Chapter One

My Typical Day

By Ben Hart

Here’s my typical day.

I wake up without an alarm clock, usually at about 7:00 a.m.

I mosey on down to my office (a 6-second commute because it’s two rooms away). I check my email and see that I made $665.88 while I was sleeping.

Cool!

Orders have come in overnight from Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Russia and New Zealand. 

I know that orders from the U.S. will start coming in any minute.

I go to the gym for an hour.

I return home at about 8:30 a.m.  I enjoy a cup of coffee and a leisurely breakfast while reading my newspapers.  I get The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily.

I’m a newspaper junkie.  I still enjoy reading the old-fashioned printed newspaper. 

At 9:30 a.m. I check my email again.  Another $295.32 has hit my account.

Neato!

Orders are now coming in from Eastern and Central time zones in the United States, as is the daily pattern.

I won’t check my email again until late tonight.

I’m a writer.  Writing is both my profession and hobby.

I’m writing this book.  So I write for the rest of the morning – usually until Noon.  My work day is now over.

I grab a light lunch.

By 1:30 p.m., I’m on a golf course, a ski slope or a beach – depending on the season and where my wife and I happen to be at the time. 

What’s nice about golfing, skiing and beaching Monday through Friday is we see almost no people. So we have the golf course, the ski slope or the beach to oursleves.

The crowds don’t roll in until the weekend.

I no longer have a physical office.  My office is my laptop computer.  My office is wherever I happen to be – which can be in Aspen, Key West, Lake Tahoe, the Swiss Alps, Costa Rica or a sidewalk cafe in Spain.

After a rigorous afternoon of golfing, skiing, swimming, hiking or biking, I’m pretty bushed. 

I’m ready for the hot tub, dinner and a glass or two of wine.  After dinner (perhaps a thick juicy New York strip steak or roast duck in orange sauce), I like a cigar.

I sit outside on the patio, look at the stars and listen to music, thinking: “Isn’t life wonderful? Thank you God! And thank you America!”

At 11:00 p.m. I check my email and see that another $1,774.45 has rolled into my account during the day. 

I smile.

My Internet marketing system continues to run like a Swiss clock.

Total deposits for the day from my Internet business: $2,735.65.

Not bad for 24 hours.

Orders continue to come in from California, and will soon start coming in from Hawaii and the Philippines.

Looks like tomorrow will be a lot like today.

This is money that just arrives in my bank account everyday on its own, seemingly out of thin air.  No invoices. No dunning clients for payments.  It’s all automatic, robotic and hands-free.

My neighbors still can’t figure out what I do.  They look confused and a little annoyed when they see me.  If they ask me what I do, I answer: “I have an Internet business.”

This answer usually produces a blank stare and a look of even more befuddlement.

When my neighbors see me, I always seem to be dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt and flip-flops, holding a cup of coffee, with a newspaper under my arm, smiling. 

Sometimes I’m wearing a bathing suit and no shirt when everyone else is rushing off to work.

My neighbors probably think I either inherited a lot of money, won the lottery, or that I’m a drug dealer.

Most likely, they think I’m a drug dealer because I only shave twice a week.  So I usually have that unshaven look.  I figure, why cut yourself shaving everyday if you don’t have to?

I wave at my neighbors as they climb into their cars every weekday morning to fight rush-hour traffic on the way to their office jobs.

I worry that stress, road rage and lack of exercise will cut their lives short.

I am giving all my neighbors a complimentary copy of this book so they can see there is a way to escape the prison of their office jobs and lead happier, healthier lives.

I have not gone to a real office in years.  I have total mobility, flexibility and freedom.  I report to no one.  My income is on auto-pilot.  I just let the machine (my computer) do all my marketing and selling for me – while I’m off doing other things and having fun.

Every month, more money shows up in my bank account than the month before.

What I have just described to you is a life made possible by the Internet.  I call it the “Internet Lifestyle.”

All that’s required to have this lifestyle is a computer, a high-speed Internet connection, and a little knowledge – not even a lot of knowledge.

You don’t need to know any programming.  You don’t need to be a techie at all. 

I have no programming knowledge.  And I’m not a techie.

You really don’t even need much of a product to sell.

What I sell mostly are words.  Is that a product?

I guess so.

What you do need is some marketing knowledge.  Specifically, you need some knowledge of how to sell on the Internet.

This is a book about how to make money on the Internet, and a lot of it quickly.

The principles and strategies I cover here will work for any business. Every business needs to be marketing and selling on the Internet—no matter what the business is.
Frankly, I was slow to get into this game.

I was doing just fine as a traditional direct mail marketer. I figured there was no reason to change what I was doing. My direct mail programs have generated $500 million in sales, donations, and membership fees for all kinds of businesses and non-profit organizations over the past 20 years.
But I also knew the world was changing fast.

I sensed that if I did not get up to speed with how to sell successfully on the Internet, the world would pass me by. I would probably be out of business within a few years.

So in 2005 I began an intense study of Internet marketing. I read every book I could find on Internet marketing.

I put up a crude website using an online website builder, www.CityMax.com. I then launched a pay-per-click ad campaign using Google AdWords.

