Chapter Three

But What if I’m a Technophobe?

By Ben Hart

Attention technophobes: I’m a technophobe.

I had zero programming knowledge when I started. I still have almost no programming knowledge. But even I figured this out.
 

Putting up a website today is easier than learning Microsoft Word.
 

It costs almost nothing to put up a website.
 

Here’s all you really need to understand to make money on the Internet: content is what matters.
 

How much money you put into your Internet business counts for almost nothing—which is why the big corporations lost billions of dollars on the Internet when it was still in its infancy.
 

They lost billions of dollars because they tried to use the old advertising models for the Internet. They figured if they just threw billions of dollars in advertising at the Internet, their online businesses would succeed . . . because that is how it works in the offline world where how much money (capital) you have is critical.
 

The problem was, their sites were no good.
 

This is not like the days when we had only three television networks to choose from. This is not like the days when we had no choice but to sit there and watch whatever garbage the big three TV networks decided to throw at us.
 

Today we have millions of choices of what to read, watch, and listen to on the Internet.
 

Money is no longer a barrier to entry on the Internet, because producing and publishing content is now just about free.
 

What matters is creativity and brainpower. What matters is what’s on your site.
 

If you want to produce and direct your own movie, you can.
 

No need any more to submit your idea to a movie studio and hope to get interest. Make your own movie. If your movie tells a good story and is compelling, you’ll have no trouble finding a big audience for it on the Internet, if you understand some basic marketing principles. And distribution of your movie is a non-issue on the Internet. Anyone who wants to see it can just pull it up instantly on his or her computer screen.

Have an idea for a sitcom? Same thing. Production of your sitcom is just about free. If it’s good, you’ll have no trouble finding a big audience on the Internet.

Or maybe you’ve written a book. Forget going through the old-fashioned New York publishers.

 
If your book is even accepted by a New York publisher (highly unlikely, unless they have commissioned your book to be written in advance), you will have to wait a year or two for your book even to appear (if you are unlucky enough to have your book accepted by a big commercial New York publisher).

The traditional book publishers are dinosaurs. They have absolutely no idea how to market and distribute a book in the twenty-first century.

But you can publish your own book using the Internet. You can offer both digital and printed versions. And you can have hundreds of thousands of readers of your book almost instantly—again, for almost no outlay of cash.
But there’s a catch. Your book needs to be good. By good, I don’t mean brilliantly written. You don’t need to be Ernest Hemmingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Your book just needs to be valuable and useful to your target audience.

It needs to contain critical information your target audience is looking for.

By the way, this is a big part of how I make my money on the Internet.

I write, publish, and market all my own books. Instead of taking the 12-15% royalty the commercial publishers offer me, I take 100%. Instead of relying on an incompetent publisher to market and distribute my books, I do it all myself with my laptop computer and Internet connection. And I have hundreds of thousands of avid readers. As importantly, I am able to generate almost unlimited income every month. I don’t even need to bother with going to the bank and depositing checks.

The money just shows up in my bank account, every day, automatically from all the credit card transactions that are happening for me literally every minute all day long, 24/7.

I generate this income (about $85,000 per month as I write this) from my books, my articles, and seminars—which are recorded and can be replayed over and over again.

My online business has been growing at a rate of 100% every 90 days. I’m sure it will slow down soon. No way to keep up that rate of growth for long, or you’d quickly own the world.

My initial cash investment in building my Internet business was almost zero—just the cost of my computer and my Internet connection. I had no idea even how to put up a Web page when I decided to launch my Internet business. I just knew I had to be on the Internet and had to get up to speed fast—at least with the basics.

I still have no programming knowledge. My websites are not at all high-design. They are almost primitive. Professional website designers still laugh at my sites.

But my sites are not designed to look pretty. They are designed to make money.
I started off using an online website builder (www.CityMax.com). After using that for a while, I then went and bought Microsoft FrontPage and built my sites with that. My sites are hosted at www.GoDaddy.com.

Using Microsoft FrontPage, it took me two days of work to figure out how to build my own sites and publish them on my own dedicated server at GoDaddy.

As I recall, that’s about how long it took me to learn how to use Microsoft Word.

I just added Dreamweaver to my site designing tool kit. I shied away from that at first because I heard it was for professional site designers. But it’s really no more difficult than FrontPage—easier in some respects. You don’t need programming or even knowledge of HTML coding with that either—though a little very basic HTML knowledge helps with all these programs (even if you are using an online-hosted third-party site builder). Basic HTML is not at all tough. It’s like learning a new language—the equivalent of taking a week of introductory French. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but not at all tough.

