"The Lightning Speed Internet Sales Success Course" LESSON #4 © 1997 B.S.A. / F.M. http://web.idirect.com/~bsa/index.htm _______________________________ THE TOPIC: True stories about dozens of individuals and businesses making a comfortable living from the Internet. THE ANSWER: There are many good e-mail newsletters that will give you real-life examples of people making money on the Internet. This list is already huge and is growing geometrically as Internet marketing's success skyrockets. I'll list just a few sources here, then later on give you some stories from "normal people" profitting from the web. Here's where to get some of them: Ralph Wilson - http://www.wilsonweb.com Guerrilla Marketing Online - http://www.gmarketing.com Barbara Besteni - http://www.profitproducer.com Netrageous Results! - http://www.netrageous.com Jonathan Mizel - http://www.cyberwave.com Mike Enlow - http://www.enlow.com Want more evidence and concrete suggestions? Do a search at http://www.altavista.digital.com with the search phrase: "money-making web site" or "profitable web site" (Yes, do use the quotation marks for your search.) But we're not nearly through yet. Please keep reading: ______________________________________________________ TOP TEN CONSUMER WEB SITES www.shareware.com www.columbiahouse.com www.hotfiles.com www.cuc.com www.amazon.com www.surplusdirect.com www.gw2k.com (Gateway 2000) www.jumbo.com www.bmgmusicservice.com www.onsale.com Funny, but there are still computer-owning North Americans who think Internet marketing is just generally unprofitable. Maybe that's because newspapers and magazines are still saying "The web isn't profitable yet", which is a blatant lie. That's like saying "Direct marketing isn't profitable" when in fact, like marketing on the Internet, most people simply do it wrong. Just consider the sites listed above. Also, the BSA web site has generated over $40,000 during a time frame when all it has cost to maintain is under $500 plus our time, which is a labor of love anyway. My organization in The Peoples Network is shaping up to provide me with life-long financial independence and it's ALL because of a few dollars worth of Internet access. Internet marketing is like any other form of marketing. There are those who crack the code and make it work - and there are those who don't. A real sharp philosopher once said that all new ideas go through three stages: first they are ridiculed, second they are violently opposed (in a usually futile attempt to maintain the status quo), and third they are accepted as self-evident by everyone. Internet marketing is fast becoming impossible to deny as a viable and powerful marketing concept. _____________________________________________________ I went out and asked people for their stories about Internet marketing success. Here are just a few responses: Date sent: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 13:15:58 -0600 From: beth ellyn rosenthal Subject:Success on the Net Hi Scott: Here is my story: In February, 1994, I attended an Information Marketing conference in Las Vegas. My goal was to determine if I should accept a New York publishing house's offer to publish my book, The Meltdown Diet and Cookbook: Learn How To Burn Fat 24 Hours A Day, Even While You Sleep, or self-publish. Their contract netted me 10 cents on the $1, which did not excite me. I decided to self-publish the book after hearing a talk from Para Publishing. But I also heard about this wonderful new thing called the Internet. My book debuted in June, 1994, when I incorporated my company in Texas. Since I had spent all my money publishing the book, I started posting in newsgroups because it was cost effective. (The Web really didn't exist then.) I mentioned the book in my sig line. All the books were stored in my bare bathroom. (I live in a North Dallas Palace!) There were so many demands for the book from around the country that in December, 1994, I got a call from the national book buyer at Barnes & Noble. They wanted to carry my book! I learned early the power of the Internet. In February, 1995 I had my first Web site ready. It had 3 pages. In addition to my book, I sell a lab test called a Tissue Mineral Analysis. This test, which has never before been available to consumers, explains why people have health problems they can't fix: it's because their body is out of whack! The solution is simple: Change your eating habits and the vitamins you take. The TMA test report includes a customized eating plan so people can bring their biochemistry back into balance. By the end of 1995, my company had grossed $60,000 in annual revenues. In November, I got laid off from my "real" job because my boss was under investigation for murder. He and I had an altercation because he asked me if I thought he did it and I told him I knew he did. So he fired me on the spot. Anyway, it's impossible to find a job in America between Thanksgiving and New Years, so I decided to devote myself to my Internet business until I found a "real" job. Of course, I never even looked. In 1996 my business became Internet only. I now have a 3 meg Web site, a secure server, a toll