"How to create a million-dollar website
on a shoe-string budget"

Dr Alex Interview

Dr Alex sees the lack of knowledge as the number one impediment to Internet success. His proven formula to turn your business into an outstanding Internet success involves 3 stages:

1. Bridge the gap from visitors to loyal paying customers
2. Explode the number of visitors to your website, and
3. Forge partnerships - and double your profits.

Getting started on your way to Internet success

QUESTION:

Dr Alex, can any business benefit from going on-line?

Dr Alex

Going on-line carries HUGE benefits for anyone - even if you only do business locally.

Let me give you an example: suppose you run a women's fashion shop. Most businesses of this kind rely on the accidental visitor - people simply walking in through the door, and they invest heavily into securing the prime location, such as a shopping center or a busy street.

However, what do they do about the visitors walking OUT? Typically - nothing!

Now suppose you ask people for their email address as they are about to walk out, in return for something valuable. Sending an email with your newsletter would allow you to establish an on-going communication with your current and potential customers to:

• Let them be the first to know about special promotions
• Organize evenings with talks and demonstrations
• Allow them to print discount coupons, etc, etc.

In order to do business with you, people need to get to know you first, and learn they can trust you. Delivering your newsletter is one powerful way to earn people's trust - and start a lifelong business relationship.

QUESTION:

Isn't is expensive to give people something valuable just obtain their email address?

Dr Alex

Not necessarily. My favorite are information products: they can be exceptionally valuable - without costing you much to produce. Also, electronic products cost next-to-nothing to deliver.

In the example I just mention, in exchange for the email address you could offer a free eBook on how to match the right outfit with your personality... or, how about an eBook "10 Tips on How to Look Like a Movie Star in 60 Minutes or Less". If you spend few minutes thinking about it you'll be able to come up with something better, but the point is: the information needs to be relevant and valuable.

Any manual, newsletter, article, help file, training material, tutorial, and course can be easily compiled into an eBook by using eBook Wizard, or eBook Gold Pro (if you require password-management and security), or a similar tool.
 

Profit from the Internet - even if you do not have a website!

QUESTION:

Would you use Outlook or some other email client to maintain contact with your current and potential customers?

Dr Alex

Outlook and other email clients are good for personal use - but not effective when it comes to managing large mailing lists.

Maintaining regular contact with your current and potential customers is essential. People are almost never ready to do business with you when they first hear about you, but the more they know about you and your services, the better.

Sending your newsletter, report and other mailings allows you to build a relationship with your clients - and profit from the Internet, even if you do not have a website!

Starting your own newsletter or another kind of email marketing is easy, but you have to select the right tool depending on your needs:

1. Free Windows stand-alone email list manager: for small lists ranging from few hundred to one or two thousand customers, you do not need to invest a single dollar!
   Use Flet Mail, the powerful but free email list manager, which you can download from the Free Internet Marketing Tools. It sends emails using the same mail-merging principles that word processors use.

   FletMail sends individual, personalized emails. It supports an unlimited number of data fields, and to learn to use it takes about 5 minutes.
    

2. Free on-line email list manager: another free alternative, with some advantages if you travel frequently.
   Top webhost providers such as Webmasters allow you to install your own on-line email list manager in seconds (you have a choice between qMailer and PHPlist), which you use and maintain from your website.
    
   The advantage of this approach is that you have access to your list manager from anywhere in the world.
    
3. Comprehensive on-line list manager: if you list is likely to run into thousands, use AWeber.
   AWeber is a first-class on-line service allowing you easily manage subscribe/unsubscribe requests, and use autoresponders to send your follow-ups and newsletters.
    
   An important advantage is that with AWeber you do not have to worry about your messages being blocked by the spam filters.
    
4. Comprehensive Windows stand-alone list manager: Mailloop.
   Mailloop automates scores of your tedious daily tasks - it is the complete internet email, bulk email, newsletter server, web form processor, customer database, newsgroup poster, and auto-responder solution.
    
   Mailloop gives you the greatest-possible flexibility. It is an important aspect if you need to aggregate your email management from a vast variety of sources.
    
