The last few years the prices have really shot up on postage, paper, and magazine advertising, and the trend hasn’t really flattened itself out yet.

Think about this - that means that it’s more costly than ever before to start a mail order business. In fact, many people who could have easily started in mail order two or three years ago are having a difficult time with it now because the price rises have become so dramatic.

This adds even more excitement to the opportunity of an online business! Now, people are able to get on the Internet, create a website, and have a website that can virtually compete with websites created by multi-million dollar companies!

Why? Because the costs an Internet marketing campaign will incur will almost never come close to reaching the sky-high rates direct mail and mail order have been suffering from the last few years! You could save tens of thousands of dollars a year in advertising expenses - THIS YEAR! Put more CASH in your pocket!

On the Internet marketers don’t have to spend millions. There’s also no envelopes, there’s no printing, you don’t have to pay a mail house to stuff everything together, there’s no list rental. All of those costs are eliminated.

Even though all the costs are going up in regular mail order, people still have the opportunity to start a small or home-based business on the Internet without going into serious debt. They can do it for $50-$60 per month and have a World Wide Website where they can market products to virtually any country in the world!

The offer is so important. Packaging everything up and making shipping free is, in fact, all just part of having an attractive offer.

We feel many of the infomercial people have made a big mistake on television. We recently bought a juicer and it was $179. We thought that’s a pretty good price, plus shipping and handling. We didn’t pay any attention to it.

When we got it, we saw that they had tagged our credit card for $39.50 for shipping and handling. It was shipped from a ware-house only 100 miles from where we were!

We fell they’re making a big mistake - a mistake that could easily be made by Internet marketers - when so many people hate high shipping and handling fees. They could package it together in their offer.

One of the low cost treadmill companies doing infomercials calculated that their shipping and handling fee actually paid for the cost of the product!

Shipping and handling can be a profit center. It’s making some people mad. But another thing to look at on the Internet is the fact that we have a great advantage. We can eliminate shipping and handling, and sales tax all in one swoop, because we can deliver electronically. And so far, to the best of my knowledge, if you deliver electronically there is no sales tax even in most states. Because no product ever changes hands, only electrons.

There are many “me too” web sites out there don’t have their own niche. People are more and more specialized in what they like and what they want to do, and that is what they go on the Internet for.

When the Internet first came out, people would go on and surf. But now they’re looking for a specialty niche. “How to Laugh All The Way to The Bank.”

There is a company who really set the model for making money with a niche and it’s fun and entertainment. There are so many people on the Internet selling things and very few of us go, “I’m going online to buy something today.” When you turn on your television you don’t say, “I’m going to watch t.v. so I can see some commercials, by golly!” You turn it on for entertainment and fun. And that’s why most people go on the Internet.

One man had the idea that making people laugh might be something worthwhile. He gives away free jokes over the Internet - it’s called Joke-of-the-day.com.

That shows you one thing - you can have a long name on your web site. It doesn’t have to be short and snappy. That’s a long one, and he even has dashes between the words.

Every day he has a joke, and you can go to this site and read it. Then, technology progressed to where they could automatically send you every day if you subscribed (called opt- in actually) the joke, and the joke would show up in your email.

Just about everybody with email was starting to get these jokes, because he told people it was okay to forward these jokes. “You can forward them to your friends as long as you leave in the information that tells them how to sign up.” And it is all free. So everyone started sending it to each other, and you know how fast a rumor can zoom all over the world on the Internet by email. Pretty soon hundreds of thousands of people were reading these jokes every day.

Eric, who is the CEO, is really funny. But how is he making any money? He is making millions of people laugh and he’s not making any money. At the beginning he said, “Boy, this is getting to be a lot of work. If everybody would just send me a dollar, it would help me keep going.” No one knows for sure, but the rumor was written somewhere that he received $62,000.00 in the mail in one week.

But that couldn’t go on forever, so rather than make people subscribe, he decided to sell advertising. You and I and anybody else can run a small ad that rides along with the joke. And the one I saw on there today was for a diet product. It was nothing to do with humor. Some of the people reading it will click on the advertisement. He is making a lot of money in the niche of humor - The specialty market and service is making people laugh.

