KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (2 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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The stakes are higher, the thrills are higher, and the rewards when it all comes together are so much higher, too.
 
If you are the owner of a brand-new store opening your doors for the first time, you have no idea whether your dream will fly or whether you’re going to be shutting down before you’ve even had a chance to declare your first end-of-season sale.
 
But when you open your cash register and hear that KaChing sound for the first time, you know. Even if the business doesn’t succeed—and many new businesses don’t—you know you’ve achieved something.
 
You’ve taken a business idea from concept through implementation to launch. And you have persuaded someone to buy. You got there.
 
If you’ve done that once, you can do it again. And again. And again.
 
You have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, and you’re going to be hearing that ring of success for the rest of your life.
 
But we don’t get that on the Internet.
 
When a check from Google lands in your mailbox, there’s no KaChing sound.
 
When money arrives in your PayPal account, you might hear the sound of an incoming e-mail, but that’s not the same as “KaChing.”
 
Maybe that’s a good thing. In a bricks-and-mortar business, sales usually come in spurts. People line up, hand over their credit cards or their cash, and process their purchase. Each sale is an event, one that can be celebrated with its own ring.
 
Online, sales come in all the time. Day and night, weekday and weekend, from Washington, Wisconsin, and Wellington, New Zealand, anyone, anywhere, anytime can push a button on his or her computer and give you money.
 
And you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to stand behind the cash register. You don’t have to count the change. You don’t even have to smile and wish your customers a nice day.
 
It’s all automated. Set up the system and your online business will practically run itself. All you have to do is cash the checks.
 
It would be nice to have a KaChing, though.
 
This book isn’t going to make a KaChing sound. It’s going to do something even better. It’s going to help you create a KaChing system. It’s going to explain the principles behind an Internet business that makes money, and it’s going to provide real, practical advice to help you build your own.
 
Those suggestions aren’t going to be general ideas about what might work or what should work. They’re not going to be theoretical. They’re going to be the real strategies that have worked for me.
 
If you count dialing into local bulletin board systems (BBS) in 1980, I’ve been online for more than 30 years. I built my first web site in 1995. That might not sound like a long time, but in Internet years, it feels like forever. When I launched my first site, there were only about 25,000 other sites on the Web. In September 2009, Netcraft, an Internet services company, found that the top half dozen or so hosting companies alone were serving an incredible 226,099,841 web sites.
 
With that growth has come the money. Advertising distributed by the top four online ad agencies—Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL—was worth $32.9 billion in 2008. In Britain, more advertising money is now spent on the Web than on television.
 
And that’s just the cash spent persuading people to buy. In 2008, Forrester Research estimated the value of retail sales made online worldwide at more than $200 billion.
 
That’s a fantastic opportunity. It’s a gigantic gold mine, and it’s one that everyone has access to. You don’t need to own a giant media company to take a share of that revenue. You don’t need a degree in computing, communications, or advanced nuclear physics to make money online. You just need to know how the system works and have the patience and the drive to succeed.
 
In the time that I’ve been online, I’ve seen all sorts of ways that entrepreneurs can divert the funds flowing on the Internet toward their own cash registers. Not all of them have proved to be as great as promised, but the best ideas have stuck around. They’ve proven their value to sellers, to buyers, to publishers, and to advertisers.
 
In this book, I’ll describe those methods, and I’ll explain how you can make them work for you.
 
I’ll begin by talking about the New Web Order.
 
The Internet has revolutionized the business environment. It hasn’t just created an entirely new way of buying and selling products and services, it has also democratized business.
 
If once you needed capital, contacts, experience, and an appetite for risk to become an entrepreneur, today you don’t need anything more than a computer and an Internet connection. That’s a genuine social revolution. It’s capitalism for the masses. It’s the chance of KaChing for people who don’t even own a cash register.
 
In Chapter 1 I talk about what it means for you and how people like you have been using that new landscape to make a mint.
 
Then in Chapter 2 I discuss what you need to build an Internet business. You won’t find a long equipment list here. Instead, you’ll find a discussion of ideas because that’s really what you need to succeed online. Understand what you love, recognize your passion, and you’ll know your niche. Success will follow. I explain how to do it.
 
Presenting that passion will usually come by delivering content. It’s often been said that content on the Internet is king. I prefer to think of it differently. I like to think of content as
KaChing.
Good content is money, and the better the content, the greater the amounts of money. In Chapter 3 I talk about more than a dozen different ways to turn content into cash.
 
Content is usually delivered on web sites, but that’s not the only way of getting information from you to people willing to pay for it. Another method is through information products sold across the Internet. These can be incredibly powerful and open a whole new opportunity to sell knowledge for its true value. In Chapter 4 I tell you what you need to do create your product line—and sell it.
 
Information certainly isn’t the only kind of commodity you can sell online. Affiliate programs have now become a standard way for savvy marketers to sell anything from cars and computers to books and buzz saws. Just one of my sites alone generates five-figure commissions every single month through affiliate sales. It’s simple, and it’s certainly rewarding, but you have to find the right products, the right market, and follow the rules. Chapter 5 explains what I do to make the sales.
 
