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Interview with Corey Rudl:
The Secrets of an Internet Millionaire
Discover the secrets of an Internet millionaire in this
exclusive interview with online marketing guru Corey Rudl.
Corey is the author of the #1 best-selling course,
"The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your
Business on the Internet" and is probably one of the
most recognized names in Internet marketing today.
In the following interview, Corey reveals how he grew his business
from a one-man show in his parents' basement to four online
businesses that attract over 1.8 million visitors per month
and generated over $7.6 MILLION in online sales last year.
Corey reveals exactly how he did it, and details precisely
what entrepreneurs need to be doing TODAY to be successful
online.
Hi Corey, and thanks so much for agreeing to do this
interview. Maybe the best way for us to begin is for you to
tell us a bit about yourself and your company, The Internet
Marketing Center.
Sure. Well, first off, I am the President
and CEO of The Internet Marketing Center, which you can find
online at
www.marketingtips.com. We
specialize in showing people how they can drive tons of
targeted traffic to their web sites and how to turn that
traffic into sales and profits. We provide all the
information you need to learn how to market your business
online, in the form of home-study courses, books, video and
audio tapes, and more.
What really sets us apart from all the
other marketing courses, though, is that we give you the
concepts AND the software tools you need to promote and
automate your business on the Internet. And we do all of
this based on our own real-world tests and experience, not
just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it BEFORE we
teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee your results.
Actually, that brings up a good question: Why,
exactly, is your "Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business
on the Internet" course so successful? Aren’t you leading
this market space?
Yes, we are by far the leaders in educating our Small Office/Home
Office audience in how to make money on the Internet.
The reason the course is so successful is because we practice
what we preach. We generated about $7.6 million in business
last year, all online. And that's not to mention the tens of
millions of dollars we have helped our clients generate. We
have over 70,000 affiliates and we get over 1.8 million
unique visitors to our sites every month, all on a
shoestring budget and all from scratch. So we are actually
using all the methods that we teach.
Would you hire a poor stock broker? Of course not. If he cannot
make himself rich, how's he going to help you? Would you
hire a personal trainer that is not in good shape? No way!
If they can’t do it themselves, how can you be sure that
what they are teaching you is not garbage?
People know our reputation and they know that the stuff we teach in
the course actually works. We walk people through every
single step they need to follow to be successful marketing
their business on the Internet -- even if they don't have an
online business yet.
We also have a few big Fortune 500 corporate clients. They're
attracted to us because most of them are so caught up in red
tape that they don’t get to see the guerilla marketing
tactics used to generate immediate revenues like small
businesses do. We're just now starting to see the big
corporations picking up some of the things we were
recommending two years ago!
So the key to your success is practicing what you
preach?
Exactly. Another big reason we're so successful is that we
take all the risk. Our guarantee is simple -- if you don’t
make money from what you've learned in the course, then you
pay nothing. You can return it anytime for a full refund for
any reason. Even if you decide you don't like the paper it's
printed on, we'll give you all of your money back. And you
know what? We get nearly zilch returns -- and that speaks
for itself.
Don’t take my word for it,
check out the testimonials at our site. We publish only one percent of the
testimonials we receive, but you can see that it's not
people saying “Oh, it was great,” but people saying they
“Made an extra $70,000 already this year," or “Traffic
increased by 400% in 30 days.” That's what counts -- results.
That is the scoreboard at the end of the day.
And we really do cover everything in the course you could ever
imagine. We teach you everything from A to Z; everything
from starting up from scratch with nothing to how to drive
traffic to your site, right down to setting up your site to
convert visitors to more sales.
You'll learn how to maximize your exposure on the search engines,
how to automate your entire business, how to build pop-up
boxes, and hundreds of other things. We even give you
templates and ideas to copy from us to ensure that nothing
will go wrong!
That reminds me of a funny story... A couple of years
back, I thought of trying to get my course on the reading
list for an Internet Marketing program being offered by a
top university. I had some meetings with a few of their
senior marketing professors, hoping to get
"Insider Secrets" into the hands
of all their Internet Marketing students.
They finally came back to me and said, basically, "Thanks,
but no thanks." Now, I was shocked! Why wouldn't they want
their students to have the #1 Internet Marketing course as
part of their education? I wouldn't let the professor leave
my office until she told me.
It turns out they were actually scared that if their
students read my course and found out that it cost less than
two hundred dollars, they would feel ripped off by the
school, which was basically charging them thousands of
dollars for the same information!
That's quite a story! It just goes to show that "traditional"
education isn't always the best way to get the BEST
information.
