Discover
the secrets of an Internet millionaire in this exclusive interview
with online marketing guru Corey Rudl. Corey is the author of the
#1 best-selling course, "The Insider Secrets
to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet" and is probably
one of the most recognized names in Internet marketing today.
In
the following
interview, Corey reveals how he grew his business from a one-man
show in his parents' basement to four online businesses that attract
over 1.8 million visitors per month and generated over $7.6 MILLION
in online sales last year. Corey reveals exactly how he did it,
and details precisely what entrepreneurs need to be doing TODAY
to be successful online.
Hi
Corey,
and thanks so much for agreeing to do this interview. Maybe the
best way for us to begin is for you to tell us a bit about yourself
and your company, The Internet Marketing Center.
Sure. Well, first off, I am the President
and CEO
of The Internet Marketing Center, which you can find online at www.marketingtips.com.
We specialize in showing people how they can drive tons of targeted
traffic to their web sites and how to turn that traffic into sales
and profits. We provide all the information you need to learn how
to market your business online, in the form of home-study courses,
books, video and audio tapes, and more.
What really sets us apart from all the
other marketing
courses, though, is that we give you the concepts AND the software
tools you need to promote and automate your business on the Internet.
And we do all of this based on our own real-world tests and experience,
not just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it BEFORE we
teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee your results.
Actually,
that brings up a good question: Why, exactly, is your "Insider
Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet" course
so successful? Aren’t you leading this market space?
Yes,
we are by far the leaders in educating our Small Office/Home Office
audience in how to make money on the Internet.
The
reason the
course is so successful is because we practice what we preach. We
generated about $7.6 million in business last year, all online.
And that's not to mention the tens of millions of dollars we have
helped our clients generate. We have over 70,000 affiliates and
we get over 1.8 million unique visitors to our sites every month,
all on a shoestring budget and all from scratch. So we are actually
using all the methods that we teach.
Would you hire
a poor stock broker? Of course not. If he cannot make himself rich,
how's he going to help you? Would you hire a personal trainer that
is not in good shape? No way! If they can’t do it themselves,
how can you be sure that what they are teaching you is not garbage?
People
know
our reputation and they know that the stuff we teach in the course
actually works. We walk people through every single step they need
to follow to be successful marketing their business on the Internet
-- even if they don't have an online business yet.
We
also have
a few big Fortune 500 corporate clients. They're attracted to us
because most of them are so caught up in red tape that they don’t
get to see the guerilla marketing tactics used to generate immediate
revenues like small businesses do. We're just now starting to see
the big corporations picking up some of the things we were recommending
two years ago!
So
the
key to your success is practicing what you preach?
Exactly.
Another
big reason we're so successful is that we take all the risk. Our
guarantee is simple -- if you don’t make money from what you've
learned in the course, then you pay nothing. You can return it anytime
for a full refund for any reason. Even if you decide you don't like
the paper it's printed on, we'll give you all of your money back.
And you know what? We get nearly zilch returns -- and that speaks
for itself.
Don’t
take my word for it, check
out the testimonials at our site. We
publish only one percent of the testimonials we receive, but you
can see that it's not people saying “Oh, it was great,”
but people saying they “Made an extra $70,000 already this
year," or “Traffic increased by 400% in 30 days.”
That's what counts -- results. That is the scoreboard at the end
of the day.
And
we really
do cover everything in the course you could ever imagine. We teach
you everything from A to Z; everything from starting up from scratch
with nothing to how to drive traffic to your site, right down to
setting up your site to convert visitors to more sales.
You'll
learn
how to maximize your exposure on the search engines, how to automate
your entire business, how to build pop-up boxes, and hundreds of
other things. We even give you templates and ideas to copy from
us to ensure that nothing will go wrong!
That
reminds me of a funny story... A couple of years back, I thought
of trying to get my course on the reading list for an Internet Marketing
program being offered by a top university. I had some meetings with
a few of their senior marketing professors, hoping to get "Insider Secrets"
into the hands of all their Internet Marketing students.
They
finally came back to me and said, basically, "Thanks, but no
thanks." Now, I was shocked! Why wouldn't they want their students
to have the #1 Internet Marketing course as part of their education?
I wouldn't let the professor leave my office until she told me.
It turns out they were actually scared that if their students read
my course and found out that it cost less than two hundred dollars,
they would feel ripped off by the school, which was basically charging
them thousands of dollars for the same information!
That's
quite a story! It just goes to show that "traditional"
education isn't always the best way to get the BEST information.
