Evolving $cientology - Building Expanding Organizations

How to Build A Business That Grows

(Photo: Daniel Foster)

ref: Evolving $cientology - Into Something Truly Workable

A (hopefully) short point about 3rd Dynamic (group) evolution.

In $cientology, there is a fiction about the Flag Executive Briefing Course.

The truth:

It. Never. Worked.

Look over its history and you see that it is no complete system - or it would have corrected itself. Yes, it had several high points as utilized in its original format - which all left the organization worse off than before. Now it had false memories of high stat times.

If you look over the actual expansion, you'll find that it was mostly due to the 1960's OEC policies, rather than the 70's FEBC policies and tapes.

I've studied all this stuff. Every tape, every PL. And spent time - years - cramming this stuff and testing it for results.

Some small parts worked. None of it built long-lasting teams.

Core problem is that Management was constantly ripping up any successful team and "promoting" it's members. Or those teams would implode on their own. None lasted more than a few years at most.

Test Everything For Yourself

I've done my own testing, but this means nothing to you.

You only need to study it all and test each one against against real-world applications.

My advantage, I've had some 20 years of study and testing. So hear me out.

If you read the various books about $cientology's growth, you'll find the following background:

The growth of Hubbard's businesses was a simple program. He went around the country giving speeches and building local groups, leaving someone behind to run them. Much along the lines of how the early Methodist churches were built.

Once he had a critical mass, he then set up a central org in D.C.

Of course, the history was that he had to flee to Britain (buying a rural mansion) to escape the Feds. Because he was running afoul of FDA/FTC anti-scam laws and challenging the Feds to dare interfere.

Where $cientology Went Off The Deep End

$cn itself has had to continue to produce more materials and courses and services to stay afloat. Historically, somewhere around 90% of the new people coming in would drop off before they reached Clear, and then right after. This is why Div 6 activities had to be so large.

This is also why Hubbard restructured Clearing technology so that now it was a much more expensive processing - and discounted by people who attended the lectures at St. Hill in person.

Somewhere along this line, Hubbard worked out that there had to be follow-up courses, materials, and services after Clear. The fantasy he wrote, plus the material of the Phoenix lectures and OT Doctorate Course, were all well accepted - and gave him encouragement to continue down this line.

Getting attacked now in the United Kingdom, he went back to the seas aboard an old ship. Unfortunately, he wore out his welcome eventually all up and down the west coast of Europe, Spain, and that area. So he had to travel across the Atlantic to base out of the Caribbean.

Again, he was wearing out these sites, plus the U.S. Government was now on his tail again.

It was this environment which developed the FEBC. Constant deception used as P.R. Examples of failures twisted into "upstat" standards - taught using violent punishment = "overboarding."

Hubbard was on drugs in order to "research" the early OT levels.

He only was able to deliver in the U.S. again when he started following government recommendations.

(Again, check this out for yourself - find the books, read them, test everything.)

A technical note about the "OT" levels

The one's Hubbard created don't exist. But one can get people to imagine anything if you keep repeating it. The e-meter had to be souped up in order to allow the very small indications of these "alien presences" which had to be audited out in order to make personal progress.

The problem is that all these years of using those OT levels had fewer and fewer results as were discussed in the early promotional magazines. Again, these went back more to the days of his Phoenix lectures.

As these levels were upgraded and redefined, people were encouraged to re-do their levels in order to achieve these-type of results. And they didn't ever actually attain them.

What we can see from this is the enhancement of desires through marketing to enable the devoted few to continue shelling out money to the only IRS-sanctioned church.

This is what the Marketing Series told FEBC's to do.

How FEBC Marketing Worked - Sort of

Studying Internet Marketing as a comparative shows what Hubbard stumbled onto - and preached:

1. Build a list of devoted consumers (clients) and continue to mail to these while giving them a string of services and/or materials which they can buy. 
2. Use them to evangelize your products to continue to procure new clients.
3. Get celebrities to endorse your products, as well as testimonials from fanatic fans.
4. Use effective emotion-appealing copy to gain their attention, and then use limited-time offers to ensure they buy in.
5. Always offer what they want, even if its unattainable.
6. Always sell them the next course as a solution for what they haven't attained. 

