The safest and most profitable form of advertising is two-step lead-generating ads.

This lets you use the secret of follow-up marketing:

FIRST, you get new customers to respond to some type of inexpensive ad or sales letter.

SECOND, you follow-up with those people by selling them additional products and services. This type of advertising can make you the richest person in your town.

Here’s how simple it can be: You run small inexpensive classified ads, small display ads, or use inexpensive postcards, self-mailers, or cheap Direct-Mail packages. The purpose of this advertising is to bring you qualified prospects. This can build your mailing list, and give you people you can go back to and re-sell.

The rules of a good radio commercial are like rules that apply to writing print advertising. The basic rules that apply to all advertising are:

1. You must get the prospect’s attention with a unique selling proposition.
2. You must create a desire to obtain your product.
3. You must get the prospect to act - to order - to send a check.

Because radio is a relatively low-impact medium, you must make an impression to influence a listener to make a decision. This may mean making multiple commercials every day, four or five days a week, each week.

You should think of radio as two basic categories: foreground stations, such as talk shows, sports shows, news shows, religious shows; and background stations that play music.

Listeners actively listen to foreground stations due to their personal interest, while the opposite is true of background stations, which they are passively listening. The results are that your commercial has a smaller chance of by people who are listening to music, as opposed to the discussion or lecture.

Set up an incentive program where you actually reward people for every person they bring to your website.

There are many school programs that reward bigger and better prizes based on how many sales the students get. The better the sales, the better the prizes. You could have some kind of referral incentive program where you have tracking software that attracts visitors to your site so you can reward them - maybe they could get one point for every visitor they bring to your site.

When they get a hundred points they can pick out a prize, or they can save their points and when they reach a thousand points they get a better gift or prize. When they get ten thousand points they can get a prize that’s even bigger . . . and even better! It’s a unique twist on giving people incentives to send good prospects to your site.

You could give people points instead and let them trade those points in for products that you have. These can be products that you have yourself or if you’re a distributor for a wholesale club. Perhaps you’ve got access to thousands of products that you can buy super cheap. You can give your customers and prospects those kinds of incentives as well.

Again, it’s just a simple way to reward other people for bring people to your site. Not necessarily paying them on the sales of products but actually just paying them for bringing people to your site with points that they can trade in.

The idea is, the more people you bring to your site, the more people you get to your site, and the more likely it is that you’re going to sell more and more of your products. This is an explosive secret that compels people to spend more money each time they go to your site! This is a simple idea, but something you can do to increase the traffic to your site and to make more money with your product.

There is one easy way that you can make your ads more credible in the eyes of your customers. You must use facts. Facts make your ads believable.

Too many companies fill their ads with a lot of hype, but they never back the hype up with facts. Facts are believable. Sure, benefits are great, but facts are the proof that people need before they will send you their hard-earned money!

Your customer knows that you are trying to sell them something. They are not stupid. They expect you to overstate the benefits they will receive from your product. But, facts are a different story! People rarely question facts. It is harder to overstate a fact, and that makes your ad more believable to the prospect.

So, next time you write an ad, include the benefits, but make sure you include lots of facts as back-up evidence that what you say is true! You will soon see your response start to rise!

Run lead generating ads. This is advertising that introduces new customers to your product, service, or company. It is designed to give you the names and addresses of the people who want what you’re selling.

This is the safest and most profitable way to make money for three reasons:

1. You can run smaller ads, which cost less money.
2. You can pre-qualify prospects with your ads. You can develop a simple system that will bring you hundreds or even thousands of the people who are most likely to end up becoming your best customers.
3. You can make it easy for people to do business with you the first time by asking for little or no money.

These ads can attract the people who are most likely to become your best customers. It’s so simple: FIRST, you attract them to your company. SECOND, you show them they can trust you. Then you show them how your product or service can give them something they want. And THIRD, you re-sell them for the BIGGEST PROFITS POSSIBLE. This is the simple three-step-system we’ve used to make millions of dollars. It can work for you, too.

