DAY 102

Update: Sunday, 19-Jun-2005 9:14 PM

I have decided that the best way to take advantage of the traffic coming to this site is to have a MALL.

I have now called it the P31-STEP Success Building Center.

I think it says it all.

The purpose of creating the mall is to sell, give away, introduce everything one needs to build personal, business and financial success.

I have already collected a lot of the information that I plan to have, which I bought for personal use over the past eight to ten years. Now I can work on the setup and create some of the products and for others I can create joint ventures and affiliate relationships.

There are also several networks on the Internet that created instant Affiliate marketing relationships. I will use one that I had created in 1999 and never really did anything with it. I looked over my log books and found the username and password. They still had the account open and instantly I updated some of the details and I am ready to go! The network has over 100,000 products I can sell as an Affiliate --instantly.

Now I need a plan regarding how I am going to setup the mall. Over the weekend I did some yard work and this was what I was thinking about while doing that.

My plan is to break down the mall into "three levels":
Level one will be personal success products, services and tools that help anyone build their mind set.

Then level two will be business success products, services and tools that help anyone build their online, bricks and mortar, bricks and clicks type store, or any type of business that they are building.

Lastly, level three of the mall will concentrate on products, services and tools that help everyone achieve their life-long financial success.

So, this is the short business plan. I'll keep adding on to the plan as I collect the products and services to "stock" the mall over the coming months. My goal is to open the complete mall by this September --perhaps, by the one year anniversary of my blog.

One of the reasons that I was swayed to open the mall was because I took a note looking at my traffic logs (you can see that by pointing to the link at the bottom left of any page) that people were visiting frequently the page in the reviews area that dealt with CORPORATE CREDIT BUILDING.

It seems that is a hot topic. No doubt -having a good corporate credit account and report goes a long way towards building a very good business.

In fact, over 95% of the businesses go broke in the first few years from a lack of capital.

However, what most people don't realize is that much of the capital needs can be built BEFORE a business is even started. OR you can even layout all the capital building steps before getting the business going. Then the first month you can send out all the capital building paperwork and then in the first 90 days of the business you will see that it's possible to build between from $10,000 to $100,000 in credit for various needs. Of course, the assumption is made that the business and owners are located in the US of A.

So, I can focus on a credit building product or two for business. What else? Well, I already have the www.nextsuperstock.com site setup to receive paid subscribers. I can add that to the mall.

Then what? Well, the www.maxsimo.com project is up and going. That gives a fantastic resource of products to line up.

My idea is not to dump all the products in the world into this mall, but to put only the best ones that I can find.

That means I'll end up testing a lot of the products and services. But that is no problem. I like to do that anyway. There are some outstanding ideas and I plan to test many of them. Measure the results on the sites that are part of our network and then report the finding to my readers.

The best products that I find, I'll try to have an Affiliate relationship with the producers.

In my checklist I also have to then accept credit cards. This is not a problem these days as there are about a dozen options to accept cards. I have a list of such sites and I'll put up my decision regarding which one I end up using.

Oh, by-the-way, when accepting credit cards it's good to have a merchant account with one and then also have a back up merchant account. My experience with over 20 years of business work is that merchant account providers like to swing a very big axe when it comes to the say they deal with their merchants.

If the merchant does anything that is deemed illegal according to the TERMS of USE of the merchant account provide, the provider will the "axe" your merchant account without any notice.

In fact, most of the time I bet a merchant finds out that the merchant account is closed when a transaction does not go through. The notification letter will follow about a week or two later with the explanation.

So, it's a good idea to keep a main account and a back up account with pages ready to switch at a moments notice.

I will also check out some shopping cart providers that enable shopping carts that are run remotely. That means that I don't need to do any programming. I do have the access to setup programming and have any shopping cart up and going. But that is not the idea. With my limited abilities to program, I plan to test a full featured online shopping cart with some 'bells and whistles' to get my mall up and running.

Perhaps, even PAY COMMISSIONS to Affiliates. Who knows. Anything is possible, so I will see how much time I have to accommodate such things as Affiliates, payments to affiliates and all the other details that go with it.

So, if I list the top decision making items that I need to keep some notes on, they are:

1. The products and services that I will feature.
2. The shopping cart that I'll need.
3. The payment methods --accepting credit cards is essential, but which merchant account will I use?
4. Will I run an Affiliate program?

I am sure there will be a ton of questions. But again, that is why the blog is here. I'll just think out loud about the ideas here and share the decisions and the decision making process with you.

Lastly a closing thought. Most likely the mall will not have physical product, which have to be wrapped, stuffed and shipped. I cannot be in the position to do all that and also provide the necessary customer service.

However, I am still going to stay open to the idea because I know there are plenty of places, especially in the US of A that I can work with to ship out products to anyone, anywhere in the world for a small item by item fee.

Such a place can be handy IF I plan to sell some CD's -especially some cd's that I have the right to duplicate and ship anywhere.

So, that gives me another possibility:

5. Sell physical products that are drop-shipped or sent by a fulfillment house to the buyers.

6. Most other products will be downloadable or delivered as an e-book to the buyer.

The summary for all of this is that I have an endless amount of products and services to work with. I have the tools to setup the mall. I have the ever-growing traffic. I have the means to display and deliver the products. Now what I need to do is just do it.

With that thought I'll close the day. I hope you have noticed the double reporting on a daily basis for the past two week. I got behind. However, instead of 'cutting the day' and calling it a lot week, I challenged myself to catch up with one posting extra per day. I think in the next three days or so I will be catching up.

In fact, I already have the posting ideas for about 3 weeks of blogging. So, not to fear. I'll be back before you know it. Later. Sam

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