Corey, could you tell us a little bit about your own history and
background? How did you get started marketing online?
Well, I won't go too far back as I don’t want to bore you, but my
first online venture was way back in 1994. I had written a
book called "Car Secrets Revealed" and had been trying to
market it offline. After wasting a lot of money on magazine
and print ads, I took a friend's advice and decided to try
selling it over the Internet. Those magazine ads had eaten
up most of my cash, but I did manage to scrape together
enough to get my first web site up and running.
I did everything myself -- built the site
in HTML 1.0, learned how to use FTP programs, figured out
how to build a banner, and things like that. Those were the
days when Netscape 1.0 had just come out and there was no
such thing as secure real-time online ordering. It was all
so new and exciting!
I was glued to my computer 24 hours a day
testing all kinds of wild and crazy marketing ideas to see
which ones worked. And I can tell you that 95 out of 100
ideas failed, but the ones that did work, worked like crazy!
Within 18 months I had the #1 best-selling car book online...
and it's been #1 ever since!
When people started seeing that my counter had logged over 1,000,000 visitors at
CarSecrets.com, they started asking how I was marketing
it. They wanted to know how such a simple and basic site was
generating so much traffic, and if I could teach them how to
do it. Before too long I realized that I wasn't able to
teach people everything I knew during a one-week consulting
contract.
So I decided to "brain dump" everything I
knew into a course, which I called "The Insider Secrets to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet." It taught just
about everything I knew with real-life examples of exactly
what I had tested, what worked, and what didn't. That was
what set my course apart from every other Internet marketing
course out there -- that I had actually tested and proven my
techniques. Other courses were just teaching fluff and
theory.
By promoting the course with the exact
same techniques I was teaching, it became the #1 best-selling
Internet marketing course online within three months. Since
then, it has been through four new versions -- it needs to
be updated regularly as the Internet changes so fast! But
through all this time, it continues to be the #1 best-selling
Internet marketing course online.
Because we're so far out in front of the
curve as to what's working and what isn't, we have also been
able to develop some of the world’s leading Internet
promotional and automation software. Basically, we developed
software that we needed for our own business. We made sure
it was the best and then made it available to our clients.
This has helped us become one of the world’s leading
Internet marketing companies helping small to medium
businesses drive traffic and make more sales.
So, what specific suggestions do
you have for someone interested in getting started marketing
on the Web?
Wow! That's a huge question and, to be
blunt, there's no way I could answer it in just a few
minutes. In fact, that's why I wrote a 1,000-page course in
the first place... There are literally hundreds of tips and
suggestions for building a successful presence online. There
is just so much to know if you want to do it right the first
time. However, there is one tip that is more important than
any other...
Get educated. Don’t think you can put up a
web site and have traffic appear from out of nowhere. It
does not work that way. Spend the time to educate yourself
about how everything works. Research your market or idea and
learn how to identify a niche market on the Internet. Create
or market products that solve other people’s problems.
Another thing to look at is your
competition. How big are they? What are they doing right and
wrong?
Learn from people who practice what they
preach -- find people that you KNOW are successful on the
Internet and model yourself after them. Don’t try to re-invent
the wheel and don't listen to people who cannot prove that
they have done what you are trying to do.
There are so many "wannabes" out there who
write books on web site promotion but don't even have a
successful Internet business themselves. Find someone who
you know is successful and use them as a mentor -- that's
what I did. I had mentors, too.
Why do you feel that so many
people who attempt to create an income on the Internet fail
to do so?
Whoa, another loaded question! There are
so many reasons, but here are the main ones. Bear with me,
this will be a long answer:
Deciding on a product before finding a
market is a big one. This is probably the most common
mistake. If you are asking “What is a good product to sell
online?” you are making this mistake right now! You need to
decide on a market first.
The Internet makes it very easy to find
people interested in a specific category like gardening,
hunting, aeronautics, accountants, or any other interest
group. Just about any group is easy to locate and target
online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion
lists, e-zines (electronic magazines), etc.
You have to make sure you have a captive
audience, then find out what they are having a common
problem with. If you can come up with a product or service
to solve that problem, you have a guaranteed successful
business. It's really that easy -- that's how all my
businesses were built.
You don’t even really have to “sell” it,
because you already know they want it before you launch your
web site. And since you already know exactly where your
customers are, it's easy to target them. I mean, it’s a no-brainer
once you think about it.
Now, let’s turn that situation around for
a second. Say scientists had found a cure for the common
cold. You'd become a millionaire selling it online, right?