Now we’re going to cover six simple steps that virtually guarantee profitable advertisers for your web site. These will help you avoid the mistakes that sabotage many sites and keep them from ever being profitable.

Advertising is a basic part of the Internet now. It is a basic business model that many of the most successful sites on the Internet follow. And it’s simply this - you offer something free to the public that large numbers of people want. It could be the joke of the day, the recipe of the day, business tips and information, how-to information, almost anything that large numbers of people want, and you offer it for free. That builds traffic.

You also use the billboard approach. You place the banner ads, or the ads on the web site, and the passing traffic sees the advertising. Advertisers are very willing to pay for that visibility. It is a basic model that many successful web sites use, and if you look at the top fifty sites on the Internet you’ll find that is probably the most common business model that is there. It was the first business model.

But, there are some pitfalls that can sabotage your success with this model of business on the Internet if you don’t know about them in advance. That’s what we would like to talk about for just a few minutes.

No matter how good your site is, and how desirable the information that you post, and no matter how large an audience that information appeals to, you can’t build your site and expect the advertisers to just come. It’s no field of dreams. Advertisers go where traffic exists, not where traffic will be. You need to remember that. Advertisers go where traffic already exists.

In planning our web sites, sometimes we forget that. Nothing sells to advertisers but exposures, traffic, clicks, and sales. That’s what they pay for, but they pay for it only when it is there, not when it’s going to be there.

So, what’s this mean? Are we really saying that you can’t sell advertising easily on the Internet? No. That is not what we are saying at all. But, we are saying that there are six steps you can take, and we’ll go over them briefly to make certain that your site attracts the advertisers that you want.

Step 1: Build Traffic.
You need to plan to build traffic. That’s not for the advertisers. You don’t have to show that to anyone. That’s just for you. But you need to know exactly how you’re going to build the traffic. How you are going to advertise, promote, list, news releases, whatever to build that traffic.

Step 2: Have a Website That Appears Professional.
You need a professional-looking site. You have to look successful from day one. Advertisers want to be associated with something that is successful, and it needs to look successful. You can’t be a homemade job. If you’re not good at that type of thing, then you need to hire a professional to do your site.

Step 3: Be Able to Support Your Site With No Advertisers Until You Have Sufficient Traffic.
This is the fatal step for so many people. A web site is not expensive, but when doing our financial plans we expect to have advertising from day one. That’s not a typical thing to have happen, so make certain that you can support your site until your traffic numbers are up and you can attract your advertisers.

Step 4: Get Banner Ads From The Get-Go.
You need to install banner ads - a banner rotation program - from the beginning.

That’s not going to bring you income, but it’s going to help you build traffic. It is very important from day one to have those banner ads on your site because they say to potential advertisers that this is a place where you can advertise and this is a site that is looking for advertisers. You need to look like an advertising driven site, even before it’s an income producer.

Step 5: Target Advertisers Appropriate to Your Site’s Size.
You need to target your advertisers appropriate to the size of your site. Many of us, when we start planning, say “Well, we have dreams of selling the Cokes, and the beer companies, and the big budget advertisers to advertise on our site.”

The truth is, they’re not going to advertise on your site because their placements are made by large agencies. These large agencies make their money on a percentage basis. It takes the same amount of paperwork for an agency to place an ad on your site for a few hundred dollars, as it does to place an ad on a major site for $10,000.

So the agency only has to do that one piece of paperwork for their commission. Therefore, they’re going to put their company on the large sites to make the large income.

You need to target smaller companies that are already advertising on the Internet. Companies that are more than willing to pay $50, $100, $150 or $250 for an ad, because that’s what they can afford. They’re very comfortable advertising with other similar size companies. So, keep your expectations realistic for the advertiser you’re going to look for, and you’ll have much better results.

