Selling Your Course On The Internet: Lessons From One Of The First To Do It (2 of 2)

Hello there everybody, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to part 2 with Corey Rudl, Selling Your Course on the Internet. Now Corey Rudl was one of the very first people to teach the strategy of selling online online, and today we're going to be talking about what lessons you can learn from writing copy both online and offline and how to properly use affiliate programs. These are original lessons. Things that worked back in the day, and history has a way of repeating itself, and you get that message right when you need it. So as you listen to Corey Rudl, make sure you pay attention to those lessons that the market is primed for today.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws. Laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. So this is how an affiliate program works. I am trying to give an example here off the cuff. I'm trying to look at something on my desk that— office supplies. Let's just give an example. I'm looking at a stapler right now on my desk and I sell these really fancy dancy staplers or what I want to do is I want to find everybody online that deals with— actually, let me cite— give me an example of one of your businesses or more common clients, Bill, that I could use an example with.

Well, let's see. I have a client of mine that provides— coaching, high-priced coaching to the people that own auto repair shops.

Okay, so let's use him as an example. I assume that what he has in the beginning is probably not— he's probably got some kind of low-end package to get them interested and get them as a quality lead for that high-end price coaching package. Is that correct?

Yeah, he brings them to a $347 one-day workshop.

Okay, so this will work out real easy. So how this works is you want to basically find all the car shop owners, correct? His goal is he wants car shop owners buying his coaching, correct?

Auto repair shop owners.

