How easy is it to create an income from a website?  Can you really create a sensible income?  These are two of the questions the World Internet Challenge is aiming to answer.

Essentially, the challenge is “Can we create a new website that generates income before the end of the four day conference”.

The man faced with that challenge was Shaune Clarke.  Here’s an outline of what he did…

Shaune’s partner Terri Dumont wanted to create a wine oriented website.  And prior to the event Shaune and Terri did three things:

• Research areas of wine to find a niche with lots of traffic and not so much competition (just like Brett talked about in the 7 Steps to success)
• Found a small number of wine experts who were happy to be interviewed - and recorded an interviews with them
• Bought the domain GrapeVineGuru.com and created a blog based website

So, strictly speaking Shaune didn’t create all this at the event - but he did explain what he had done and why (and promised later that he would tell us how he & Terri secured the interviews; Shaune positioned himself as ‘the interview guy’ more about that in a later post)!

The business model of the website was perhaps the most interesting, simple and hopefully effective (yes, take note of this bit!)

The backend product that is being sold is a monthly subscription for wine enthusiasts, to receive regular expert interviews.  The route to that subscription is:

1. Offer 2 free audio interviews in exchange for name and email (the opt-in or squeeze page)
2. At the ‘thank you page’ offer 4 more for a small amount of money say $47-$97 (this is the sales letter page)
3. As a part of the 4 interviews, offer a ‘free period’ to the subscription service

Pretty simple, and a tested model where the upgrade from a free opt-in to the low priced product has in the past proved to be high (over 20%)

Why is the site based on a blog?  Two reasons, firstly it’s quick to update and assuming that it is being updated regularly, search engines like to keep them indexed and generally consider them good information sources.  That’s key for medium to long term traffic generation.

The landing page, including the opt-in to get the free interviews is a separate page on the site (not part of the blog).  Using this approach means that you can have a well ranked site by the search engines (to generate organic search traffic) AND have an opt-in and sales letter.  An opt-in and sales letter alone aren’t very interesting to search engines so this approach gives you:

• A simple sales funnel from ‘free’ to ‘regular subscription’ (see our short video on the sales funnel - it’s the second one in the list of our demonstration videos and I talk about the sales funnel after 2 minutes)
• A flow that can convert prospects from a free opt-in to a subscription
• The chance to follow-up using email autoresponders for those that don’t buy our product
• And finally, a site that has a chance of appearing in the search engines

Overall, this was a great session and there’s such a lot’s more we could discuss about this approach.

For now, I’ll sign-off.

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

The first session on day one of World Internet Summit, Brett McFall covered what he described as the 7 Steps of Success during his “Internet ABC’s” session.  There was nothing startling there, but it was good basic advice for getting started (or indeed for any new project)

1. Find a hot niche market FIRST

   The point here is simple, many, many people have an idea for a product or service and they invest in that idea and take their chances in the marketplace.  Whereas this can of course work, isn’t more sensible to find a hot market where there is demand for information or products… and then provide them?  Well, that’s the difference between someone creating a business based on their passion verses someone who is passionate about being in business.  You must choose which will work for you of course.

   The example that Brett gave for himself was related to Scrapbooking - in 2005 he heard someone one the radio say ‘this is going to be big’ or something similar.  He did a little research and decided this was a hot market.

   The simplest research is to check the number of people that search for phrases specific to the niche you’re researching, using a tool like WordTracker.  When you find a popular niche you can use your favourite search engine to see how many great products and websites already exist.  Clearly a high number of searches and a low number of quality sites and products is a good start.

2. Create a product which gives your market what they want

   OK, we know this makes perfect sense and on the internet ‘information products’ like e-books and audio programs are good product categories to start with.  So, in the scrapbooking market Brett created ScrapbookingProfits.com.

   Additional advice was over deliver and surprise your customer and make it unique.

3. Create a powerful, compelling sales message

   Simply, why is the product you’ve created interesting to your target market.

4. Design a simple website that converts prospects in to buyers

   Typically, this is a ‘one page’ website containing a sales letter OR (the preferred suggestion) a squeeze page to collect your interested visitors name and email address and then your sales letter.  If you have their email address, you can of course follow-up using an autoresponder or newsletter email.

