DAY 114

Update: Thursday, 30-Jun-2005 9:05 AM

Another inch, centimeter --what ever you want to call it --closer I am today to having the listing process at maxsimo.com setup. Yesterday I had the step taken to delete all the old 'test' listings. And today some of the issues are getting finalized.

So, progress and just in time as I need to release the product tomorrow.

Now on to other ideas that were brewing in the pot.

The primary idea that I wanted to explore was the building of the Business Success Center, which I have already stated with the links to the right.

To the center I also wanted to add my own products and I came up with several:

1. The first of which are already active at www.nextsuperstock.com where I have a subscription area and an annual seminar. Both of these are very high-end products that will take years to develop fully.

2. The other product that I wanted to develop was the CORPORATE CREDIT REPORT. This is also under way as I subscribed to several resources to improve the final edition of the report. Once again, I think this product will sell very well and I can command a price of $99.95 to $199.95 for the report and worksheets that accompany it.

3. I wanted to make a WORKBOOK and MANUAL discussing all the lessons that I have learned from P31.COM and the setup that runs it. I wanted to offer it for just $19.95 to those who are pressed for time, yet want to learn everything that I have experienced building the site.

4. Lastly, I wanted to sell a collection of resources on CD/DVD that I collected from various sources that would help any web master build a business on the Internet or for that matter any offline business as well. The collection of CD/DVD's are about 4 at this time (4 CD's) and would amount to a wealth of information that would help anyone running a web business build their success. I could sell the CD's for $19.95 plus shipping worldwide for another $5.95 in the USA and $9.95 worldwide.

For all the above products I have been working on them for years, now that I realize it. I have collected a wealth of resources and now is the time to organize them and put them up in a shopping area as part of the 31-STEP Success Building Center that I plan to open.

The last part of this "thought pattern" is my timing --all these would be great "self-gifts" (gifts that one would give to him or her self) during the up-coming Christmas Season. So, my timing is good as well. I think when I put in a good month, I can assemble all the products and services to get my part of the equation going.

However, let me know start things by doing that. I plan to start in less than 24 hrs. That's right. The way the Internet is setup, you don't need to wait a day or two to open your own shop. You can do it in a few hours. My plan is to work with an existing shopping setup and open up the sales area in a matter of hours -- Not days, months or years. Right now.

Perhaps, the first item that I want to do is to make the TEMPLATE that will help setup the pages of the mall. At this time I have ONE template for all the pages. However, I think the best way to work and plan for the long run is to have a different template for the shopping area.

I'll setup that now.

UPDATE: Thursday, 30-Jun-2005 4:59 PM

Now the sales area was setup here. To this point I have had only one "template" for use on the site. As I pointed out before the center section is the only part that is updated just about daily. The sides, top and bottom are filled in by the template.

However, using the same template for the sales area presented a major problem. I could not customize this template enough to meet the demands of the sales center. So, I decided to build a second template, which I am using for the Success Building Center.

As you may have seen the second template focuses on the sales area and products. It also allows me to make changes to the sales area without making changes to the primary template.

I am not sure if you know how a template works or the advantages behind it. So, let me explain. When I make a change in the mostly blue areas of the template, that change is then transferred to EVERY PAGE that was started with the primary template.

Obviously, this saves me a lot of time and management duties. When I started the blog, I didn't even use a template nor did I know how to create one. I spent a few minutes studying the possibilities and soon enough I made the first an only template.

It's not difficult at all and I will be making a short DVD on how to use this program to do all the web publishing that you need to do.

OK, 2nd template: DONE!

Now on to some thoughts about the programs, services, applications, software and the like that I will promote to generate an income, in addition to the primary program -maxsimo.com.

There are two ways of going about making a sales center on the Internet. First you can develop your own products and services and then set up a sales area to take care of the items.

OR

You can become part of the many affiliate programs like Commission Junction, Clickbank and a host of others to start representing a whole host of products and services.

My plan? To do both. I'll work on developing my own products and services, as I have done all along. I'll also work with the Clickbank and Commission Junction type of operations. My goal is to find the best products and services that helps everyone build a business and then test as many of them as I can, and present it in the resources area for the visitors to "consume". That is the plan!

First let me discuss CLICKBANK. You can go here and setup a free account with them and you'll see all the products and services that you too can sell and earn a very good income from. I have been a member for about 6 years, and didn't do much with them. However, now I see the opportunity to represent a lot of products that I can generate a revenue from. Clickbank claims they have 100,000 Affiliates. But the question is how many of them are 'active'. I don't know the answer to that, but I will bet you that you'll be able to find anywhere from 10 to 100 products to market from their system. Just spend some time going to CLICKBANK and looking around seeing how they have setup their sales and marketing network. Interestingly, most of their products and services are of the digital type, with delivery of sales taking place just about immediately after the sale.

By-the-way, IF you are wondering why I didn't do anything with them --there is just one reason. I have been on the Internet since 1994 (sorry. That's not accurate. Back in those college days I used email and chat, before it was called the Internet! That was the late 80's!) -Ok, so it's been a while. But, the point I was trying to make was that I didn't have a site that produced the "exposure" like this site is getting to do.

The problem that I didn't generate the traffic was actually my fault. I always worked on grandiose, large, monster traffic generating ideas. I didn't just take the first step to do the basic promotional work to get things going. That was why I failed. For example, take a press release. For about 20 years I been reading them. But, until last week I had written NONE.

Well, anyway, the traffic is building. The exposure is building and I need to be ready. That method is by getting the sales area ready and if I don't have my own products then I can use services such as CLICKBANK and COMMISSION JUNCTION to build a base of products and services to work with.

I would like to conclude my day with you by talking about COMMISSION JUNCTION. This is the Grand Daddy of Affiliate Program networks. You can learn all about COMMISSION JUNCTION or just CJ by going here. (NOTE to update this link in TO DO LIST!)

Commissions Junction is a special service in that you'll find a lot of advertisers who will work with Commission Junction to promote their affiliate programs. The advantage to me and you is that we can find advertiser who are going to pay very nicely to promote whatever they are producing.

Take for example a mortgage company in this red-hot Margate environment where houses in many parts of Europe and North America are selling at the highest historical prices --literally overnight. I know about this. I had to buy such a place when the family moved to the Netherlands last year. Anyway, such companies that are looking for customers will pay you and me to drive traffic to their site. Targeted traffic that can trun into a lead, which turns into a prospect, which turns into a sale.

By the time the lead is created and after a certain approval process they mortgage company will pay me via Commission Junction a fee for my services. In the case of a lead the usual going rate is around $10 to $15 US Dollars. This is not that bad.

The question is this: How many visitors does it take to make $100.00? Will that be 100, 1000 or even 10,000? That I do not know as of yet. I hope to.

Now with careful planning and proper invitations to search engines and my prospective audience, I may earn $100.00 with about 100,000 visitors. Yes. Why? Because the odds are that the general audience reading this site will not be interested in a mortgage refinance.

HOWEVER, IF I setup a web page that ranked and researched the best mortgages and then featured some aspect of that on the site, then the traffic coming to it is highly targeted and I may increase my lead generation capabilities greatly and earn perhaps $100 per 100 visitors. That gives an interesting possibility then. I could pay a Pay-Per-Click search engine like Google or Yahoo an amount of $0.25 or $0.35 or even $0.50 to visit my site. Knowing that every visitor is worth $1.00, then I know that my cost is $0.50, so for each visitor that I get to the site that I have setup, then I can earn $.50.

I have made the above example a bit over simplified, but that again is the summary of what needs to be done via Commission Junction.

I will get to just that in the coming days. Sam out for now.

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