Ken McCarthy:

Sure.

Actually, I was involved before the beginning of time. When I started, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were all on the record as saying the Internet was an unimportant fad.

In 1993, I remember attending what was then the sharpest conference on online media – not marketing, just media – and the experts on the Internet panel didn’t talk about how to make money on the Internet, they were evenly divided about whether the Internet could be commercialized at all.

Ken McCarthy:

We sure have, but to answer your question, I got started on the Internet because I was a marketer.

I’d done all kinds of things. As a kid, I promoted concerts and social events, a real “gun to the head” kind of business. You either fill the seats or you don’t.

And since I was putting up all my own money – for bands, halls, equipment, security, staff etc. – I learned to focus on selling seats fast. It was an ideal introduction to marketing.

I went from that to starting a company called Optimal Learning. Instead of selling live music, we sold the idea that people could read faster, remember more and just over all be smarter.

Similar business in a way. It was all about selling seats.

By the way, this was how I first encountered Gene Schwartz who was madly passionate about the idea that all of us can become smarter just by exercising our brains. I didn’t know anything about his business life initially. I didn’t even know what a copywriter was, but I did learn eventually, from Gene as it turned out.

By a circuitous route – a lot of the routes in my life are circuitous - I ended up on Wall Street smack in the middle of the “Go Go” 80s. My job was to help software designers understand financial markets and help traders learn to use computers to trade.

I went from that to being a partner in a start-up that offered what was then an extremely new and exotic service: digital audio editing for films. We were the first of just a handful of companies on earth offering this kind of service at the time.
My partner was the tech guy and I was the marketing guy.

Then I got wracked up badly in an accident and basically watched my whole world fall apart. A year after the accident, I was still very weak so I moved to California hoping the milder weather would help me recover.

As luck would have it, I landed smack dab right in the middle of the digital media revolution of which the Internet was about to become an essential part.

And when I say “in the middle” I mean that literally.

My neighbors were people like Mark Graham, who at the time was known worldwide as “Mr. Internet”; Ed Niehaus, who became the PR strategist for Yahoo! and many other Internet industry grand slams; Hal Josephson, who organized the first conference on multimedia and CD-ROM production. We were all living within five blocks of each other in an area of San Francisco called the Fillmore.

So there I was, immersed in the world of digital media - the buzz word then was multimedia - but I had this one nagging doubt, which was this; the business model at the time depended on being able to sell CD-ROM titles for $50 a crack. I didn’t see that as sustainable over the long run. It certainly wasn’t a business I was getting excited about.

Meanwhile, I was keeping my eye on another phenomenon, the BBS world - computer bulletin boards. I was going to conferences on that, and meeting people.

I said to myself, this looks like where the future is going to be because if all media boils down to digits – you know, zeroes and ones – then all we really need to do is figure out a way to get those digits across telecommunications lines to people’s computers, and we’re going to have a whole new world.

This was before the World Wide Web, but I had a strong intuition that that’s where things were headed, one way or the other. It seemed inevitable.

I’m a big student of history, and online communications seemed to me to have as much potential impact as the invention of the automobile and the telephone.

Whereas the car lets us move our bodies around the landscape, the modem, the personal computer, and online services were starting to let us move text and pictures, and – ultimately – audio and video around at the speed of will. Push a button and you’ve got it. And I thought, boy that is really going to change everything.

Daniel Levis:

It’s called Eloquent.

They had the coolest thing that started out on CD-ROM, and then made its way onto the Internet. What we would do was videotape our customers’ sales or technical presentations, and then synchronize the video with the presenters’ PowerPoint slides, and also a full text transcription of every word of audio. The end user could then view the canned presentation on their computer, and do a full text search to find anything they wanted by keyword search.

So you could actually type in a word, and the talking head on your computer screen would start talking at that exact point in the presentation, and the appropriate slide would show too.

Ken McCarthy:

Exactly.

I’ve been saying this for years, and nobody’s challenged me on it so I guess it’s true.

I believe I organized and sponsored the very first seminar on the Web as a marketing medium. That was in the year 1994. It was targeted mainly to multimedia developers and people in the advertising industry.