Auto repair shops, I'm sorry. So your goal is to find all the auto repair shop owners online. Now, how you go about doing that is go into the search engines, find all the auto repair, type in auto repairs, find all the different websites, forums, and what I call congregational areas, websites that actually cater to information, tips about car repair shop owners, that will have forums that car repair shop owners talk back and forth, email lists that deal with car shop repair owners. Once you have this, find who controls these market spaces or find who controls these communities, you want to affiliate with them. You basically want these people because they have access to your market, they have access to all these car repair shop owners, you want these people to be out there selling your products for you. What you do is you go to them and basically say, "Hi, I'm Corey Rudl with this Car Shop Repair Owner's Manual." I notice that all the people that are part of your forum, part of your email list, part of— that are visiting your website are car shop repair owners. So why don't you— why don't I give you a special link and from that link you'll drive traffic to my site and that link can be a banner, it can be a little recommendation piece on me, a letter from you, it can be just a little pop-up if you wanted to. But in any case, that will drive traffic to my website to show them I have the solution to help them make more money in their car repair shop business, and from those links, you know, from that link, the people that come through to my website, whoever buys my $397 course, I will give you $100. And you can put this link for a couple of weeks, and if it doesn't work out for some reason, if something doesn't, you know, it doesn't make any money, then no big deal, just take it down. But if it does make you money, then of course you want to keep it up. And this is all tracked automatically, so when you link to me, I'll also give you a special username and password. You can log into my website and check exactly How many people have linked from your website to my website and how many people have bought? So you can see how much money you're making at any point in time. That, for all intents and purposes, is the relationship of an affiliate. He became an affiliate of my car repair shop manual. Now every time that he comes, a customer comes through that link, he could have 10,000 customers come through that link and buy nothing and I pay this guy nothing.. But if 10 people come through and all 10 buy, then of course I just pay them a healthy portion of the profits. I'm only paying them after I collect the money and collect the sale, so I have nothing to lose. It's absolutely impossible for me to lose money. I can't lose money because I only give them money once I've made the sale. Now that's beautiful, nice and dandy, but here's where the real part comes in where you start blowing this up into having literally thousands and thousands of people out there promoting your products and linking to you or being affiliates for you, this marching army of commission salespeople. Is that this guy that owns this website that has car shop owners visiting it, he may know other people in the business that have similar type websites, similar type forums, similar type email address that you don't know and you will never know because he's in the business, he's in that industry. So you go to him and you say, look, you know what, you just made a few hundred bucks with me last month putting a little link on your website. First, let's talk about how we can make that better and how you can make me more predominant on your website to make more money. And second is, do you have any friends in the business that would be interested in doing exactly the same thing you've done and help them make money? And by the way, if you show them how to become an affiliate for me, not only will I give them their $100 per $397 course that they sell through that link, I will give you $50 every time that he sells a course. So basically, for making an introduction to me, and if he sells hundreds or thousands of courses over the next 5 years, I will give you $50 for every time that he does that for the rest of your life. So at the end of the day, what you're doing is having this one affiliate recruit the second affiliate. And the key here is it's only 2 tiers deep. You can't go any deeper than that because then it becomes multilevel marketing and all the rules change. But this is an offline— this would be impossible to manage. Online, it's a way of doing business. I'll just give you a quick example. I went and recruited my first 100 affiliates. I got people out there interested in my products and services that have websites that were similar, that had a target customer base that was sitting on their websites or sitting in their forms and sitting in their email list. And I went to that that community owner, that website owner, that email list owner, that forum owner and said, "Hey, why don't you partner with me? Why don't you become my affiliate and recommend my products and services and drive traffic to me?" I did that with 100 websites in the beginning. That was many years ago, not many but 5 years ago maybe, probably more like 7 years ago. Now today, I have 70,000 affiliates. I haven't done anything since that first 100. That first 100 have snowballed, have exponentially grown into 70,000 by the first 100 going and seeking out hundreds of more people they can get involved in my affiliate program. Go out and seek more people that can get involved in my affiliate program because they're motivated to do so by money. Every time they get someone to sign up for my affiliate program, anytime that person makes a sale, they get a kickback on what we call the second tier. So it's a win-win situation for everybody. We win, the first affiliate wins, the second affiliate wins, and the customer wins. I mean, everybody wins here. And they build your affiliate program for you, so you just get to go out and worry about your first 100 affiliates, and they basically over time propagate and exponentially grow your affiliate program to be this massive thing. And here's the beautiful part about it. Your affiliate program runs everything. The software runs everything. I could never manage 70,000 affiliates, 70,000 commission salespeople. But online it's a piece of cake. It takes me about half a day a month to run. The software runs it all for you. The software automatically tracks how many people have come through so somebody can check their stats. It automatically sends out the checks at the end of the month. I just press a button and it automatically prints the checks and prints the label. My biggest job is looking in the envelope to actually send the check out to all of my affiliates that have made money this month. And it automatically signs up new affiliates and sends them an email with all of the special links that they want to put on their website with the different banners or different recommendation letters or different promotions or pop-ups they want to use to promote me. It's done automatically. The software actually emails them automatically once they've joined all this information. On top of all this stuff, it actually goes out and manages all the affiliates internally, and it will allow me to mail affiliates based on different criteria. For example, say affiliates that are not doing anything, haven't started linking to me yet, I can press a couple of buttons in my software, it will automatically email all the people that have not taken action and have not started linking to me and motivate them to do so. Hey, you can say something like, hey, I've noticed, hey John, I've noticed you joined our affiliate program on blank date and you haven't started driving traffic to us. Here's different ways to do it. Here's some successful people that have made money in the last few days just linking to us quickly. And if worse comes to worse and you don't understand how this all works, just cut and paste this simple link into your website and you'll start linking to me immediately and hopefully making some money immediately. And I would do this right away because you have nothing to lose. It only takes you a couple minutes of your time. So these are the types of little promotions you can do, the software can do for you automatically that makes managing 70,000 affiliates take half a day a month, something that offline would be impossible. You can never manage 70,000 salespeople offline. So hopefully that kind of gives you a gist of how affiliate programs work and the power of using technology to manage this. Offline you can never manage this amount of people, but electronically it's very easy to manage 1 affiliate or 1,000 or 100,000 affiliates. It takes the same amount of work.

Well, you know, speaking from personal experience, I would say that, you know, the Glaser Kennedy inner circle membership has more than tripled since January and predominant mechanism that we used to make that happen was affiliate programs. I mean, there were some other things that we did as well, but affiliate programs was a key factor there. And, you know, it's just a very, very, very powerful tool. You know, I'd like to now ask a question to both to Dan and to Corey. And Dan, if you could probably answer it first, I'd appreciate it, is what similarities and differences do both of you guys see as far as writing copy for online versus offline, and maybe what are some of the— pitfalls that you need to make sure that you avoid?