Step 6: Go Get That Advertising!
You need to actively solicit advertising. It’s not going to come to you. It’s not hard to do - in fact it’s really easy to do. We’ll show you how.

First of all, you start looking for sites that are similar to yours. If you have a travel-related site, start looking for other travel related sites. When you go to those sites, find out how much traffic they have and what they charge for ads. They’ll give you that information. Tell them, “I may want to advertise on your site.” They’ll tell you what their traffic is, and then you’ll see how they charge.

Next, you look and you see who is advertising on their site. When you see who advertises on their site, you’ve found potential advertisers to advertise on your site.

Now you have a really good advantage when going after those advertisers. You know that they are advertising on similar sites, what they’re paying on those other sites, the amount of traffic they are getting on those other sites, and all this works as a guide to show you how to price your advertising according to the traffic that you have.

Now it is more like shooting fish in a barrel. You are totally armed to go out and sell your advertisers. And when you have a nice looking site, with sufficient traffic, and you can prove that traffic by your statistics that are available for your site, then you’re in a great position to attract advertisers and have a very, very profitable web site.

These steps will help you get advertisers for your site, no matter what you are selling, and what your model is. If you are looking for advertisers, these six steps can make a big difference.

It’s testing... This is the one simple formula that will help make you millions of dollars over the course of your life! It is the only way you can find out what really works! You can test different ideas and find out which one will work the best.

You should never just jump right out in the market without testing. You always want to start on a small scale. Then analyze the results. The tests that proved profitable can then be run on a larger scale! You must always test and the study the results. Not testing can prove detrimental to your business.

Many businesses are not testing, and therefore, they are throwing away thousands of dollars each and every year, sometimes more! They come up with a promotion that they think is hot! And, then they run full scale with it! Maybe it made them money. But, was there something they could have changed that would have made them ten times more money? They will never know because they never tested!

These kinds of people always go with their own feelings for the product, rather than the customers’ feelings. The customer will decide what products are worth spending their money on. That is why you must test. Find out what works and doesn’t work on a smaller scale before you bet the farm on one single un-tested promotion!

Remember, it will never hurt you to test several different things on a small scale. It will only help you. You will get hurt when you don’t test and you run a major promotion that flops. So, be wise and test as much as you can. The more you test, the better!

Just follow these three steps:

1. Develop a front-end promotion to attract new customers.
2. Create a line of products around your initial offer.
3. Develop a simple marketing system that attracts new customers to your front-end promotion and then re-sells them the largest quantity of your related products and services.

This is the simple strategy we used to turn a few hundred dollars into several million in just a few years. Don’t let the simplicity of these steps fool you. They have the potential to make you rich. Look for and study all the ideas, methods, and strategies in this manual that are related to these three steps.

The big companies out there just don’t use free publicity ideas. We’ve been selling information on free publicity, and we’ve developed courses to teach other people how to use it. Paul Hartunian has traveled across the country telling people to get free publicity and free advertising. And yet, the big companies don’t seem to get the message. The small guys like us are using it with great effect. But Microsoft and Ford and IBM - they just spend and spend and spend.

So instead of trying to re-educate a big corporation, there’s a way to profit from what they’re going to do in spite of what we tell them. Cars.com is a national online newspaper. You’ll be able to go on and advertise your car or buy a car just like the classifieds in your newspaper but it’ll be on the Internet and it’s all cars. It’s a great idea! So to launch it, they’re going to spend a few bucks. They’ve budgeted 25 million dollars - just to launch the company!

We have a friend who used to own an ad agency. He formed one at first just to get discounts on magazine ads. You see, if you have your own ad agency you get a discount when you buy an ad at a magazine. So he said, “You betcha, I’ll do that!” The next thing you know he started doing a lot of stuff in the ad agency business. He wrote ads and became a list broker.

So when he sees someone’s going to spend 25 million on advertising, he immediately wonders what his commission would have been if he were the ad man? What would he get if they spent that on lists? Well, you’d get 20% or $5,000,000, if that was all on mailing lists. He’s also sold printing. What would 10% be? Well, 2.5 million if you’d spent all that on printing.