His example also showed this:

7. Start up a new incarnation when you have to.

For all this, Hubbard had the same churn of clients as any average marketer. They continued to lose new clients at a high rate, while spreading the PR that there were multi-millions of Scientologists world wide - while practically there are probably around 50,000 or so who are regularly active.

What we find here is what works in the Administration of $cientology are the natural laws which run the rest of the world we live in. Read "Influence" by Robert Cialdini.

These natural laws run everything. Everything.

How to Make Your Business Expand - Continually

Find the natural laws, understand them, apply them.

Start with "Think and Grow Rich," by Napoleon Hill.

Follow this up with "If You Can Count to Four" by James Breckenridge Jones.

My own "An Online Sunshine Plan" will give you a lot of the background to how Internet Marketing works and most of the modern tools.

I've made these available to you just so you could succeed.

Your success will depend on the strength of your vision.

Luck to us all.

P.S. 

There's a pattern here:

• Formation and expansion.
• Self-destruction through over-promotion and under-delivery - ignoring national laws.
• Continuing to produce new sales through new materials and products (in new locations) - which themselves were scammy, overpriced and sucked up by their loyal followers.
• Cover the back-trail with false PR.

You can see the flaws with this. Lack of Honesty is one.

The other, senior datum - Hubbard was there to make money and get rich by running a religion. He succeeded, at the loss of his own freedoms - and also doomed his on multi-million dollar organization. The result is that it's been contracting for years, on a slow death spiral.

Do the opposite - deliver an honest service, expand your business routinely. 

Related articles

• How to Find a Millionaire
• How to Earn Money From Your Own Home Business: Mike DIllard's Elevation Income Review and Guide
• Evolving Scientology - Part Two
• When the bottom drops out of your online business.
• My Lesson for Mike Dillard and his Problem with Wal-Mart: quit resisting.
• Day 26 - Ebay and Craigslist: getting buyers to find you

Come the revolution... 6 steps to proof yourself against lousy sales offers

Continuing on with all our work in upgrading sales, sales pitches, marketing, ad nauseum...

Look, marketing exists for a single purpose - to help you to improve your life by helping others with theirs. The action is to let them know you have a product which can help them live their life better.

Marketing by itself (if governments would stay out of its way) would actually create World Peace all on its own - since everyone likes to buy great products and improve their lives. Violence and war just cut across the free exchange of goods and services. Any government's job is actually to keep the peace, preserve property ownership, and protect the trade routes - and very little beyond that.

All this crass silliness which goes for Madison Avenue "latest and greatest" is like the "awards" they hand out to movies these days. They just get worse and worse. When the Golden Globes got cancelled and the Oscars became threatened, I wasn't upset.

Movies and what is served up on TV has gotten worse and worse. Ratings have gotten more and more lenient - such that even a "G" rating can have foul language, violence, and various sexual innuendos included. No more "Sound of Music" or "Gone With the Wind."

Movie and TV awards now days do not reward quality, or public service - instead they are rife with political comments (strange bedfellows, that) and have no relation to actual box-office performance and popularity (the strongest metric of public service and inherent value).

It's like the last I heard of the "Cleo's" - that was supposed to be awarded to the best and greatest in advertising. However, it got a reputation of only awarding to companies that ended up going out of business that next year. And the products they advertised didn't sell (and so didn't renew their contract with that advertising company...). The Cleo's are no more - and you should have read about their last "awards event".

Advertising is the same way. It's filled with such garbage that it actually has an incredibly bad name for itself. Sales pages and advertising are both built on the same basics. Once you know how a sales page is built, then you can analyze what is good and bad advertising.

You have to look at the rules which make up a truly good sales pitch and see why they are that way:

Headlines propose solutions to problems people have - they tell the benefit your product will handle. Common sense, isn't it? You are trying to help someone with your product. A product isn't any good if it just rips someone else off.

(I won't diverge here into 17 page e-books of "incredible value" being sold for "the low, low price" of "only $37.95 for a limited time..." -- limited because once people open that package, that person won't "sell" very many more.)

But the best headline, promising the most vital benefit is worse than worthless if you don't deliver that promise. Benefits could be described as "touchy-feel-good" emotional appeals by those hardened cynics out there - but while benefits brush emotional buttons, they do connect with real essential needs as described by Maslov and others.

Sub-heads simply amplify what you've already got there attention with in the headline. They can be simply non-sensical or can actually bring the reader in to what you're offering. The best sub-heads simply set the scene for the story to follow.

