This is one of the most popular ways to promote a web site - banner ads, banner advertising. Banner ads, for the uninitiated, are just small graphic designs that advertise a web site. The power of them is you can put some really compelling sales messages into a banner ad and, if somebody just clicks on that banner ad, it takes them directly to your web site.

One compelling sales message plus one mouse click could equal money in the bank!

You can work these banner ads up into banner exchanges where they are free, you get free banner displays on other people’s web sites for displaying their banner ads on your web sites, you can swap banners one on one with others and you can buy banner placement on some of the bigger, hot web sites.

You can do this free! You can design a nice web site and actually advertise your web site for free using this banner in exchanges or trades, or if you have a little money, you can buy banner placement. Banner ads are very popular!

The problem is getting people to click on that banner, because there are a lot of banners out there. You need to trick people into reading your banner ad. Not only that, but there is even one more step – how to trick them into clicking on it, because even if they read it, if they don’t click on it it’s not going to take them to your site.

The real trick is to make a banner ad look like part of a web site. It’s that simple. That’s one of the best tricks we’ve seen. Make it look like a bar, or a miniature windows-style button or window into a little piece into another program. The best way to do that is to use a form with “click here” buttons or like actual check boxes you can click on.

For example, this is a neat banner ad we’ve seen used before. It asks, “How much do you want to make? Click here.” Along the bottom of the banner ad is $10,000 with a little box beside it, $25,000, $100,000, $1 Million, with little boxes beside them. It actually entices the reader -“Well I want to make $1 Million.”

It doesn’t matter which box they click on, it doesn’t matter if they missed the box entirely, now they’re clicking on your banner. It takes them to your web site, where it starts telling them how they can make $10,000, $25,000, or even $1 Million by following these instructions.

So you design the ad to actually entice the user into clicking there, or to make it look like a scroll down window with text under it, and they have to click on the little scroll bar to read more.

This is another neat trick - the text is an enticing message like, “I’m going to give you all the tips and tricks on how you can make more money next year – it’s really easy, all you have to do is…” And the text ends there. There’s a little scroll bar along the side there like you see on so many web sites or on programs that you run on your computer and you click on the little scroll bar to try to read more. What it does, you’re clicking on the banner to read more, and it takes them to the web site where they can read more. Again, it’s tricking them into it, getting them to actually participate and actually click on the ad.

The real trick, though, is you also have to make that banner attract their attention, so you want to work some of the other neat tricks in for catching the eye, making them see it and read it. For this, one of the best techniques, one of the highest-rated techniques we’ve seen, is some form of animation. That really helps. For example, a simple flashing background color, or a word or two that flashes is very nice, because if that banner appears on someone else’s web site with 5 other banners on that same page, yours has something flashing. It automatically attracts the eye. We’re attracted to flashing and glimmers and movement of some kind.

A little more complex technique is to actually change the copy. You can have copy scroll up and finish a sentence, or words that flash up half a sentence and then flash again and change to the other half of the sentence. It’s not much harder than making a flashing background or color, but you basically have two banners that swap out in an animation sequence.

Again, this actually allows you to get more information and more enticing sales copy into a very small space which is all you’ve got with a banner. But it also attracts the eye, so it kills two birds with one stone.

Even more complex, if you’re daring or you want to pay someone to do it, is some kind of moving characters or actual animation – something that runs across the banner. For example, on the checklist form we covered earlier, we’ve seen these checklists with an actual pointer, similar to the cursor you see on your screen, moving from check box to check box. That way, it’s actually telling you to check here, or check here, or check here. It’s also attracting your eye, telling you what to do, and you tend to follow it and click on one of them.

We have seen these techniques increase response to a banner ad from 30% to 75% - that much increase in the number of people who actually click on the banners and move to your web site through them.

The other thing to remember is there are certain key words to use through your copy. These key words work in sales literature, and these same key words work in banner ads marvelously. There are a few of them that always attract the eye and always make someone want to click to see what is behind them.

One of those words, of course, is a four letter word – FREE. Anything free is going to be attracting to people. Anything you can give people free in return for clicking here, you’ll increase the number of people who actually see the banner and click on it. The other word is WIN. People like to find out how they can win things because, again, it implies that they are free.

EARN MORE has been proven in banner ad after banner ad to generate more click-throughs. The other one, believe it or not, is dollar signs. Any dollar signs on a banner ad can increase the click-through rate, which means the number of people that see the banner and actually click on it.

If you are looking for a unique way to establish your dominance over your competitors, you need to develop a U.S.P., which is a Unique Selling Proposition. It will help give you the power you need over your competition. The way to use U.S.P. is very simple once you know how.

First - Find out what your competitors are doing wrong. Find the things that irritate your competitors’ customers. What things are they doing wrong.