   For example, your orders may come from multiple affiliates and online-resellers of your products, or from multiple subscription forms. The notification messages that you receive can come in different formats - and yet Mailloop easily deals with them, and sends different personalized emails selectively depending on the criteria you specify.
    

Know your market!

QUESTION:

What if you do not have a business yet? Are there products or services that sell better than others?

Dr Alex

Products and services go in and out of fashion all the time. It is tempting to sell the hot product of the day... but it can quite easily become yesterday's news overnight.

My suggestion is, go in for the long-term: people succeed with all sorts of different businesses, so choose something you know a lot about, are passionate about, and enjoy doing - and build your business around it.

This way, you can run your Internet business and enjoy it and have fun in the process - while making the great living out of it!

QUESTION:

Dr Alex, many people do not know where to start when it comes to building your business on the Internet. What is your first step?

Dr Alex

If you are thinking about developing a product or a service, or if you just have an idea, you cannot assume that people will rush to do business with you. The first step is to find out if there is interest for your product/service/idea.

Without this step, you are in danger of spending time and money developing something that no-one wants.

On the Internet, people find you most of the time by typing the key-phrase into the search engine. You have to know the exact keywords and key-phrases people type in to find your business on the Internet. This tells you how many people need your services and how often.

This step is absolutely crucial, but you do not have to spend thousands of dollars in research. In fact, you do not have to spend any money at all: Wordtracker now allows you to open a 7-day free account, and even a thorough and comprehensive keyword research only takes hours.

QUESTION:

What about the old "You get what you pay for"?

Dr Alex

What costs you most is the lack of knowledge! This is the number one reason why so many businesses fail to make an impact on the Internet, even after spending fortunes in web development and years of their time.

You do not need a bag of money to run a successful business on the Internet, you need knowledge.

This is the reason Strategic Internet Marketing exists: to give the know-how to people so they could build million-dollar websites on a shoe-string budget, and supply them with all the tools they need to guarantee their success.

Back to your question - on the Internet you can find exceptionally valuable resources that are either free or dirt-cheap, but you have to know where to look for.

QUESTION:

OK, let's say the Free Keyword Research Tool reveals there is lots of interest in your product, but also lots of competition. What are your chances of success?

Dr Alex

Of course you do not want to enter an already saturated market, but the main question is not how many competitors there are. The two main questions are:

1. Can you offer distinct advantages over your competition?

2. How strong is the competition?

If you do not have any distinct advantages over your competitors, it is always possible to develop them - EVERY product and service can be improved on. Improving just one of the aspects of the business gives you what is called the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) - this is what sets you apart from anybody else.

As for assessing the strength of the opposition - again, it is not necessary to fork out the top dollar to find out, or any money at all. Wordtracker 7-day free account is all you need.

If you look critically at your main competitors, you will discover not only how they made it to the top, but also what their weaknesses are and what you can do to be more successful.
 

Build a great-looking, compelling website

QUESTION:

Once you've ready to build your website, do you do it yourself? Or, do you hire a third party to do it for you?

Dr Alex

I'd say build it yourself - with the right tools and some HTML knowledge it is unbelievably easy. Alternatively, C Point's Pronto Websites service gives you a head start - a 5-page website built on marketing principles and optimized for search engines.

Of course, for large web-service websites that are particularly complex and require lots of custom programming you might want to lookup Elance.com and hire a programmer to do the job for you.

In all other cases, building the website yourself is the way to go - with the right resources it is fun and fast. With no prior knowledge whatsoever, it takes only 7 days or less to build a fully-functional eCommerce-enabled website.

Compare this to hiring a third-party, which costs at least $5,000 for a basic bare-bone website without the on-going maintenance costs. After all, you know your own business best! This is what you need:

1. Some working knowledge of HTML
2. A great-looking web template
3. A visual web editor, and
4. A web-hosting account.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the language of web pages, based on simple tags. For example, placing the text between the <b> </b> tags makes it bold.