If you took Macbeth and it's first scene about witches, you'll have a good example of a headline and it's sub-head. The reader says "What's a Macbeth? Can I get fries with that?" and then gets all involved in three witches foretelling a story about a the death of a Scottish king and what's to happen his progeny. (Now that's a story line - who wouldn't like to be king or solve a mystery?)

The all-time best sales letters are stories. See Collier's letters and compare them to the really memorable ads. Even Volkswagen's "Ugly" series about their Beetle left you wondering what was going to be told about that cheap-but-rugged car next.

Next you build your own credibility. And here's an easy way to see these guys fall on their face. Because their story doesn't hold up. It's either too good, too slick, or unreal. I don't know if you remember those old ads which sold pears, but they start out with the very real slang used in the orchardist industry. One old guy is talking to his partner who has a crazy idea to sell their fruit by mail-order instead of just on the roadside...

Too-slick sales people jump in with all these nice screen-captures of all the money they made with their gimmicks. They don't tell you that they can only help you do anything but "make money in double-handfuls" and "sit back while your deposits just roll in"...

Oh, come on. You have to get inspired and really take action to get anything rolling in this universe. Even Elvis had a long runway of hard work playing backstreet bars before he started any sort of fame for his particular style. Charles Schultz is probably still the most well-known cartoonist today - but how many years and years did he spend drawing kids and a dog?

But as I've said over and over and over, there is a certain small percentage of people who will buy anything once. And that is THE basis of all advertising - and spam. P.T. Barnum knew it and said it more than once - you know, the one about suckers born every minute...

Next you talk about the benefits of your product - not its features. Because in order to get someone emotionally involved, they have to see how it will improve their lives. Emotion is used because this is a short-cut psychologically to get them to act. You are actually just bypassing their logic circuits in order to get them to act on what you tell them at the bottom of the page.

Look over this (rant) above. It gets you into how despicable these lousy so-and-so's are who pollute our emails with garbage. Am I really upset with them? Not really. But the reason I'm writing this is so that you can educate yourself and wise up your friends and family.

Earl Nightingale, Robert Allen, and others say if you just save 10 percent of what you take home each week, just through the laws of compound interest you'd have a million to retire on after about 30 years. (Beats the hell out of Social "Security", doesn't it?) So if I could tell you how to save 10 percent of your income by not buying worthless junk, would it be worth it to you?

Now look over what you just went through in your own mind. That is a sales process. Take a hot-button subject like money and add in another one called "retirement". I just told you how to make a million dollars to retire on. All you have to do is wise up and buy smart. Now you got interested - unless you are already rich...

Continuing on --

Next on the list is testimonials. These are used to show how great your product is and how the reader should buy it. Often these are done by (paid-for) celebrities-as-prostitutes who may or may not have used the product. Or they are simply made-up people (or character actors) - or affiliates who are working to sell that same product themselves. Or a family member, or a "friend" or, or, or...

The reason you use testimonials is because you can't give them the product to try out. (Oreck does just that now days, even giving free shipping both ways. I'll tell you how that particular approach works in just a few minutes.) This isn't an open-market bazaar, so we deal with the amount of stars or "thumbs up" that people leave when they like a product. Ebay and Amazon both have their own systems in this. The idea itself has built huge social networks, by linking networks like "Stumbleupon" and "Digg".

People want to express their opinion and so are open to listen to others'. You use other people's opinion and results in your sales copy to reassure your readers that your product is a good one. And you include pictures of the product and give away downloads of the operating manual - all sorts of ideas come in here. You are creating a virtual bazaar, where they can all but touch and taste the actual thing.

Here's where the "instant gratification" of online sales, especially digital products comes in. People can get what they ordered right off the bat. Like the rage of ring-tones. If you don't like it, you can get a refund - almost as instantaneously.

However, in this culture, we've been styled, coifed, and trained to demand instant gratification in every part of our lives - and we live pretty spoiled lives in general these days. But you can avoid this particular bad habit from ruining your life -- I'll tell you more at the end (and it won't cost you anything...)

This leads us to guarantees. These are a fail-safe mechanism. You want to tell the person that their purchase has no risk to it. The funny part is that all mail-order sales require a 30-day guarantee, so this is a no-brainer. But many don't know that.