Then - Take these negatives and turn them into positives for your business! If your competitor’s price is too high, you can make a more appealing offer. If they have bad customer service, you can give exceptional service. If they take too long to deliver, you can find a faster way to ship. The list could go on and on. But, the goal is still the same. You must find a Unique Selling Proposition that gives you a market edge over your competition!

Using these two steps to develop a U.S.P. can place your business way ahead of the competition!

One very successful technique you can use to increase your response immediately is put your sales letter headline in quotes! This is a headline secret of the world’s richest marketers!

After years of extensive testing of all sorts of variables that can be used to make headlines more effective, marketers found that putting a headline in quotes does increase response substantially.

Why? Prospects will look at the quotes, and they will think that someone stated the headline at some point. This can be more believable, and therefore they’ll be more open to buying what you offer!

This sounds strange, we know. After all, no credit for anyone saying it is put after the headline like this, but it doesn’t matter . . . it’s as if people trust something that might be spoken word over a typed message.

Whatever the logic behind it, it certainly doesn’t stop you from using it . . . and enjoying the money it could bring you!

Because radio and television stations must appeal to a mass viewing and listening audience, all of whom have diversified interests, they are constantly looking for news that will appeal to their broad audience.

That appeal may involve featuring a story on any of a thousand subjects. But the one basic ingredient that subject must have is “Interest.” Here’s the key to getting all the FREE publicity you want.

You want to come up with some sort of dramatic story about your product, your service, or your company. What can you say that will really dramatize the main benefits that you really have to offer?

You want to get the readers involved with the advertisement and see themselves enjoying the benefits of what you have to offer. If you are able to do this well, you will get more of the responses you want . . . and more profits!

For a long time we were so scared that this was going to hurt our business. Initially we believed in detrimental competition, and then for years we held back our best customers. We would rent all of our customer names out month after month, quarter after quarter, but not our best customers because we still said we weren’t going to give those away. But now we even rent our best customer names out. It hasn’t hurt our business one single bit. People still feel a relationship towards us, and they are still very responsive to our offers.

The most successful people we’ve seen on the Internet or regular mail order are those people who cooperated or made things available to others and then shared with others - but also they were shared with.

The people who are the most unsuc-cessful that we’ve met over the years, especially mail order, are those people who don’t want to share anything, and are so afraid of competition. It’s almost like that Biblical story of the talents, where one person was so afraid he might even lose what he had that he buried it. The other people multiplied their money.

Of course, the Lord had some pretty bad things to say about the person who was so afraid of losing that he did not compete, but he just buried the talents. So I think that we can learn from the Biblical story that we’re supposed to share and we’re not supposed to just hoard. It’s a hoarding mentality that says, “I don’t want to help anybody else,” or “I don’t want to share with anybody else, because I’m afraid they might take from me.”

People need to stop thinking of competition as a negative. A lot of people use competition as their excuse for never getting started. “Well, there’s competition, I can never make it, so I’ll just never even get started.”

Other companies look at competition as a positive thing – there’s a company out there already, how do we compete with them? How do we make our products better? How do we compete with price? How do we compete with service? They look at it as a positive, find out what their competition is doing, and they try to give more to their customers.

That’s really what America was built upon – competition. It makes companies better. It makes them perform better. It makes our products better. So don’t look at it as a negative and something to be worried about. Look at it as something that is positive and can help your web site, and your products, and your pricing, and everything better.

When a small ad is written, the first objective is to get the reader’s attention. Because there may be hundreds of classified ads on a single page, your ad must say something special, unique, or outstanding that will make a reader stop when he/she sees yours.

This means that the first two or three words of an ad are crucial! Words or phrases that quickly involve a reader are the most effective.

Words like FREE...MAKE BIG MONEY... WIN...SUCCESS, are tried and tested winners. Using words like these is the secret to making your ad stand out in a huge crowd of other ads!

You should become a student in “advertisement reading 101.” Look to see how the other people and businesses out there are doing it. This helps you to gain your knowledge of how to take ideas and put them into effect.

When you read other ads, you get to see many of these ideas being used by other ad writers. See how others use them, then, when you go to write ads yourself, it should be that much easier!

Remember, you learn much more from witnessing ideas at work than from just studying the theory with no real-life application to compare it to.

Always run some type of advertising that pulls in new customers and re-sells them. Think of your advertising message as a radar beam that sweeps your market for the target. The target is your best prospects and customers. You can earn steady money all year long by keeping your advertising message out there all the time working for you. Just develop a simple marketing plan that attracts new customers and re-sells them additional products and services. You can do this by following many of the other secrets in this manual.

For those of you out there who are wondering just how simple and easy selling over Internet auctions is, we’re going to give you an example of how to post. Let’s just look at e-Bay as an example because it’s the premier auction site right now.