Probably half our audience at the conference were cutting-edge people from the multimedia industry. And within a year, at least half the audience – half of that half – had started web site development companies. Some of them became quite huge. We were instrumental in helping a lot of multimedia people – particularly in San Francisco – identify and make the transition from multimedia to website production.

It was a very fun-filled and exciting time, and I met a ton of very interesting and creative people. It was perfect for me too because I had this one ace up my sleeve that made me different from everybody else in that environment: I had a classical, traditional, nuts and bolts direct marketing, direct mail background.

I’d used direct response in all the businesses I’d owned prior to getting involved with the Internet. I had also worked as a direct mail consultant to a lot of companies, mainly in the mortgage industry. So my direct marketing chops were sharp and no one – I mean no one – in the digital world in San Francisco seemed to have the first clue about it. So I was the go-to guy on the subject for everyone.

That was my big edge in the early years of the Internet industry because there just weren’t any direct marketing people at the time that took the Internet seriously. Believe it or not. They just couldn’t see it.

Ken McCarthy:

It was a challenging time, too, because you had to get deep into the technology to be able to do even the most basic things.

I don’t know if you remember this. Very early on, it must have been 1995 or 1996, this guy appeared out of East Germany – he was 19 years old or some crazy young age – and he created the first sophisticated shopping cart and catalog program for the Internet. This thing was selling for $25,000, and once you got it, it took about a month of 40 to 50 hour weeks to configure it.

Now here’s the punch line: That system had far less functionality than the $50 a month Yahoo store program that anybody can get and set up today themselves.

So not only has the marketplace of Internet users exploded in the last fourteen years, but the tools we have today are so much more powerful and trivial in cost.

Ken McCarthy:

Yes, exactly. This guy was in the business of putting in driveways. He put up a very useful site about the subject and, turns out there are thousands of people out there with an interest in it. Because of the way he structured his site, people found it. Then he developed relationships with equipment manufacturers, and has become very successful, basically as a manufacturers’ rep for all these different lines of driveway paving equipment makers.

This is something that you just couldn’t have done in the old print only world. What was he going to do? Rent a mailing list of every guy that ever thought about going into the business of putting in asphalt driveways?

Thanks to the Internet, this person who in an earlier era might never have been able to start a business like this now has his own successful business. There are thousands of people with similar stories.

The other big social change that I recommend people pay attention to is that the Internet is no longer a side issue when it comes to media. It’s becoming central. It’s the way a lot of people get their news … and their music … and their video.

The Internet is becoming the central switchboard for all media. We’re not there yet, obviously. We’re in a transition period, but that’s where we’re heading.

Ken McCarthy:

Well, this year, clearly has been the tipping point. It kind of sneaked up on us. I’ve been waiting for practical Internet video since the beginning – since I first saw the Internet. From the start, I thought if it’s all just digits, that means we can put video over on this.

What’s made this possible is the penetration of broadband. In the U.S., among active Internet users, the Nielsen records 68% broadband use and it’s still growing.

We’ve got a huge number of people globally with broadband. If you look at places like Canada, and the U.K., and the developed Asian countries, broadband is here. And that, in a nutshell, is what has opened up the mass market for video on the Internet.

The second factor is the improvement of Internet video players.

QuickTime gets better all the time. And then there is Flash. A whole bunch of companies have grown up using Flash Video as their delivery vehicle. YouTube is the supreme example. Last I looked - and I know this number will be outdated soon - but last I looked, their viewers were downloading one hundred million videos per day. That’s per day.

We were talking early about the fact that marketing and business float on a sea of media, so it behooves entrepreneurs to pay very close attention to the media landscape.

One of the challenges of living through a period like the one we’re in - and profiting in it - is the challenge of adjusting your mind to deal with a new reality. The new video-on-demand reality has hit us so fast that most business owners haven’t realized the significance of it.

Let me give you a way to think about it because Internet video is going to become radically important.

Video is becoming as easy – easier really – to distribute than print.

Once there was a time when written documents were very rare and producing them took a lot of technology.

