KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays Comm, Joel (books for 8th graders txt) 📖

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