Corey,
could you tell us a little bit about your own history and background?
How did you get started marketing online?
Well,
I won't
go too far back as I don’t want to bore you, but my first
online venture was way back in 1994. I had written a book called
"Car Secrets Revealed" and had been trying to market it
offline. After wasting a lot of money on magazine and print ads,
I took a friend's advice and decided to try selling it over the
Internet. Those magazine ads had eaten up most of my cash, but I
did manage to scrape together enough to get my first web site up
and running.
I did everything myself -- built the site
in HTML
1.0, learned how to use FTP programs, figured out how to build a
banner, and things like that. Those were the days when Netscape
1.0 had just come out and there was no such thing as secure real-time
online ordering. It was all so new and exciting!
I was glued to my computer 24 hours a
day testing
all kinds of wild and crazy marketing ideas to see which ones worked.
And I can tell you that 95 out of 100 ideas failed, but the ones
that did work, worked like crazy! Within 18 months I had the #1
best-selling car book online... and it's been #1 ever since!
When people started seeing that my counter
had logged
over 1,000,000 visitors at CarSecrets.com,
they started asking how I was marketing it. They wanted to know
how such a simple and basic site was generating so much traffic,
and if I could teach them how to do it. Before too long I realized
that I wasn't able to teach people everything I knew during a one-week
consulting contract.
So I decided to "brain dump"
everything
I knew into a course, which I called "The Insider Secrets to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet." It taught just about
everything I knew with real-life examples of exactly what I had
tested, what worked, and what didn't. That was what set my course
apart from every other Internet marketing course out there -- that
I had actually tested and proven my techniques. Other courses were
just teaching fluff and theory.
By promoting the course with the exact
same techniques
I was teaching, it became the #1 best-selling Internet marketing
course online within three months. Since then, it has been through
four new versions -- it needs to be updated regularly as the Internet
changes so fast! But through all this time, it continues to be the
#1 best-selling Internet marketing course online.
Because we're so far out in front of
the curve
as to what's working and what isn't, we have also been able to develop
some of the world’s leading Internet promotional and automation
software. Basically, we developed software that we needed for our
own business. We made sure it was the best and then made it available
to our clients. This has helped us become one of the world’s
leading Internet marketing companies helping small to medium businesses
drive traffic and make more sales.
So, what specific suggestions
do you have
for someone interested in getting started marketing on the Web?
Wow! That's a huge question and, to be
blunt, there's
no way I could answer it in just a few minutes. In fact, that's
why I wrote a 1,000-page course in the first place... There are
literally hundreds of tips and suggestions for building a successful
presence online. There is just so much to know if you want to do
it right the first time. However, there is one tip that is more
important than any other...
Get educated. Don’t think you
can put up a
web site and have traffic appear from out of nowhere. It does not
work that way. Spend the time to educate yourself about how everything
works. Research your market or idea and learn how to identify a
niche market on the Internet. Create or market products that solve
other people’s problems.
Another thing to look at is your competition.
How
big are they? What are they doing right and wrong?
Learn from people who practice what they
preach
-- find people that you KNOW are successful on the Internet and
model yourself after them. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel
and don't listen to people who cannot prove that they have done
what you are trying to do.
There are so many "wannabes"
out there
who write books on web site promotion but don't even have a successful
Internet business themselves. Find someone who you know is successful
and use them as a mentor -- that's what I did. I had mentors, too.
Why do you feel that so
many people who
attempt to create an income on the Internet fail to do so?
Whoa, another loaded question! There are
so many
reasons, but here are the main ones. Bear with me, this will be
a long answer:
Deciding on a product before finding a
market is
a big one. This is probably the most common mistake. If you are
asking “What is a good product to sell online?” you
are making this mistake right now! You need to decide on a market
first.
The Internet makes it very easy to find
people interested
in a specific category like gardening, hunting, aeronautics, accountants,
or any other interest group. Just about any group is easy to locate
and target online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion
lists, e-zines (electronic magazines), etc.
You have to make sure you have a captive
audience,
then find out what they are having a common problem with. If you
can come up with a product or service to solve that problem, you
have a guaranteed successful business. It's really that easy --
that's how all my businesses were built.
You don’t even really have to
“sell”
it, because you already know they want it before you launch your
web site. And since you already know exactly where your customers
are, it's easy to target them. I mean, it’s a no-brainer once
you think about it.