You needed one guy who was an expert in preparing animal skins, because that’s what people wrote on. He’d stretch it and strip the hair off, and bleach it, and do all the things you had to do to prepare it for writing on.

Then you had another guy that was an expert in carving pens, which they called styluses. Then you had another guy that was an expert in making ink. Then you had highly trained technicians – monks – who would actually create manuscripts. And they weren’t even writers. They just transcribed what someone else had written.

For the average person in those days, the idea of being a writer as we think of it today was about as realistic as visiting the moon.

Writing was a multifaceted, complicated process. Books were very rare, and the only people who had books were popes and kings and institutions.

Then gradually the technology improved and after the mid-19th century, we had an explosion of cheap paper, high-speed printing, and universal postal delivery. It hit all at once. And that’s when print became ubiquitous.

That’s also when mail order and direct marketing started because for the first time you could sell to people at a distance. You could write a letter, and put it in the hands of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million people. That just wasn’t possible before. Even though writing has been around since caveman times – carving things on a rock – print really didn’t become ubiquitous until the mid-19th century.

Here we are now at the early, early part of the 21st century, and we’re experiencing the same phenomenon with video. Remember what making movies used to mean? You needed a studio. You needed huge cameras. You needed dozens of specialized technicians. Then you needed an small army to distribute your work.

In contrast, today, once you’ve produced a video, you can put it online instantly and thousands of people can be watching it from every corner of the globe for the cost of pennies, really.

In fact, a lot of the big Internet video services - Google and YouTube being the best known ones – will host and stream your video for free. If you take yourself back just twenty, ten years, or even just five years ago this is mind-boggling. Absolutely mind-boggling.

So we already have one foot in this new world, and I think we’re very close to the point where people are going to come to expect that if a topic is of any importance, they’re going to be able to search for it on the Internet; find it; hit a button; and see a video that lays it all out for them.

Now I’m a writer, you’re a writer, this interview is for a publication read by writers and we’re in love with the written word, but we have to face the fact that video – good video – is very compelling and in many cases trumps the printed word.

Ken McCarthy:

That’s a really good point. You don’t get good video by accident or by flipping on a camera. It is a writer’s medium in many ways, for sure.

But I guess what I’m saying is those of us who write, and those of us that are involved in direct marketing need to start thinking: How do I apply the things that I’ve learned about marketing to the video format?

Look, the movie studios and television stations, and record companies, are all basically training our marketplace to expect instant, on-demand audio and video and as entrepreneurs, we need to be there.

Ken McCarthy:

Absolutely. Very good point.

And it’s interesting – you know, we were talking about this earlier, off camera so to speak – that really smart, forward-looking direct marketers have actually always been at the forefront when these big sea changes took place in media.

For example, the famous Albert Lasker, who Claude Hopkins wrote copy for, was who came up with the idea of the radio soap opera which was responsible for selling many, many billions of dollars worth of soap and still works on television.

Ken McCarthy:

Another great example of a traditional direct marketing guy being a leader in a new media is Gene Schwartz.

Most people think of Gene as a direct mail writer, and he certainly was one of the very best who ever lived, but he as also a very, very early pioneer of television. He was actually doing what we would now call infomercials back in the 1940s. He had a program that featured an artist named John Gnagy. It was a regular program with real content, and the commercials were: “ Hey, if you like what you’re learning from John about drawing and painting, why not get the complete course?”

Ken McCarthy:

It was. And there was a time when something like one out of every 17 television set owners in America owned the John Gnagy course on how to paint as a result of Gene’s television program.

Of course – as you said earlier – it started with words. It started with text. So there’s absolutely no barrier that keeps people who are involved with print from making the transition to these new mediums.

In fact, we as writers are better positioned than anybody else to make the transition successful, because video is not just waving a camera around. It’s not just pushing record. It’s all the things that we do as writers – coming up with hooks, coming up with compelling narratives, keeping things moving forward. This core competency is what makes video work, and is what makes audio work too.

