How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: by Ewen Chia - Notes Part 1

How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business by Ewen Chia


This is one of those books, like Fastlane Millionaire, that has a name that seems at first to be a little like a scam, but once you dig into the book, it is well written, well thought out, and pretty interesting.

Not being a internet marketer, I do not how much is real and valid, but my gift in life is finding good advice in any text.

It was interesting.

The important thing to understand is that Internet-based marketing is driven by information. The visual interface makes us sometimes forget that it is all data, numbers are what matters, and numbers can be measured.

There are more than a few different models for Internet business. However, there are only two core models in the transaction of online business itself: 1) Direct proprietor, also known as the merchant or product owner 2) Third-party proprietor, otherwise known as an affiliate marketer

I knew, for instance, that I needed to target a viable market. I knew I needed to deliver solutions to that market. I understood that I needed to drive market traffic to my offer and that I had to have a lead-capture and follow-up system in place. I started focusing much more on building my opt-in lists and on forging a solid relationship with my list subscribers. It was through their feedback that I learned just how important it is to provide value and information. I came to understand that people are looking for solutions, not just products.

The secret was in first understanding the fundamentals of marketing: 
•  You must find a target market. 
•  You must offer a solution to that market. 
•  You must drive market traffic to your offer. 
•  You must capture leads onto an opt-in list in order to follow up on your offer.

The overall system relied on driving targeted traffic to an opt-in page where people could download the mini e-book, consume the information, and then click-through the affiliate links contained within it.

Whether you want to be an affiliate marketer, a product owner, or both, there are five core components that undergird every successful Internet business, and you must master them above all else if you want to make your first million on the Internet. These five components are as follows: 1) Market 2) Offer 3) Traffic 4) Backend 5) Duplication

Every successful Internet marketing system comes down to five components: Market + Offer + Traffic + Backend + Duplication

You want to choose a market that satisfies the following criteria: 
•  Hungry for a solution 
•  Willing to spend disposable income on solutions 
•  Easy to reach

Every market represents a niche, but not every niche represents a viable and profitable market. Make sure the market has money. Product targeting is really secondary to market targeting. Pay attention to your market above all, and the rest will follow.

You must target the market first, determine its needs, and then either create or locate a product to address those needs. Product targeting is really secondary to market targeting. Pay attention to your market above all, and the rest will follow. There is nothing wrong with brainstorming ideas, but market selection should be governed by real research and hard data.

You will be years ahead if you memorize this one concept: people do not buy products—they buy solutions.

Shift your focus away from the details and features of your product. Look instead for the problems it can solve. The solution is your offer. No matter which market you go into, you must position your product as a solution, and you must market it as a solution

The core of your revenue is going to come from the targeted prospects you’ve collected onto an opt-in mailing list and converted into repeat customers. The backend refers to the offers you make as follow-ups after an initial sale. The majority of your income is going to be generated by backend offers. However, these front-end sales are not where you’ll earn the bulk of your income. The majority of your income is going to be generated by backend offers.

I hope it is clear now why you cannot rely on front-end (or I should say “one-time”) sales alone. A successful business model requires that you maximize the lifetime value of every customer by including a solid backend follow-up series in your sales funnel. Otherwise you’re just leaving money on the table.

Duplication has been one of the major factors in my ability to build wealth. Duplication allows you to explode your overall profits by creating multiple streams of income. Having more than one income stream is crucial for a variety of reasons.

If you want to earn your first million online, you must become an information provider. The demand for information exceeds that of any other item you could sell.

For an affiliate marketer, especially, the following four tools are required: 
1. A Web site with your own domain name 
2. An autoresponder 
3. Link-tracking software 
4. Link-cloaking software

How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business


It all comes down to freedom and control. Your site is the engine that will power all of your marketing strategies. You need to know where your Web traffic comes from. You need to know which advertisements perform and which ones are duds.

Link cloaking involves the manipulation of a URL from its original form into a different URL while still permitting both to lead to the same destination.

I wouldn’t recommend relying on third-party services like TinyURL to cloak your links, because you have no control over how long your link redirect will last. Instead, invest in software that will do the job reliably and for however long you need it to. An excellent product is the Affiliate Cloner, which you can check out at http://www.EwenChia.com/clone. Why bother with cloaking links at all? Think about affiliate links for a moment. Often these links are very long and ugly, kind of like this: http://www.abcsite.com/shopping/cart.asp?$lang=true$affid=76394

A good rule of thumb to follow is: when in doubt, cloak it.

To summarize, then, these four tools really are the engine behind the majority of communication that will take place between you and your customers: 
1) A Web site with your own domain name 
2) An autoresponder 
3) Link-tracking software 
4) Link-cloaking software They are the key technical components of your sales

What you need to look for is a niche market. You must target your products and services toward a well-defined group of consumers.  However, it is not specific enough to say that you intend to target “guitar players” or “investors.” The question becomes: which segment of the guitar-player or investor market are you going to target? There are markets/niches within the categories above.

You simply must not attempt to launch a marketing campaign until you determine what your market wants and how badly they want it! 
1) Need/Demand 
2) Profitability 
3) Competition

A niche business consists of a business idea that is centered around a highly targeted market group.  When you zero in on a niche, what you’re really doing is zeroing in on the following: 
1) The audience or target market you would like to serve 
2) The core mission and unique selling proposition of your business 
3) The core product line of your business 4) The realities of the market—which guide every aspect of how you structure your business, how you advertise and promote your business, and how you manage the long-range growth of your business

So, first things first—do research and brainstorming via other sources, and get your markets of interest (your affinity markets) nailed down to start.