Let’s just step through that. First of all, you have to have a computer and an Internet connection. You log on by typing ebay.com or www.ebay.com at the top of your web browser.

One of the first things you should do is just poke around. Just look around and go window shopping. Pretend that it’s Christmas in 1956 and you’re walking down State Street, and Marshall Fields has all of the windows displayed. It’s fun to do that.

Like so many other things on the Internet, it’s point and click. Of course there’s a facility for searching for something.

We have a friend who collects frisbees. He’s been collecting frisbees since the early 70's, and he knew maybe two other people who shared that same hobby.

He tells us that the first time he logged on to eBay he thought, “Well, I’ll see if there are any frisbees on here.” Boom! There were seemingly 300 of them there, and some of them were really neat.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of different things being offered up on the Internet auction blocks . . . and the collectors are paying attention. For almost every product out there that exists, there is some collector market for it!

Old toys, comic books, baseball cards, old advertisements, records, photography, tools, computer parts, salt and pepper shakers, books, election materials such as “I Like Ike” buttons and such, newspapers, furniture, board games, old role playing games . . . the list can stretch on and on for miles, seemingly. And there’s always someone out there who will want to buy these things. These collectors are constantly on the Internet auctions, bidding to their heart’s content. This is why Internet auctions are how to sell ANYTHING you might ever have with the simple flick of a finger necessary to place your item up for auction! It’s so easy!

In this article I’m going to give you a great idea for a hot product that someone could literally create within a twenty-four hour period.

It’s a directory. Directories have been very popular. In fact, directories are so popular that there’s a directory of directories out there now! If you get to a large library in your area, I strongly recommend that you go look at the directories, because you will discover that directories are hot sellers.

There are a lot of directories out there being sold on a variety of different topics. For example, there are directories of bed and breakfasts all across the U.S., arts and crafts shows, vacation spots that welcome pets, or discounts for seniors. All these are just a compilation of sources that offer a particular thing to a particular group of people.

The best thing about this type of a product is that you don’t have to do any creative writing. Basically you’re compiling a variety of different sources that a niche market would be interested in.

This can be very simple to do. I think that, with the Internet, when you tie these two together it’s a powerful tool. When you talk to people about the Internet, of course, there’s a lot of entertainment that will come up. But a lot of people use it for research.

If you want to create a product very quickly, then the Internet is a tremendous tool you can use for creating a directory within twenty-four hours - in fact, maybe even less -because you can get on there very quickly, and you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re creating a directory on freebies - specifically we’ll use free things for children as our example. You can get on the Internet on any of the search engines, and now you’re looking for companies and large corporations that offer freebies for children.

Within a couple of hours, you can have a big list of companies that offer freebies to children. You can compile that list into a print product and immediately have a product to sell!

Because the Internet is always growing, you’re always going to have new sources of information for your directories. I think that’s another strong point about directories in general - with the constant updating, people have a reason to buy the new version year after year.

The great thing about a directory is the fact that, not only can you sell it long term, but the information in the directory, over time, will get outdated. The directory that someone buys today, maybe in two or three years, is going to be completely outdated. They’re going to want to come back to you again and again to purchase updated directories.

You might have a customer who purchases an initial directory from you. Maybe next year when you have your newest edition, and the year after that when you have another new edition, they will constantly come back to purchase that new edition.

There are a variety of companies that offer directories. They offer drop ship directories and import directories that continuously update their directories. They have most of their customers coming back year after year to purchase the new updated versions. In fact, it’s become easy to create profit centers for their business.

There’s really no creative writing involved. You might write an introduction, but your real time and effort will be put into the research. Fortunately, with the Internet as your tool, you can get your research down to a very small amount of time instead of spending weeks or months in your local library. The Internet has made research very quick, very fast, and very easy.

Sometimes the real secret to making money is through buying correctly. If you can get a good deal for very little or no cash of your own and turn a chaotic, poorly-run business into a winner, you can find exactly what you want.

This is where the SBA (Small Business Administration) comes in. The SBA supplies people who want to get into small business with mailing lists of businesses that are on the auction block.

You have to be willing to take a risk, though. You have to be willing to move. But if you don’t have to put up much of your own money, you could get the deal you are looking for. Contact the SBA and get your name on a very special mailing list that will make you huge amounts of money.

By getting your name on the SBA’s mailing list of interested business buyers, you will create an excellent opportunity to purchase hard assets at extremely low prices - AND MAKE INCREDIBLE AMOUNTS OF MONEY! And, since the SBA has so many businesses for you to pick from, the SBA can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars in MORE WAYS THAN ONE!