Affiliate sales should come in a steady flow, but the best kinds of sales are subscriptions. These are guaranteed payments that you can rely on month after month. They can form the basis of a business, giving an entrepreneur a solid foundation on which to grow. They require a little more thought than conventional web sites, but they can be lucrative, valuable, and enjoyable. My membership site has brought in tens of thousands of members who pay $78 per month each. In Chapter 6 I tell you what I do so that you can do the same thing.
 
And once you’re achieving success, you’ll find that you’ve picked up two more assets that are more valuable than anything you’ll have sold until now: knowledge and experience. You can’t sell those assets, but you can sell the benefits of those assets. Coaching programs are a fantastic way to give back to the community of entrepreneurs—and make even more money from your achievements. In Chapter 7 I explain how to offer both group and personal coaching, and how to use branding and PR to bring in clients.
 
Finally, in Chapter 8 I provide a bunch of examples that illustrate many of the strategies that I’ve described in this book. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel when someone’s done all the hard work for you. One of the most important steps to success is to build on the achievements of others. When you achieve success, you can be certain that others will be building on your accomplishments, too. You’ll be able to use these case studies as models for your own business.
 
In a bricks-and-mortar store, there’s only one way to generate a KaChing sound. It happens when a customer agrees to swap hard-earned cash for the product the store owner has agreed to sell. Online, your opportunity is much, much bigger. There are five primary methods of making money on the Web, and I explain how I use all of them in my multi-million-dollar Internet business.
 
By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have all the information you need not just to create a successful online business—that’s easy—but to create an online business that makes the most of
all
of the Internet’s most powerful revenue-generating opportunities.
 
That’s not a one-off KaChing ring. It’s a constant chime that will accompany you as you continue to grow and develop your online business.
 
Let’s start by looking at just what those opportunities can bring.
 
1
 
The New Web Order—How the Internet Has Brought Opportunity to Everybody
 
My first KaChing moment was not a pleasant sound. It was more like a thud than a ring. It wasn’t the tinkle of a bell, and it wasn’t even the pleasing sound that the cash drawer makes as it opens.
 
It was the sound of a cardboard box landing on the kitchen table.
 
But to me it was sweet music.
 
The year was 1994, and I’d already been playing around with computers—the simplest kind, the type that are less powerful than today’s MP3 players—since 1980.
 
Of course, when I say “playing around” what I actually mean is “playing.”
 
I’d had all the right intentions when I bought my first computer. I’d looked at the manual that explained how to create BASIC code and tried to write a few simple programs. I even got the screen to show “Hello world!” and felt very proud of myself. But I also discovered that to play a game all you had to do was stuff a floppy disk into a slot and wait for the program to load. That was so much easier and so much more fun.
 
I never did learn programming. In fact, I can’t code my way out of a paper bag. I leave that to those who are far more knowledgeable and talented in that arena. However, I have always had a love for computer games.
 
Games cost money, and back in the mid-1990s, I had the sort of income that meant every penny had its place. My career until then had consisted of a mixture of disc jockeying at weddings and bar mitzvahs and selling encyclopedias door to door. I couldn’t really justify feeding my hobby with every new game that came out. That was when I spotted my first computer-related business opportunity.
 
It happened while I was reading reviews in a computer games magazine. I realized that the reviewers were getting their games for free. They got to play all the new games, and they didn’t have to pay for any of them. I liked the sound of that. I was all for getting free games, especially if all I had to do was write my opinion of them afterward.
 
But I didn’t have any writing experience then, and I couldn’t see a magazine hiring me to write reviews—even in return for free games—just because I liked playing them. So rather than hit the phones and hear a series of rejections, I created my own games magazine.
 
The
Dallas Fort Worth Software Review
was never the most popular publication in the world. Some of the early editions might even have had a readership of ... one. Two if a friend came over and happened to pick it up.
 
But when I called the software companies, told them I was a writer for the
Dallcas Fort Worth Software Review,
and asked if they’d like to send me review copies of their new games, one question they never asked me was how big my readership was.
 
In fact, the only question they asked was, “What’s your mailing address?”
 
When that first game was delivered to my door, and I laid the box on the kitchen table, I knew I’d had my first success. It wasn’t money. I still hadn’t made a dime. But I had a plan, the plan had worked, and I was off and running.
 
Soon games were pouring in from all the major software companies, and I didn’t have time to play them all, let alone review them all. So I put an ad on an Internet bulletin board system—there were no forums back then—offering free games in return for reviews. That meant the games could continue to come in and I could continue to produce my little games magazine without breaking too much of a sweat. The small readership, however, was a problem.
 
That problem was solved by the Internet. When the Web really took off, I was ready. Playing with computers made me aware of its growth—and its potential—so I took all of the game-related content I had collected and put it on a new web site called WorldVillage. com. I also invited other writers to come in and submit content on any subject that interested them.

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