Psychology tells us that one of the strongest human incentives is curiosity. Advertisers employ it whenever they can.

Psychology tells us that if you make a person curious enough about a product, you can secretly influence them to buy from you! You can use their curiosity to get their attention with your headline.

Then, you can build desire with your ad copy. Finally, you end up with a call to action. Tell your prospect how to contact you immediately.

Here are four ideas for making money with other people’s secrets:

1. Legally steal. Look for marketing materials and ideas other people are using. Be a detective. Snoop.
2. Value the sales materials others are using. Keep these materials. Study them. Spend time analyzing them.
3. Find ways to use these valuable ideas. Weave them into your marketing plan and sales material.
4. Teach yourself how to see the “big picture.” Look for the unrelated ideas others are using. Determine the ideas that are behind the strategies. Ask yourself “why are they doing this?” Play with these ideas in your mind...

See if there are ways you can incorporate these ideas into your products/services or company... Remember, the money-making ideas that are working for others right now are secrets because: (A) Most people don’t recognize them. (B) Most people don’t think there’s any way to use these ideas in their business.

A list broker helps you find the names and addresses of prospects you will mail your offer to. The more names they can find for you to profit from, the more you will go back to them and rent their lists. They make their money through helping you make money by providing you with lists of good, qualified prospects.

List brokers get a minimum of 20% commission every time they get out there and find mailing lists for you to rent. If they happen to manage those lists, they tend to get up to 30% to 40%. They are making their money by helping you make money. The more money you make, the more money they make.

A list broker’s responsibilities include:

1. Acting as a clearing house for data: A list broker is a one-stop shopping source that can provide you with all the information you require regarding which list will most likely work for you.
2. Locating new lists: A professional list broker makes a living by providing lists, and is continually seeking out new lists that will be suitable for his/her clientele. Encouraging list owners to rent their lists is a constant effort that must be pursued daily just to stay in business.

3. List performance data: A list broker keeps accurate records on the past performance of all lists his/her clients have used. Therefore, they have a working knowledge of what will pull in any given situation. A broker will carefully screen all information provided by the owner of a list. Additionally, he/she may even verify the information if a list owner is new and has not yet established a trustworthy business relationship. The broker must have knowledge of the makeup of a list to determine what constitutes a representative cross section of the list. Any error in determining a cross section would invalidate the desired test results, and possibly eliminate a group of names that might have been responsive to a particular offer.

We came across a woman from Lexington, Kentucky a while back. She had just started to sell some of her old dolls over the Internet auctions. She said, “I’ve had this one doll since I was a child that I sold for $150 and it probably cost $1 way back then.”

She said that the nice thing about these auctions is not only because it’s a way to make money, but she’s already made two new friends in just the past few weeks. She said, “This is just a wonderful way to make money and make new friends around the country.” We think that, for a lot of seniors, this is going to be a boom - a way to get rich and have fun at the same time!

The friendships come from the fact that, again, we spend money on the things that are most important to us. As collectors on these Internet Auctions, we are instantly and immediately surrounded by other people who have the very same interests that we have. And so, we end up making some new friends over the Internet!

A friend of ours once said, “I was put on this earth with one commodity to spend and it isn’t money, it’s time.” If you use your time well, you can make money and you can enjoy yourself. This is a good outlet for both of these things.

It’s kind of like that book, “Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow.” A lot of people have said, “Well, gee, I love doll collecting but how in the world can I ever turn that into an income?” This gives them a vehicle.

We talked about the woman who was a shut-in, had lupus, and couldn’t leave the house. When you’re in the business that we’re in where you teach people how to make money, there are many people that will say, “You know, I’ve been in an accident, I have a health problem, I’m older, or I’m stuck in my house. I’m still alert but I just can’t get around. I’m willing to do something. I can’t go out and dig a ditch but I’m willing to be active. What can I do?” They’re looking for something . . . and here’s a great opportunity for them!

The key here is to look at something like eBay - they’ve got millions of users and a million items up at one time.

