This is one of the most popular ways to promote a web site - banner ads, banner advertising. Banner ads, for the uninitiated, are just small graphic designs that advertise a web site. The power of them is you can put some really compelling sales messages into a banner ad and, if somebody just clicks on that banner ad, it takes them directly to your web site.

One compelling sales message plus one mouse click could equal money in the bank!

You can work these banner ads up into banner exchanges where they are free, you get free banner displays on other people’s web sites for displaying their banner ads on your web sites, you can swap banners one on one with others and you can buy banner placement on some of the bigger, hot web sites.

You can do this free! You can design a nice web site and actually advertise your web site for free using this banner in exchanges or trades, or if you have a little money, you can buy banner placement. Banner ads are very popular!

The problem is getting people to click on that banner, because there are a lot of banners out there. You need to trick people into reading your banner ad. Not only that, but there is even one more step – how to trick them into clicking on it, because even if they read it, if they don’t click on it it’s not going to take them to your site.

The real trick is to make a banner ad look like part of a web site. It’s that simple. That’s one of the best tricks we’ve seen. Make it look like a bar, or a miniature windows-style button or window into a little piece into another program. The best way to do that is to use a form with “click here” buttons or like actual check boxes you can click on.

For example, this is a neat banner ad we’ve seen used before. It asks, “How much do you want to make? Click here.” Along the bottom of the banner ad is $10,000 with a little box beside it, $25,000, $100,000, $1 Million, with little boxes beside them. It actually entices the reader -“Well I want to make $1 Million.”

It doesn’t matter which box they click on, it doesn’t matter if they missed the box entirely, now they’re clicking on your banner. It takes them to your web site, where it starts telling them how they can make $10,000, $25,000, or even $1 Million by following these instructions.

So you design the ad to actually entice the user into clicking there, or to make it look like a scroll down window with text under it, and they have to click on the little scroll bar to read more.

This is another neat trick - the text is an enticing message like, “I’m going to give you all the tips and tricks on how you can make more money next year – it’s really easy, all you have to do is…” And the text ends there. There’s a little scroll bar along the side there like you see on so many web sites or on programs that you run on your computer and you click on the little scroll bar to try to read more. What it does, you’re clicking on the banner to read more, and it takes them to the web site where they can read more. Again, it’s tricking them into it, getting them to actually participate and actually click on the ad.

The real trick, though, is you also have to make that banner attract their attention, so you want to work some of the other neat tricks in for catching the eye, making them see it and read it. For this, one of the best techniques, one of the highest-rated techniques we’ve seen, is some form of animation. That really helps. For example, a simple flashing background color, or a word or two that flashes is very nice, because if that banner appears on someone else’s web site with 5 other banners on that same page, yours has something flashing. It automatically attracts the eye. We’re attracted to flashing and glimmers and movement of some kind.

A little more complex technique is to actually change the copy. You can have copy scroll up and finish a sentence, or words that flash up half a sentence and then flash again and change to the other half of the sentence. It’s not much harder than making a flashing background or color, but you basically have two banners that swap out in an animation sequence.

Again, this actually allows you to get more information and more enticing sales copy into a very small space which is all you’ve got with a banner. But it also attracts the eye, so it kills two birds with one stone.

Even more complex, if you’re daring or you want to pay someone to do it, is some kind of moving characters or actual animation – something that runs across the banner. For example, on the checklist form we covered earlier, we’ve seen these checklists with an actual pointer, similar to the cursor you see on your screen, moving from check box to check box. That way, it’s actually telling you to check here, or check here, or check here. It’s also attracting your eye, telling you what to do, and you tend to follow it and click on one of them.

We have seen these techniques increase response to a banner ad from 30% to 75% - that much increase in the number of people who actually click on the banners and move to your web site through them.

The other thing to remember is there are certain key words to use through your copy. These key words work in sales literature, and these same key words work in banner ads marvelously. There are a few of them that always attract the eye and always make someone want to click to see what is behind them.

One of those words, of course, is a four letter word – FREE. Anything free is going to be attracting to people. Anything you can give people free in return for clicking here, you’ll increase the number of people who actually see the banner and click on it. The other word is WIN. People like to find out how they can win things because, again, it implies that they are free.