If the office you contact does not maintain a mailing list, ask the SBA office for the name, address, and telephone number of the private auction company that is selling business assets for them. This is how “default liquidations” can make you RICH. This enables you to find businesses being auctioned for very little money so you can buy them yourself and turn them around!

Get good help and learn MARKETING! Learn selling, promotions, and advertising. That’s the secret of how to get your cash register to ring. Learn the key to the business.

Practice all of the good marketing techniques you have learned. Keep it simple, and realize that every business can potentially be a gold mine. If a business is serving a market of customers and giving them something they really want and there’s profit to be made and any business can be a gold mine.

The business was probably mismanaged. Always keep your eyes open for good deals. They are out there waiting for you. Most people don’t know about this, but you can get these businesses for pennies on the dollar, perform your “marketing magic,” and turn around all of the business’s problems.

With your fresh approaches and your use of proven marketing techniques, you can make that business a winner instead of a loser. Get the SBA list, and happy hunting!

People use credit cards to raise cash all the time, whether it be to get a quick amount to cover an over the limit check or for money to buy groceries when no other cash was available. You can even buy the business of your dreams with plastic credit cards!

People want to believe in what you have to offer. They are skeptical, though. That skepticism is why you have to be as absolutely honest as you possibly can.

These days, everyone wants to talk benefits. All the successful lead generation ads out there focus on benefits. You have to find a way to raise yourself above all of those other ads. You have to find a way to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Honesty allows you to do that, and the prospects’ need for benefits - their self interest - is the secret to “hooking” customers and “keeping them on the line.” Let them know all of the reasons you can give them what they really want. The better you can convince them of that, the more sales you are going to get. The more sales you will get, the more customers you’ll be able to go back to with your back-end offers.

As long as you’re providing a valuable product or service of real value, and you’ll be able to attract them, make them believe in you, and keep them buying from you. You are going to be successful.

Study the successful advertising that is used by other companies. This is the quickest way you can learn how to become a millionaire! Find all of the reasons they are so good, look for all the ways other people gain sales through their copy, and try to ask yourself, “What is it about these ads that makes them work?”

The best route to making money is definitely not through conducting your own trial and error campaigns. Use the trial and error of other companies to bring you money.

What do we mean? It’s simple. When you see ads and sales materials that keep running over and over again, you know that ad is making a profit. That other company might have found it through the painstaking procedure of trial and error, but there is no trial and error in it for you.

You should simply find as many ways as you can to model after the successful materials that you see others using. Study from the best, and pattern your materials after theirs!

Using the right words that will be a call to action to your prospects is how you can turn non-buyers into buyers! Really compel people to take advantage NOW!

People are naturally procrastonistic. They may want to buy, but they will put it off, and put it off, and put it off until your offer fades from their memory.

That’s why you have to get them buying RIGHT NOW! Get them to strike while the iron is hot. Get them excited about doing it IMMEDIATELY! If it works, this turns people who would have never bought due to their own procrastination into people who accept your offers and send you the money as quickly as they can.

There are many techniques you can use to do this. The best way to learn techniques when you’re starting out is to study other ad copy from other companies and see how they’re doing it. Still, one of the best starting points is to give your prospect a strong, believable reason to respond now. Think about the offer from the customer’s perspective, and get creative!

Many successful marketers are building their fortunes selling just one product. Now, granted, if you have a successful product, by no means should you stop selling it - you should capitalize on it as much as you can!

What most marketers miss out on, though, is the fact that a successful product opens up a door of opportunity - to expand that product into an even larger moneymaking opportunity!

Here’s a good example of this concept put to use. You’ve got a successful product. Now you want to capitalize on its success so it makes you even more money. How do you do this?

The answer - advance the product! It’s how to instantly make more money from each online customer who reads your sales letter!

The original product could be the basic version. You could have versions with more information and/or bonuses, and give them titles like “silver,” “gold,” “platinum,” or whatever. A version with more information could have a plus symbol on the end, or a revised edition could state which revision it is, i.e. “5th Edition.”

It could have specific information dealing with other topics. You might have a version with more examples of the product in use. The opportunities are endless!

Curiously, this technique is seemingly used the most in the entertainment industry. Video games that have sold very well will typically end up after 6 months or so with a few new levels added to them and a few gameplay improvements coded in, and they get the name “Gold” added to their title.

Look through the video rental stores - you’ll see various forms of the same movies. Some are widescreen editions, also known as “Letterbox” editions, which restore the width the movie had in the movie theatre - typically a couple of inches are cut off on either side of the film in make the movie fit on a television screen, which has a different shape than a movie screen.

You’ll find versions of movies that have been digitally restored. You’ll find versions that have footage originally cut from the theatre release restored and put back in the movie.