So here’s my monthly bill for my online business:

• Monthly hosting at Godaddy.com. I bought the top of the line premium hosting service and pay $149 per month for that. I wanted a dedicated server and maximum storage capacity. But you can pay as little as $19 per month for hosting at GoDaddy.

• For $19 per month, I use www.Aweber.com for my prospecting email program (mass broadcasts to tens of thousands of leads) every day. And I use www.iContact.com for my existing customers for about $80 per month. I also have my own desktop email broadcasting software as a backup plan, if I ever get shut down by the third-party email-marketing service (always a possibility with these services, which are on a hair-trigger anti-spam smackdown alert). I explain my reasons for all this later in this book.

• The shopping cart system I use is www.1ShoppingCart.com. They are among the more pricey shopping carts—about $79 per month. But I like the company because it understands marketing and has many valuable marketing tools in addition to the shopping cart—for example, a tool for tracking the performance of affiliates and commissions I owe to affiliates. (More on this later.)

• The merchant account gateway I use is www.Authorize.net. You need to have a gateway that integrates with your shopping cart and delivers transactions to the credit card company. This is super simple to do. Just follow the step-by-step instructions the company provides. I also have a PayPal Pro account because some customers prefer to pay with PayPal. I’m not much of a fan of PayPal myself. But you should offer a pay-through-PayPal option. You’ll lose sales if you don’t. Just figure total transaction fees being around 3.5%.

For my business, I also need a webcast service to hold my electronic seminars. I mostly use www.InstantTeleseminars.com for that, which is just $47 per month.

Later in this book, I’ll show you how to use webcasts and telecasts to supercharge your selling (no matter what business you are in), conduct educational programs for thousands of people, or even to become a media superstar.

The podcast revolution is about to overwhelm old-fashioned television, media, information delivery, and entertainment. Just look at what YouTube.com is doing to see why. YouTube is just the start, just the tip of the iceberg, of what we are about to see.

So my total monthly bill for my Internet business is less than $300, not including the roughly 3.5% in transaction fees or my advertising costs (which are substantial now). As of this writing, I am spending about $25,000 per month on pay-per-click and other advertising. But that’s only because my advertising has been so successful. I double the money I invest in my advertising every 75 days or so on the Internet.

I started out spending just $50 per week on pay-per-click advertising on Google AdWords until I figured out how to make it work.

That’s what’s so revolutionary about marketing on the Internet. It’s zero risk. You can test ideas for pennies. Once you find an idea, a theme, or a product that’s working, you then ramp up your advertising.

I love direct mail marketing also. I built my reputation in direct mail marketing. In fact, my direct mail packages have generated well over $500 million in sales, donations, and membership fees over the last 20 years for scores of businesses and non-profit organizations.

So I love direct mail. For many decades direct mail was the single most cost-effective and powerful marketing tool on the planet, especially for the small business.

Now there’s no question the Internet is by far the world’s most powerful marketing tool. Actually, the Internet includes many tools. Don’t get me wrong. I still love direct mail also. But the Internet empowers the creative entrepreneur (or “infopreneur”) in an entirely new way.

You actually don’t need to pay for any advertising on the Internet. There are dozens of powerful “organic” and “viral marketing” strategies that can allow you to get your message out quickly to tens of thousands of ready-to-buy-from-you prospects for free.

I’ll explain all these wonderful strategies in the pages that follow.

But the point is, you can have a highly profitable online business for less than $100 per month and look as big as Wal-Mart.

Contrast this with starting a business in the offline world. How much would it cost you to open up a physical store—say, a dry cleaner shop?

Near the end of this book, in the “Internet Marketing Tool Kit” chapter, you will find a list of all the vendors I use for my online business.

But it’s really a mistake just to think of Internet marketing as limited to the Internet.

It’s not just an online business that you should be building. This is your business. All your marketing—online and offline—needs to be integrated. Yes, some businesses can be pure online businesses with no offline advertising or marketing. But every business needs to be online, needs to be marketing and selling on the Internet.

This book will show you how to combine online and offline marketing to supercharge all your selling.
The big point here is that money is not the main currency of the Internet world.

Creativity, imagination, brainpower, and content are the currency of the Internet.

You don’t need money, as you would to capitalize your brick-and-mortar store. You don’t need money to hire employees. You don’t need money for a lot of heavy equipment. You don’t need inventory. You don’t even need much in the way of office supplies.

I like to jot down ideas on yellow legal pads. For some reason, my brainstorming works best when I’m jotting down ideas on a yellow legal pad—probably because I’m 49 and still a bit stuck in the old offline world. So pens and yellow legal pads are about the extent of my office supplies.

