory of a domain name I already own, like http://www.Market-Tek.com/neweBook.html

But then I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and register a new domain name and set it up as a whole new web site.

I rent an entire web server, and my web host charges around $10 to register the domain name for one year. There are no additional monthly costs for any of this.

So we’re looking at $10 bucks total. That’s not much and we’ll get a lot of benefits from having a new domain name. For one thing, it will be easier to get the site listed at the search engines if it has it’s own domain name. And then there’s the intrinsic value of creating a brand…but we won’t get that theoretical!

So what domain name should I pick? The domain name is very important, it should be selected with care. It should be as short as possible but as descriptive as possible. The obvious MakeALivingOnline.com was taken, of course! So here’s a few of the names I came up with (that weren’t already registered).

- AnInternetLiving.com
- ALivingOnline.com
- AnOnlineIncome.com
- EarnOnlineIncome.com
- CreateALivingOnline.com

I wanted the domain name to start with a letter towards the beginning of the alphabet like a – b – c – d – e because I wanted to test a theory that those show up better on search engines because some search engines use alphabetical order (just a theory, not proven maybe not true but what the heck, I thought I’d test it out!)

Then I pulled out my copy of the Submission-Spider software http://www.Submission-Spider.com and started using the keyword analysis tool that comes with it. This tool makes it REAL easy to pick a domain name. You just start searching for keywords…I was leaning towards EarnOnlineIncome.com so I plugged in the keyword phrase ‘earn online income’ into
the keyword tool to see how many people searched for that phrase each month at the engines…111 searches last month (OUCH!) then I typed in ‘make money online’…57,874 searches last month. (you can see how extremely valuable this tool is!)

57,874 now THAT’s more like it. Of course, makemoneyonline.com was already taken as was make-money-online.com, but makemoneyonline-Now.com wasn’t

True, it’s a little long and it’s not catchy. But I ran a search at google for the phrase “Make Money Online” and of all the sites listed on the first page, only like one or two actually had the phrase ‘make money online’ in their domain name. So that means it’s going to be pretty easy for me to get my site listed there under that phrase. And if I can get even a tenth of those 57,874 searchers each month that’s nearly 6,000 targeted visitors to my site each month for free…imagine if I got HALF of them! With the lineup shown when I typed in that phrase, I think it shouldn’t be too hard.

Next I want to talk about price for the ebook, and how I arrived at it. Choosing the correct price to sell your product is very important. Too high and people won’t want to buy it, too low and people think it’s cheap and worthless. Setting the correct price can make or break a project.

I usually sell anything for either $49.00 or $99.00 or higher. Over the years those prices have tested well in a full range of products that are similar to this one.

This time, however, I decided to sell the eBook for just $19.99 Why? Because of two reasons.

-I’m offering a very good bump product for $18.72 and I think many people will upgrade their order to include the bump thus adding $18.72 to the $19.99 to get a total of $38.71

-The backend products that I will be selling to buyers after they buy this ebook are especially strong. These products that I will try to sell are higher priced products (like our submission-spider software and other books I have written). And they are all highly complimentary to this eBook so I believe I will be able to convert a high percentage of customers into ongoing customers.

So really by offering this low $19.99 price initially, I believe it will make me more money in the long run. Long term goals are always my number one priority. Building a large past customer list that you can continue to sell things to for years to come is what this business is all about. Plus remember, I can always raise the price from $19.99 to $49.00 later on if it doesn’t sell well at the lower price. More than a few times, raising the price has turned a dud product into a stellar seller for me…keep that in mind.

Next lets talk about the bump I chose. Recently I had to increase the price of my Marketer’s In A Box membership site to $99 per month. I did this because I only want a limited number of subscribers to it since I spend so much time helping them succeed with their businesses.

For the bump in this project, I’m offering 3 months membership in my Marketers-In-A-Box.com for only $18.72 I think this is a tremendous deal and I believe a lot of people will take advantage of it.

I also hope that after 3 months of my expert advice at their fingertips and access to my support staff 24 hours a day to help them in any way (via web design help, copy writing help, web programming help, advertising help etc etc) that they will go on to purchase full time membership for the regular price of $99 per month. Of course, not all will do this, but if only 5% of them do, I’ll make a lot of dough.

This bump fits in perfectly with the eBook. The eBook teaches you how to make a living online, Marketers-In-A-Box.com gives you “face to face” (well email to email!) personal one on one help doing it. Two products couldn’t compliment themselves more!

Next I want to talk briefly about backend sales.

I have yet to program the backend automated follow-up system that will automatically email customers after a certain amount of time to pitch them new products. But I have decided on what products I will pitch them. It’s always important to have a backend sales system and products in place when selling anything on the Internet because the backend is where you make most of the money in any project.

For this project I will be pitching my Submission-Spider software and a couple of my other books on the backend. Both those products compliment this eBook well.