Remember, almost everybody up there doing this is not following these techniques. They’re just putting stuff up and succeeding anyway. By following these techniques, you will escalate your success ten times! It’s how to immediately be more successful than your auction competition!

You don’t have to do everything we’ve talking about, just start with one or two techniques and add them to your repertoire as you build your business. It gives you an instant head start!

A simple 30-page report can be a sales letter in disguise. Here are five powerful tips you can use to produce simple reports that make huge amounts of money:

1. Take the 100 top selling ideas for your product and service.
2. Write a paragraph or two about each one.
3. Then tie these paragraphs together and turn them into a report. The name of your report can be: “100 Of The Best Reasons My _____ Can Give You What You Need!” or something like that. The figure 100 is not an absolute. You may only be able to come up with 5 reasons C or 10... Just use this same concept. Write a page or two about each benefit until you have 20 to 30 pages.
4. Typeset and print this to look like a report - not a sales letter.
5. Then send this “report” and a cover letter to all prospects or customers. Include a separate order form.

This strategy is simple and easy. It’s a great way to sell your product or service because people perceive reports differently than sales material. In fact, the more you make your report look different than a sales letter - the more sales you can make. Make your report helpful and appeal to your prospects’ self-interest.

According to some experts who have been studying American society, Americans have fallen into a new trend - a trend that’s being called “cocooning.”

The term “cocooning” refers to the process a caterpillar goes through before it becomes a butterfly or moth - of isolating itself within a hard shell, protecting itself from the world.

That’s the attitude people are developing these days. They want to stay home where it’s safe and warm, and if they do venture out into the cold world they want to drive some four-wheel-drive urban-assault vehicle around.

It’s the “cocooning” of America - use this American mega-trend to get rich on the Internet - right now!

The ability to buy and sell products over the Internet has both helped this trend and enjoyed more success because of it.

The bottom line - it’s safer, easier, and just a lot more convenient than driving all over town to buy something. Therefore, people are very inclined to buying what they want this way!

So . . . if you’re able to offer people what they’re wanting over the Internet, you could very well get rich . . . and as the cocooning trend continues, the more money you’ll stand to make!

Now most people who spend money on the Internet are not computer geeks. They don’t care about the technology, they don’t know how their computer works, and they don’t know how the Internet works any more than they understand the technology of their refrigerator or their telephone or their TV or their car.

They don’t look under the hood, they just hop in and drive. All they want is the result! They want to save time, save money, save effort, and get it done now so they have time to tuck their kids in or watch their tele-vision show and get some living out of their life.

What we suggest you do on the Internet is, number 1, make it easy for people to shop, so they can just click with their mouse to buy something. We also suggest you offer something free on your site which gets people to visit in the first place.

The Internet auction explosion started with eBay, a site based in the San Francisco bay area. eBay = Electronic Bay. The concept was that this would be an electronic, virtual bay where people come in, drop things off, sell them, buy other things, then leave.

It was founded in 1995 by a gentleman named Peter Omajar. His girlfriend was a collector and seller of Pez dispensers - you know, the little candies in a shaft with a character’s head on top - and he figured he could start a site to help her with her Pez dispenser buying, selling, and trading.

eBay exploded into so much more . . . and as of this writing there are over 300 Internet auction houses alive and active on the Internet. In 1998 there were 80,000 people using these sites for buying and selling - at this time of this writing, it’s jumped to 2.4 million buyers and 6.5 million users! Currently, eBay is the largest consumer site on the Web!

In essence, it’s Marshall McClone’s global village in reality with the sales aspect, social aspect, and everything else about that, too. Last time we looked, which was a couple of days ago, there were over two million items for sale in 1,600 categories. That changes every week and sometimes every three days. You can put an item up for sale for 3 days, 5 days, or 7 day auctions. We are talking about e-Bay, specifically, just to grab the premier group and build the story around that. Every week that many turn over. Every day more than 250,000 new items are listed! Every minute 600 bids are made!

