Apr 04 02 SBC Small Business Newsletter

April 04, 2002

Table of Contents

Editorial - A LITTLE STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT INTERNET BUSINESS
Tax Tip of the Week

Guest Article - 3 WAYS TO GET UNENDING TRAFFIC -- AUTOMATICALLY
Featured Resource - FREE INTERNET COURSES WORTH YOUR TIME

Parting Comments

Unsubscribe Information

Welcome

Thank you for subscribing to the Peak Small Business Newsletter! We take our obligation to provide you with useful information very seriously. As a result, we always welcome your input on articles or other information you would like to see presented here.

For those of you who prefer the html version, you can find it on our website at the following location:

http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/newsletters/sbnl_apr0402.htm

If you still prefer to receive the html version in your email inbox, let us know by emailing us at mailto:cary@peakconsultinginc.com with "html" in the subject line.

Quote of the Week

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living
things, man will not himself find peace.

- Albert Schweitzer

Administrative Stuff

FREE EXPOSURE FOR YOUR BUSINESS!

We want to give you an opportunity to gain free exposure for
your business! We are asking each of you to send us an email
and tell us about yourself and your business. We have added a
section to this newsletter where we will periodically spotlight your websites or businesses so our other subscribers can get to know you and possibly do business with you. We hope many more of you will
respond in the coming weeks. This is FREE EXPOSURE to THOUSANDS
of people! THIS IS VALUABLE so please act TODAY!

Just send your email to mailto:mybiz@peakconsultinginc.com with
"Info on my business" in the subject line.

Editorial

A LITTLE STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT INTERNET BUSINESS

by: Cary Christian

Rather than write a piece this week on one topic, I found myself in the mood to publish a more broad smattering of my thoughts on various subjects related to doing business on the Internet. The mini-topics covered here were inspired by questions from you, our subscribers, and visitors to our website. We'll cover some of these topics in much more detail in future issues, but for tonight we'll keep it high level and, hopefully, inspire some give and take between you and us. So without further ado, I'll get right down to it!

INTERNET GURUS

A lot of people ask us what we think about the sometimes "self-styled" gurus of Internet marketing. We also get a lot of traffic from the search engines where people are looking for dirt on one guru or another. It seems that people have a natural dislike and mistrust of the word "guru." I have to admit that the term has some negative connotations to me also.

But the fact remains that there are a number of individuals who have built tremendously successful businesses on the Internet and have gained enough knowledge over the years to legitimately qualify as "gurus." These are people you can learn from and there is nothing wrong with listening to what they have to say.

On the other side of the coin, you should avoid listening to just one of these guys. No single individual has a monopoly on knowledge of what works and what doesn't. If you read enough of their writing, you'll get to know their various approaches and can use your own knowledge to decide how to pick and choose between the advice and techniques of one versus another. This will enhance the creativity of your campaigns and prevent you from becoming a clone that cannot stand out from the pack.

SO WHICH GURUS DO WE LIKE?

Terry Dean ( http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/nbt.htm ) and Dr. Ken Evoy (http://www.sitesell.com/peaksbc.html ) because we believe they offer very practical and no-nonsense advice for the markets they service. They do not resort to gimmicks and they do not rely on hype to sell.

(Don't forget to download your free Affiliate Masters Course written by Dr. Evoy. When you read it, we think you'll see why we like him. Download it here:
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/Aff_Masters_Course.htm )

But we also like others that are not considered "gurus" yet, like Anthony Stillwell ( http://www.getfreeadvertising.com ) and Joe and Maria Gracia ( http://www.givetogetmarketing.com ). Anthony Stillwell is only in his early- to mid-twenties but has an incredible grasp of Internet marketing! Joe and Maria offer extremely practical advice and do so in a way that is so easy to understand.

You will find a couple of legitimate "gurus" that you will want to follow very closely, but there are many others who can teach you a lot if you're willing to listen. We all have something we can teach. And that includes YOU!