5. Bring traffic to your site

   Consider these as getting traffic to your site in short, medium and the long term:

   Short term: pay-per-click advertising - using PPC you can have people visiting your site within hours
   Medium term: E.g. publish articles that include the link to your landing page or issue online press releases at places like PRWeb.com
   Long term: this is essentially search engine optimisation than typically takes weeks (or months) to kick-in (and of course, articles and press releases all help with this)

6. Use email to turn even more people into customers

   If you captured the names and emails of your prospects, then you can follow up.  An interesting statistic Brett used was 82% of online buyers have bought from an email!

   So, you would use an autoresponder, permission email marketing service to do this.

7. Finally, have people sell your product for you

   This is essentially about having an affiliate program for your product, whether your create an manage this yourself though a service like the one included in our ValuedClientSystem.com professional package or use a service like ClickBank.com.

All good basic stuff to get going!

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

For each day of the event I’ll list the agenda and then where I think its interesting I’ll post a separate item on the actual session… so what happened on day one?

Day one is described as Newbie’s Day, it looked like this:

• 10.00-10.30 Opening - the usual welcome and how to get the best of type material
• 10.30-11.30 Brett McFall - Internet ABC’s - Brett covered the ‘7 Steps of Success’ (see separate post)
• 12.00-13.00 Shaune Clarke - How to guarantee you’ll succeed online - this session had nothing to do with the web, but was a session about getting your psychology right and writing your goals for 30-90 days and most interestingly your two year vision, written as a movie.  In fact, this was a really good session (though I am interested in success psychology) delivered with real passion by Shaune.
• 14.00-16.00 Shaune Clarke & Brett McFall - “World Internet Challenge” - creating an online business, while we watch (see separate post)
• 17.00-18.30 Tim Brocklehurst - How to build a huge list of customers (see separate post)

(If the ’separate posts’ aren’t URL’s yet, then we’ve not written the post yet, so its coming really soon.)

Enjoy…
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

The World Internet Summit (WIS) is making its third annual visit London, as I type, to the Earls Court conference centre in London.  It started on Thursday 15th Nov and finishes after four days on Sunday.

Paul and I attended the first WIS event in the UK in 2005 and generally we had a great time.  So having had a year off, we thought it was time for another visit.

The event was created by Ted Ciuba from the USA, Tom Hua originally from China but now an Australian citizen and Aussie native Brett McFall.  Last year Ted's passion for creating an updated 'Think and Grow Rich', the classic by Napolean Hill, meant he decided to leave the event with Tom and Brett in charge to run the show - which has appeared in Australian, USA, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Japan and of course the UK.

From the conversations I had, just like our attendance in 2005, the majority of the 500 attendees are new to business on the internet. Drawn by the promise of freedom from the daily grind in a regular job and the opportunity to generate a huge income by working a few hours a week, from anywhere in the world, using your laptop.

The way these events work (and yes, there are many such events) is that the speakers are invited to deliver two things - inside knowledge on running some aspect of your internet business and secondly an offer.  To speak at this kind of event you must have a high value, high price product to sell and offer during your talk.  The events make their money by taking a split of the profit from the sale of each speaker's product - products ranging from US$1000 to maybe US$10,000 (I'm writing in the afternoon of day 2, and the highest priced product so far was just under $4,000). I think understanding that helps you enjoy the event - expect to be sold to, but expect great information too.

One of the unique selling points of the World Internet Summit is the 'World Internet Challenge'.  Where a product is created and marketing set in motion during the event.  I'll tell you more about that and Shaune Clark who ran the challenge in a later post… followed, of course, by the answer to the big question… how much money can Shaune make in the four days of the event?

We'll also tell you more about each of the speakers and the overall agenda in posts to follow shortly!

-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

Keywords and phrases drive internet search, they drive search advertising and so they are used in search engine optimisation.

And I’m going to let you into a little secret… when we do SEO for our clients or ourselves and when we are looking for the best combination of keywords and price for advertising (looking for niche phrases that arn’t going to cost £££’s per click), we use WordTracker.