And the numbers are only going to go up. In fact, there’s an interesting phenomenon where some of the people who were in this thing really, really early as buyers are complaining because they can’t get quite the bargains that they used to get. So they are all selling now . . . and they’re really happy about that! Putting products up for auction on eBay is how to sell your products and services on the “World’s Largest Consumer Website” - before an audience of millions of people - for as little as 25 cents!

We think there’s a real opportunity for people in specific niche markets where people would be willing to pay twenty, thirty, fifty, even a hundred dollars for one of these memberships to a directory like that. Basically, once you have a foundation of links that would be of interest to a particular market, to keep it updated you simply have to spend thirty minutes a day or less checking the current links you have.

Just make sure they’re still working and go out onto the search engines and do your own intensive searching. Find maybe just a link a day that you can add to your directory. Some days you might not find any. Some days you might find two or three that you can add. But in just 30 or 40 minutes a day, you can find some great new links that you can add to your directory and really build value to your members.

Here’s a profit example. We will give you an example using this company’s pricing. It was $50.00 for a membership to their directory. Now let’s say you create your own directory and sell memberships to it for $50.00. If you sell just six memberships a day, you could pocket over $100,000.00 in sales a year.

Just signing up six people to your small niche directory, people who instead of going to the search engines want to go directly to your site. And you can keep it updated and keep it growing in as little as 30 minutes a day or less. It is a simple idea.

But if you go to a niche market, it would be worth their time to spend you $50.00 instead of spending hours on the search engines. You may have a great idea for a membership package that could put a lot of cash into your pocket!

Telling a “story” in your ad is how you can easily make thousands of extra dollars with each ad you run. It really is easy. All you have to do is tell them a story. If you are selling a money-making program, then you story can be how you went from being broke to making over “X” dollars a month, and then you can show them how they can do it to!

People are fascinated by hearing about other people’s success stories. That is why newspapers and magazines always run them. If you can make your next sales letter into a story, you will see your profits soar! Whatever your product or service, try to make your sales letter into a story that your customers will enjoy reading!

You could start your own Internet auction consignment business, and have hundreds of other people pay you to help them sell their products! All you have to do is set up a website which people can buy space on. It’s sort of like you have a consignment store, and people are buying space in your store, but now you have a web site. You have space on your web site available.

You could charge them every month in the area of $30 to $70 - if you can get $100 a month, get it. You have to sort test this out and find out what the market will be willing to pay and what prices are going to be most attractive. Then, you do some listing on the Internet auction sites for the best items that you have in your consignment site.

People can come to your web site, they can buy through the auction sites, or some people will just come directly to your site and then buy these products there. Then, you earn 20% commission on each item that is sold, plus you get to wake up every morning, and know exactly how much money is going to come into your business!

How can you know that? Because you’ve got people that, month after month, year after year, have their space on your auction site. It’s a great business! Many people are already earning good money this way. They’re not on the Internet, though - they’re doing this locally. Many of them aren’t even very experienced business people!

They’re making money, and they really don’t even know what they’re doing.

So, here’s the principle behind this. Everyone who has something to sell, and THAT MEANS EVERYONE, is always going to be willing to pay you a percentage of their profits if you can help them sell their items. You become extremely valuable by helping them make money, and they make money by paying you more money.

STEP ONE: Develop front-end offers that attract new customers.

STEP TWO: Build relationships with your customers by re-selling to them and giving them THE BEST products and services.

STEP THREE: Take your best promotions, and fine-tune them to work on the front-end. Then repeat this process. This is the same three step process that has made us millions of dollars in sales and profits. It is simple, but extremely profitable. Think about it. Try it. Master it. This really works! It will give you a steady stream of new customers and a great deal of consistent business from the people you do business with.

A lot of people think that it might be very difficult to turn out a big book. I think that one of the simplest ways to do it is to take lots of notes and then just get started - and do it! Of course, you should pick a hot topic - something that everybody is talking about - something that is in the news.

What I’m going to talk about is a very simple idea of how to create a product without having to write - without having to sit there with a blank page and come up with lots of things to put on it - Something that can certainly create a product that can be a hot seller if you pick the right topic.