I’ll talk more about the backend system next week when I’ve finished creating it.

Last I want to talk about the affiliate program. I’ve finished building it. I write the code for my own affiliate programs though most people would just go out and buy an affiliate program code or use a free one from any of the free programming sites out there. Or if you didn’t want to even do that, you could sign up for clickbank.com and let them take care of your affiliate program themselves (at a very reasonable fee).

But as I said, I write the computer code to create my affiliate programs myself. Actually I use the same code for all my affiliate programs, so creating it is only a matter of changing a few lines of code and uploading it to the new domain which takes about 2 minutes.

That’s not really important though. What is important is the fact that I’ve decided to only offer the affiliate program membership to people who have bought the eBook.

I know, that will decrease the potential number of people out there selling my product for me, but I’ve always felt that a person should own a product themselves before recommending it to someone else. That’s just the way my ethics fall.

But on the other side, I’ve put a price on the affiliate program ‘membership’ of $49.00 So it costs $49 to become an affiliate for this project and have the ability to earn 50% commission for recommending this product to others.

But I’m going to give away that $49.00 ‘affiliate membership’ for free with the purchase of the eBook. So if you buy the eBook, I’ll wave the $49.00 affiliate fee. This way I kill 3 birds with one stone.

-I only allow people to recommend this product who have purchased it themselves (thus upholding my strange ethics)

-I’ve created out of thin air a $49 free gift to give away to people who buy the eBook.

-I only get people promoting my product who are serious about it and really want to make some money.

Maybe I’m too clever for my own good…but then again maybe I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am! :-)

I was going to talk about the other freebies I will be giving away to entice people to buy this book, but this article is getting too long and you can always go to the site in a few days when I finally finish the sales letter and see them for yourself. I shouldn’t have to tell you that offering high quality freebies can increase sales like nothing else in the world!

I’m having a lot of fun with this project and sharing the process with you. I hope you are enjoying it as well and hopefully we can get on to the really fun stuff next week, which is showing you how to drum up customers and sales!

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

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

Well, I’ve finished writing the eBook we’ll be selling for our little project. It’s called, ironically:

“Make A Living Online – How To Lead The Life You’ve Always Wanted”

And It’s about starting an Internet Business. I think it will sell well, don’t you? I spent all last week writing fast and furiously and I’m pleased with the result.

I’ve also finished creating the basic design of the web site that we’ll use to sell the book.

The next step is writing the sales letter for the web site. This is the most important step because it’s the sales letter that will actually sell this book to people.

Whenever writing a sales letter I focus first and foremost on the headline. The headline is the most important part of any sales letter. It can make or break your entire project.

I start off brainstorming headlines. I write 30-50 headlines as fast as I possibly can. Then I print them up and throw them in a corner where they will sit for a couple of days while my mind has a chance to sift and settle.

I’ll come back in a few days and read through them, then brainstorm another 30-50 headlines and toss them all in a pile and let them sit for a day or so. Your brain needs time to cool off after writing headlines, it’s important.

After that I’ll go through the pile and pick the best headline. After that I’ll write the rest of the sales letter. At least for me, writing the rest of the sales letter is a breeze once I get my headline. Once I get the headline, the rest of the letter practically writes itself.

Whenever I write headlines I use certain structures and guidelines. I use the following words to start most of my headlines:

Introducing

Announcing

New

How To

How

Why

At Last

Who Else

Wanted

This

Which

Because

If

You

Would You

Where Else

If You’re

If You’ve Ever

Finally

Let Me

Keeping these words in mind really helps the brainstorming process.

I’ve posted my brainstormed headlines for you to check out, you can read them here:

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

I’ll spend the rest of the week working on the sales letter, then I’ll put the letter on the web site and you can take a look.

After that it will be a matter of adding bonuses, adding a bump, creating the order taking process, creating the follow up process and backend sales products, creating the affiliate program to go along with the product, and then we’ll be ready to start promoting this sucker and making some money!

So far the cost of this project is zero, I’ll keep you posted on the exact costs I incur. Since I’m designing the site myself there will be no web design or hosting charges so keep that in mind.

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

You’re reading this, I assume, because you either have an Internet business and you want to make more money at it, or you want to start an Internet business.

How can I help you the most?

Most people (myself included) try to teach theory.

The problem is, a lot of people don’t respond well to theory, they need solid examples to follow.

So I’ve decided to spend the next several issues teaching a little differently than I usually do.

I’m going to start a new Internet business, and let you watch me step by step to see exactly what I do.

I’ll let you watch as I pick the product, build the web site, promote the web site, take orders, follow up on new customers, everything that needs to be done to build a successful Internet business (well I HOPE it will be a successful Internet business!).

I’ll show you how much money I spend to get this thing off the ground, I’ll show you where I spend money on advertising and how much I spend and what kind of ads I’ll run.