Your website is almost free. Your email communications are almost free, or can be almost free. And your marketing and advertising are free, or can be almost free, if you understand viral marketing, how search engines work, and how to build an email list of people who are interested in what you are doing or selling.

For me, one of the greatest aspects of my Internet business is that it allows me unlimited mobility.

All you need is a laptop computer and a high-speed Internet connection, and you are in business. You also need your brain and some knowledge of how to do it. You need a business model and a system. That’s what this book is about—showing you how to build an online business model and system that literally cannot fail if you do it correctly.

Your office can be anywhere.

My office can be (and often is) a ski lodge in Aspen, a beach in Costa Rica, a sidewalk café in Spain, a chalet in Switzerland, or the clubhouse at Pebble Beach golf links. I got rid of my physical office. My company is now completely virtual.

Not only are my employees a whole lot happier, they are at least 100% more productive than when they had to fight rush-hour traffic and slog into the office every day.

We have our meetings via WebEx.com. We can see each other, talk to each other, and show our charts and PowerPoint presentations, just like we are sitting around a conference room table.

The automobile was often called the “Great American Freedom Machine.”

Our cars allowed us to travel almost anywhere.

But the new Great Freedom Machine is high-speed Internet. It’s this technology that is freeing us from our physical offices and freeing us from having to be trapped for hours in rush hour traffic.

Not only can you conduct your business now from anywhere, you can be virtually untrackable. If you are using a nearly untrackable Internet phone service (e.g., www.Skype.com) your clients or your employers who are talking with you and communicating with you every day might assume you are local, when in fact you are conducting your business on a beach in Rio de Janeiro.

To achieve this level of freedom and mobility, you will also need to learn how to outsource many of the key physical aspects of your business. We will get to that in this book as well.

But there’s a catch.

If you are “IQ-challenged,” you probably won’t be a wild success on the Internet.

It’s almost impossible to fail completely on the Internet because there are almost no start-up costs. If you are on the Internet, no matter how poorly, you will be more successful than if you had no online presence.

But native intelligence is a huge advantage because “Content really is king” on the Internet. So your content needs to be good. That requires brainpower, thinking, and also some dedication and hard work. But I think it’s fun work.
With more than 120 million websites on the Web, the Internet is a world where the fittest survive—the fittest determined not by how much money you have, but by the quality of your content or idea.

I’m a huge believer in the free market because the competitive pressures inherent in the free market (if allowed to operate) will always produce the highest quality products, in the shortest time, and at the cheapest price. Because there are no financial barriers to entry on the Internet, this is a world where the free market operates in its purest form. It’s a free market of content and of ideas—where the best flourish.

But here’s the good news.

You don’t need to be the best in the world to succeed wildly on the Internet.

You just need to be one of the best in your target niche.

Your niche might be an area of your specialty or expertise (and probably should be). Or it can be just something you love doing. Almost everyone is good at something. Almost everyone knows a lot about some subject. Almost everyone has a hobby, a sport, a game, or some passion they are really good at. You win on the Internet primarily by becoming a big fish in a small pond. This principle applies especially to local businesses.

If you try to win by swimming in the ocean, chances are you will be eaten by the big, mean fish—the sharks. What you want to be is a big fish in a small pondSuccess on the Internet is all about targeting a niche and drilling deeply into that niche.

But here’s what’s great.

There are a near-infinite number of highly profitable niches for you to choose from and dominate. You can even create your own niche tailored specifically to whatever it is you love doing. That’s right, on the Internet you can get rich by pursuing your hobby or your passion.

In fact, pursing your hobby or passion is one of the very best ways to succeed on the Internet.
I’ll explain all this in detail in the pages that follow.

The lessons and information you will receive here will work for any business. The concepts, methods, and strategies you will learn here will work for:

Lawyers
Doctors
Writers and Publishers
Educators
Realtors
Insurance Agents
Inventors
Aspiring Movie Directors and Producers
Information Marketers
Investment Advisors
Financial Planners
Dentists
Retailers
Manufacturers
Restaurants
Car Dealers
Auto Service Centers
Banks and Lenders
Property Developers
Consultants of all kinds
Direct Marketers
Home Businesses
Network Marketers
Every kind of Service Provider
Athletes
Even Makers of Heavy Equipment

It does not matter what your business, hobby, or passion is. There’s a market (an entire world) for you to dominate on the Internet.

So now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of how to build a profitable business on the Internet, no matter what business you are in.
 

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