Sure, I could have paid a Web designer to put up a really nice looking site. But that was not the purpose of this exercise. I wanted to learn how to do it myself. I wanted to learn how to use the tools. I wanted to be able to change my site at a moment’s notice, not wait days for a webmaster to get to it.

To my great relief, I quickly saw that the principles of how to sell successfully on the Internet are no different than direct mail or any other form of direct marketing.

The big difference is cost.

For example, it will cost you at least $10,000 to conduct even a small market test using direct mail—by the time you have factored in the cost of postage, printing, and list rental.

And it will take at least two months to get results back from a direct mail test—that’s if you measure from the time you start writing your direct mail package, to the time it takes to produce and mail a direct mail package, to the time it takes a letter to make its way through the postal system, to the time it takes people to mail their responses back.

But I can conduct a market test using Google AdWords for less than $50 and read the results of my market test within hours.

Plus, once I build a list of leads and customers, I can communicate with my list for almost free because it costs almost nothing to send email.

As I write this sentence, I have more than 100,000 names on my email list.
Mailing a direct mail package to 100,000 people would cost at least $50,000—probably more.

But I can send an email to 100,000 people just about for free. And response to my email is instant. Almost all the orders that will come in response to my email occur within 24 hours—instead of the six-week response “bell-curve” that’s typical for direct mail.

So Internet marketing requires zero financial risk—unlike all other forms of advertising. And response to your marketing campaign is instant.

But there’s more.

Your website can be like your own personal TV station that broadcasts whatever you want to say to the world.

You can put audio and video on your website. If you know how to bring traffic to your website, you can become a significant media property worth many millions of dollars. And that’s just about free also because it costs almost nothing to have streaming video and audio on your website.

This is huge . . . and means the death of twentieth-century-style media and entertainment that are controlled by a few big corporations. On the Internet, your own personal TV station can attract millions of viewers. If you have a good idea, you can be bigger and more influential than ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the big media conglomerates.

An example of this new reality—YouTube.

It cost virtually nothing to start YouTube. You could have started YouTube.

You don’t need capital to build a multi-million-dollar online business. In fact, having money to capitalize an Internet business will more likely hurt you. Capitalizing an online business with money will make you lazy. That’s what the big Fortune 500 companies tried to do in the late 1990s—throw money at the Internet. The result? The dot-bomb era.

Money is not the currency of the Internet. Brainpower and creativity is the currency that counts on the Internet.
There is no such thing as an “undercapitalized” business on the Internet.

In the old world—the pre-Internet world—you and I had little hope of competing with the big Fortune 500 companies with their multi-billion-dollar advertising budgets.

All we could really hope to do was pick up the crumbs. But that’s no longer true—not with the advent of high-speed Internet.

Thousands of people are now becoming multi-millionaires on the Internet.

Why and how?

Well, because they have learned how to sell and market on the Internet. They have learned how to transform their local mom-and-pop businesses into global commercial empires on the Internet.

The truth is, anyone can succeed on the Internet. It’s really not that difficult if you just invest some time to learn the keys to success.  But this new world—the virtual world—is also scary to some.

Many are intimidated by technology. I’m among them. The world is changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with it—especially all the technological changes.

We now must get familiar with an entirely new vocabulary—such as “viral marketing,” “autoresponder,” “cookies,” “browser,” “source code,” “hover ads,” “opt-in,” “double opt-in,” “landing page,” “squeeze page,” “RSS feed,” “podcast,” “router,” “webmaster,” and “interface.”

If you are my age (49) this is an entirely new world from what it was even 10 years ago.

And we’ll have another new world still 10 years from now. The gap between the computer and Internet literate and illiterate is getting wider and wider. The technologically feeble will continue to fall farther and farther behind.  So guess what that means.

That means you are going to have to get yourself up to speed if you are going to survive in business and life in the twenty-first century.

You will need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and learn how to navigate this new world. You must learn how to use the awesome tools on the Internet that are now at your disposal that will allow you to make as much money as you want, as fast as you want it, and to be anything you want to be.

It took me two years of study and trial-and-error to really figure out how to make significant money on the Internet.

As I mentioned, I started my study of Internet marketing in 2004. But it wasn’t until 2006 that I figured out how to bring in money across the Internet literally whenever I want, and as much as I want.
Since then, I have generated millions of dollars in sales across the Internet.

This book shows you exactly how I do it. The pages of this book contain everything I have learned about what works and what does not work in Internet marketing. You will learn the mistakes to avoid. This book will give you the step-by-step road map that ensures your marketing success on the Internet.

By reading this book, you cut the time on your learning curve to about one-tenth (or less) of the time it took me to figure out the riddle of how to make money on the Internet.

Instead of the two years or more of trial and error it took me, you can learn it all probably in 12 to 24 hours—depending on how fast you read. That’s about the time it will take you to read this book.
In fact, you will probably want to read this book several times.

And don’t worry if you are a rank beginner. This book is easy to read. A twelve-year-old child could easily read and understand the principles and strategies that I describe for you in these pages.
I know because I asked a twelve-year-old child to read it. She has now started her own Internet business, which is already turning a nice profit.

So let’s get going and you can start making money on the Internet—a lot of it quickly.

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