I’ll show you exactly how many orders I get and how much money I make.

Forget about theory, I’m going to show you how to build a Successful Internet business from the ground up step by step.

You can watch, you can email me with questions, you can even participate in the affiliate program that will go along with my new business and earn yourself a little cash along the way.

I think it’ll be a lot of fun for all of us and I hope you learn a lot from it.

The first thing we need to do is pick a product. Now we can either pick someone else’s product and sign up as an affiliate for them, or we can build our own product.

I choose to build my own product. That way I get to keep all the profits myself, and I have complete control over everything.

What kind of product should I create? It should be a digital product I think. Some software or an eBook that people can download. That way we don’t have to worry about stocking inventory or order fulfillment.

The time frame I’ve given myself to come up with a product is one week (since I’d like for it to be ready to go by next weeks issue!).

That pretty well rules out software, it’d take more than a week to create any software product.

So that leaves a service of some sort, or an eBook. I don’t want to bother with performing a service for each new customer I get, so let’s go with eBook.

I’ll spend the rest of the week writing and creating the eBook and in next week’s issue you can take a look at what I come up with and we can start building the web site.

PS…were you one of the many lucky readers that took advantage of my tip last week and bought one of the sales packages on Powerful Psychological Triggers Guaranteed To Increase Sales? If not head over to the site right now and take a look, I promise you’ll thank me for it! The URL is:

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

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

This week I want to talk to you about a very powerful marketing tool that’s especially useful to those who might not have much of a marketing budget or are just starting out in business.

It’s the Joint Venture.

What is a joint venture? It’s pretty simple. A joint venture occurs when you team up with someone else to sell your products.

Why would you do this?

Well, if you are just starting out and don’t have a marketing budget, or haven’t made a name for yourself as a credible business person, a joint venture may be just the thing for you.

Old, established Internet business people all eventually run into the same problem. After a while, they simply run out of original items to sell.

They’ve been in business for a while, have a well established name, full list of past customers many of which are hungry for new products, and they’ve probably got a well established mailing list of potential customers or newsletter subscribers.

What they need are new original products to sell their newsletter subscribers and backend past customers.

That’s why they are approachable by you, someone who happens to have a new original product to sell!

Enter the Joint Venture.

You agree to sell them your products, they agree to promote the product to their own past customers and newsletter subscribers, and you agree to split the profits 50/50.

Overnight, with just a few joint venture agreements, you can go from no profits to more money than you know what to do with, all at no cost (and no risk) to you whatsoever.

You need to do your research first in order to find people in your own field. You wouldn’t JV a marketing book you wrote to a person who owns a gardening web site.

JV’s (joint ventures) tend to work better with higher priced products where the potential profit per sale is larger since you’ll be splitting the profits. A $9 dollar ebook probably isn’t worth it to a potential JV’er whereas a $99 ebook would be.

And don’t get discouraged if the first people you approach turn you down, many will. But keep at it, offer a higher cut to your JV partner (60/40 or 70/30 – what do you care as long as your costs are covered by your cut and you make SOME profit).

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

I’m officially on vacation this week. 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 Ways To Create A Killer Product!

by Larry Dotson

1. Solve an existing problem for people. There are thousands of problems in the world. Create a product that can provide a solution to one of those problems.

2. Find out what’s the current hot trend. You can find out what the new trends are by watching T.V, reading magazines and surfing the net. Just create a product that’s related to the current hot trend.

3. Improve a product that is already on the market. You see products at home, in ads, at stores etc. Just take a product that’s already out there and improve it.

4. Create a new niche for a current product. You can set yourself apart from your competition by creating a niche. Your product could be faster, bigger, smaller, or quicker than you competitor’s product.

5. Add on to an existing product. You could package your current product with other related products. For example, you could package a football with a team jersey and football cards.

6. Reincarnate an older product. Maybe you have a book that’s out of print and is no longer being sold. You could change the title, design a new front cover,and bring some of the old content up to date.

7. Ask your current customers. You could contact some of your existing customers by phone or e-mail and ask them what kind of new products they would like to see on the market.

8. Combine two or more products together to create a new one. For example, you could take a brief case and add a thermos compartment inside to keep a drink hot or cold.

9. Survey the people who visit your web site. You could post a survey or questionnaire on your web site. Ask visitors what kind of products they would like to see on the market.

10. You could create a new market for your existing product. For example, if you’re selling plastic bottles to a pop company, you could turn around and sell those bottles to a fruit drink company.

—-
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,

As you know, the purpose of this ezine is to teach you how to market and promote your web site. Getting more people to your site, and therefore more sales of your products, is my main goal.

But this week, instead of talking about another new technique to promote your web site, I want to talk about something a little more fundamental.