Check out the music industry. CD’s that have sold very well over the years find life in a variety of formats. They could be digitally mastered, they could have songs added that were originally cut from the album, they could have commentary from the band, they could have hidden songs - one of the wilder ideas we’ve come across is selling special, 24 karat gold versions albums!

Underneath all of the gloss and glitz, the same basic product remains. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is still “It’s a Wonderful Life” whether or not it’s been colorized, digitally re-recorded, and an hour of extra footage has been added.

The same is true for any product you sell. The basic architecture is the original product. But, by building up on it and adding new bonuses - creating new editions, throwing in new improvements, more tools, better interfaces - you are creating yet another product.

This is a product that stands a good chance at success. After all, it’s previous version was a success - so why can’t a newer, better one succeed?

And the customer who bought the original version and found it good will definitely want the new and improved version! You could double the money you made, because instead of selling that one product once, with just a little work you can create a new version - and sell the product to them all over again!

You might have noticed that, with most direct response or mail order offers you receive, the package requires you to shuffle stickers around, fill in blanks, lick stamps, put stamps or stickers in certain places, rip off perforations, so on, so forth.

Stop and think about it. All you’re usually doing with these is ordering an item or two. So why does it take all of this extra work?

These sorts of things are called involvement devices. They’re a powerful tool used for getting sales - and if they didn’t work, you would never see them!

People have short attention spans. It’s as simple as that. They’ll read through a sales letter or an offer, and many end up setting it aside and forgetting the offer that was being made. After all, people are busy. They have children to take care of, jobs to go to, hobbies to indulge in, television shows to watch, games to play . . . why should your offer get so much of their attention?

This is the point of view of the average prospect. They see an offer as an intrusion upon the schedule of their life, and they will treat it as such.

That’s why involvement devices were created!

In order to gain that prospect as a cash-paying customer, it is necessary to keep them interested in the offer long enough to reach the end and order it. This is the task many mar-keters assign to involvement devices. Involve-ment devices will pop up sporadically throughout the offer, keeping the prospect involved in the offer by having them do something that both physically and mentally requires them to concentrate on it, yet at the same time breaks the monotony of the offer itself.

Involvement devices keep the prospect involved in the offer, keep it fresh in his or her mind, and ultimately serve to lead them to the end situation of ordering whatever it is that’s being offered. The more involved they are, the more they’ll buy!

Involvement devices can be used on the Internet in a variety of different ways. You can have forms where you actually ask people to fill things out. You can have places where people vote on a particular product. You can have different types of products where people can actually click on a spot and decide what they want, what color they like, and what the product is. You can do these three things to get your customer’s involved.

There are a lot of different things that you can do instead of having people go to your Web Site and passively look at it, and these are only examples. They can actively surf it, making decisions along the way. They can look for certain things and make a buying decision instead of having the light from the screen glinting off their eyes.

There was a time when legal issues did not concern us that much. Starting out, we didn’t have much to lose. The longer we’ve been in the business, though, the longer we have realized that this attitude in the beginning was really very foolish. Legal aspects are really very important. Pay attention to them at all times.

Here we have given you several of the “black and white” rules. You must remember, though, there are many rules that are in the gray area, and you should try to learn them too.

If you follow the rules we are going to give you now, you will be able to avoid legal problems. The real key, though, is knowing how to treat people right. If you were to study most of the companies that ended up in trouble, you would find that they weren’t treating people well, whether it was dishonesty or whatever.

Here are the four “legal” rules that you must follow if you want to get rich:

1. A marketer cannot make false, or misleading, claims in advertising.

2. A marketer cannot ignore refund requests.

3. A marketer cannot fail to ship an order within a reasonable time, unless otherwise specified, and agreed upon, by the buyer.

4. If a marketer cannot ship a product in the period they have promised, or within 30 days, the customer must be notified of any delay, and offered a refund. The choice of waiting or receiving a refund is the customer’s. If the customer elects to wait another 30 days, and the order still is not shipped, the mail-order firm must automatically refund the customer’s money.

Doing these four things will keep the U.S. postal inspectors off your back so you can run your business without even thinking about them!

These rules are easy to understand and comply with. They do not represent a valid reason for avoiding the potentially tremendous money-making, mail-order business. But, there are operators who are either dishonest or just plain careless, and are being shut down after too many complaints have been received by the Better Business Bureau or the U.S. Post Office. Their loss, however, can be your gain!

Study the ads of successful companies. Keep testing to find out what things will make you the most money. Learn everything you can. Read books written by the “masters” of direct-response marketing and mail-order. Try new things. Make it your life and learn how to do it! This is the scientific approach to making money in direct response marketing and how you can use it to make $1,000,000 a year!

Many marketers are doing all of these things RIGHT NOW. If you want to get rich and make your own million, you have to do the same things they are doing. There is competition in this business.