free number, and one part time employee in addition to me. (I already had a merchant account from my pre-Internet days.) I even developed a new product: my own formulation for wild yam cream. In 1996 I had annual revenues again of $60,000. The reason I didn't grow is due to pilot error. I made a lot of costly marketing mistakes. The Internet is a new medium and I made some wrong choices. This year I hope to double revenues because there are more people shopping the Net and I will act smarter. The key to Internet success is this: Have a great product. Give 100% money back guarantees to show you believe in your product. And have the best customer service on the planet. Internet shoppers want their stuff now! I have to say I still have my wonderful lifestyle, even though I haven't had a paycheck since October, 1995. I work half the time and have much more fun doing it. I can sit at my computer without underwear and talk to the world! I love it. Who says you have to work for a living? {Hugs} from Dallas, Beth Ellyn, the supplement specialist 214-553-1347 Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, CEO, Meltdown International, Inc. Phone: (972) 390-0323 E-mail:bethellyn@meltdown.com Get an Owner's Manual to YOUR body at the do-it-yourself health store. Shop the Web in '97! ----------------------- Date sent: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 19:41:52 -0800 To: scovert@accel.net From: hydromed@westworld.com (hydromed) Subject:Stories Hydromed is a company that markets inventions and products of mine, i.e. Murray Grossan, M.D. I am an ear nose and throat specialist with a special interest in simple remedies, but with scientific validity. The Grossan Sinus Irrigator works for sinus relief, post nasal drip, and helps asthma and sinus infection of aids and cystic fibrosis. The throat irrigator is a simple way to clear sore throats and breath problems I didn't want to spend big dollars to advertise and really didn't have the time from my practice. But with the internet, I placed a web site, http://www.ent-consult.com which contains the office information sheets I and my associates hand out to my patients. There is material on headaches, migraine, sinusitis, allergy, tinnitus, TMJ - temperomandibular joint disease- and Biofeedback. The web site has been successful because so many people have e mailed to thank me for helping them. A medical device, such as the Sinus Irrigator usually requires big bucks in promotion, magazine ads, sales reps, dinners, etc. The average new drug budgets $100 million dollars for advertising. So here is a chance to tell the public and doctors about the sinus irrigator, give the medical facts, and offer additional articles and scientific material as well. The Sinus Irrigator is unique in that it uses pulsation to restore the nasal and sinus cilia to normal. Now, not many people understand about cilia and the web affords an opportunity to tell the whole story. I am particularly pleased that many more people will derive benefit by learning about cilia function - a list of to do things is in the page -than could possibly have come to my office for personal consultation. Murray Grossan, M.D. http://www.ent-consult.com --------------------------- Murray Grossan, M.D. hydromed@westworld.com http://www.ent-consult.com ---------------------------- From: Nikki Murphy Subject:Small business success Date sent: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 10:10:16 -0000 Hi Scott - I wanted to tell you about me. I'm female (obviously) just 23 years of age (two weeks ago) and set up impact web publishing ltd eight months ago with 500 pounds redundancy from the software company that I was working for who went to California and left us all in the UK! It's been tough but this week alone I've brought in 2000 pounds of new business with a view to another 5700 pounds more! I've now got 5 completed clients sites with 2 more to soon be added and business is booming and I couldn't be happier! (Editor's note: a pound is about $1.65 US$). It all happens from my dining room table and I'm loving it! Once this month's money comes in I'm going to use it to expand my equipment here and do some advertising in a carefully chosen place. I'm really excited to see what 1997 brings and I hope everyone else has at least as much success as me (only relative to their financial circumstances of course!) Kind Regards and Good luck with your own projects for 1997. Nikki Murphy Managing Director ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * i m p a c t w e b p u b l i s h i n g l t d * * Tel: 01628 522099, Fax: 01628 850157 * * nikki@impactwp.com * http://www.impactwp.com * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Date sent: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 10:52:25 -0500 To: scovert@accel.net From: Gene McMahon Send reply to: woodman@inkimage.com Organization: Ink & Image, Inc. To: scovert@accel.net Subject:Making $$ with shockwave Scott, Here are a few responses I've gotten regarding making $$ with Shockwave. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 11:09:48 -0600 From: Steve Hagenlock The Coach's Edge leveraged it's investment in niche animation software products to utilize the shockwave file format and advertise/build brand on the web when shockwave was released. Since then, many favorable things have happened outside of our realm of influence. (USA today article and link, "The Web" magazine sports feature review, etc...) None of this actually MADE us any money (I'm talking about our web site here). At best, it served as PR and a decent brand-building tool. However, we've recently signed a contract with one of the two major media syndication companies. We are committed to serving both a printed (Quark) piece and an interactive piece (HTML + Shockwave) once a week as syndicated material. In this instance, we've acquired a very powerful sales force with international reach, and leveraged both custom authoring tools and mainstream authoring tools to deliver two forms of media very efficiently. Currently, the technical people in our company are keeping busy with further development/bug- zapping of our internet technologies. Well, in short, that is what shockwave has done for us. Given us more bang for the buck on an established code base. later, Steve -- <----------------------------------------------------------> Steve Hagenlock AT&T (605) 330-1406 Senior Multimedia EngineerFree 1-800-367-0050 LodgeNet Entertainment FAX (605) 330-1491 http://www.lodgenet.com steveh@lodgenet.com --------------------- The Coach's Edge Educational Sports Software Director of Technology http://www.coachesedge.com <----------------------------------------------------------> ____________________________________________________ On the web the newest thing is a site for In your Ear Recording Studios. www.lobe.com The site is pretty loose and the guy who wrote it has a neat sense of humor. I've worked on pieces for Sega online, Crown Books, Rockwell International and GE. i can give you the URL's but I need to look up exactly where they are (the pathname and everything). john R. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 13:09:57 +1100 From: artyprdn@arty.com.au (aRTy Productions) Subject: Re: Making $$ with SW I was employed as a contractor to develop a shockwave site for one of Australia's cable TV co's. The site was a trial for their broadband internet service using schools in 2 Australian states. The main site is no longer in use, however a copy of it can be found at http://www.arty.com.au/optus/ Be warned, as this was developed for broadband services, the .dcr file is large (1.9MB) so will take time to download via a normal modem - btw: this was developed with a very early version of shockwave & director 4. When/if you do get the site, have a play with the animated character - pick him up & move him to various parts of the screen (the corners are especially good) also try just clicking on him to watch him surf the logo wave. Anyway - that's one job for the "paid to develop" area - anyone else? TYPE EMAILURL personal richard@arty.com.au http://www.arty.com.au/resume ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 13:38:00 -0700 From: donr@eriver.com (Don Relyea) Subject: Re: Making $$ with Shockwave The company I work for (Eagle River Interactive) has sold a bunch of stuff to several large well known companies, most under NDA, for good $. They pay me to make shockwave games for our clients. They also pay Matt Cave and Jeff Bennett, other regular contributors to this listserve and general all-around good guys. Eagle River has an arcade that has indirectly generated around 750,000k in new buysiness for us(although the sales people will never concede to that, the client responsible for the sales told me personally). Extreme Snowboarding has been licensed to both Apple and Microsoft. I have a lot of shockwave on my personal site as well. Even though I am not done with the site and pretty much nobody knows about it, in the first five days the site was up somebody found it and saw a shockwave texture map browser thingy that demos a texturemap CD I have. They ordered the CD immediately. I thought that was pretty cool. I am working on some killer SW games (every night after work) to draw people to my site. Games that specifically use textures from my CD so maybe people will be stoked to by the CD. Who knows, maybe it will work. Regards, Don ------------------------------------------------ Don Relyea donr@eriver.com Senior Multimedia Producer don_relyea@eriver.com Eagle River Interactive direct 214-571-4038 1701 North Market, Suite 400 main 214-571-4000 Dallas, TX 75202 fax 214-571-4040 =================================================== Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 15:04:17 -0700 (MST) From: Hugh Graham Subject: Re: Making $$ with SW At CCG Online we have been paid by a variety of clients to develop Shockwave - they've ranged from Express (Fashion site) to US West Telechoice (cable modem service navigation) to a variety of others. At USWest, we had a request from the client to create a relatively high bandwidth interactive audio and slide show navigation - At the time (last summer) shockwave was the only way to accomplish this. I should add that as I'm not a hotshot game