Whenever you promote your site, you need a plan, a strategy, a guideline that you can follow.

Something that says:

- step one: do this

- step two: do that

- step three: do this etc

There are many different strategies and techniques that can be used to promote a web site. But the most important part of any marketing strategy is this..

Writing the plan down.

Sounds stupid, but to have a successful marketing campaign you must write your plan out on paper.

Why is this so important?

Simple, if you don’t write it down it isn’t reality. The plan doesn’t really exist until you write it down on paper.

For years I planned my marketing strategies out in my head then implemented them. That worked ok, but I lost a lot of great ideas that way because I didn’t write them down on paper, and then I forgot them.

This doesn’t just apply to marketing or promotion, but all aspects of your business. Write your thoughts and ideas down constantly.

Keep a notebook handy at all times so that when inspiration hits you can get it onto paper as soon as possible. Spend a little time at the end of each day reviewing your notebook.

You’ll be surprised how much more focused and therefore more effective you’ll become at marketing and running your business this way.

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Happy July!

So, I went to a bachelor/bachelorette party this weekend. Have you ever went to a party where the bride and groom combined their bachelor and bachelorette party into one party?

It was strange…but a lot of fun. And I’m still a little woozy today so if this article is a little sub par I hope you’ll forgive me! (Yes, I’ve always got a good excuse don’t I?)

This week I want to talk about selling your own product.

So many people start internet businesses and the first thing they do is start promoting a referral product via an associates program of some sort.

This is the easiest way to start a web business because the start-up costs are so small.

Of course, it’s a lot harder to make any real money promoting associate programs unless they pay out well, like our Submission-Spider Referral program which pays $50 for each copy you sell. http://www.submission-spider.com/referral.cgi

I always recommend selling your own product as opposed to promoting an associate program, even if you are just starting out.

Yes, it may cost you more in start-up costs to create your own product, but you keep all the profits – so it evens out, and then some.

Plus you have complete control of your own product.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again. You join an associate program, build a web site, spend thousands of dollars on advertising, and then the company changes the terms and conditions of the program, or stops the program completely – leaving you out of luck.

That’s not to say these things will happen with every associate program you join. It may not happen at all, but it certainly won’t happen if you own the product.

Yes, you can make money with associate programs. But you can make so much more with your own products.

So take the leap. Spend the extra time and money to create your own product. It’ll be more than worth it in the end.

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

-John Skorczewski

Hello,

Well it’s tax time again. Yeah….

Today I’m going to keep things short and sweat. You’ve probably got more important things on your mind today if you’re like me.

If you’ve already filed your taxes, well, I don’t like you very much right now.

I suppose it’s fitting to talk today about taxes and the role they play in your Internet Business.

First off, I should stress that I’m not an attorney or a tax advisor or CPA, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. Always consult with your own accountant and or lawyers.

SO! You’ve been reading my little newsletter for a while now, you’ve been following my advice, and sales are starting to pour into your business.

Great!

The only problem is, the more money you make, the more taxes you’re going to have to pay.

Especially if you’re “self-employed”, which many of you undoubtedly are.

I think a single self-employed person pays like the highest amount of taxes out there. You have to pay a 15% self-employment tax, then you have to pay regular income tax on top of that. Blah.

Most people, when starting an Internet business, work first and hardest on creating the business, getting sales, defining markets etc etc.

Most people don’t think about or plan for taxes till it’s the end of the year and too late.

When you decide to start an Internet Business, the first thing you should consider are your taxes.

What does that mean?

Well, you need a tax strategy from day one. Otherwise you’ll find most of your profits go straight to Uncle Sam.

First and foremost, you need to decide what kind of business entity to create. Do you become “Self-employed”, do you form a “Corporation”, a “Partnership”, an “LLC”?

Determining what kind of business entity you create will determine how you pay taxes (among other things).

Most people don’t realize that you can form a corporation fairly easily. It costs like a hundred bucks to file the
papers with the secretary of state.

Then you call the IRS to get your employer identification number (which is kind of like a social security number for a business) and away you go.

Go to the book store, buy a couple of books on forming a corporation. Read through them. Start to learn about the different tax advantages to forming a corporation.

Then meet with your CPA (certified public accountant) and ask him to go over everything with you. Ask him if forming a corporation will help reduce your tax burden. Ask him to discuss the pro’s and cons of it.

With a simple tax strategy in place, you can reduce the amount of taxes you owe down to virtually zero.

I’m not talking about illegally avoiding taxes here, I’m talking about taking advantage of the legal deductions that the IRS allows to small business owners.

Basically what I’m trying to tell you is to form a good working relationship with your CPA. Ask him/her questions, get advice regularly.

Many people who start Internet businesses overlook this very important part of the business and end up paying far more in taxes then they are supposed to.

And that’s all I’ll say on that.

See you next Monday!

-John Skorczewski