Now veteran sales people also know that out of every set of orders there will be a certain percentage which always demand refunds. That's just in their overhead calculations. (But online sales of digital products save on shipping and handling. ;-O)

When you are telling people your data - use bullet points. Why? Because people want their data in bite-size, chewable amounts - like your parents used to cut your steak for you.

Overdone, or misused, it's like also dividing your peas or salad into bite-sized portions. Or dabs of peanut butter, each cracker-sized. Use bullet points for benefits. Your other paragraphs should be the story itself, the gravy sauce which keeps your meal moist and tender - or your peas on your knife.

Bonuses - yuck. Real bonuses add value. Overdone, they cheapen the product. You want to give them a reason to purchase your item that helps them out. I have a standing offer: buy my 800 page book, send me the receipt, and I'll burn and personally ship you a DVD full of over 4 gigs of sales and marketing data at my cost. (Actual offer.)

The idea is that you are giving them something that will add value to their purchase. Oreck, above, not only gives free shipping, but also a mini-vacuum and a steam-iron to boot.

You are looking to improve peoples' lives with your product. Digital downloads have this easy, just include more products in the .zip file, or more .zip files.

However, it's also over-done. And this brings us right back to where we started. Some people give away literally hundreds of free stuff (most worthless e-books that no one can sell anymore) just for your name on an opt-in mailing list. THEN, they just send you offers for theirs or others' products which are similarly worthless. So you opt-out - with a sour taste in your mouth.

(I've even run into an online set-up where they give away "hundreds of free items" every year. Trick is that this is a network of people who each get you to opt-in to their list so that you can now get even more inane offers to throw your money away.)

The close is where salespeople end up their pitch. During the course of this, they've used an old sequence called AIDA, for Attract, Interest, Desire, Action. You get their attention (headline). Then you Interest them in your product pitch (sub-head). Then you fan their desire (benefits, guarantees, bonuses). Finally, you tell them what they should do - you ask for the sale.

Now go look at a few TV commercials and tell me they don't all have these.

Often you'll see an artificial limit - which is exploited by ticket sales to big events. There are just so many tickets and the curtain goes up at a certain time - and you aren't going to see this again, no matter how many lifetimes you spend on this planet. So the price is now 3 or 4 hundred percent of what I paid for it -- but since you have a nice face, I'll drop it down to just 250 percent... Or, call this free number in the next five minutes and we'll double the offer (while this commercial is run 80 times a day for the next two months).

Another thing is to use a postscript (P.S.) - here you can add another bonus, reinforce the guarantee, or insert various tactics to close the sale.

Does length have anything to do with sales copywriting -- only if your writing quality is poor. For me, the jaded buyer, I usually skip right down to the cost. I have a general idea of what it's worth and what they had to do to produce it - and if I can get that same result for a little Internet research on my own. Good stories are always worth reading - even wordy Charles Dickens' (at least his good stuff, anyway - I could only get through "Great Expectations" when I found a cartoon adaptation - true!).

- - - -

There you have the bulk of what makes up a sales page.

Now:
How to proof yourself from these knuckleheads out there and save yourself some money:

1. Print this off and start watching commercials and newspaper/magazine ads to see how they are selling you stuff. See how many of these points are present in every sales talk you encounter. You'll soon see what is good salesmanship and what is really stupid nonsense. And, you'll be able to see when they are pushing a garbage product.
2. Learn to budget your money and time. Practice delayed gratification. Take up a hobby which takes a long time to get a truly great product - like painting, or carpentry, or hand-knitting. Lots of practice, plus the right tools and techniques will improve what you produce over time.
3. Save what you don't have to spend. Turn off the TV, radio, and video machines. Go to the Internet sparingly for news and less for entertainment. Read books, or listen to classics (this includes rock and pop, not just opera - but doesn't include rap) - stuff that makes you feel good, peaceful. Rent, don't buy DVD's - unless you find yourself watching them three or more times.
   
4. Get a hobby that is gratifying. My sister likes Sudoku - I like writing (and farming). My mother raises chickens, has her garden in summer, and half-a-dozen social clubs to attend weekly or monthly.
5. Anything over 10 percent of your income (which you save only and never, ever spend), invest in something that gives you at least a 10 percent dividend each year. There are plenty of good books that can tell you how to do this (but if you have to go through a pitch like above, caveat emptor).
6. Attend to your spiritual side. Go to a local church, read some self-improvement books. Start listening to personal development cassettes or MP3's during your commute or when you're exercising. Grow yourself.