Well, you know, I don't see a lot of difference or distinction in what works in one place versus the other, any more than in other media. I mean, it doesn't really matter to me whether we're writing for television or we're writing for website or And in fact, the biggest mistake that I consistently see is the site that lets the customer meander and wander and leap around, or I should say prospect really because you might do it with established customers. But the site that lets the prospect every 2 seconds have something that he could click that takes him someplace else and lets him hop around like a flea on a dog instead of running them through a step-by-step controlled sales process. I mean, I think selling is selling. So the differences that I see looking at Corey's stuff, Yannick's stuff, and Matt's and the clients that I work with where I have to be involved with this, the differences that I see are pretty minor indeed. And I think there's great danger in the belief that the different media mandates dramatically different techniques. And you've got to be careful, I think, of the website designer geeks who might convince you of that. Just the same as the business owner, you know, the single most common mistake made with a Yellow Pages ad is thinking that it's different than a newspaper ad or a radio ad. Or a magazine ad because it's the Yellow Pages. And so I think you have to be very careful of believing that there ought to be monstrous differences between what you do here and what you do everywhere else. Last, I would say— Corey said it earlier in the call, you know, I mean, copy is king. I mean, it's all about the message and the right message tends to work many different places and often people focus on the media first and the message last and that's the wrong order.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think the differences are minor. You know, what the internet lacks— I shouldn't say that. What the internet has as disadvantages, direct mail has advantages. What direct mail has advantages, internet has disadvantages. And we're not talking about just direct mail but infomercial, you know, newspapers, magazine ads, so on and so on. I think the biggest mistake I see is people writing bad copy or for that fact making the same blunders that they would also make in direct response copy of infomercial or magazine, newspaper, direct mail. So yeah, the differences are very minor. You'll see a lot of different techniques done via— I'm going to use a direct mail example because there's a very good affiliation between direct mail and long sales copy on a webpage.. There's a lot of the same techniques you see. You've probably seen from Dan many times the different techniques he uses. And one of them is that if you decide not to purchase this, please open the second envelope inside the first envelope with the direct mail piece. So the same thing is being done online, just done through a pop-up window. If you decide not to buy, click here and it pops up a pop-up window with the same message. There's a lot of different affiliations. You know, the value-adds and the order forms by direct mail where if you're ordering this product, you get in front of a small extra fee. Check this box and add on these following products, also done online.

Well, you know, the biggest advantage I think, and it's the one that you have to be careful not to overdo, but actually the two biggest advantages are one, you can make it somewhat of an interactive process, which we can't do in any kind of direct mail. And you've got testing applications that with offline media is much more complicated. I mean, you can drive traffic and split it up as it comes in to 2 or 3 or 4 different versions of the same sales letter, changing one variable at a time. And I know, Corey, you do this a lot. Whereas we've got to print 5 different versions of that thing and segment a list and put 5 different pieces in the mail and then try and evaluate results over a month.

Yeah. No, I totally agree. And not only just actually testing copy on your— direct sales piece online, your webpage online, you can be testing different emails going out, you know, 5 or 6 different emails, 5 or 6 different price points, 5 or 6 different headlines that, you know, you can change all the offer itself. It has some major advantages that way. And I do agree you have a little different interaction. There's one thing that I find that direct mail at least has a little more advantage. Once you get that piece opened with direct mail, people tend to pay a little more attention than online. That attention span is very short because you are a push button away from visiting 100 other websites that they just popped up on a search engine.

Yeah, I agree. It's more challenging because of that.

I agree. Yeah, got to keep them interested.

And also, operator, if we do have any other questions in the queue, we can certainly take them now as well.

Our next question comes from Bruce Backa. Please state your question. Yes, I have a question about the affiliate program. When you were talking about the rewards that you give affiliate members, you mentioned $100 and $50. Is there a rule of thumb about the percentage of the cost of the item that you offer?

Yes, definitely.

If you could share that.

Sure.

First thing is you have to find out how much margin you have in your item. That's the most important thing. Some people are going to have very big margin in information products. Other people selling hard goods may not have as big of a margin. The key is 50% of your net profit should go away in affiliate fees to the first and second level. For example, if you have a $100 product you have only $20 in margin total as your net profit, then you may give $50— sorry, you would give $10 away in total, which may be $7 would go to the first tier and $3 to the second tier. Generally speaking, your second tier is about 50% of whatever your first tier is. I hope I've explained that well. And again, your total amount paid out is about 50% of whatever your net profit is on that product.