On magazines, you get 15%, so he always thinks, “How can you make money off all these big, big dollars that are changing hands on advertising?” Well, the way to do it is to sell advertising on your Website. Now you have a Website, you have your products on there, but then how do you generate added revenue without added work? Online advertising is incredible right now. It’s a “feeding frenzy!” It’s the one proven system you can use to make thousands of dollars a month on your website - and NEVER SELL a single product!

There’s an advertising bureau that’s similar of like the direct marketing association - it’s called The Internet Advertising Bureau. And they estimated that $2 billion of ad revenues were generated for online advertising last year. So you can talk about all the products that are being sold - but advertising is generating billions and billions of dollars!

For example, some people have a Site that doesn’t really sell anything. A good example of this would be a “Joke Of The Day” site - people go there to read the joke every day. Some of them use it as their home page and it’s making all its money from advertising on the site. They just say - we have thousands of hits per day on our site to read the joke. We don’t have anything for sale except advertising and they let other people advertise there who want all those hits. They want people to see their ad!

One thing you can do to make your customers pay you the money rather that your competitor, is to make it easy, enjoyable, and fun for them to buy from you. There are a lot of ways to do this. You need to decide how to do this with your product and company.

One way to make it easy is to accept credit cards. If people can just call you instead of having to write to your competitor, they will more likely call you and order with their credit card. You can get a merchant account to accept credit cards from most banks. Also, some companies that advertise in the opportunity magazines will help small mail-order businesses get merchant accounts. Some of these small businesses would not normally qualify.

Merchant Accounts really aren’t that expensive, and they can dramatically increase your response! Today, you can even set up a system so that you can accept checks by fax and by phone. Most of the companies that can help you do this advertise in the opportunity magazines, also.

Always look for new things. Always think. Always be waiting for that new idea to show itself!

We ask ourselves constant questions about how other people are making their money. We are endlessly trying to get to the bottom of what other successful companies are doing that’s bringing them success.

We try to get ideas from other people and companies, even things that, on first glance, will not appear to even be remotely related to what we are doing.

Creative people don’t get stuck on what they’re doing. They try to see what they’re doing from all the angles they possibly can. They try to look at it from a conceptual vantage point. They fully expect great ideas to come to them. Many times some of our own best ideas come to us when we’re working on a different unrelated project!

You will very rarely find us without a legal pad. Then, when we get an idea, we write it down. We always expect these great ideas to come . . . and they do!

Quantity of ideas is also important. You need to have as many ideas as you can have, because many ideas will not work. Even out of the ideas that don’t work, though, you can get closer to what does work. You can even get better, stronger, more successful ideas, thanks to the experience a few failed ideas can give you!

Remember, all it takes is one good idea to get rich. One idea that is well-executed and properly expanded upon can potentially bring you a fortune. As long as you stay open, receptive, and ever-thinking, these ideas will eventually come to you.

One of our pet peeves is the fact that everybody is so worried about competition! It just drives us crazy! Never worry about competition!

We’ve heard it so many times from so many customers and we try so hard to change people’s attitudes. What do you say to the person who’s reading this thinking, “I’m not going to put anybody’s link on my Website - that’s going to drive business to them instead of me!”

The Web is totally different - it’s a completely different world than inserting a flier for someone selling a competing product with you in your own product. You’re providing a resource that people will bookmark and come back to your Website to find links to other Websites. It’s a whole different ballgame here!

You’re actually providing a resource! One of the things that people on the Web are constantly looking for is a good place to go to other places on the Web.

What about Yahoo? Everybody’s heard of Yahoo. It’s a multi-billion dollar business in just a few short years. Guess what their whole business started out doing? It was nothing but a place to go to other Websites from.