Now, let’s turn that situation
around for
a second. Say scientists had found a cure for the common cold. You'd
become a millionaire selling it online, right? Well, not necessarily!
How do you find people that are sick online? You would have to market
to the general Internet community to try and find the 1 out of 10,000
people that are sick that day. It would cost a ton of money to market
to 10,000 people just to find one qualified buyer!
And to make matters worse, if you are
selling this
over the Internet, by the time you ship them the pill through the
mail, they'd probably be over their cold! So by choosing the product
instead of the market, you can actually fail no matter how great
your product is.
Your course has a lot of
information about
generating traffic. Is that a big hurdle for online businesses?
Many people think they can build a web
site, submit
it to the search engines, and the buyers will come. The logic is
that there are hundreds of millions of people online surfing around
and that some of them are bound to stumble onto your product. Wrong!
Search engine ranking is more competitive than ever.
Yes, there are secret ways to get high
rankings
in the search engines and we spend more than 40 pages in our course
showing you how to do it. It is probably one of the most complex
marketing techniques out there. There are lots of different options
for grabbing high rankings. You can do it all yourself, or you can
buy really good positioning software, or even hire specialized companies
to do it for you.
The course even recommends which positioning
software
you should be using, as there is a lot of junk out there! The same
with Search Engine Optimization companies -- most have no idea what
they're doing. So my course shows you how to tell the good guys
from the bad guys.
The real key is to know what your potential
buyers
do online. Are they searching online for a specific term? Are they
visiting specific web sites all the time? Are they subscribed to
topic-specific e-mail lists or e-zines? In other words, you need
to know where your target market is “hanging out” online.
If you can find where your potential buyers are, this is where you
should spend your marketing and advertising money.
That
is why I said before, spend your time getting educated, learning
everything, and researching your market and product or service.
Spend your time and money driving them to your site and then show
them how your product solves a problem they have. Marketing is everything
online! You could have the best product in the world selling for
half of your competitor's price, but if you cannot get the word
out, you don't stand a chance.
What
are some of the big psychological obstacles for online entrepreneurs?
Number
one in
that department is definitely procrastination. I cannot tell you
how many people I've met who have really great ideas and plans,
but so few of them actually do what they say they are going to do.
So turn off the TV, stop using your new baby as an excuse, stop
going for drinks after work with friends, and take the time to get
serious about your business! You will have plenty of time for all
the rest when the big income starts rolling in.
Let's
be honest
here... We're all good at justifying excuses to ourselves. I've
even done it a few times myself! But there really is no excuse for
not following your dream. You're only hurting yourself.
The second biggest psychological obstacle
is fear
of failure. Never fear failure. Heck, we fail every day. The key
is to fail small. In fact, your ticket to success is failing regularly!
Every time you fail, you're eliminating bad ideas and getting closer
to the things that work.
If you aren't failing, you are not learning.
We
test new ideas, new prices, new marketing strategies, new looks,
new products every month! Most of them fail, and we expect that.
And we don't call it failure, we call it testing.
We are just looking for the five winners
out of
every 100 small failures we have, because what we learn from the
winners we apply to everything we have. Here's a perfect example:
We don’t even send out an e-mail to our opt-in list without
testing at least four versions of the e-mail to see which one performs
the best -- that is how much you have to test. Some pull in 200%
better results than others with small changes, so it's definitely
worth it.
Speaking of results, what
kind of results
should people expect when they are just starting out?
Don't get discouraged if you don't see
immediate
results. This is another huge psychological barrier faced by many
new entrepreneurs. Some people expect their business to be successful
immediately and their dreams to come true overnight. It usually
doesn't happen that way.
An Internet business is like any other
business
-- it takes work. The only difference on the Internet is that you
can automate a lot of repetitive chores... and you can test and
roll things out WAY faster than an offline business could.
Things generally start slow -- that is
to be expected.
But when it snowballs, it snowballs VERY fast! And you really have
to be prepared, because the Internet moves at seven times the speed
of offline business. If you do things right, you can easily grow
700% faster than any offline business just due to the speed of business
on the Internet.
Think of it this way: if you had just
30 people
a day sign up for a newsletter, that adds up to over 10,000 subscribers
in a year. This means that your company now has a database of 10,000
highly targeted leads to market your products to. If you were to
purchase a list of 10,000 targeted leads (who have never even heard
of you before and may not be receptive to your product), it could
easily cost you up to $5 per lead.
So just by attracting 30 new people a
day, you've
created an asset that is worth around $50,000. Sometimes, even if
it seems like things are moving slowly, you're actually building
something great! I hope that makes sense.