I'd like to suggest another way to look at it too, Corey, because in some cases Somebody might choose to actually give away more than 100% of the entire sale. A real relevant number is what is your cost of sale via other means? Because often business people get idiotically cheap about this. So over here they'll be running full-page ads in a trade journal and sending out a 6-step direct mail follow-up. Campaign to sell, let's say, a $500 item and they're incurring a $300 cost of sale, and then when it comes time to do joint ventures with somebody, which an affiliate program is a version of a joint venture, they go, oh, I don't want to give him $400. That's ridiculous. Well, if you can come in at a buck less than what your cost of sale is otherwise, you ought to jump up and down. And there are even instances where all sorts of businesses go negative on the first sale to get the customer. And there's no reason to think that you would necessarily alter those economics, although it could be a benefit of this to be able to alter those economics and in fact bring your overall— your average cost of sale from all media down by using this method. So I think there's lots of economics you have to consider, but this is definitely not a place you necessarily want to be a penny-pincher.

Yeah, I totally agree with Dan. That's what I was trying to illustrate too is don't be afraid to give away a lot of your money. Now, people that are subscribers of Dan aren't afraid to do that because they know the value of a customer, but the majority of people that I talk to don't know the value of a customer and are scared to give away at least 50% or maybe even 100% or in your case, Dan, going negative and giving away more than you make on the front end. One of the challenges you're going to have online with that is if you go giving more than 100% away of your profit, People aren't used to that online. Affiliate firms normally don't do that. It's very rare. I think the only place that happens I think is somewhere in the adult industry online. They give away more than they actually— they're willing to lose money in the front end. And the gambling industry wouldn't lose money in the front end. But it's not very common, so you actually may find affiliates suspicious of you when you do that going, "Wait a second, you're giving away more money than you make. That doesn't make any sense to me." They don't actually get the mentality. That's the only risk you take. It's a very little risk. Just be aware of that and to maybe overcome that if you decide to offer more than 100% of the volume.

You just need to tell them we're making it up in volume. Yeah, exactly.

But Corey, conversely to that, I don't know if this has been your observation. It certainly has been mine is that since affiliate programs have become more and more popular that the percentages that people are offering seem to be becoming more generous.. And now it's not uncommon at all to be offered 50% of whatever the sale is. Are you seeing that or in your world that hasn't really changed much?

It hasn't really changed much in our world. I mean, you're going to find the 50% of the gross price on information products, especially electronically delivered information products. You really won't find that percentage anywhere else, generally speaking, anywhere else other than electronically delivered information products. Alex, do we have any other questions? Our next question comes from Jim Richard.

Please state your question. Okay. A couple questions. One is any differences in business-to-business, particularly in corporations? I'm sure you're going to say it's basically the same, but are there even any subtle differences and do you have any examples?

I think that it's really— first thing is I actually have a question for you before I answer that. Sure. What kind of sale price are we talking about? Is this like a $50,000 sale or—

$200 sale?

Actually, that could vary. Let's say $1,000 just for sake of argument.

Generally speaking, for under the $5,000 price point, it's generally acceptable to be selling it directly online rather than having to walk them through a very detailed lead process and not try to sell them immediately. You'll find a lot of the bigger price points people will— and we're just talking, you know, historically speaking, a lot of people will get them as a lead, offer white papers, offer free ebooks, offer whatever, and then get them as a lead and try to follow up with a phone because usually to close a sale that big you need to be doing some kind of direct contact via phone so they get the warm and fuzzies. But at the end of the day, generally speaking, the sales process and how you sell, the copy you write, the email promotions, the pay-per-click promotions, the affiliate promotions aren't going to really differ. You're still going to use all the same marketing techniques, all the same ways to drive traffic to your website.. And the same principle is to convert that visitor into either one, a lead, or two, a sale.

So it's an almost identical process. With regard to what Dan was talking about, about controlling people down a line on a website, if you've got a general consulting site, for the most part you've got to have stuff up there. I mean, you've got to have a reasonable amount of stuff. You may disagree with me on that.— in other words, like different clicks that people could have. How do you link that with having a sales funnel that takes a person down through a series of individual steps?