The folks at Wordtracker periodically compile a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis - and then makes it available for our research, which they make pretty straight forward.

Anyway, my point is that as one of their clients and affiliate partners they have given us the ability to pass on a rare discount opportunity on to you… a 15% discount on their service during November, so it ends on November 30th.

To take advantage visit
WordTracker and use this promotion code: us-annual-15

Enjoy!
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

Yes, it’s done.  On 5th September Microsoft released Silverlight version 1.0 to the world.  With so much information made available during the beta stage of products nowadays, it’s unusual to have surprising news at launch time… but they managed it.

Yes, there were announcements about big names who have decided to use Silverlight and a partner program - and we already know that quality streaming is being offered with a starting price of free and that Silverlight will run on Mac’s as well as Windows.

But I was surprised by their announcement that Silverlight would be made available on Linux as well!  Of course Microsoft aren’t well known for their skills in building Unix or Linux applications (!), so here they have partnered with Novell who run the ‘Mono’ project.  The Mono project writes it’s own version of Microsoft’s .NET for Linux (called Mono) - though without any form of Microsoft support.  In this case, there is formal partnership for Novell to make Silverlight available on many flavours of Linux through it’s Moonlight project.

Well, well.  Microsoft software available on Linux, whatever next!

You can see our own steps into using Silverlight here on our ValuedClientSystem.com site.  Take a look at my previous posts if you want to see how they were created.

See microsoft.com/Silverlight or Silverlight.net for more information.

Have fun,
-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

Last year Derek Gehl’s Internet Marketing Center included the UK in their Internet Millionaire Protégé Bootcamp (26-27th May 2006) - and they broke the mould in two ways:

1. The event was completely free
2. The content was genuinely useful

Looking back at my notes, for example, I recorded 26 website references of useful places to go in order to help promote our business (27 if you include their own site).

Now, this year’s Internet Wealth Building Bootcamp isn’t free, but knowing how great Dekek’s content is, it’s more than worth $97 registration free (less than £50 given the current exchange rate) .  And, the price includes 60 days membership to their
Internet Entrepreneur Club and full refund in the unlikely event that you’re not entirely happy with the event.

It’s taking place in London on 3rd & 4th November 2007 - read the details here!

If you decide to go, I’d love to meet up, drop me a note!

All the best,
Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

In July Microsoft took another major step towards releasing Silverlight by issuing the ‘release candidate’ - essentially a version of the software that’s ‘nearly’ ready for release.

Along with the Silverlight release, they also provided updates for Expression Media Encoder - the software needed to encode video.  And an updated release of its Expression Blend product - the software used by designers to combine graphics, animation and interactivity when building applications for Silverlight.

Here at Know It Use It we’ve just recorded a new video tutorial for our online business software ValuedClientSystem.com, so I thought I’d give the updated software a try - again using the FREE streaming account provided by Microsoft.

In my last step-by-step account of creating Silverlight video, I had to do lots of ‘fiddling’ in order to get the kind of output I wanted - the right mix of quality and size that would be supported by the free streaming account.  This time around, I simply chose the “WC-1 Web Server 256k” output and “WMA Low Quality” for the audio and set it to encode the full batch of videos… much easier this time around.  I’m assuming this is due to the updated encoder, but of course there would have been some element of my own familiarity simplifying things!

One challenge I did have was due to the batch encoding (I was encoding eight videos).  This produces separate video files, but only ONE set of scripts… the scripts that each video needs when uploading it to the streaming account (again see the step-by-step to read more about this).  This meant that I had to manually edit and create scripts for each video - which I wanted to show on separate pages.  So, there’s some room for improvement with the encoder there.

For the Flash version of the videos I was using Camtasia and its ‘batch’ encoding process creates a separate, self contained, directory for each video, which was perfect for my requirements.

The result… well, you can see for yourself..  The Flash version of the videos are slightly larger - no doubt with some fiddling in Camtasia and/or Media Encoder I could have made them the same size.

Check out our new tutorial videos in either Flash or Silverlight RC.  They’re not yet linked in to the site, because there’s still some testing and a welcome video to create, but I thought I’d give you a peek anyway.

I have to say that overall, I’m pleased with the Silverlight output!

-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box