There are plenty of good HTML tutorials on the web. You can download a free HTML tutorial from the free Internet marketing tools page. You will know the basics within minutes, and have enough working knowledge to start building your website within 1 or 2 hours.

Web templates give you a head start. You add your own information - and presto, you have a website. You can find some stunning, professionally-designed templates at the free website templates.

This includes all the design files - pages, the style sheet and images you can change.

By the way, I wish I had these templates back when I designed my first website, C Point - if you look at it through the Wayback Machine, you'd be amazed how ugly it was in 1998 by today's standards.

When visual web editors are mentioned, people immediately think of Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Well, an exceptionally good free visual HTML editor is there for you to use, NVU, and you can download it from the free Internet marketing tools page. It allows you to design and edit your pages through a visual interface, much like you would use a word processor.

In addition, once you have your web hosting account ready, you can upload your web pages from your local computer to the Internet with few clicks.

Web hosting accounts have come down in cost so much, that the question is no longer whether you pay 1 or 2 dollars extra per month to have one, but whether they can provide you with:

• Plenty of additional tools at no cost (eCommerce, statistics, polls and surveys, your own customer support system, etc)
   
• Plenty of disk space for your files and plenty of bandwidth for your visitors
   
• High-speed access (people HATE to wait on web pages to load), and
   
• Outstanding customer support.

I've changed 8 webhost providers in a bid to find the right one. For the past 5 years I've been using Webmasters for all of my websites, and I give them my heart-felt recommendation.

In short, at the cost of less than $10 per month Webmasters provides you with:

• Beautifully organized and easy-to-use webhosting control panel - the best one I've ever seen - with over 50 free web applications and tools you can add to your pages in seconds (popularity check, email manager, mailing list manager, FTP, HTML analyzer, eCommerce shopping carts, statistical analysis, your own customer support system, guestbooks, galleries, forums and live chat, etc - the list is truly impressive)
   
• 10GB of disk space and 300GB of data transfers per month
   
• Incredibly fast customer support - on 10 or so occasions when I've needed support my questions have been answered within 24 hours.
   

Create irresistible marketing message

QUESTION:

Some of your sales pages at C Point are very long. For example, your JavaScript Editor page takes 24 clicks to scroll-down to the end! You are obviously in favor of long sales pages?

Dr Alex

Actually... I am not! Or rather, I do not think of sales pages as "short" or "long". Let me explain...

If I had to name one singe thing that separates successful websites from the unsuccessful ones, it would have to be the sales page. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have compelling sales pages - it is the key difference between struggling to make ends meet and running a million-dollar website.

The answer to the question of how you need to compose your sales pages to make them irresistible and compel people to do business with you takes more than few paragraphs or few pages.

Marketers who believe that long sales page is the answer often repeat themselves. I am totally, 100% against this strategy, which is mercenary and disrespectful to your visitors.

In short, I can tell you that the guiding principle is to provide people with all the information they need to make the purchasing decision.

A sales page for a printer cartridge will therefore take a tiny amount of space. However, explaining the benefits of a huge and versatile tool such as JavaScript Editor takes up a lot more space.

Because of its importance, most of you web-design time needs to go into writing your sales copy - and any mistakes here are costly. There is an outstanding course that would tell you step-by-step to write the amazingly effective sales copy. This course is called Power Copywriting for the Internet - a Step-by-step Guide to Writing Million-dollar Advertising Copy.

I was so impressed that I paid top dollar to the Internet Marketing Center for the republishing rights, and made the course available to the members of the Underdog Marketing Challenge.
 

Explode the number of visitors to your website

QUESTION:

When your website is up and running, how do you drive traffic to it? How many visitors are you getting?

Dr Alex

Put together, my websites attract just over 250,000 visitors per month. My first website, C Point, is visited by 54,000 people every month - and all this traffic comes free, without any pay-per-click advertising at all.

How do I drive traffic to my websites? There is one simple marketing strategy that practically guarantees your success:

• Bring thousands of visitors to your website - without paying one single dollar
   
• Keep your visitors absorbed in your web pages
   
• Get your visitors to come back to your site - again and again
   
• Compel search engines to give your pages high ranking - and keep increasing it!