Doing the above will give you a very satisfying life - and very rich in more ways than one. By saving and investing, you'll be financially independent sooner than you think was possible, even if you start relatively late in life.

The key point is that you will be able to take more control over your life and quit being one of that small mindless percentage who buy any and everything offered.

Oh - and your email spam might be less (but your mileage may vary)...

- - - -

About that offer above.

I've got a high-priced book I cobbled together after several years of research just into online marketing. It's just under 800 pages because that's as many pages the printer would let me have for a single volume. (And I won't cut it down to 700 to fit on Amazon - I've already had to come down from around 1200 in the original.)

What I found was that there were only a few misused basics in marketing and about 8 or so key ways to market online. And the people who used these effectively and routinely made literally millions doing so.

But don't take my word for it. I've put the original 1200 words in several books at Lulu - all under "An Online Millionaire Plan" title, and you can read each of these in their preview completely from start to finish.

If that isn't enough, you can sign up for the newsletter and right now I've got 7 extra-long articles out of the first section (on marketing basics) which each have its own PDF and audio file. I'll send these to you email, or at least give you the link for download. When I get some more time, I hope to get the bulk of the book available through that email subscription.

Now, if you decide to get the near-800 page book for yourself through Lulu, send me a copy of your reciept and I'll burn and send you a DVD with as many of the original files I extracted thsi book from - over 4 gigs of data, programs, scripts, articles, etc.

P.S. Yes, if you don't like the book, Lulu will refund the cost to you - but the DVD is yours to keep.

Or, you could do like I did and spend a year or so signing up for all sorts of offers and downloading countless packages of marketing materials, as well as haunting article directories and burning up Google's servers looking for data.

Your choice.

- - - -

As usual, I wish you the best of luck -- and Good Hunting!

Update 080113 - podcast now linked as enclosure.

The general sequence of getting started making money as an Online Millionaire

Welcome to what is interestingly the launch of the Online Millionaire Plan. Below is a rough outline of what is going to be in the blook I'm writing based on this blog entry.

This blog post is simultaneously being created as a Squidoo lens - and will also shortly be submitted as an article to various and sundry article directories.

As I make time to expand on the below, this will be added to my blook - and within 6 months or so, I'll have something to put up on Lulu and then to Amazon.

Your job in the meanwhile is to help me write it with your many comments and experiences you've had with your own Online Millionaire Plan. It will be your help which will speed or expand on my research into this area and the publication of that blook.

How to get started

I've covered other places/articles how people pay money for things and why. We've also gone over how you aren't really in it for the money, but to provide better service to people so that they can improve their lives. That's a perfect fit - they want to spend money to improve their lives and you are more than happy to accept money to enable them to do so - with your product and services.

Money is really just an indicator of how much you provide real service to others - and how valuable they think that service is. We've gone over how you can increase your income by giving it away, as well.

Now, down to the brass tacks of what to do when and why.

Before we start -

Don't quit your day job. Rome wasn't built in a day, God took seven to create this world - so don't figure you are going to become a millionaire overnight. I've heard some talented people got rich in 90 days, but we'll take the conservative approach here.

Until your Internet activities start bringing income to you, that day job will be providing the seed money for your online business.

Consider all your online activites a second job. This is much better than going to get a second job at some company. Then you are spending 60 hours a week just working for a fixed wage - away from your family and giving a large proportion of it to the government and insurance companies with very little return.

So your online business is your second job. Set it up with a specific workplace and a schedule. Treat it like a business, not a hobby. Show up on time and ready to work - not late and hung over or taking constant breaks for food - or having the TV running so you can "catch the game". Arrange for your spouse and kids to keep the noise down - or set up your garage so it is comfortable all year round and you can easily work there with no distractions. (Remember, setting this up as an actual business means you can deduct these expenses from your "day job" income tax.)

Work out your finances. See if you can get by on only 80% of what you currently earn in income from your day job. Means you are going to have to set up a budget and find out what you are spending your money on. Or - you could simply have your check deposited directly, 80% going into your checking account and 20% going into your savings account (preferably) or another account.