Are you starting totally from scratch? If you are, then pay close attention to what follows next. I’m going to give you a crash course on how to perceive the landscape of salable products the way a businessperson perceives it. So, let’s say you are starting totally from scratch ... The first thing you need to be aware of is that your mind is habituated to seeing the world from a consumer’s point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. You should keep this ability intact, because it’s going to help you relate to your customers. However, this way of thinking (when done without awareness) can also blind you to the profit opportunities staring you in the face.

The average person thinks in terms of products that already exist. The niche marketer thinks in terms of both existing products as well as products that haven’t been introduced to the market yet. How does the niche marketer see opportunities where others don’t? It’s simple: •  He pays attention to what people are already buying. •  He pays attention to trends and the latest hot industries. •  He keeps up with national and world news. •  He is a voracious reader. Now, how do you apply this so that you can come up with your own list of potential target markets to research? Ask yourself the following questions: 1) What products am I already consuming? 2) What issues have been in the news lately that might connect to a need for a particular product or type of information? 3) What have I read about in books or magazines lately that might point to a potential market? Now, write down everything that comes to mind. Examine your answers and pull out anything that looks like the simplest one- or two-word description of a broad niche.

Now, pick out a couple that really grab you, and get ready to do some serious reading and research. You’ll want to start out just surfing the Web for sites related to the broad keywords you’ve selected. See what you can find in terms of existing products, services, and content (e.g., articles, message boards, etc.) related to your niche topic. The questions you want to answer during this process are as follows: 1) How many visible submarkets does my market break into? 2) What are the products and services being sold? 3) What range of prices are people charging? 4) How are these products and services being delivered? 5) What information is the market seeking out? 6) What topics are currently hot items of discussion? 7) What is the market’s “inside vocabulary”?

Market profitability is based on two factors: 1) The market has plenty of disposable income. 2) The market is known to buy. In other words, the market is willing to spend a fair share of disposable income on products or services that address needs.

However, you cannot guess at the profit potential of an average market simply by looking at the average income of your target market, as this is hard to determine except in all but the most exclusive cases. You would be surprised at how much money people will spend on their hobbies, even when they nearly go broke in doing so. So, the profitability of any given market comes down not to how much one type of individual is willing to spend, but to the following factors: 1) Are there preexisting products or services in the market that sell well? 2) What is the average price of these products and services? 3) How much demand for these products and services is being expressed?

In other words, what you really want is a healthy amount of competition, and where there’s a wide variety of price points. Be wary of markets where it appears no one is selling anything. There’s often a good reason for it! Also be wary of markets in which there’s not much variation in product type or quality. The best type of market allows you to promote everything from entry-level, low-priced products to higher-ticket items.

The surest and easiest way of getting the big-picture view of your market is to examine the advertising that’s already targeted to that market.

Use the resources listed below to discover the markets people are already spending good money in: 
1) http://www.eBay.com 
2) http://www.YahooShopping.com 
3) http://www.Amazon.com 
4) http://www.Magazines.com 5)

When you visit any one of these sites, you should look for the following indicators: 
•  WHAT’S POPULAR
•  TOP LISTS
•  RELATED ITEMS
•  NICHE MARKET IDEAS

How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business

PROFIT CHECK #2: ARE YOU TAPPING INTO CURRENT OR FUTURE HOT TRENDS? These sites can give you a sneak peek at growing trends in popular culture and society: 1) http://Pulse.eBay.com 2) http://50.Lycos.com 3) http://www.Trendwatching.com This is a good check to use against any affiliate products you’re considering, too.

PROFIT CHECK #3: WHICH MARKETS ARE WRITTEN ABOUT? You can visit the following article directories and search for articles targeted to your market: 1) http://www.Ezinearticles.com 2) http://www.Goarticles.com 3) http://www.ArticleAlley.com 4) http://www.IdealMarketers.com 5) http://www.Searchwarp.com The reason for doing this is simple: popular subjects (and people) get other people talking!

Any time people care enough to read, write, and relate around a common interest, you can be sure there is a need just waiting to be filled. There is, in other words, a demand for information.

PROFIT CHECK #4: VALIDATE YOUR MARKET WITH FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS To validate your market through keywords is to verify that your market is present on the Internet and hungry enough for information that they search for it online. This is crucial. When you run this type of search yourself, you’ll be able to get the actual numbers. Google does provide that information, but you have to download your keywords into a file in order to get to it. Other research tools, like Wordtracker, will display the search volume right next to your results. That said, here is a useful rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating search volume: Weigh your keyword(s) search volume against the number of indexed pages reported by Google as natural search results and by the number of sponsored advertisements being run by Google PPC advertisers. So, for example, if the bulk of your niche market’s keywords average five hundred searches per month, while Google reports that it has indexed over a million pages containing those keywords, you may have some market saturation on your hands.

If you see some commercial Web sites in the natural results, but little to no sponsored advertising, you may have hit an untapped niche. However, if there are no commercial Web sites at all and zero sponsored advertising, you’re likely looking at a dead market.

Weigh your keyword(s) search volume against the number of indexed pages reported by Google as natural search results and by the number of sponsored advertisements being run by Google PPC advertisers.

Conversely, what if you find a niche with a lot of competing advertisers? Competition is good. It means the market is alive, and highly profitable for some people. It may or may not be profitable for you. In order to find out, you will have to look at what the existing advertisers are paying per click to run their ads.

Market opportunity has to do, in a sense, with breadth. In other words, how many opportunities are there for you to capitalize on the market? This is in large part influenced by competition, or other players in the market.

You want your market to have some established businesses already there serving it. Why? Because these businesses may give you a leg up with opportunities for partnerships and joint ventures. They’re also going to be big sources of additional traffic to your Web site.

At this stage, what you’re really looking for is how many profitable offers you can target to your market. As an affiliate, you especially want to look for residual or passive income programs, programs with a variety of products (at all price points), as well as the breadth/depth of available products and solutions for your market

How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business