On top of that, every link you add you make sure you’ve got a link on their Site bringing people to you from their customers. Anybody who clicks on a link and goes to another Website just has to go up to that little button that says “back” on their browser, hit back, and pow! - they’re right back to your Website!

They can go over these links and use them to go check out other stuff. And so what?!? There’s so many billions of users on the Internet, all you want to do is get enough traffic coming through consistently to make the sales from those customers who chose to buy from you.

We have a friend involved in credit card processing and he’s got hundreds of people, maybe more, that have entered our Site to say, “Hey, can I put an advertisement for your Site on my Site?” and he’d pay them if any business comes through. Sometimes somebody clicks on that banner which goes to another Site, which goes to another Site, which goes to another Site and eventually they end up on yours and they buy your product.

He talked to some of his customers and ask, “How did you find us?” And they say, “Well, I went to buy a CD-ROM but I clicked over to another Site that had printing because I needed to get printing, then I clicked to another Site that had a mail room and I clicked to another Site that did packaging, then I clicked over, clicked over, and eventually clicked over to a Site that said ‘Hey, need to accept credit cards for your sales? Click Here!’”

They just kept bouncing around till they found them. And it’s beautiful because they get business they wouldn’t have had. The people who actually sent the customer to them gets paid a nice fee, and everybody is happy and the customer’s satisfied because with just clicking his mouse he’s been able to get everything he needs for his new venture. It’s wonderful!

It’s so ridiculous that people worry so much about competition. Because it’s silly!! By joint venturing with these other Sites you just get your message across to so many more people. It reminds us in Mail Order of a mailing list. Over the years, we have made hundreds of thousands of dollars by renting out our names to mailing list brokers and to companies who used our buyers’ names.

There are some companies (we still run into them) that say, “These are my customers and no one else shall ever have them!” They won’t take this money! These thousands and thousands of dollars they could make every year, tens of thousands, because they have this crazy idea that they’re not going to share with anyone else. It’s really ridiculous!

Anytime you drive past a McDonald’s, Burger King, or a Wendy’s, look around and within a block or usually across the street you’ll find the competition. And they both make more money because they’re both there. People know food and they move to that area. Next time you go in front of a fast food place, look around and you’ll see a competitor.

One of the most popular shopping centers in San Diego, actually in San Marcos now, is a real innovative shopping center . . . the whole shopping center is restaurants!

There’s an Italian restaurant, there’s a Chinese restaurant, there’s a steak house, there’s a Japanese place, there’s any kind of restaurant. There’s a Thai restaurant, there are about 12 or 15 restaurants all in the same strip mall and they all are doing more business than they can handle!

The shopping center is ONLY for restaurants. There’s no bookstore, there’s no electronic store, there’s no clothing store. Every place in there - and we think there are about 15 now - is a restaurant!

That would be the place we’d want our restaurant!

ave you noticed how every bookstore has a coffee shop in it now? If they were real scared they could say, “Every dollar spent on coffee is one dollar less that’s spent on books or vice versa!”

and read a book! Have a cup of Java. Take your time. “They both make more money!

The other thing to keep in mind is they call it the World Wide WEB because it’s thousands of points, all these millions of Websites, linked together with that strand in between. They’re all connected, that’s why so many people find other Websites by links from other Websites. And just imagine that World Wide Web - if there’s 25 million Websites today - that’s one BIG WEB with 25 million spiders sharing it! But they’re all still collecting goods!

All 25 million other spiders could have decided they wanted a little tiny web of their own, so there’s 25 million different little webs. But how effective would that be compared to this gigantic WEB that covers the entire world?

We have a friend who works for a company that manufactures computer equipment, and they’re starting to downsize a little bit, so he’s dropped down to four days a week.

He takes that other day and puts things on an auction site for the company he works for. He cleans out some of their inventory that might not be moving as well as other things. This includes certain types of firewalls and other equipment -things that were manufactured that are in their warehouse.