EARN MORE has been proven in banner ad after banner ad to generate more click-throughs. The other one, believe it or not, is dollar signs. Any dollar signs on a banner ad can increase the click-through rate, which means the number of people that see the banner and actually click on it.

If you are looking for a unique way to establish your dominance over your competitors, you need to develop a U.S.P., which is a Unique Selling Proposition. It will help give you the power you need over your competition. The way to use U.S.P. is very simple once you know how.

First - Find out what your competitors are doing wrong. Find the things that irritate your competitors’ customers. What things are they doing wrong.

Then - Take these negatives and turn them into positives for your business! If your competitor’s price is too high, you can make a more appealing offer. If they have bad customer service, you can give exceptional service. If they take too long to deliver, you can find a faster way to ship. The list could go on and on. But, the goal is still the same. You must find a Unique Selling Proposition that gives you a market edge over your competition!

Using these two steps to develop a U.S.P. can place your business way ahead of the competition!

One very successful technique you can use to increase your response immediately is put your sales letter headline in quotes! This is a headline secret of the world’s richest marketers!

After years of extensive testing of all sorts of variables that can be used to make headlines more effective, marketers found that putting a headline in quotes does increase response substantially.

Why? Prospects will look at the quotes, and they will think that someone stated the headline at some point. This can be more believable, and therefore they’ll be more open to buying what you offer!

This sounds strange, we know. After all, no credit for anyone saying it is put after the headline like this, but it doesn’t matter . . . it’s as if people trust something that might be spoken word over a typed message.

Whatever the logic behind it, it certainly doesn’t stop you from using it . . . and enjoying the money it could bring you!

Because radio and television stations must appeal to a mass viewing and listening audience, all of whom have diversified interests, they are constantly looking for news that will appeal to their broad audience.

That appeal may involve featuring a story on any of a thousand subjects. But the one basic ingredient that subject must have is “Interest.” Here’s the key to getting all the FREE publicity you want.

You want to come up with some sort of dramatic story about your product, your service, or your company. What can you say that will really dramatize the main benefits that you really have to offer?

You want to get the readers involved with the advertisement and see themselves enjoying the benefits of what you have to offer. If you are able to do this well, you will get more of the responses you want . . . and more profits!

For a long time we were so scared that this was going to hurt our business. Initially we believed in detrimental competition, and then for years we held back our best customers. We would rent all of our customer names out month after month, quarter after quarter, but not our best customers because we still said we weren’t going to give those away. But now we even rent our best customer names out. It hasn’t hurt our business one single bit. People still feel a relationship towards us, and they are still very responsive to our offers.

The most successful people we’ve seen on the Internet or regular mail order are those people who cooperated or made things available to others and then shared with others - but also they were shared with.

The people who are the most unsuc-cessful that we’ve met over the years, especially mail order, are those people who don’t want to share anything, and are so afraid of competition. It’s almost like that Biblical story of the talents, where one person was so afraid he might even lose what he had that he buried it. The other people multiplied their money.

Of course, the Lord had some pretty bad things to say about the person who was so afraid of losing that he did not compete, but he just buried the talents. So I think that we can learn from the Biblical story that we’re supposed to share and we’re not supposed to just hoard. It’s a hoarding mentality that says, “I don’t want to help anybody else,” or “I don’t want to share with anybody else, because I’m afraid they might take from me.”

People need to stop thinking of competition as a negative. A lot of people use competition as their excuse for never getting started. “Well, there’s competition, I can never make it, so I’ll just never even get started.”

Other companies look at competition as a positive thing – there’s a company out there already, how do we compete with them? How do we make our products better? How do we compete with price? How do we compete with service? They look at it as a positive, find out what their competition is doing, and they try to give more to their customers.

That’s really what America was built upon – competition. It makes companies better. It makes them perform better. It makes our products better. So don’t look at it as a negative and something to be worried about. Look at it as something that is positive and can help your web site, and your products, and your pricing, and everything better.

When a small ad is written, the first objective is to get the reader’s attention. Because there may be hundreds of classified ads on a single page, your ad must say something special, unique, or outstanding that will make a reader stop when he/she sees yours.

This means that the first two or three words of an ad are crucial! Words or phrases that quickly involve a reader are the most effective.