If you could tell someone
just one thing
about how to be a success in marketing on the Web, what would it
be?
That’s easy! Learn how to drive
targeted traffic
to your site inexpensively and the rest will all come. Once you've
got the traffic, you can change the design of your site, you can
test different prices, and you can even change products if your
product isn't selling well. Without traffic, nothing you do will
make your online business a success.
Now, don't get me wrong! You still have
to sell
a real product to real people for real money. You can't just build
a site, promote it, and try to think of a way to make money after
the traffic comes. That was what killed all of the so-called "dot-bombs"
a couple of years ago.
So simply attracting lots
of general traffic
isn't necessarily a good thing?
General traffic is fine, but traffic targeted
to
your specific niche market is much, MUCH better. In my experience,
finding a niche and selling to it is the single easiest route to
profitability online. If you are trying to sell books or CDs online,
forget it -- Amazon.com will crush you. Those markets are gone.
However, if you target your market to
a specific
interest -- say gardening, hunting, cars, or whatever -- it's easy
to find people online with an interest in those things. All you
have to do is find what that market wants and give it to them. I
have a lot of clients that make hundreds of thousands of dollars
a year who just started their businesses a short time ago and almost
all of them make their money by having specific products that go
over well in a very targeted niche market.
Check out a newsletter I have called
www.SecretsToTheirSuccess.com
-- your readers have got to check this site out. It is cool because
it shows how people that were in low-paying or dead-end jobs are
now making it huge online now, working their own hours and making
profits they couldn't even dream of before. We interview two new
people every month that are making between $30,000 and $2 million
in profit online each year.
Check out the site and you'll see what
I mean. You
can learn so much by reading about how they started their businesses
from scratch not too long ago and made them successful by targeting
a specific niche market. For example, one interviewee makes over
$1,500 a day selling a plan to bald guys on how to regrow
their hair. And another guy sells tools to make wire jewelry and
makes $40,000 a month!
These products would be a flop if you
sold them
at a local storefront because the market in a local area is way
too small to support them. But on the Internet, you have access
to a global market that can support extremely obscure products and
ideas… and be very profitable!
Corey,
I wanted to ask you about search engines. How important are they
to the marketing beginner?
When
you are starting out on the Internet, search engines are a very
cost-effective way to drive traffic to your site. But as your business
grows, a good advertising campaign, joint venture, or affiliate
program will outperform your search engine rankings every time --
guaranteed.
To
start with,
you have to make sure that people are actually looking for your
product or service online. I hate to see people starting out on
the Web who automatically put all of their time and resources into
search engine submission when, in reality, their target market isn’t
even looking for what they have to offer in the search engines.
If
you want
to find out if the search engines will be worth the effort, there
are a few great services online that I show you in my course that
will actually tell you approximately how many visitors you will
get if you have a top ranking under your keywords in the major search
engines.
I
tell people
to type five of their top keywords into one of these keyword popularity
services, and if your keywords are not getting more than at least
1,000 searches every single month, it is probably not worth your
time.
Also,
you should
never make the mistake of relying on just the search engines to
drive traffic to your site. Although they can be an extremely valuable
source of traffic, they are constantly changing their rules. If
you get into a situation where you rely solely on a couple of good
rankings in the search engines for all of your traffic, and then
one day the search engines drop your ranking, you could be out of
business literally overnight. Believe me, I've seen it happen more
than a few times.
Make
sure you
have multiple sources of traffic to your web site so that if you
lose one, you are not out of business!
Pay-per-click
search engines seem to be a great place to test market products
on the 'Net. What should people know about using a pay-per-click
strategy for their site or product?
The
pay-per-click
search engines can be a great way to get traffic to your web site
but, once again, only if your target market is actually looking
for you in the search engines. They're great for testing your offer,
testing your site, testing your price, even testing your product
to see if it will work.
Success
through
the pay-per-click search engines is all about basic math. If the
traffic they drive to your web site makes you more money than it
costs to buy those clicks, then they are a great investment. Unfortunately,
many beginners pay way too much for keywords, never actually calculate
how much they can afford to spend, and end up losing lots of money.
I
should also
mention that you can't expect to enter a couple of your top keywords
into the pay-per-click search engines and start making money --
that is very rare. To be successful, you need a list of at least
100 to 500 keywords and phrases. You can really make pay-per-click
search engines pay off by bidding on lots of less popular keywords
that are actually more targeted
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