It may sound hard to believe, but you can automatically make $5,000 a month, sometimes even a lot more without doing any work for yourself. What we’re talking about is something you won’t find very many people are doing on their website, and it’s a huge mistake in our opinion because it’s so easy to make this automatic cash!

What we’re referring to is selling advertising on your website - and not just selling any advertising, but a specific way to do it so it can maximize your profits. It’s the world’s most powerful way to automatically make $5,000 a month on your website without lifting a single finger.

If you look around the Internet you do see some websites that are selling advertising or have advertising on their sites, some of them are actually swapping banner ads with other people. Some of them put links to their websites. That’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re actually talking about having people pay you in cash to be able to put their banner ad on your web site to bring people that are visiting your website to their website.

Now the way we recommend doing this is, first of all, you don’t want to have a lot of banner ads on your website. You’ve probably seen some websites that take ten minutes to bring up because they’re busy loading all the graphics. They’ ve got hundreds of banners and just a little tiny bit of information. It gets hard to read, it’s hard to wait for it to load and a lot of times, if that’s the way your website looks, your customers will be gone before they have a chance to even see what’s on your website because they won’t wait around for your tapes to load.

What you can do instead of that is simply have one banner that rotates among several ads. That’s what we’re going to tell you a little bit about: how to do to maximize your profits and make up to $5,000 a month or more without lifting a finger.

First of all, to back up a little bit, there are actually some people who only sell advertising on their website. There’s a gentleman that has a website that delivers a joke of the day and you can go to his website and register and receive a joke in your e-mail everyday. That’s all he has on his website. He gets millions of people that go to his website and register for this joke of the day.

He sells advertising on his website and makes money through the advertising. So there are some websites that sell products and services and then there are some websites that we call content-only websites and they make all their money from selling advertising. You can do it either way - what we’re going to tell you will work either way.

All you have to do is set up one banner ad and there is software out there that can do it for you. Alan Bechtold is a much better expert on the technique behind this so you might ask him if you get a chance if you really are interested in doing this.

There is simple software - a simple technique - that will allow you to have one banner ad that’s displayed on your website that every time a new person comes to your website it will rotate down through a list of those advertisers who have banners listed with their paid-for advertising on your website.

So let’s say you had ten different websites that were advertising, you would have basically ten different banner ads all on the same spot on your web page, except that only one would be appearing at a time. So if we came to your website, we would see a banner for another website and then if another person came to your website right after us they wouldn’t see the same website we saw - they would see another person’s website.

It just clicks down the list one by one by one with each new click. Each new person that comes to your website will see another one of those ads.

The amount of ads you can have there - the number of websites - is really unlimited. So you want to stick with something that’s in your own market and your field.

Really it’s unlimited! You can have as many as you want!

Now the example: how we got to $5,000 a month would be if you had fifty ads and you were charging $100 a piece (you could do it the opposite way too, a hundred ads at $50 apiece). You would be making $5,000 a month. All that revenue would come in automatically month after month without you having to do a single thing to get it!

If you have a merchant account (some old merchant accounts require you to actually swipe cards or the numbers manually) there’s new technology out there that allows you to process credit cards automatically over the Internet. If you have that technology, you can actually set it up to automatically know whose credit card hit every month for that advertising.

All you have to do is keep your content up to date - whatever you have on your site that’s driving the traffic in and whatever you’re doing to drive people to your website - have that constantly ongoing. Then you can make automatic money month after month because you have say fifty, a hundred people, five hundred websites, however many you want to do, rotating on your website and you have an on going agreement with those websites where you take their MasterCard or you take their Visa!

Every month automatically - they don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to think about it - automatically $50 per website or per advertiser is going right in to your bank account.

It can be whatever price you want. This is just for easy math. That would automatically come to you month after month without you doing a single thing to get that money.

Whether you do anything just like this or you adapt it a little bit, the key to remember here is to sell advertising on your website. There are so many websites out there that are making a fatal mistake by not doing it. It’s just easy money in the bank and it can come to you automatically without lifting a finger if you’ll just do it.