Is the question clear? Yeah, very clear. The first thing that I'll just give you a little hint. I'll actually save this for right at the end of the answer. As far as what you're talking about, you don't want to have too many links off your website. You don't want to lose track of that person. The person gets so excited about all the free information they're reading and everything they can get for free. Free that they don't see any value in what you're selling. So what we've done is we've actually had people being driven to what we call landing page. A landing page specifically targets that person or that particular type of client because we have different traffic sources coming from different types of websites that have different interests. But we have a landing page. On that landing page, we have a long sales copy just like Dan does, and throughout that we'll offer some bits of content, little bits of content that keep them interested and excited that they want to read the rest of it. The key here is not to have a link to tons of articles. What they have to do is give you their email address to get that extra content. So you have the ability now as you've collected them as a lead and can follow up again and again and again as a sale. If you just start offering lots of content on your site, you're going to find they're just going to read the content, print things out, never actually subscribe to your newsletter or e-zine, wherever it may be, and therefore never have the ability to be able to follow up with them again and again and again and put them into that sales process. We actually have a pop-up on the way in to subscribe and saying, if you want 300 pages of back issues of our newsletter, please enter your first name, last name, email address here. And then in the actual sales letter, we have an opportunity midway through to do that again. But we only give them 2 options. We try to force them to a specific action. Either 1, they subscribe to our newsletter. We capture their email address. Or 2, they buy. Or 3, they get out. We don't give them other opportunities to surf around our site. And we first a long time ago did. We actually had that. Same navigation bar that I see up there that everybody has, you know, the left-hand side of the top that says, you know, Contact Us, About Us, Products, Location, Articles, whatever it may be on your list of your navigation bar. We stripped out that navigation bar so they couldn't surf our site. Our sales went up 34% overnight because we focused on making one decision, either— well, two decisions, subscribe to our newsletter, buy, or get out.

Bill, can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Can you talk just a little bit about what you actually did or go into a little bit more detail on how you got the newsletter subscriptions up? What are you actually doing online to make that work?

We've actually gone to key individuals who have an email list and we hopefully they're— it's an email list that would in some ways— the people on that list would be seeking marketing information. And we joint ventured with them in order to offer to their list, and oftentimes it's their customers or members or clients, what have you, an opportunity to test— drive the Danny Kennedy Gold Membership for 3 months. For free. We do charge $5.95, which is a— which covers, you know, part of postage. The main reason we charge that is because it's our mechanism to collect the credit card information because beginning on month 4, we automatically put those people going to continuity. Without getting into too much detail in the first 3 months, I just want to mention that we do remind people in the first 3 months that have taken advantage of this offer that they can— they don't, you know, although they will be put automatically in the continuity, we don't use the word term continuity, but they will be automatically charging them beginning month 4 for $39.97. What we do do is we give them also the information if they want to opt out. So we get rid of all the— the people that are going to be real cranky a month before they realize the charge was going to be on their credit card. And then we pay our affiliate partners a very substantial percentage of the revenue that we generate for months 4 through 15, which is 12 additional months. And then there's other things that we do as well. When you go to— when people join, they go to a thank you page, and on the thank you page they get an opportunity to invest some other Dan Kennedy products and we pay affiliate commission on that as well. And that's how we've done it. So we basically have built the business dramatically by offering joint venturing with other folks through an affiliate relationship by offering pretty much free memberships.

So the bulk of it is all affiliate, that's the driving force behind this?

The bulk of it has certainly been affiliates, yes.