Words like FREE...MAKE BIG MONEY... WIN...SUCCESS, are tried and tested winners. Using words like these is the secret to making your ad stand out in a huge crowd of other ads!

You should become a student in “advertisement reading 101.” Look to see how the other people and businesses out there are doing it. This helps you to gain your knowledge of how to take ideas and put them into effect.

When you read other ads, you get to see many of these ideas being used by other ad writers. See how others use them, then, when you go to write ads yourself, it should be that much easier!

Remember, you learn much more from witnessing ideas at work than from just studying the theory with no real-life application to compare it to.

Always run some type of advertising that pulls in new customers and re-sells them. Think of your advertising message as a radar beam that sweeps your market for the target. The target is your best prospects and customers. You can earn steady money all year long by keeping your advertising message out there all the time working for you. Just develop a simple marketing plan that attracts new customers and re-sells them additional products and services. You can do this by following many of the other secrets in this manual.

For those of you out there who are wondering just how simple and easy selling over Internet auctions is, we’re going to give you an example of how to post. Let’s just look at e-Bay as an example because it’s the premier auction site right now.

Let’s just step through that. First of all, you have to have a computer and an Internet connection. You log on by typing ebay.com or www.ebay.com at the top of your web browser.

One of the first things you should do is just poke around. Just look around and go window shopping. Pretend that it’s Christmas in 1956 and you’re walking down State Street, and Marshall Fields has all of the windows displayed. It’s fun to do that.

Like so many other things on the Internet, it’s point and click. Of course there’s a facility for searching for something.

We have a friend who collects frisbees. He’s been collecting frisbees since the early 70's, and he knew maybe two other people who shared that same hobby.

He tells us that the first time he logged on to eBay he thought, “Well, I’ll see if there are any frisbees on here.” Boom! There were seemingly 300 of them there, and some of them were really neat.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of different things being offered up on the Internet auction blocks . . . and the collectors are paying attention. For almost every product out there that exists, there is some collector market for it!

Old toys, comic books, baseball cards, old advertisements, records, photography, tools, computer parts, salt and pepper shakers, books, election materials such as “I Like Ike” buttons and such, newspapers, furniture, board games, old role playing games . . . the list can stretch on and on for miles, seemingly. And there’s always someone out there who will want to buy these things. These collectors are constantly on the Internet auctions, bidding to their heart’s content. This is why Internet auctions are how to sell ANYTHING you might ever have with the simple flick of a finger necessary to place your item up for auction! It’s so easy!

In this article I’m going to give you a great idea for a hot product that someone could literally create within a twenty-four hour period.

It’s a directory. Directories have been very popular. In fact, directories are so popular that there’s a directory of directories out there now! If you get to a large library in your area, I strongly recommend that you go look at the directories, because you will discover that directories are hot sellers.

There are a lot of directories out there being sold on a variety of different topics. For example, there are directories of bed and breakfasts all across the U.S., arts and crafts shows, vacation spots that welcome pets, or discounts for seniors. All these are just a compilation of sources that offer a particular thing to a particular group of people.

The best thing about this type of a product is that you don’t have to do any creative writing. Basically you’re compiling a variety of different sources that a niche market would be interested in.

This can be very simple to do. I think that, with the Internet, when you tie these two together it’s a powerful tool. When you talk to people about the Internet, of course, there’s a lot of entertainment that will come up. But a lot of people use it for research.

If you want to create a product very quickly, then the Internet is a tremendous tool you can use for creating a directory within twenty-four hours - in fact, maybe even less -because you can get on there very quickly, and you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re creating a directory on freebies - specifically we’ll use free things for children as our example. You can get on the Internet on any of the search engines, and now you’re looking for companies and large corporations that offer freebies for children.

Within a couple of hours, you can have a big list of companies that offer freebies to children. You can compile that list into a print product and immediately have a product to sell!

Because the Internet is always growing, you’re always going to have new sources of information for your directories. I think that’s another strong point about directories in general - with the constant updating, people have a reason to buy the new version year after year.

The great thing about a directory is the fact that, not only can you sell it long term, but the information in the directory, over time, will get outdated. The directory that someone buys today, maybe in two or three years, is going to be completely outdated. They’re going to want to come back to you again and again to purchase updated directories.