You can have all this - and more - when you apply this one simple strategy.

This strategy is called article marketing!

Article marketing guarantees your success for 4 simple reasons:

1. You provide rich, valuable content for your visitors
    
2. Search engines put lots of value on rich content and reward you with high ranking
    
3. The articles add greatly to the credibility of your website , and
    
4. The articles you write establish you as the expert in the industry.

My first website, C Point, is rated 6 out of 10 on Google, and it is in the top 68,000 sites world-wide by traffic - thanks to 400 pages rich in content.

QUESTION:

Wow! 400 pages! How long did it take you to produce them?

Dr Alex

They did not appear overnight - but you only need about 25 pages for a noticeable jump in rankings. Yes, I know that to many people 25 still sounds like a lot of pages - but there are powerful solutions to make your writing quick and effortless.

The resource that tremendously speeds up your writing is Steve Manning's book “How YOU can Write Your Book On Anything in 14 Days or Less... Guaranteed!”. This is an expert's step-by-step guide unlike anything I have ever seen. It turns you into a prolific writer - even if you have never done any writing before.

I was rather skeptical when I bought “How YOU can Write Your Book On Anything in 14 Days or Less... Guaranteed!” because I had already been established as a writer. I had 3 of my books published (one in England and two in Germany), I've written countless articles, and I hold the regular newspaper column in the Adelaide Advertiser.

Yet, my only regret is not knowing about this course earlier - I can't believe how sluggish my writing has been before!

Use blogging to dramatically increase
the number of your visitors

QUESTION:

Blogging is the buzzword you hear a lot today. Any comments?

Dr Alex

Yes, everyone seems to be into blogging and if you believe the marketing experts blogging is one of the fastest ways to boost the traffic to your website.

The truth is, today blogging is a lot less effective because of two reasons:

1. The number of blogs is enormous. In the past 12 months, the overall number of blogs have increased 100 times!
    
2. Most of the blogs do not offer quality content. No wonder that blogging is sometimes called "clogging" and bloggers are known as "cloggers" - they clog up the Internet with countless worthless blogs.

Can you still profit from blogging? YES, greatly - but only by producing quality content!

Search engines love dynamic content. For this reason, using other people's quality blogs on your web pages is a powerful strategy to turbo-charge the number of visitors to your site!

You do it by using RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it allows you to display other people's content on your pages. When the new content is added, your page is automatically updated.

With RSS you get the valuable information for your visitors, which is updated daily - giving your visitors the reason to come to your website again and again. Also, search engines get to index your dynamic content and advance your ranking...

But why would people allow you to post their content on your pages? Because it works well for them too - they get the links back to their site.

There are a number of script-based tools that would allow you to add RSS feeds to your pages. Let me tell you a little secret: none of them are any good. Why? Because the search engines need to see the text, not the script if they are to index the page properly.

Therefore, it is imperative to translate the RSS feed into plain HTML, visible to the search engines, and the tool that does it automatically for you is called CaRP (Caching RSS Parser). This is how you add other people's quality blogs to your pages:

• Go the the CaRP site, scroll to the bottom of the page and depending on your needs choose the CaRP Evolution for the single webmaster, single server, or the company license
   
• Go to Blogger.com and search the blogs for the topics relevant to your website
   
• Check every RSS feed and use only high-quality ones
   
• Follow the instructions you received with your CaRP software to install it and add RSS to your pages.

I use CaRP extensively on all of my websites. To see example on how RSS works on the C Point site visit:

• JavaScript Editor News
• DHTML News
• AJAX News
• PHP News

Create stunning video presentations and convert each of your visitors into buying customers

QUESTION:

So far you have placed lots of emphasis on textual content. What about audio, video and other rich media?

Dr Alex

Audio and video take up lots of bandwidth, but the cost of high-speed Internet has decreased sharply and more and more people are getting it.

The research shows that people can prefer visual, auditory or kinesthetic (doing rather than talking) way of acquiring information.

To put it simply, many people would rather hear or see what you have to say rather than read about it.

