How, in this highly competitive Internet Market, with billions of web pages and millions more being added each and every day (it is estimated that 150,000 blogs alone are added each day), with economies around the world reeling from the global credit crisis, how do people like you and me make any money?

Now more than ever, with banks and governments stealing through taxes and inflation the dreams of millions – some who thought that they had achieved the dream seeing it dribble away, we must discover how to make money, and then how to grow it and protect it.

With so many challenges in front of us, when we try to start our Internet business we face one especially monumental one: how do we get our first customers?

I call this particular issue “The Bootstrap Problem“.  Like a computer that must “Boot Up” from the initial switch of the power supply and the initial spin of the primary disk, our online businesses must start up and grab initial customers – customers that, through word of mouth, through testimonials, through blog comments, etc. get our business snowball rolling down the hill.

I believe (from experience) that this initial problem may be one of the main reasons that so many beginning online business starts end up in failure.  You are told that to sell products you need to have a site with testimonials and “a buzz” but if you have not even sold your first unit, how do you do that?  It’s a catch-22! you can’t put up testimonials if you have never sold anything, and buzz requires several people who have a presence of their own talking about you and your product.

So how do you get to that place?

There are some practical steps to do this, here is three of them:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. Do something radical.
3. Use every channel to broadcast yourself.

Give your product away for free: Obviously you want to make money on your product, so what this step is really addressing is giving your product away to a small group of “beta testers” – people who agree to give you a real, honest appraisal of your product.  This helps you do two things:

• - find bugs in your product and fix them.
• - get testimonials from actual users which you can put on your sales pages.

Do something radical: People like to read about new, weird, radical, strange, controversial things, that is why when things are sane, good, comfortable, nice – you never see that in the news!  You want to be searched for you got to be different, and hopefully just a bit over the edge.  There is an Internet marketer out there I just hate, and that is the way he likes it!  You may have heard of the so-called “rich jerk” or seen his sites. The thing is, the debauched person who talks on the site, and the garbage he spouts about being so incredibly wealthy, having several girls in his hot-tub, etc…is mostly just crap.  The actual owner does not show his face on the site, those are actors, playing a part to create a sense of Vegas style playboy-isms.  This has been a brilliant marketing strategy because it is so radical compared to “normal” strategies.  There are many other ways, however, that you can create a sense of “this is different” – just as long as you are attracting the kinds of people who will also want what you have to sell.

Use every channel to broadcast yourself: You need to look into all the possibilities, even those you may not have yet considered.  Today, with Web 2.0 we have tons of social networks (if you look in the upper right hand of this blog you will see “LinkedIn” and various feeds and below each post a “ShareThis” link to social networks).  There are a variety of auction and promotion sites (most people never even consider advertising their business on craigslist for example). There is Twitter, and other phone based applications, the list is almost endless and growing daily.

I have a report on using social networking to establish yourself in the Internet business world, and you can get it free with your purchase of my super sized Business E-Book collection “Marketing Magic Collection 1” which has over 250 ebooks, reports, and articles from some of the most influential writers and Internet marketers, copywriters, etc. such as Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Dan Lok, Brian Keith Voiles, etc.  For only $7.00!

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Use these ideas to bootstrap your success!

David T. McKee

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

(This is a reprint of an original article I wrote back in early 2007)

Mmmmm Capitalism!

I love cheesecake.

My wife makes the fluffiest, creamiest, most delectable cheesecake I have ever tasted, slightly browned at the edges, delicious light yellow, dripping with cherries or blueberries.  There is no store-bought cheesecake that can hold a candle to it.

Yet companies like “The Cheesecake Factory” or “Junior’s Cheesecakes” make literal fortunes selling cheesecakes at $50.00 apiece not including the shipping!  Those store-bought or Internet bought cheesecakes are good, but my wife can makes them so much better.

And this got me to thinking: Cheesecakes mass produced under the most ideal conditions are still inferior to those made with love by wives and grandmothers everywhere.  What does this mean for the Internet marketer?  It means a lot, because it points to new niche markets.  Can you get several grandmothers to produce a few cheesecakes each?  You pay them 15 dollars for every one they produce.  They win because they produce as much as they want, and in some cases that may be something that gives them a new purpose!  There are so many widows and others who, having retired and having families that have moved away, have time.  Some may need a few extra dollars too.

You have your own product resource here, a freelance cheesecake factory if you will.  And don’t stop there, what else can be produced in this way?  Knitting? Gifts? Crafts? Cookies? Fried Chicken?

You can sell these obviously superior products online and ship them anywhere in the country, and if you use Ebay as an example, you can do it without even having to set up your own web-presence, just create an Ebay store!

You see older retired people may not want to bother with running their own business, but they may want to feel useful and to get a few dollars for it as well makes it even sweeter.  Why not?  Everyone wins: The customer gets a superior product, the retired person gets worth and dollars, and you make money with your on-line business.

By the way, Colonel Sanders started KFC when he was over 60!  He “invented” something called “home meal replacement” selling complete meals to busy, time-strapped families and called it “Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week.”  Could you have some grandparents or others create complete meals, store them with dry-ice and ship them using the Internet?

And no matter what the Mass producers say, properly positioned and skillful marketing will pit them against “Grandma”!  Not an enviable position for them, but a great place for the savvy marketer.

Niches are funny things… They typically exist right in front of you unrecognized by almost everyone, but one thing I have noticed, they always seem to exist close to un-used resources.  This is a case where there is unused wisdom and experience, in our elderly population and amongst those who have skills and abilities but perhaps not the time or energy for full-time employment.  If you can use Internet technology to leverage these resources, you can create wealth where nobody ever thought to look for it.

David T. McKee

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

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