Well, not necessarily! How do you find people that are sick
online? You would have to market to the general Internet
community to try and find the 1 out of 10,000 people that
are sick that day. It would cost a ton of money to market to
10,000 people just to find one qualified buyer!
And to make matters worse, if you are
selling this over the Internet, by the time you ship them
the pill through the mail, they'd probably be over their
cold! So by choosing the product instead of the market, you
can actually fail no matter how great your product is.
Your course has a lot of
information about generating traffic. Is that a big hurdle
for online businesses?
Many people think they can build a web
site, submit it to the search engines, and the buyers will
come. The logic is that there are hundreds of millions of
people online surfing around and that some of them are bound
to stumble onto your product. Wrong! Search engine ranking
is more competitive than ever.
Yes, there are secret ways to get high
rankings in the search engines and we spend more than 40
pages in our course showing you how to do it. It is probably
one of the most complex marketing techniques out there.
There are lots of different options for grabbing high
rankings. You can do it all yourself, or you can buy really
good positioning software, or even hire specialized
companies to do it for you.
The course even recommends which
positioning software you should be using, as there is a lot
of junk out there! The same with Search Engine Optimization
companies -- most have no idea what they're doing. So my
course shows you how to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
The real key is to know what your
potential buyers do online. Are they searching online for a
specific term? Are they visiting specific web sites all the
time? Are they subscribed to topic-specific e-mail lists or
e-zines? In other words, you need to know where your target
market is “hanging out” online. If you can find where your
potential buyers are, this is where you should spend your
marketing and advertising money.
That is why I said before, spend your time getting educated,
learning everything, and researching your market and product
or service. Spend your time and money driving them to your
site and then show them how your product solves a problem
they have. Marketing is everything online! You could have
the best product in the world selling for half of your
competitor's price, but if you cannot get the word out, you
don't stand a chance.
What are some of the big psychological obstacles for
online entrepreneurs?
Number one in that department is definitely procrastination. I
cannot tell you how many people I've met who have really
great ideas and plans, but so few of them actually do what
they say they are going to do. So turn off the TV, stop
using your new baby as an excuse, stop going for drinks
after work with friends, and take the time to get serious
about your business! You will have plenty of time for all
the rest when the big income starts rolling in.
Let's be honest here... We're all good at justifying excuses to
ourselves. I've even done it a few times myself! But there
really is no excuse for not following your dream. You're
only hurting yourself.
The second biggest psychological obstacle
is fear of failure. Never fear failure. Heck, we fail every
day. The key is to fail small. In fact, your ticket to
success is failing regularly! Every time you fail, you're
eliminating bad ideas and getting closer to the things that
work.
If you aren't failing, you are not
learning. We test new ideas, new prices, new marketing
strategies, new looks, new products every month! Most of
them fail, and we expect that. And we don't call it failure,
we call it testing.
We are just looking for the five winners
out of every 100 small failures we have, because what we
learn from the winners we apply to everything we have.
Here's a perfect example: We don’t even send out an e-mail
to our opt-in list without testing at least four versions of
the e-mail to see which one performs the best -- that is how
much you have to test. Some pull in 200% better results than
others with small changes, so it's definitely worth it.
Speaking of results, what kind of
results should people expect when they are just starting out?
Don't get discouraged if you don't see
immediate results. This is another huge psychological
barrier faced by many new entrepreneurs. Some people expect
their business to be successful immediately and their dreams
to come true overnight. It usually doesn't happen that way.
An Internet business is like any other
business -- it takes work. The only difference on the
Internet is that you can automate a lot of repetitive chores...
and you can test and roll things out WAY faster than an
offline business could.
Things generally start slow -- that is to
be expected. But when it snowballs, it snowballs VERY fast!
And you really have to be prepared, because the Internet
moves at seven times the speed of offline business. If you
do things right, you can easily grow 700% faster than any
offline business just due to the speed of business on the
Internet.
Think of it this way: if you had just 30
people a day sign up for a newsletter, that adds up to over
10,000 subscribers in a year. This means that your company
now has a database of 10,000 highly targeted leads to market
your products to. If you were to purchase a list of 10,000
targeted leads (who have never even heard of you before and
may not be receptive to your product), it could easily cost
you up to $5 per lead.
So just by attracting 30 new people a day,
you've created an asset that is worth around $50,000.
Sometimes, even if it seems like things are moving slowly,
you're actually building something great! I hope that makes
sense.
If you could tell someone just one
thing about how to be a success in marketing on the Web,
what would it be?
Click here for Part 2 of
Corey Rudl's interview...
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