programmer like Don or Gary Rosensweig at clevermedia, I've had a harder time finding justifications for using shockwave instead of intrinsic web based technologies (cgi scripts, that kind of thing) - but I'm hoping that as the plugin architecture gets more secure, we won't have to admit such large flaws in a shockwave strategy - i.e., a large part of your viewing public will not be able to see what we create, because they either have lousy browsers or insufficient ram or no plugin, or error 100s or etc... Still, I've done 15 or 20 different projects over the last year that involved shockwave, and so far all the checks have cleared. We use shockwave to present our work to clients - not on our site, but rather in the conference room. It makes more sense for us to burn a director file as a shockwave, then embed it into a page to jazz up and personalize our presentations - It makes for a pretty modular presentation, where we can use a chinese menu approach. We can always add a new shockwave, remove a client we don't like anymore(?), add some links, and burn the whole thing on a cd - as most of our work is on the web, we can more easily adapt our director work to the web, than adapt all our sites to director - this stops us from having to use multiple applications during one presentation. Now if I can just talk the sales geeks into quitting using powerpoint for sales calls, we might just get somewhere. Does this address your point? I'm not sure, but it does indirectly generate revenue (at least we hope it does). Sorry for the tardy reply - best, -hugh ___________________________________________________ | Hugh Graham Associate Creative Director | | ccg://online interface/design/multimedia | | hugh@ccgonline.com http://www.ccgonline.com | | (303) 986-3000 (303)988-7580x137 direct | =================================================== Date sent: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 15:25:09 -0800 To: scovert@accel.net From: Deborah Werksman Subject:Free Publicity Hi. We are a small independent publisher called Hysteria Publications. We specialize in humor books, including such illuminating titles as Getting in Touch with Your Inner Bitch (recommended by your therapist!) and A Useless Guide to WindBlows95 (your computer, your appliances, and your life will never be the same!) We put up a rudimentary web site about a year ago, and it attracted a new distributor. Andrews & McMeel is the largest humor publisher in the country, and their sales force will be representing our books. They just started on January 1, but since they'll be taking our books into areas we've never been in before (Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, England, Australia) we're looking at a terrific increase in sales this year. Thanks. *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** Deborah Werksman Rose Communications/Hysteria Publications rose@bridgeport.com/hysteria@bridgeport.com (203) 333-9399 Books & calendars, humor & topics of interest to women Hysteria publishes "Getting In Touch with Your Inner Bitch" Rose publishes "I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words" Visit Hysteria on the web: www.bridgeport.com/hysteria Visit Rose on the web: www.rosecomm.com ----------------------------- Date sent: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 10:30:03 -0800 (PST) To: scovert@accel.net From: ace@artcellarex.com (Art Cellar Exchange) Subject:Free Publicity Dear Scott, The Art Cellar Exchange is an international fine art consultancy. We've been on the web since December of '94. We officially announced our launch on January 1, 1995, and within 30 days, we had made $10,000 of profit from our web site. After the first year we had made over $60,000 in NEW business, and it has steadily climbed since then. The Art Cellar Exchange is a small business employing less than 5 people. The company has been in existence since 1988. Articles about the Art Cellar Exchange can be found in: Art Business News, Art News, Art in Auction, San Diego Business Journal, Computer Edge, San Diego Daily Transcript, Belgium's Das Standaard, Shopping on the Internet and Beyond (book by Jacqueline Easton), Delta Sky magazine, CBS news radio, CNN, Independent Business Magazine (cover, January '97). The Art Cellar Exchange is an international fine art brokerage specializing in buying and selling art on the secondary market. Prime Interest uses Real Audio to discuss a distinguished work for sale using art historical references and market knowledge. Hundreds of works of art are for sale in our classifieds. Ads have both retail and asking prices as well as images available to prospective collectors. Interactive editorial answers questions about the fine art market. The URL is: http://www.artcellarex.com. Web Awards: Top 5% of all web sites, Netscape's What's New, Top Shopping Site, Hot Site, Cool Lynx, Magellan 4 Star, Positive Places. Thank you Scott! Sincerely, P.B. Van Cleve Art Cellar Exchange -- -- Art Cellar Exchange Voice: (619)338-0797 Global Fine Art Consultancy Fax: (619)338-0826 2171 India Street #HWeb: http://www.artcellarex.com/ San Diego, CA 92101 Email: ace@artcellarex.com