You might have a customer who purchases an initial directory from you. Maybe next year when you have your newest edition, and the year after that when you have another new edition, they will constantly come back to purchase that new edition.

There are a variety of companies that offer directories. They offer drop ship directories and import directories that continuously update their directories. They have most of their customers coming back year after year to purchase the new updated versions. In fact, it’s become easy to create profit centers for their business.

There’s really no creative writing involved. You might write an introduction, but your real time and effort will be put into the research. Fortunately, with the Internet as your tool, you can get your research down to a very small amount of time instead of spending weeks or months in your local library. The Internet has made research very quick, very fast, and very easy.

Sometimes the real secret to making money is through buying correctly. If you can get a good deal for very little or no cash of your own and turn a chaotic, poorly-run business into a winner, you can find exactly what you want.

This is where the SBA (Small Business Administration) comes in. The SBA supplies people who want to get into small business with mailing lists of businesses that are on the auction block.

You have to be willing to take a risk, though. You have to be willing to move. But if you don’t have to put up much of your own money, you could get the deal you are looking for. Contact the SBA and get your name on a very special mailing list that will make you huge amounts of money.

By getting your name on the SBA’s mailing list of interested business buyers, you will create an excellent opportunity to purchase hard assets at extremely low prices - AND MAKE INCREDIBLE AMOUNTS OF MONEY! And, since the SBA has so many businesses for you to pick from, the SBA can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars in MORE WAYS THAN ONE!

If the office you contact does not maintain a mailing list, ask the SBA office for the name, address, and telephone number of the private auction company that is selling business assets for them. This is how “default liquidations” can make you RICH. This enables you to find businesses being auctioned for very little money so you can buy them yourself and turn them around!

Get good help and learn MARKETING! Learn selling, promotions, and advertising. That’s the secret of how to get your cash register to ring. Learn the key to the business.

Practice all of the good marketing techniques you have learned. Keep it simple, and realize that every business can potentially be a gold mine. If a business is serving a market of customers and giving them something they really want and there’s profit to be made and any business can be a gold mine.

The business was probably mismanaged. Always keep your eyes open for good deals. They are out there waiting for you. Most people don’t know about this, but you can get these businesses for pennies on the dollar, perform your “marketing magic,” and turn around all of the business’s problems.

With your fresh approaches and your use of proven marketing techniques, you can make that business a winner instead of a loser. Get the SBA list, and happy hunting!

People use credit cards to raise cash all the time, whether it be to get a quick amount to cover an over the limit check or for money to buy groceries when no other cash was available. You can even buy the business of your dreams with plastic credit cards!

People want to believe in what you have to offer. They are skeptical, though. That skepticism is why you have to be as absolutely honest as you possibly can.

These days, everyone wants to talk benefits. All the successful lead generation ads out there focus on benefits. You have to find a way to raise yourself above all of those other ads. You have to find a way to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Honesty allows you to do that, and the prospects’ need for benefits - their self interest - is the secret to “hooking” customers and “keeping them on the line.” Let them know all of the reasons you can give them what they really want. The better you can convince them of that, the more sales you are going to get. The more sales you will get, the more customers you’ll be able to go back to with your back-end offers.

As long as you’re providing a valuable product or service of real value, and you’ll be able to attract them, make them believe in you, and keep them buying from you. You are going to be successful.

Study the successful advertising that is used by other companies. This is the quickest way you can learn how to become a millionaire! Find all of the reasons they are so good, look for all the ways other people gain sales through their copy, and try to ask yourself, “What is it about these ads that makes them work?”

The best route to making money is definitely not through conducting your own trial and error campaigns. Use the trial and error of other companies to bring you money.

What do we mean? It’s simple. When you see ads and sales materials that keep running over and over again, you know that ad is making a profit. That other company might have found it through the painstaking procedure of trial and error, but there is no trial and error in it for you.

You should simply find as many ways as you can to model after the successful materials that you see others using. Study from the best, and pattern your materials after theirs!

Using the right words that will be a call to action to your prospects is how you can turn non-buyers into buyers! Really compel people to take advantage NOW!

People are naturally procrastonistic. They may want to buy, but they will put it off, and put it off, and put it off until your offer fades from their memory.