PET PEEVES

It will be difficult, but I'll try to keep this list short!

o Guaranteed hits programs - most of these sound wonderful but are absolutely worthless.

o Word lists that give you words and phrases that are "guaranteed" to produce results in email marketing campaigns. Everybody has read these lists. Everybody is using the words and phrases. Therefore, nobody using these lists stands out from the crowd. The use of these lists has become a way to get your email messages ignored rather than noticed. There is no substitute for your own creativity.

o Affiliate programs that tell you they cannot become saturated. In fact, most of them WILL become saturated. If you're interested in affiliate programs, find those that have subject matter that will be useful for many years to come or are able to adapt and change as the Internet environment changes. In other words, find an affiliate program that is a legitimate long-term business.

o Affiliate programs that advertise based on one of their members "already earning $10,000 per month from the program." There are a few heavy hitters out there who take the equivalent of ready-made downlines with them into any program they enter. They make a lot of money. Most people do not and will not ever be able to duplicate this accomplishment. It is worthwhile to note that these "heavy hitters" built their following by using very practical, tried and true, no-nonsense methods to build their personal lists. They did not just join an affiliate
program and start sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per month.

o Companies who lead others to believe they can build a solid business using a free web site, free hosting, free advertising, free everything! It's not going to happen. Every business or individual who really wants to succeed online needs to have a real budget for marketing, their own domain name and their own website. I'm not saying free advertising should not be used. It should! But use it as a complement to your paid efforts.

o Programs that tell you no experience or work is required to make large sums of money on the Internet. Internet business, like any business, is hard work. You'll have to gain experience, or hire it, and put lots of hard work into your business if you want to succeed.

o Over-emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO). If you have hundreds, or even thousands, of competitors in your business, search engine optimization is going to be a full time job for you. You will either have to devote a tremendous amount of time to it personally or pay large fees to have a professional do it for you. Most people simply can't run their business and keep up with SEO at the same time unless they are an expert at SEO already.

For most small businesses, the effort will be better spent bidding on the pay-per-click engines and increasing your links from complementary sites. There are exceptions, however. If you have a business that targets a niche market (and therefore has few competitors), SEO could be very important to you and could make your business a goldmine in a short period of time. Also, if you use a product like Site Build It!
( http://buildit.sitesell.com/peaksbc.html ), the work is done for you for a very minimal annual fee.

(If you have decided that SEO is important to your business, be sure to read the Guest Article in this issue)!

o Spam blocking software that is so poorly written it blocks legitimate business communications between willing business partners. (See last week's editorial for more info).

o I'll close this list for now with what is probably high on everybody's list of pet peeves: those MLM programs that offer grossly overvalued and useless products and promise to make you six figure incomes in a short period of time. Enough said.

WHAT ARE THE THREE TOP MARKETING METHODS AVAILABLE TO ANYONE?

This is only our opinion, but it is an opinion based on a lot of testing! For most small businesses and home businesses, the pay-per-click engines, ezine advertising and building your own targeted list are by far the most important marketing efforts you can undertake.

We have found pay-per-click and ezine advertising less expensive than hosting FFA pages, guaranteed hits programs, and any other type of low cost advertising when you compare costs on a cost-per-sale basis. Building your own list can be done for free but can also be done more rapidly at fairly low cost. (Note: we plan to explore building your own list in more detail in a future issue).

(As a side note, if you're interested in ezine advertising at no cost, don't forget to send us the information on your business for inclusion in future issues of this newsletter. Putting your business in the spotlight is the equivalent of a sponsor ad for free)!

That's all the space we have for this week. I may continue this in the near future. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your comments on what I've said, particularly if you disagree. I enjoy hearing from you very much. Let's talk!

Copyright (c) 2002

Tax Tip of the Week

As you surf the net you will undoubtedly see programs that promise freedom from taxation as one of their primary benefits. Some of these involve the use of offshore companies. Be very wary of these! Most nations, including the United States, levy tax on the worldwide income of their citizens. Moving your money offshore does not exempt it from taxation. Setting up a company offshore does not exempt its earnings from taxation. While it is possible to DEFER taxation utilizing offshore
entities and transactions, doing so involves some very sophisticated tax planning and results in a deferral only, not avoidance of taxation. If you get involved in many of these programs the only result you will achieve is tax fraud! Additionally, with many, if not all, of these programs the
investments you transfer offshore will likely never be seen again.

Guest Article

3 WAYS TO GET UNENDING TRAFFIC--AUTOMATICALLY
by Len McGrane

We all pay lip service to hard work and marketing--but secretly we want our web-based businesses to lift off by themselves and carry us into wealth without effort.

And that's never going to happen. Right?

Wrong.

It SHOULD happen to a well-run Internet business.

Actually, it MUST happen. Because we can't spend the rest of our lives laboriously marketing our services 10 hours a day. We have to find ways to get a certain amount of traffic moving automatically to our site.

And if we're building a series of small, one-product web sites, we need to start a flow of visitors to the first site, then when that flow is steady, move on to the next site and another product, and then to the next one...and so on.