Take us for example. We are out there following our own advice. When it comes to our competitors, they’d better be as good as we are at creating and developing campaigns and advertisements, because we have made it our life. We can always out perform businesses that aren’t really taking the business seriously or have stuck themselves in a rut.

This doesn’t only apply to our market, though. The people who are out there making the most money - regardless of the market they are in - are the people you will have to compete with. These people have advertisements written by some of the best ad copywriters. The ads are laid out by some of the best graphic artists. They spend a lot of time developing their sales messages.

If you aren’t willing to learn everything you can about the business and how it operates, you are going to have great difficulty in finding the success you are looking for. You will never be able to compete with those other companies out there.

Another sort of auction that is really taking off over the Internet is charity auctions - the one type of auction that people will always pay more to win!

Charity auctions, be they on the Internet or on the street corner, always tend to bring in more money than typical auctions. Why? Because a charity auction is obviously serving a good cause.

It might be helping find a church or school activity. It might be raising money for a person with a particular illness or problem that comes with high expenses. It may be going to fund research into various diseases. There is a nearly limitless number of charities - on local, national, or even worldwide scales - that you can base an Internet auction around!

Charity auctions are great publicity for whoever is sponsoring them - and they can be incredibly profitable, potentially even more profitable than regular auctions! Why? Since the money is going for a good cause, people are willing to bid higher to get whatever’s for sale! It will satisfy their feeling that they’re doing something good and helpful - and they’ll want to win in the bidding, because that way, when they’ve defeated their other bidders, they’ll have gained a sense of righteousness - and they’ll have the proof they did something good, because they received whatever you were auctioning off! This is how you get top cash for this kind of auction!

Another factor to keep in mind is the fact that the Internet community is much closer knit than the physical global community. We’re not saying that people who communicate over the Internet are necessarily closer emotionally than those who might all live in the same town. With the Internet, people are able to have great friendships despite vast distances between them.

Friends might be on the other side of the world, or just next door. Because all of the communication is over the phone line, it’s all the same. There is no four-hour flight - there’s your friend, right there in a chat room ready to talk right now!

The perception of what close is changes when you’re dealing with the Internet community - and therefore, people over the net are much more willing to take part in a charity auction, even if it’s on the other side of the world!

It’s testing... This is the one simple formula that will help make you millions of dollars over the course of your life! It is the only way you can find out what really works! You can test different ideas and find out which one will work the best.

You should never just jump right out in the market without testing. You always want to start on a small scale. Then analyze the results. The tests that proved profitable can then be run on a larger scale! You must always test and the study the results. Not testing can prove detrimental to your business.

Many businesses are not testing, and therefore, they are throwing away thousands of dollars each and every year, sometimes more! They come up with a promotion that they think is hot! And, then they run full scale with it! Maybe it made them money. But, was there something they could have changed that would have made them ten times more money? They will never know because they never tested!

These kinds of people always go with their own feelings for the product, rather than the customers’ feelings. The customer will decide what products are worth spending their money on. That is why you must test. Find out what works and doesn’t work on a smaller scale before you bet the farm on one single un-tested promotion!

Remember, it will never hurt you to test several different things on a small scale. It will only help you. You will get hurt when you don’t test and you run a major promotion that flops. So, be wise and test as much as you can. The more you test, the better!

The easiest way to explain it is to give you an example. Take an example like Hotmail. This is a company that offers free e-mail. You get on there and you sign up.

It’s free of charge, and you have an e-mail address.

The way they make money is through selling advertising on that site. Then people who use the e-mail addresses are forced, in some cases, to view that advertising. It’s peppered all over the place. The way they use viral marketing is, every time you send out an e-mail message using that address, at the very bottom there is a marketing message that says “Sign Up For Your Own Free E-Mail Address At Hotmail.com.”

So, if you’re sending out five or ten e-mail messages a day, you are helping them market their web site. And as more people sign up, that message goes out to more people. Soon, even though hotmail.com is doing very little marketing, their own customers are spreading the message for them and pulling in more people.

Viral marketing is very powerful, and it is at literally no cost. You are letting your customers do it for you. Now, if you tie that in with e-books, it can be a very powerful way to sell information on the Internet. We’ll give you a concrete example of how this has been done very, very effectively.

Let’s say, for example, that you create an e-book on whatever topic. Instead of selling that e-book, why not give it away free of charge?

Let’s say it’s a $20, $30, $40 e-book. Why not give it away free of charge? This is a powerful way to get people excited about your information, but, of course, you’re not making any money giving the information away.

How do you make money? You sell a bigger package!

J. Paul Getty, the first billionaire in the United States, said, “I would rather make 1% on 100 men’s efforts, than 100% on my own efforts.” It’s that type of thinking that makes the affiliate programs and joint venture marketing so powerful. Now you can get a huge cash flow coming to you from many different sources.