That’s why you have to get them buying RIGHT NOW! Get them to strike while the iron is hot. Get them excited about doing it IMMEDIATELY! If it works, this turns people who would have never bought due to their own procrastination into people who accept your offers and send you the money as quickly as they can.

There are many techniques you can use to do this. The best way to learn techniques when you’re starting out is to study other ad copy from other companies and see how they’re doing it. Still, one of the best starting points is to give your prospect a strong, believable reason to respond now. Think about the offer from the customer’s perspective, and get creative!

Many successful marketers are building their fortunes selling just one product. Now, granted, if you have a successful product, by no means should you stop selling it - you should capitalize on it as much as you can!

What most marketers miss out on, though, is the fact that a successful product opens up a door of opportunity - to expand that product into an even larger moneymaking opportunity!

Here’s a good example of this concept put to use. You’ve got a successful product. Now you want to capitalize on its success so it makes you even more money. How do you do this?

The answer - advance the product! It’s how to instantly make more money from each online customer who reads your sales letter!

The original product could be the basic version. You could have versions with more information and/or bonuses, and give them titles like “silver,” “gold,” “platinum,” or whatever. A version with more information could have a plus symbol on the end, or a revised edition could state which revision it is, i.e. “5th Edition.”

It could have specific information dealing with other topics. You might have a version with more examples of the product in use. The opportunities are endless!

Curiously, this technique is seemingly used the most in the entertainment industry. Video games that have sold very well will typically end up after 6 months or so with a few new levels added to them and a few gameplay improvements coded in, and they get the name “Gold” added to their title.

Look through the video rental stores - you’ll see various forms of the same movies. Some are widescreen editions, also known as “Letterbox” editions, which restore the width the movie had in the movie theatre - typically a couple of inches are cut off on either side of the film in make the movie fit on a television screen, which has a different shape than a movie screen.

You’ll find versions of movies that have been digitally restored. You’ll find versions that have footage originally cut from the theatre release restored and put back in the movie.

Check out the music industry. CD’s that have sold very well over the years find life in a variety of formats. They could be digitally mastered, they could have songs added that were originally cut from the album, they could have commentary from the band, they could have hidden songs - one of the wilder ideas we’ve come across is selling special, 24 karat gold versions albums!

Underneath all of the gloss and glitz, the same basic product remains. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is still “It’s a Wonderful Life” whether or not it’s been colorized, digitally re-recorded, and an hour of extra footage has been added.

The same is true for any product you sell. The basic architecture is the original product. But, by building up on it and adding new bonuses - creating new editions, throwing in new improvements, more tools, better interfaces - you are creating yet another product.

This is a product that stands a good chance at success. After all, it’s previous version was a success - so why can’t a newer, better one succeed?

And the customer who bought the original version and found it good will definitely want the new and improved version! You could double the money you made, because instead of selling that one product once, with just a little work you can create a new version - and sell the product to them all over again!

You might have noticed that, with most direct response or mail order offers you receive, the package requires you to shuffle stickers around, fill in blanks, lick stamps, put stamps or stickers in certain places, rip off perforations, so on, so forth.

Stop and think about it. All you’re usually doing with these is ordering an item or two. So why does it take all of this extra work?

These sorts of things are called involvement devices. They’re a powerful tool used for getting sales - and if they didn’t work, you would never see them!

People have short attention spans. It’s as simple as that. They’ll read through a sales letter or an offer, and many end up setting it aside and forgetting the offer that was being made. After all, people are busy. They have children to take care of, jobs to go to, hobbies to indulge in, television shows to watch, games to play . . . why should your offer get so much of their attention?

This is the point of view of the average prospect. They see an offer as an intrusion upon the schedule of their life, and they will treat it as such.

That’s why involvement devices were created!

In order to gain that prospect as a cash-paying customer, it is necessary to keep them interested in the offer long enough to reach the end and order it. This is the task many mar-keters assign to involvement devices. Involve-ment devices will pop up sporadically throughout the offer, keeping the prospect involved in the offer by having them do something that both physically and mentally requires them to concentrate on it, yet at the same time breaks the monotony of the offer itself.

Involvement devices keep the prospect involved in the offer, keep it fresh in his or her mind, and ultimat