Okay, good. Well, thank you. Sure. Another thing I should probably mention here is I kind of want to reverse everybody's thinking on the call about affiliate programs too. There's another opportunity. Not just to have your own product being sold through your own affiliate program, having a marching army of affiliates out there selling your product and service for you, but the opportunity for you actually to join an affiliate program and use someone else's products and services as your backend automatically. For example, say we have my book called Car Secrets Revealed. Once I sell them the book, I have nothing else to sell them. Many people on the call may be in that position where you've sold them your only product. You don't have a good backend system in place for multiple upsells. What I did in that case was I went out and found I sat down as a good entrepreneur and said, "Okay, wait a second. Once people buy the car book, where is their mindset? What are they going to be doing next? What are they going to be buying next?" Well, one of course is a car, hopefully, and then second is if they already have bought their car, maybe they're looking for insurance, maybe they're looking for extended warranties, and all these things they may be purchasing higher up in the value chain. I came up and started searching online about these different other businesses that say offer new quotes or quotes on new vehicles locally. People offer extended warranties. People offer great insurance prices and so on and so on on the new vehicle. Then I put an email together that automatically when someone buys my Car Secrets book, they're going to get an email 3 days later automatically. My software will take care of it. It's a program called Mail Loop that will automatically take that information, merge all the details out, all their personal information out, and then set up an email to go out 3 days later automatically for me. It will say something like, Hi John, thanks for buying CarSecrets on July 24th. I really appreciate your business. And by the way, we found some great resources, so if you have bought a car already, we recommend you check out this insurance site because it will show you what the top 3 companies are charging for insurance and to make sure you're paying the lowest. If you're not, you can buy it through them. And if you have bought your car— sorry, if you haven't bought your car, then you definitely want to be checking out this new car service where It will actually sell you a car $50 over dealer cost from a local car dealership. What they don't know is I'm getting kickbacks. I'm basically an affiliate for these people, so they're going through an affiliate link, looking at the insurance rates for the car, and if someone puts in their information just to get an insurance quote back, not even buying it, just getting an insurance quote back, I get $3 for every time someone fills out an insurance quote form. The second one where they're actually getting details about the cars where someone wants to buy a new car, they go to this website and they fill this little form of yes, please contact me about the local dealership that will sell me a car or $50 over dealer cost. I get $7 for someone filling out this form as a lead. This is equaled in the past to over $6,000 a month in pure affiliate revenue or affiliate commissions coming to me when I didn't have anything else to sell them after the Car Seekers book. Just realize that affiliate programs, you can become an affiliate and start selling your competitors' products, complementary products, or whatever as an affiliate and take affiliate commissions if you have nothing else on your backend. And you can do that literally tomorrow. You can go to places like associateprograms.com and find a list of thousands of affiliate programs out there available for you to join right away and start putting into your backend process.

Yeah, and Corey, you know, I mean, wouldn't you agree that after you put together a pretty good list of customers, it's not that hard to become an affiliate. People start really seeking you out. I mean, I can tell you from my perspective, there isn't a week that goes by that I don't get 2 or 3 requests that they want to sell their products to my list in some way.

Absolutely. There are business models online. We didn't even talk about this today because I know there are a lot of people online that— or there are a lot of people on this call that already have their own business and are sticking to that and not going to veer off from that. But there are entire business models where all you do is you build a list and then you offer affiliate products. People partner with you and you offer their product to that list. There are entire business models. I know people making $10,000 a month just by having a list that offers a newsletter once a month and then they partner with people coming to them just like people come to you and they offer these products and services through an affiliate link and make their affiliate commission, for lack of better terms. I mean, there's people out there— I can talk about Rosalyn Gardner. She has her home business model where she's just what we call a super affiliate. She just joins an affiliate program of every dating site out there and then does reviews on her website of these dating sites. So in this— I mean, you go to SageHearts.com, you'll see, you know, a list of all the different dating sites you can— she's reviewed, like Match.com and Personal.com, and she'll write them up, what she liked and didn't like about them. At the bottom, she'll say, if you want to join this site, click here. Well, when you click there, you're actually going through an affiliate link to Match.com and When that person purchases, she's getting an affiliate check. What you don't know is that she gets $30,000 to $50,000 a month just in writing articles about dating programs online.

So there are all these different business models online, too. It's a reinvention of a very old business model that still exists in a number of categories—health, business opportunities. Where you see companies running full-page ads selling very inexpensive items— $5 book, $10 book, $19 book— and they have no back end apparently. And everybody wonders how in the devil are they making any money? And they're really in the list rental business, and it's all about building a huge list and renting that list 6 bazillion times to other people who want to market to the list. That model has been around forever. This is just a reinvention of that. It's another way to play the game, and it's a smart way to play the game. I mean, I like— just like you just described, Corey— I've got at least 5 or 6 members I know of who are purely running a portal site business where they really have no product.

It's a great business to be in because you have no customer service issues. You don't even have to have your own merchant accounts, no credit card problems, no shipping issues, no inventory issues. No employee issues. You can be running the business at midnight in your underwear if you want because all you're doing is building a list.

You're building this asset you have.

That's what I feel on my coffee. People will find this of interest is that we get so many requests to join people's affiliate programs that Dan and I actually discussed that.. And we don't— we won't even join a program ourselves unless that we review, you know, what it is that we're getting involved with and making sure that we're offering real value to our customers and to our members. And it's very nice to get into that position when that happens. And that often happens in these affiliate programs where, you know, you're really in the driver's seat when you start putting together a list of—

and in our case, a very highly responsive group of people.