We’re going to cover what we like to call the no risk, lazy man’s way to get hundreds or even thousands of other web sites to make your sales for you. That kind of wraps up the whole idea of affiliate programs and joint ventures.

We hope it gives a hint of why this is indeed one of the hottest areas of marketing on the Internet today. In fact, it is not only the hottest, but some of the most successful marketing programs involved affiliate programs and joint ventures.

Essentially what you do is work with other web sites and trade links with them or get them to bring you customers to your web site. But in an affiliate program or a joint venture you give them an incentive to do so.

Some of these get a little complicated. That’s why we were going to discuss a unique way that we have found to be very successful that we tell many of our clients about. They pay us a lot of money to tell them this ... It’s Link Exchange.

The only way you can be sure that an ad is working is by tracking. This is where direct-mail can be much better than other means of advertising such as television. When you advertise on TV, you can ask the viewer to mention that they saw your ad on TV, but how many times does that really happen? Not very many.

With direct-mail, you can “key” each ad so that you can track its success or failure very quickly and effectively! You can know real soon which ads are doing well.

There are several ways you can “key” to track success. One is with a mailing list. If you are using names from a mailing list called “homeworkers,” you can simply put an “HW” in the bottom right corner of the order form. Then, when the order comes in, you can see that it came from the homeworker mailing list. So, if you had the homeworker list and another list called “money-makers,” you could track them both by using simple “keyed” codes that are placed on the order form.

Another way to track success using “keys” is with the sales letter. If you are testing different headlines, or testing a different price, etc., you can “key” the order form in some way so that you know which ad that order came from. Say you were testing two headlines. You could have a “#1” for the first headline and a “#2” for the second one. So, when you get more orders with the #2 key, you know that the second headline worked better!

Also, you might be tracking several things at once, and then you will need several numbers or letters. If you are testing several mailing lists, and you send the offers out at various times, you need to track both the time and the mailing list. So, you might have a “key” that looked something like “010297HW.” This code means that you mailed the sales material on Jan 2, 1997, and you sent it to the HomeWorkers mailing list.

You should never mail something out without tracking it! You should always be able to tell where your order originated from. You never know when one list or one headline might make you an instant success, so you need to be able to track the order back to see where it came from. If you know where it came from, then you can make more money by offering your product or service to that same group of people who made you money once before!

I like to use the Internet and technology, because I’m as lazy as anybody. Well, maybe Mark Nolan might have me beat, but I don’t like to get up out of my chair any more often then I have to. I think humans are kind of that way.

One technique I’ve got here will actually take several days for your efforts to come to fruition, but it only takes a few minutes to plant the seed. You go back, check on what you’ve planted, and you will have the material for a book to sell as an information product.

The key is news groups. On the Internet, these are like public message boards that are divided by information category and subject matter.

You want to come up with a subject that interests you. This is the same for any infor-mation product you ever create. You’ve got to be interested in it. That doesn’t mean you have to know anything about it. In fact, it could be something that has always interested you.

This has worked best for me. It could be something that has always peaked your interest, but you don’t know anything about and you would really like to learn more.

One of the best ways to create an information product is to gather information as you learn it. Come up with a subject that you’d like, and that you know also there are other people out there that would be interested in, of course. It doesn’t help to sell an information product to an audience of four. You want to make sure it’s something that a reasonable number of people also are interested in.

Those companies have to work with those big markets - but you can actually make a fortune by focusing on the tiny little markets that these huge corporations can’t touch. It’s how to make huge profits and huge amounts of cash with tiny little markets and gain a HUGE advantage over Fortune 500 companies!

So, you wonder, how do you decide what small niche market you are going to go into? Our suggestion is to work with someone with a subject or a hobby that you are already interested in.

There’s a quote that says something to the effect of “Do what you love and the money will follow.” That’s very true. If you find something you love, you can make money at it and have lots of fun, and it just comes automatically because you’re excited about it - after all, it is something you are interested in.

We’ve said it time and time again - Internet auctions are one of the greatest ways to get rich. We firmly believe that, and we are going to tie that concept in with this subject matter and show you how you can make it work.

This is why some really GREAT ideas fail: the company gets wrapped up in thinking about themselves instead of thinking about the customer, be it a catalog or an individual purchaser.

Companies - and yes, even small companies - can get very bureaucratic in their thinking. They forget that they’re only in business to serve other people.

There are people out there that say terrible things about capitalism. They say that capitalists greedily exploit other people. Granted, that may be true when it comes to some “fly-by-night” operations. The companies that make their profits from working with established customers repeatedly, though, can’t get away with cheating and ripping people off over and over again. The bottom line is: they have to provide value.