Therefore, placing high-quality audio and video on your pages is beneficial in many ways:

• It builds rapport with your customers
• It eliminates or reduces customer support
• It allows you to tell your message - quickly
• It lets you easily sign up people to your newsletter
• It is known to increase sales 2-5 TIMES!

It's been proven. Presenting your customers with something they can actually see sky-rockets your sales.

However, up until recently placing audio and video on your website have been out of reach for most people due to the time required to produce them and the high production costs.

Not any more - with a tool like Camtasia you can easily produce a video, and until recently version 3 of Camtasia was available for free. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, but you can still get the 30-day free trial.
 

Enlist hundreds of affiliates to promote sell your products

QUESTION:

Is it a good idea to sell your products through affiliates?

Dr Alex

Of course! It goes without saying that an army of sales-people can do a lot better than a single salesman.

The question is not whether you should get affiliates to sell your products - of course you should, the problem is how to get them! Why? Because there are so many different affiliate programs today, with each one claiming to be "great" and "highly-rewarding", and "automatically generating an income stream for you".

So, what can you offer to compel people to become YOUR affiliates?

My research shows that to stand out in the sea of other affiliate programs you have to fulfil four prerequisites:

1. You must have a quality product.
   If your product is not top-notch, you stand to lose both your affiliates and your customers.
    
2. You have to be generous with your commissions.
   5% or 10% are not going to cut it. Be generous! And why not? Your affiliates have invested their time and efforts to promote and sell your products - they deserve top commission rates!
    
3. You have to provide your affiliates with text, images, audio, video and other resources to make it easy for them to promote your products.
   In other words, provide your affiliates with all the help you can possibly give them instead of leaving them to their own devices.
    

Learn from my mistakes...

QUESTION:

What do you regard as your biggest marketing mistakes?

Dr Alex

I've made so many of them it's embarrassing...

Here are the major ones:

• Creating and supporting too many software products.
  This dissipated my energy and made the task of properly implementing, supporting and promoting so many products impossible. I did a lot better when I reduced the number of products - and claimed back my time to be able to focus on each one of them.
   
• Registering the meaningless domain name.
  The name of the c-point.com website has nothing to do with the nature of the business, making it twice as hard to get the good search engine ranking, get people to remember it, and associate it with products on it.
  The domain names of my other websites are so much better - the experience shows!
   
• Creating and releasing products with disregard for the demand and the competition.
  The result was a total waste of time and effort on products like Web Effects (yet another visual web editor) or Quick Setup (yet another setup program), which had to be retired without ever breaking even.
   
• Trying to do everything myself.
  I don't think that even 48-hour day would have been enough for me - and I was slow to realize it! It took me 3 years and several burnouts to overcome this madness and start employing people, forge partnerships, learn to appreciate the advice of experts, and get the best software tools for the job.
   
• Naming the C Point product range "Antechinus®".
  This is the name no-one can remember or even pronounce! By the way, antechinus is a cute (but utterly unknown!) Australian marsupial. Only 5% of the males survive the mating season, the rest get so wired-up that they do not know when to stop and die of exhaustion (ah, with any luck I'd like to die this way in my old age!).
  I thought I was being clever, but giving the name of a sex-crazed animal no-one knows to the product range was quite simply the stupid thing to do.
   

Forge partnerships - and double your products

QUESTION:

Dr Alex, any final advice you would like to give to people starting their business on the Internet?

Dr Alex

Yes - involve other people, forge partnerships - and do it regardless of whether you are just starting or have been in the business for the last 20 years.

One person can only do so much - joint venture is the surefire way to launch, develop, nurture and grow your business into a profit-pulling, lead-generating, cash flow flooding enterprise with guaranteed results!

QUESTION:

One final question: to run a successful Internet business, people need a number of tools and resources you mentioned, it must cost thousands to put everything in place?

Dr Alex

Not at all. As I've said, to create a hugely successful website you need knowledge, not a bag of money.

Many of those essential tools and resources are available for free and many come with a price tag regarded as small by anyone's standards.