I have found three simple, elegant, ways to get a slow, steady automatic flow of visitors. I also do other marketing, but these three tasks I do once, and they then ceaselessly work for me on auto pilot.

They're based on the two biggest Internet traffic generators-- search engines and word of mouth. So they're powerful.

They don't use 'tricks'. and that means they'll continue to work for me long after search engines change their algorithms and black-list today's 'stealth marketing' techniques.

Together, these three things are a powerful, reliable, automatic combination.

- FIRST, I build a web site around the words people use to search for my services and products.

Domain name, title, description, keywords and text. All these things are decided AFTER I find out what people are actually looking for.

Lots of tools available for this. Start finding one you like at http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/facts/searches.html

In a perfect world I'll stay out of markets where I'd have too many competitors, of course. But I must admit I've been seduced several times into trying to sell shoulder to shoulder with thousands of others. Don't make this mistake. You'll get lost in the search engine databases no matter how good your word research was.

- SECOND, I collect a set of articles on my site that are rich in the words people are using to find services and products like mine. In other words, I build a small library of text pages, each with the meta-tags optimized for the search engines.

The library on my http://www.netgain.co.nz site has about 300 articles in it now, and although that site is listed on Yahoo and ranks well on Alta Vista, it's these articles that bring me 70 percent of my visitors.

Of course, the library need not be that big.

I can provide the articles myself--because I've been writing a weekly Internet marketing newsletter for nearly three years now, and have literally hundreds of my own articles and personal interviews with people who are successfully making money on the 'Net!

But I can also collect them from others. If you need articles that are already written just go to the newsletter directories and collect as many keyword-rich pieces as you need. You'll find this could take less than half an hour!

- THIRD, I develop a page of links to complimentary sites. You link to me and I link to you.

My visitors like this resource. If I am not what they're looking for, they can use this page and spring off to related sites that might help them better. They're happy, and I'm happy to have helped them.

This links page also frees me from a dependence on the search engines. I do need the search engines, but they're being worked by sharp dealers using doorway pages and sneaky tactics that often push me way down the list. And they're constantly changing the way they rank me. Search engines are hard to play with!

Also, a links page can bring visitors to my site just minutes after the reciprocal links are set us--literally.

Find tools and tips to do this at
http://www.workz.com/content/1560.asp

Or go straight to the Big Three Tools that I recommend:
http://www.cyber-robotics.com
http://willmaster.com/master/rlinks/
http://www.linksmanager.com/

And that's it!

I like the simple elegance and on-going, self-driving power of this combination:
- words
- library
- links

Build them into your site and you'll come to appreciate them also.

==
Len McGrane helps people make money on the Internet. He'll personally spend hours evaluating your web site, and come up with pages of specific ideas and recommendations to help you put it into a healthy profit. Start with his FREE course at:
http://www.evaluatingyourwebsite.com

Featured Resource

Here are some terrific courses available to you for free. They are the "Masters" course series and there is one for virtually every facet of your online business activities.

Just send a blank email to the address listed for the course or courses you want to receive. Each course is absolutely free and very much worth your time.

o Affiliate Masters Course
mailto:tamspeaksbc@sitesell.net

NEW! The Affiliate Masters Course is now available as a download in pdf format. This is over 200 pages of solid information you can use. Due to its length, this format is easier to read and refer to than in email format. Get your free copy here:

http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/Aff_Masters_Course.htm

o InfoProducts Masters Course
mailto:timspeaksbc@sitesell.net

o Pricing Masters Course
mailto:tpmspeaksbc@sitesell.net

o Netwriting Masters Course
mailto:twmspeaksbc@sitesell.net

o Net Auction Masters Course
mailto:tnamspeaksbc@sitesell.net

Enjoy!

Parting Comments

We hope you have enjoyed this issue of the Peak Small Business Newsletter and found it useful. Please visit our website at http://www.peakconsultinginc.com to check out all the resources we provide.

If you need to contact us, please use the following links:

Our CEO - cary@peakconsultinginc.com

Information - info@peakconsultinginc.com

Support - support@peakconsultinginc.com

To unsubscribe - unsubscribe@peakconsultinginc.com

To suggest content or ideas for articles, click this link to send an email.

Unsubscribe Information

You are receiving this newsletter because you requested it on our website or through an advertising link on the Internet. If you want to cancel your subscription to this newsletter, simply click the following link - unsubscribe@peakconsultinginc.com