Review of 2002
// Well, it is nearly the end of another year, just Christmas to get through and it will be 2003! I have been looking back over the past year in an effort to decide if I have achieved anything with my online businesses during 2002. I came up the following: 1. Three new websites up and running & one more on the way 2. Three new eBooks written, published and selling 3. Two of my eBooks are now listed on Amazon.com 4. Newsletter subscribers increased from 700 to over 7,000 5. Income up considerably Now, the reason that I am telling you this is not because I think you will be pleased for me, but to illustrate that a lot can be achieved in a year and there is no reason why you could not do something similar in 2003. Yes, it is hard work, but then so is running any business. Yes, it will take up a lot of hours, but then so does any business. Why not make 2003 the year that you start your own online business – it isn’t as hard as you might think and it is a great way to earn a living. This
$6.6m a year working online?
// I mentioned Corey Rudl a few weeks ago in this newsletter and promised I would tell you a bit more about him at some point. That point is now, so here is a quick summary of how Corey makes literally millions of dollars a year online. Corey originally wrote a guide about ‘Car Secrets’ – how to save money when buying cars, how to make sure you don’t get ripped off when paying for servicing, that sort of thing. Corey was marketing it in magazines etc and losing thousands of dollars. He decided to start marketing it online and turned a failing business into a $500,000 revenue stream! From there, Corey has developed other products and with the help of just 11 staff, his online businesses attract over 450,000 visitors A WEEK and last year his gross revenue was over $6.6 million!! (which is apparently more income per employee than Microsoft makes). Corey has been interviewd on the Maury Povich show and his story really is an ‘amazing but true’ tale. Now, his products are not the cheapest available – his Internet Marketing Course sells for around $200. However, he has recently published a shortened version of the course
Exclusive interview
// Paul Tranter and Terry Johnson had been working in the information publishing business for several years before deciding to move over onto the Internet full-time at the beginning of this year. Paul told The Online Trader, “Our main reasons for moving to the Net were the ease of product delivery and cost effectiveness. Marketing offline is far more expensive – it costs approximately $775 to mail out 1000 flyers, yet we can hit our entire 80,000 email database at the touch of a button for nothing!” Between them, Paul and Terry now run several online businesses, all focused on selling digital information. The main business is ‘The Vangard Alliance’ which promotes an extremely popular business and personal development plan called ‘The Omni-Science Principle’. Initial expectations for the site were high but it was hard to get the ball rolling at first as Paul explains, “We thought it would be a lot easier than it is to sell online – we thought we would just build a website and people would come…..they didn’t! Seth Godin (online marketing guru) sums it up best with his quote, ‘it took ten years to become an overnight success’”. It is beginning to snowball now,
Crash!
// Something happened to me this week that COULD have turned into one of the most stressful experiences of my life – OK, slight exaggeration, but it wouldn’t have been good! What happened? My computer crashed. When I say crashed, I mean it fell over in a big way – none of my Internet software would function, Internet Explorer was a goner, Outlook was lifeless and many other programs were terminally ill. For someone that earns their living online, this was not a good situation to be in Now, I say that it COULD have been a stressful situation – the reason it wasn’t is because I use a program called Drive Image to back up my entire hard drive in one go (and that includes the operating system). You can then reinstall everything at the press of a button – took me about 20 minutes to load over 5GB of software. The reason I am telling you this is because I know how much time it would have taken me to install each of my software programs individually – about a day – and this could happen to you. If you are working online, even just part-time, you should
What's your website ranking?
// Anyone with a website will understand when I say that I love to watch my hits increasing every week/month/year, but did you know that there is another way of monitoring your website traffic AND that of your competitors? www.alexa.com provides traffic rankings for the majority of websites in the world. It works like this, Alexa has around 10 million users worldwide that have downloaded a free toolbar that integrates with Internet Explorer. This software tracks each website that the user visits and allows Alexa to build up a database of the number of hits a particular site receives over a certain period of time. Alexa then apply a calculation to the information and give the site in question a traffic ranking. A new website will normally have a ranking of 3,000,000 or thereabouts (or nothing at all if no data is held) and as the traffic to the site increases, so the ranking reduces. The closer to ’1′ you get, the more hits you are receiving (In case you were wondering, Yahoo holds the top position). You can also use Alexa to view the ranking of any website (your competitors?) at any time and if you download the toolbar