What you do with that 20% is to set half away for savings - never touch this for anything except, perhaps, a real emergency. The other half (10% of your income after taxes) goes to investment. This is what you are allowed to spend on your online business. But the idea again is that you are investing in your own business - not just blowing it on nice stuff for your home office.

Now as we go, I'm figuring that we don't really have a lot to start with. So I'll be pointing out some very frugal ways to get things up and running.

Step Zero

Make sure, darn sure that this is what you really want to do with your life. You are going to shortly become a millionaire. Most people who have earnestly dedicated themselves to getting rich have done so on the Internet in a year or less. Some have done it in ninety days.

There are two books and one tape you need to read/listen to and take to heart:

• Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich"
• Wallace Wattle's "Science of Getting Rich"
• Earl Nightingale's "The Strangest Secret".

There are dozens of other references which would reinforce these, but these three are the core basics on getting rich - and none of them say it is a miracle process or things will happen by magic. But they all give you the vital tools you have to have in order to succeed at this Online Millionaire Plan.

You have to apply the second chapter of Hill's book and the summary of Wattle's on a daily basis. You have to listen and re-listen to Nightingale's recording regularly.

Only then - if you honestly apply these and are honest with yourself - will you be ready to succeed with this plan.

Now that you're ready, let's go:

First

Get yourself access to the Internet and a way to be found. Similar to Archimedes, "Give me a place to stand and a long enough lever and I can move the world."

You want some true broadband - which is pricey, but a lot better than tying up your telephone with downloads (or uploads) that take all night. Get DSL if you can, some wireless or satellite connection if not. This is going to run you a bit each month and is your first investment. If you only can afford a dedicated telephone line and a dial-up connection, do that. You can set up your uploads to go as long as they want overnight while you sleep. But get some decent broadband as fast as you can. (To take this expense out in taxes, it has to be separate from any other use - don't let your kids surf on it while you are at work - unless they are helping you with your business and are on the payroll, another deduction.)

Second

Next to get is a domain name - this is what you are going to start doing your business under - how people are going to find you. Don't worry, most of the really good short ones have been taken. So get a name that makes sense to you, describes what you are doing, and is easy to remember. Online Millionaire Plan (http://onlinemillionaireplan.com) is just that - and not hard to remember (but spelling might be tricky for some...) On the otherhand, I also have gothunkyourself.com - Go Thunk Yourself is just an easy phrase, but is going to take a bit of marketing to get people to even know it exists as a self-help book outlet, much less make the book of the same name a best seller.

You get a domain name from GoDaddy.com or other domain name providers. Competition is keeping these fairly cheap these days.

People will tell you to grab keywords and make them your domain name. That strategy works - as keywords are those phrases people commonly search for. But really, would "google" or "yahoo" or "MSN" be top keywords if they weren't search engines? So pick out a name you and your friends (and potential customers) can remember - and describes what you are doing or offering as a service/product.

Now, right at this point, you could get into business selling stuff - and I'll go into this in another post. But this has some drawbacks. You'll need to understand some additional basics, so stay with me here...

Third

Next is to get a web host. Someone/company to host your files. Don't get a free one - people have no confidence in these, and as well, they have all sorts of limits to shut you down at a moment's notice - used too much bandwidth, someone objected to a post you made, etc. The reason for a free site is to sell advertising or products to you or someone else. Very few free sites don't have some sort of catch.

My preference is for a site with CPanel, which is a graphic interface which enables you to do all sorts of things as a webmaster. Now, you can always pay someone for this, but that raises your initial investment quickly.

You want something simple and inexpensive, since this is a monthly fee. I've found some sites which offer decent services cheaply if you buy for an annual fee - which is just over $100 a year. If you budget your bandwidth demands and what files you actually have on the site, you can make it with such an intro package. Just make sure that provider is able to upgrade your package when you grow...

When you get your web host, go back and assign your domain name to that webhost. Both GoDaddy and your webhost should give you enough data so you can figure it out. If not, Google it - someone knows how and will tell you, having been there and done that themselves.

Fourth

Now, you have to have your product ready. While most of this post (and blook) are aligned to providing information products for sale, this same data can be used to market and sell brick-and-mortar products. The difference is that you are shipping (or having shipped) real-world products, not digital equivalents. So there are shipping times, expenses, returns, and so on.

Digital products are able to be nearly instantly delivered over the Internet. While there might be refunds, the customer simply deletes (or not) the product he purchased.