It’s easier for people to think of themselves before they think of their customers. It’s easy for a company to get locked into its own love for the product it’s offering and not think about how the customer perceives that same product. Remember, it’s the customers and the prospects - the market - that really count in the long run.

Yes, we have to love what we sell. We have to be able to communicate enthusiasm for our products and services. We have to feel strongly about what we have. Then, we have to try to transfer those emotions to the prospects and customers. If you are excited about a product and you are able to convey that excitement to me, I’m going to get excited about the product! Remember, think about your market, your prospects, and your customers. Think about what they’re really interested in.

It should all center around thinking about the customers, not around the business. For some reason, it is extremely difficult to see the offer from a reader’s point of view. Don’t fail to understand that anything you have to offer is as important to a consumer as it is to you. Millions of dollars are wasted every year because mail-order marketers with great ideas fail to understand that what consumers want to hear is not always what the marketer has to say.

Some of the people who should be the most attracted to free publicity are the people that are least likely to get free publicity. These are, in many cases, people that are looking for something for nothing.

The individuals and companies that are making the most money with free publicity are the ones that make it their business to get into those publications. They take it very seriously, spend a lot of good money, follow up, and treat it as if it were a business.

Many times we see companies and people that want free publicity, but when the reporters and editors look at their materials and see everything done in a haphazardly lazy fashion, printed poorly on shabby material with a high number of typing errors . . .

Editors are in the business of printing and communication. These are professionals, and they will be very critical of poor materials, writing, and quality.

When it comes to trying to work with editors and reporters, you have to try harder and do more. You want them to take you seriously. Remember, they are getting material constantly from publicity companies, and if you don’t have something professional that looks to that editor like it’s worth his or her time, that press release is going to wind up in a trash can without a second thought wasted on it.

Reporters turn down hundreds of “stories” every single week - make sure they don’t turn yours down! The format that is used most often is simple and easy to understand.

1. Indicate who the reporter should contact, including your name, address, and home and office telephone numbers.

2. Indicate a story title such as, “Local Author Writes Best Seller,” or “Entrepreneur Opens New Business,” etc. Then, briefly tell your story.

3. Tell the reporter who would be interested and why they would benefit from what you have to publicize.

4. Briefly tell any interesting or unique facts about your product, business, etc.

5. Include an appendix if you have any supplemental data.

The way to keep more of the customer’s money coming your way instead of to the competitions is to create a niche in your market! It really is easy when you know how.

The trick is to separate yourself from the competition! That means that you will have to come up with a Unique Selling Proposition. That is something that makes you better than all the others in the business you are in. Your U.S.P. gives you the perfect opportunity to get rich by cornering your market! Once customers begin to realize that you have something to offer them that is better than your competition, they will keep spending more money with you!

Here are five ways to stop living from paycheck to paycheck! Here is how to take your ideas and put them into a specific formula. These will help you transform your ideas into huge amounts of money:

1. Problem Focusing - Optimists are planners. They examine the situation, and then, as much as they can do something about it, try to resolve it.

Optimists take action sooner. They act quickly to prevent small work assignments from mushrooming into big overwhelming jobs. They break big problems down into smaller, more manageable problems. Optimists tend to formulate subgoals or intermediate steps that will help them eventually reach their ultimate goal.

You can apply this step-by-step approach to any overwhelming commitment or obligation. If you plan to write a book, for example, the enormity of the project could be daunting, unless you say something like, “I can write five pages a day, so I can write a chapter a week,” etc.

2. Perseverance - Stimulated by positive emotions and past successes, optimists keep going when others might quit.

Problems often have unexpected repercussions, beyond the effects on morale or finances. Optimists have a certain amount of tunnel vision that keeps them focused on their goal.

3. Positive Solutions - People who think positively tend to emerge from difficult situations thinking:

I have developed a greater trust in my judgments. I must modify my personal or career goals to more closely match my true interests, abilities, or values. I have gained confidence in my ability to handle other difficulties. I have discovered I can rely on others to help me get a job done.

These types of thoughts allow a person to feel that he/she has a chance to improve. There is much confidence and satisfaction to be gained from getting through a problem and being able to say, “I handled that pretty well.”

4. Social Support - Optimists believe others can help. They tend to talk to others about a problem and follow pertinent advice.

5. Acceptance or Resignation - Optimists are realists. They seem to know instinctively when to charge forward and when to back off. When reason tells them a situation is out of their hands, they accept it and focus on situations they can control.

Instead of focusing on the cause of a problem, pessimists become preoccupied with anger, hurt, frustration, or other emotional distress. In short, they get upset and give up.

This is why some people never make any money no matter how hard they try - and no matter what they do! They allow themselves to get overwhelmed. They let the negative energy shut them down before they even get started. Don’t let this happen to you!