You know, one of the things that we haven't really talked— well, we talked— you mentioned one way, but Corey, we really haven't talked much about traffic. You talked about taking offline and driving traffic to online, but can you just spend a few minutes talking about some of the good online strategies in order to get traffic to your site?

Sure. Here's what— and I'll kind of give you the— step, you know, 1 to 10 or 1 to 5, whatever it is, of what things you want to do first, second, third regarding driving traffic. And there's different ways to do it. I'll give you two different methods. One is just going out there and getting all the free traffic you can. You're going to submit your site to the search engines and trading links with people and offering free content on the websites that have an article about, you know, about something that has your bio on the bottom, the old standard stuff. And you can go out and do that and get free traffic all day long. It's very time-consuming. It's not guaranteed to have a lot of revenue coming in from it, but it works, and I recommend you do that, and there's ways to do that. However, if you're really serious about this and want to leapfrog yourself into getting traffic right away, you want to leapfrog yourself into just exploding your business online, then you should invest a little bit of money. What I suggest you do is you go and buy traffic. You buy traffic through pay-per-click search engines, and you actually pay for visitors. You can do that tomorrow morning. You can literally get off this call and have traffic come to your website an hour from now. If you're willing to pay for it. We won't go into how to do that because it's a whole hour conversation by itself, but generally speaking, a lot of stuff is covered in my course. You can read some of the stuff online at our website. You want to buy pay-per-click traffic. You want to pay for your visitors, and you'd be paying as little as 10 cents and as much as 65, 80 cents for each visit that comes through. Your goal of this is not to make a ton of money. Your goal for this is to test your website to make sure it converts. If you're buying this traffic and you spend a couple hundred bucks on it and people are coming through and you know you're making a couple hundred bucks back, great, you're breaking even. Or maybe you're making $400 back and you're doing great. Or maybe you're not doing good and you're only making $100 for every $200 you spent on this pay-per-click search engine traffic. Well, then you know you need to improve your site. You have a wrong offer, wrong price, a poor sales funnel, so on and so on and so on. If you test it through that and you pay for the traffic and basically for lack of a term, fix your site to be very productive and very, what we call, good revenue per visitor. Then you can start doing all these other things. You can start now blowing up your affiliate program and getting all these affiliates involved with you because they are motivated to get involved with you because they know your website converts and they are going to make a lot of money from it. But if you don't do those testing beforehand, you try to go get a bunch of affiliates, well, what happens when the first affiliate joins and sends a bunch of traffic to your website and it doesn't convert into sales? And he's upset and leaves, you'll never have that opportunity to get that good affiliate again. Make sure your site converts good in the beginning by going and buying traffic, testing it, then starting your affiliate program and getting all those people excited about your affiliate program. In the background, of course, you can be doing all these free things like submitting yourself to the search engines, you know, getting, you know, trading links, doing the user groups and forum promotions, advertising in ezines. I know this is very general, Bill. If you want me to be more specific, I can do that. I don't know if we have time, but I can totally do that.

Just let me know however you want me Where do you want to go with this? Well, I think you gave everybody enough information to confuse them, so that's good.

I just have so much to share, I can't get it all out.

Just think though that if we had a normal guest on the call, the amount of information that you've already shared would probably take them about 4 hours to say.

So you've been able to condense it down pretty well. Let me leave you a summary because you're right, it is a little confusing, especially if you're not internet savvy, that is a little confusing. When I say internet savvy, it doesn't take long to become internet savvy. I mean, it's really— you get online and start playing with a couple of these things, it all makes sense. It's just different variations of what's done offline. You can apply the same techniques online. Let me just state this. You want to be buying pay-per-click traffic, and then you want to start your own affiliate program and start looking for those first 100 affiliates. Once you have those first 100, they will get the rest of them, the thousands of others. A lot of clients that have started an affiliate program and in 2 months made $30,000 in the first 60 days they launched their affiliate program or had 3,500 affiliates in their first 4 weeks of starting their affiliate program. Those are kind of the key. Buy traffic, make sure your site converts, and get your own affiliate program and do all the other stuff on the side.

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