In getting a product, you are providing service to potential customers. Here you can either make the product yourself, or sell someone else's product.

The key point is to have a good quality product and to let people know about it, to get people to come to the point where you are offering something for sale or exchange.

This is called "Market-ing" - meaning you are in the action and business of getting customers to your market, to see and hear and find out all about your product so they can exchange a commodity valuable (money) for it and improve their lives.

The following steps are all marketing. This step is to ensure that you have a product and it is able to be uploaded to the web (or otherwise in final form and ready to be shipped). I'll go over creating a product in another post/article. At this point, let's assume you have something or have found something which you can offer for exchange.

Fifth

Along with your product, you have to be able to accept money for it. You need a PayPal account and use this to get a ClickBank account.

PayPal enables you to accept credit cards directly without any hassle (just a small fee from each transaction).

Clickbank allows you to sell your product directly as well as allow others to sell your product for you. They again take a small fee.

While you could accept PayPal payments yourself, there is a certain amount of keeping the accounts straight - which some people are left-brained enough to do, but I would rather give a very small percentage of my incoming millions to these guys to keep the whole thing straight. Now you can also set up an ecommerce store on your webhost (CPanel has several free ones which are each very good) and use your PayPal account to handle these transactions. Again, the reason to use ClickBank is to enable others to help you with your sales.

Sixth

Set up your autoresponder so you can collect and send emails out to potential customers, educating them about your product. Again, here we have an expense you have to consider. By this time, you have enough invested that you should seriously ensure that there is no turning back.

An autoresponder enables you to almost automatically respond to people emailing you for information about your product. It will also originate emails for you which you have written in advance. And allow you to communicate to thousands of ready customers with a single email.

While spammers also do this, the difference is that these people have requested you send them data. In fact, they had to confirm that they really wanted to be on your list. Spammers just send out millions of messages to anyone they can find. All the people on your list really want to be there.

While there are several autoresponder programs/services (and more being launched every day), and many that you can install on your own machine at home, I'd suggest you pick one of the top two. Just figure out how to budget this investment, swallow that lump in your throat and take the plunge. Reason being is that the CAN-SPAM laws can quickly put you out of business in a single complaint - and even result in your home computers being seized and a hefty fine. Besides that, these guys really know their stuff about helping you with your email messages and getting your business on the road.

Once you get that autoresponder (A/R) service going, there are ample instructions and videos and FAQs and forums to help you on your way. And you can always research on Google or pick an article directory like ezinearticles.com to search for help.

The main thing is to get it set up and ready to recieve email addresses for you.

At this point you are going to create two pages:

• Landing/Squeeze page - this gives the person arriving all the key reasons to opt-in.
• Thank you page - this acknowledges the person getting through the double opt-in system of your autoresponder and frequently contains a bonus for arriving.
  

These two pages are uploaded to your webhost - which is all you need on that webhost right now. So you aren't going to have a lot of bandwidth being consumed at this point.

Later, we are going to upload your product and get it set for sales, but right now we are just getting a lot of people into the buying mood.

Seventh

Now the fun begins. This is also where all the work is in earning your millions.

All we are doing at this point is figuring out how to get people to give you their email addresses in exchange for valuable data and products which you deliver to them.

There are about seven or eight ways you can inexpensively and effectively market your good(s) to a buying public - or several.

1. Article Marketing - this is writing articles, submitting them to the hundreds of article directories out there. Each article has a link back to your autoresponder.
2. Blogs - this is one of the easier way to write articles, but unlike what you submit to directories, each of these is able to link directly to your squeeze page and to other relevant sites (like places people can buy your books, for instance).
3. Squidoo lenses - these have higher page ranks than many blogs, and so can potentially get you a lot of opt-ins. And you can build them simply - especially if you use your blog content to do so. Like blogs, they link directly and also give you credibility. (See Squidoo Queen for an example of how to use Squidoo Lenses to drive business to your squeeze page - it's free, after all).
4. Press Releases - similar to articles, although with a different, specific format and much fewer places to distribute them to.
5. Podcasts/Radio Interviews - These drive people directly to your product sales, like books or CD's you are already offering on Amazon or similar (like Lulu.com). This involves mailing or emailing media packs to various radio stations across the US which would love to fill their air time with your expert knowledge. But you talk to them on your telephone (or Skype - or similar) instead of travelling anywhere.
6. Affiliate program(s) - where you give other people a "piece of the action" to send people your way. Hopefully, this is set up such that you capture their email as part of the sales. This is where you use Clickbank's (or others') facilities to take these sales and divvy out the commissions.
   