They pay him $100 just to put anything up on an auction site! Then, if it sells, he gets a commission off of that minus the $100. Either way he makes money on it! This is amazing! It’s how to actually GET PAID to list other people’s products on Internet auctions - even if the products don’t sell!

Many marketers find themselves searching high and low for the tips and tactics that will bring them success. They try all sorts of things, and scratch their heads when they realize that they just aren’t pulling as much as they’d like to. And so the search continues for the best, most profitable marketing techniques.

What a lot of these marketers aren’t realizing is the fact that a lot of the time these great techniques they’re looking for are right under their noses - and they’re not recognizing it!

What do we mean? Every time you see a direct ad run in a magazine for months upon months - every time the same sales letter comes back to your house - every time you see the same classified ad presenting the reader with a “business at home” opportunity - you’re seeing a successful example of sales copy.

The truth is simple - If those ads weren’t making any money, they wouldn’t still be running. They would be disposed of and the company would have tried something else.

When you see sales copy like this - copy that you know is successful because it just keeps running month after month - you can model your own sales copy after it! This is how you can cash-in from another company’s million-dollar advertising budget, and use their money - not yours - to get rich on the Internet!

Every year, big companies spend millions upon millions of dollars creating their marketing campaigns. They research, they test, they do everything they can to find something that’ll work for them.

You know what they have works . . . if it’s been running for a long time. And you don’t have to find out why it works for yourself - if you can emulate what they’re doing, you have a good chance of succeeding, too!

Now, we’re not saying you should copy word-for-word what these other companies are putting in their sales copy. That’s plagiarism, and it’s highly illegal.

What we’re saying is, you should borrow some of the ideas that are at work in the sales copy - because there’s no way to patent an idea or concept.

For example, their guarantee might be really good. You could model a guarantee that’s similar to theirs. Perhaps they have good headlines. You could write your headlines in a similar style. Perhaps their sales letter is long. You could try a long letter yourself!

There are all sorts of different concepts at work in a sales letter - why not find a successful one and use it to find your own success?

We’ve talked about Link Exchange before in other articles, and it’s a very clever, very neat idea. For every two visitors to your Site who view the banner that you have on your Site they will display your banner once on one of their member Sites.

The magic of that system is it leaves them one extra display on every one of their 400,000+ member Websites. Right now, they’ve got over 400,000 Websites that are members. How do they make money if they’re just trading - it’s even up - there’s no money changing hands - you don’t even have to pay to join! This is absolutely free!

But you can go to what they call The Ad Store and buy those additional views. So, every time they show all 400,000 Website members’ ads, they’ve got 400,000 more displays or one time views they can show. They sell those! That’s where they make their money!

In addition to exchanging ads, you can go to Link Exchange and it’s just http://www.linkexchange.com - you go to that Website and go to their Web Store and you can (for as little as $50, for example you can sign up for $50) have your banner displayed 5,000 additional times. Yes, you could advertise your products for 1-cent per ad! This is how you could sell your products on 5,000 websites for only $50!

There are a lot of marketers out there that think people really don’t care about specific information. Everything in their copy is approximate or almost, everything is an even number.

These marketers are making a mistake - being specific in your sales copy is much more powerful than being general, or “in the area of.”

Why would being specific make such a difference? It’s a matter of believability. Which is more believable, that a man made $1,000 in one week, or that he made $997.45 in one week?

That’s right - the second choice is! How many times do you spend an exact, even amount of money? If you’re paid by the hour and you punch a time clock every day, how often do you end up with an exact, even paycheck? In real life, these things happen very rarely.

People know this, and when they read through sales copy and come across such a rounded, even claim, they KNOW that’s not accurate. How far off is it? $10? $20? $100? What’s the truth?

Now they’re questioning your honesty. Why aren’t you telling them the exact results? What are you HIDING . . . ?

There went that prospect’s trust, right out the window. Want to keep that prospect’s trust? This is the power of being specific! Learn to be specific in your sales copy - and instill that prospect with trust in what you say!