The Finest Collection of Real Estate Software on the Planet

… and YOU can do it too!
by: Milt Tanzer

Let me begin by saying that I’m not in the category of the Internet marketing guru who began a one-person operation in his garage and built it into a Six Million Dollar a year business. That’s right, $6,000,000 a year income from the Internet. (Details on him and his Internet Marketing Course can be found at: www.realestate-supermarket.com/Netutilities.htm.)

I can tell you that my income from the Internet produces a nice annual income with very little effort (now) on my part. But, I need to start at the beginning to really show you what I did to create a profitable website business. Unfortunately, the vast majority of new Internet marketers fail because the do not learn what needs to be done to be successful. I was determined it was not going to happen to me.

My first concern: "What am I going to sell"? Fortunately, my first real estate investment book, published by Prentice Hall had been selling well since 1996 and was in its third fully revised edition. So, I had something to sell, but what? I could buy the books, as the author, at a discount from my publisher, but who’s going to order it on the Internet when they can walk into any bookstore in the country and buy a copy. Besides that, even buying the books at a discount and reselling them at full price was not worth the effort. First of all, the profit margin was too little to make it worthwhile. Second, by the time I charged shipping charges, it would cost a visitor to my website more to buy it from me than at the bookstore. I needed a way to build an investment package out of the book.

For several years I was on the seminar circuit, offering a twelve-hour seminar based on the book. It included a workbook and a copy of my book, and was moderately successful. When I decided to quit the seminar route, I had a twelve-hour cassette tape set professionally recorded at a live seminar and packaged that with the book and workbook. That worked for a few years, and then the tax and depreciation laws changed. We rewrote the book, but redoing the tapes at a live seminar did not seem practical, cost wise.

So, what could I offer to Internet visitors? I developed a CDRom program that added what the book or seminar tapes could not offer. It has full working versions of the two property analysis programs spelled out in the book. (I might add that the third edition of the book made extensive use of these analysis forms, which also helped give me a salable product. My website address appears in the book to tell buyers how to get the full program).

I now had a product to sell, but only the beginning of a crude website. I purchased a copy of "Microsoft Front Page" to get started. Front Page is an easy to use web-designing program that does not require any knowledge of computer code (HTML). I wanted to develop my own website for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I wanted to learn how to do it and second, I wanted to be able to revise and update the website whenever I wanted to. If I used a website designer (Webmaster), I would have to pay him or her every time I wanted to make a change and wait until the Webmaster had the time to make the changes.

I must admit, my first website was crude and not very appealing. My sales, or lack of sales, quickly proved that. Traffic or visitors to my site were very minimal and sales did not even cover the cost of my monthly fee to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) to keep my website on line. I realized I needed to learn more about how to successfully market a product on the Internet. I searched the Internet for information on "Internet Marketing" and one name kept coming up over and over in many different places.

www.realestate-supermarket.com/Netutilities.htm gives you full details on this program. The program cost about $200 and was the best investment I ever made. I realized that my present website was guaranteed to be a failure, something I had already discovered the hard way. I begin to implement some of the techniques and suggestions I learned from my new Internet marketing manual. Activity to my website began to increase and some orders came in, occasionally.

I soon discovered that every time I made a significant change, based on what I had learned, my traffic would increase. But orders were still very slow in coming in. This taught me a few important lessons.

First Lesson I Learned: Internet browsers are searching the Internet for free information on the subject they are searching. They ARE NOT there to buy something. It is up to your website to convince them they need to buy your product and that they must place an order now, before they leave your website. Retailers call it "impulse buying". We cover this topic in detail in our "Should You Have Your Own Website and Why Would You Want One" E-book, and how to create this "need to buy now" sense of urgency. Take a look at
www.realestate-supermarket.com/ownsite.htm to learn more about our Ebook on Internet marketing.

Second Lesson I Learned: You are doomed to failure if you do not accept credit cards on your website. You cannot expect someone say, "I want that product" so they print out an order form, fill in the blanks, write you a check, address an envelop and put a stamp on it and then mail it the next day. First of all, they will not go through the effort and, even if they start to do it, the "impulse" to buy is overshadowed by the effort involved in ordering so they forget the whole thing. As soon as I added the credit card program to my website, orders begin to come in. Now, thousands of orders later, I don’t think I’ve had half a dozen orders by check and mailed for purchases of my products.

But, I’m getting ahead of the story. Accepting orders over the net made it easy for visitors to buy, but I still was not getting much traffic (hits) to the site. Since Internet marketing and selling is a "numbers game" I needed to get my website producing thousands of hit a day not a hundred or two. Back to the drawing board and my Internet Marketing "bible".