7. Viral marketing - essentially giving away ebooks or special reports which can be used by others, but link right back to your own squeeze page, blog, lens or sales page. These are so valuable that people want to pass them around to others.
8. ?? - I'm sure there are others, but the above seven are the key ones that you can get started with right now, inexpensively - except for the time you spend on it (but you budget that, too - don't you?)
   

None of these are easy, simple steps to do. But all of them can be automated via the internet to one degree or another. For instance, you have to submit articles regularly and to the tune of many separate articles every week to hundreds of directories - or at least the top 20 or 30. But there are article submitter programs which can do this for you.

And they often cross.

• If you give away a viral ebook or special report in order to get them to opt-in, they have something they can give away.
  
• Affiliates can give these away as well, in order to entice them to buy.
  
• When you do a radio interview, you can tell people to fill out a special form at your site and recieve a free download version - or other bonuses when they email you a reciept for buying your book or product online.
  
• Every single blog page, lens, or other page on your website has a link to your squeeze page. And you can have several squeeze pages for different opt-in bonuses, all linked to a central landing page - but this gets beyond what we are at this point. I'm sure your imagination can fill in a lot more details...

You don't see buying advertising in that above list. Mainly because my research has shown advertising as it is currently being done to be a bit of a scam. It's based on percentages and the proven fact that a small percentage of people will buy anything you offer. It's also an addiction, in that businesses are told that there is something wrong in their ads, not in advertising itself. Your best reference on this is the Cluetrain Manifesto, written by veteran marketing executives and consultants.

I don't tell you to get into advertising to begin with as you have to be very exacting about it in order to make it work for you - and your budget to begin with might be so small you can barely pay for your monthly ISP, webhost and autoresponder bills. And we do stick to our budget and don't commit to services we can't afford, don't we?

Consider your radio interviews advertising, if you want. It certainly is promotion and marketing of your goods. If you want to invest in advertising, spend a larger amount of time in getting and doing radio interviews. But skip PPC, banner ads, ezine ads and all the rest - just for now, anyway. When you pick up a couple hundred other books on advertising and how this works on the Internet, then you can start to use this in your marketing.

But the research I've done says that if you do the above seven marketing actions - you'll be rolling in so much dough that you can hire someone (on a budget) to invest in advertising for you. And if that person can't bring back at least a ten percent increase in what you invest (and prove that it's from their ads) - then you've got a bad investment.

Eighth

Now, figure out more products and more higher-priced products which you can offer to your customers. This is known as a "sales funnel" where you both cross-sell (would you like fries with that?) and up-sell (would you like to super-size that order?) your potential customers with more products.

The trick is to build real relationships with your customers and then offer them solutions to the common problems you share - for a price, or for free.

Et Cetera

There are lots of variations on this.

A quick start-up is as follows: You can sell other's products by having a domain name which points to their sales page and includes your affiliate link. You then article market (or otherwise promote to people to go) directly to that domain name. Means you don't have autoresponder or webhost expenses. And you can get going fast that way. But this is limited. It does get you money quick - if your their product and sales page are good.

Then you can reinvest that money into your own product line, webhost, autoresponder, etc.

Another version, recommended by Robert G. Allen (Online Millionaire several times over) is to rent a list, send them to an affiliate product as above - and then get them to opt-in to your list so you can then sell them other products.

- - - -

And so now you see the rough Plan of how to become an Online Millionaire.

I'm going to be hard at work over the next few months fleshing this out, including the various ebooks I've found and telling you where these make sense and where they don't.

You see, we are both starting out at the same spot. I'm working a day job on weekends and farming half-days during the week. The rest of the time is spent in figuring out how to make my online activities make me some real income. Those first two just keep my bills at bay and my room-and-board covered.

It's fully my intention to be well on my way (if not fully arrived) at Online Millionaire status by this time next year.

And the story of my journey is going to be documented by blog/book (blook) at http://onlinemillionaireplan.blogspot.com - and you can sign up for the newsletter based on this blog (but filled with a lot more complimentary bonuses) at http://onlinemillionaireplan.com

Here's to both of our continuing good luck success!