Third Lesson I Learned: Large volume of traffic to a website results in more orders (maybe).

I began to concentrate on promoting my website. Traffic started to improve several fold, but very few additional orders came in.

Fourth Lesson I Learned: Traffic does not necessarily mean sales if your website "sucks", and mine still did. I wasn’t capturing the interest of my visitors in the first line of text or in the first ten seconds of their visit. If I did, I was immediately losing them when they started reading the first paragraph. By now my site had attractive graphics, some animated, but still no more orders.

Fifth Lesson I Learned: Pretty graphics and animated pictures do not sell your product. In fact, they can actually cause you to lose sales for several reasons that I spell out in my "Should You Have Your Own Website…" E-book.

Once I solved these problems, the volume of orders began to improve, still nothing to rave about, but a lot better than when I started out. So, I went back to my Internet "bible" and followed several of the multitudes of techniques I learned. It wasn’t long before my orders were coming in at a pretty good rate and I realized I was spending too much time processing credit cards and manually responding to my buyers. It was than that I implemented an automated credit card processing program to automatically process cards. This was especially helpful as I added several new products of my own to the website.

I became an affiliate for a company that has a line of real estate software programs that compliment my mine. I developed a whole second website, www.realestate-supermarket.com to promote both their products as well as mine. It’s a great way to market on the Internet. I promote and take orders for someone else’s programs. I collect the money and place an order on their website order form, showing what was ordered and who it ships to. They do all the work, shipping the product, handling returns and customer support. Once a month, I receive a statement for the discounted amount I owe them for the products shipped to my customers.

About the same time, I developed my own affiliate program in which other Internet markets can place a link to my website and their visitors can buy my products. The program is again, fully automated to track other website’s visitors so they get credit for any sales made by their visitors to my website. See www.realestate-supermarket.com/AffilReward.htm for details

Finally, at least for now, I reached the point of fully automating my programs. I signed up with a shopping cart program that handles everything for me, except actual shipping of my products. This program involves a very minimum monthly cost for all they handle. Details on their program are at www.realestate-supermarket.com/Netutilities.htm.

Sixth Lesson I Learned: Getting traffic and sales is only part of the picture. You need to know what is happening to those visitors when the enter your website. How many visitors are you getting to your site? How long do they stay? What pages do they visit? And much, much more. The ISP (Internet Service Provider) you use has this information available for your review whenever you desire. You log onto your personal website’s administrative log and can review a wealth of statistics. It tells you exactly what is and what isn’t working.

Seventh Lesson I Learned: You don’t have to have your own products to sell. You can sell someone else’s products and still make a lot of money. I’m continually looking for products compatible to mine. If you think you don’t have anything to sell, look at some of the ideas on the www.realestate-supermarket.com/Netutilities.htm web page. There are a lot of successful websites on line that only market other company’s products. They have none of their own to offer on their website.

I have two suggestions for you, if you want to look further into having your own successful and profitable website.

1. Pick up a copy of my "Should You Have Your Own Website and Why Would You Want One" E-book at www.realestate-supermarket.com/ownsite.htm . It could be the best $29 you ever spent at less than the cost of a steak dinner at a fine restaurant.

Order this Ebook Now

2. Put on your thinking cap and, following the suggestions in the Ebook "Should You Have Your Own Website…" you’ll find a wealth of things to sell, including some you could have on your own that you never thought about.

A final thought: If you have ever searched the Internet for some information, you can understand why it is the marketing medium of tomorrow that is available today. I started out knowing only that I could see the potential of earning a great living through Internet marketing. I studied every book I could (thousands of dollars later) and put the techniques into practice. To that knowledge I’ve add my own experiences and published the "Should You Have Your Own Website" E-book that highlights a multitude of proven marketing techniques I have learned and use. You can benefit from the mistakes we have made so you don’t make them too. At the same time, you’ll learn what does work and how to make use of that information.

For me, this is really just the beginning. My websites and marketing skills keep improving. I may never have a multi-million dollar a year website, but than, who knows?

What about You? Why not at least look into how you can become involved in Internet marketing. It sure beats punching a time clock five days a week. It’s easy and inexpensive to get started with your own website and marketing plan. Then, as your business grows and your income increases, you add new time saving features to your system. The nice thing is, you can get started in your spare time and bring in a sizable extra monthly income. Let us get you started at www.realestate-supermarket.com/ownsite.htm.

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