Ken McCarthy:

It really isn’t. Keep in mind that, for the time being at least, you want to keep things short. You don’t want to create an hour-long program. The art of Internet video seems to be coming up with a very strong, three to five minute program that engages people, conveys the big message, and then leads them to some kind of definite action. For instance, making an inquiry, asking for a free report, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.

TV as it is today is going to look very primitive to us ten years from now. We’ll hardly be able to imagine that we ever endured it, limited programs, having to wait for specific times for programs to air.

Ken McCarthy:

Video will be far more targeted. People will watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it.

Instead of passively waiting for something good to show up, they’re going to actively seek out the things that interest them most.

As advertisers, this probably means that the old “grab them by the collar and scream” type of TV advertising is not going to work on the Internet. In fact, it could be very counter-productive.

When you’re actively seeking information out, you don’t need or want the person giving it to you to yell and scream, and jump up and down, and shoot off fireworks. You just want the information.

Daniel Levis:

Well, this is an interesting parallel. What you just described there is also true of the Internet, as we know it today, never mind proliferation of video and audio. Direct mail is an intrusive medium, where the Internet isn’t always that way. Sometimes the only reason that somebody is at your site is because they’ve actively looked up that page.

And yet you still see people land on a Web page, and they’re there for six seconds before they’re gone.

Ken McCarthy:

So it’s a challenging medium. But I think for the niche marketers in particular, this is the golden age of all golden ages.

We talked about the guy selling asphalt information; I have a good friend who sells wedding party favors. A little, niche you wouldn’t think would amount to anything –

Ken McCarthy:

Yes. His business, between his retail and wholesale – the wedding party favor business alone, not even counting his other his ventures – is going to exceed $10,000,00.00 a year in sales this year. It’s a nice, solid, real business. People get married all the time, in good times and bad. If they’re going to have a party around it, they’ve got to have the wedding party favors, so –

There are just so many niches like that we can reach now for the first time. It’s breathtaking.

When you think about it, consumers do not want to be sold anything. That’s the last thing that they want. What they do want – and what they’re avidly seeking, and what they’re very grateful to receive when it’s offered to them - is good, useful, practical, actionable information on the thing that they’re trying to accomplish.

So if they’re trying to fix their driveway, or they want to go into the business of fixing driveways, they want to know – how do you do it? If they’re getting married, they want to see a big selection. If they want to improve their health or overcome a particular ailment, they want all the information they possibly can get about it.

So people following the approach Clayton uses, for example, are going to be very well-positioned for the future. His creates an information-rich environment that is intrinsically interesting and useful to prospects which is the ultimate customer magnet.

One of the big things that people misunderstand about Internet marketing is they think that e-mail is free. Technically, e-mail is free. If you get somebody on your list, you can mail them forever and it won’t cost you anything.

But in reality, there’s a huge price to be paid to be involved in e-mail successfully.

The price is you’ve got to send interesting, compelling, and useful content to your readers. If you do that, your e-mail is free – and profitable. If you don’t do that, you’re basically sending e-mail to a landfill. Your prospects may not unsubscribe when you send them junk, but any time you do, you’ve lowered the chances they're going to open and read – and thus respond – to your future offers.

I see so many Internet gurus who just don’t have a good background in real direct marketing.

They think - and they lead others to think - that successful direct marketing is just learning a bunch of tricks, a bunch of canned routines. They don’t realize that direct marketing is about using media to build a relationship with your prospects, and your customers. The way to do this is by bringing them interesting, compelling, useful information, by making yourself welcome. Almost every great direct mail person I’ve ever met sings the praises of a book called How I Raised Myself from a Failure to Success in Selling –

Ken McCarthy:

(Laughter) Exactly. So when I get an e-mail from Clayton, even if I can’t read it at that moment, I make sure that I file it because I want to read it. Filing is the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is if I’m able to read it at the moment, I’ll read it in the moment.

That’s the real price of e-mail. There’s no dollar price attached to it, but there is a price in terms of being ingenious, and coming up with new, interesting things to say, and interesting offers.

We’re coming full circle here –we’re talking about the most important skill a writer can develop. It’s learning how to “go to the well” over and over again, and pulling out new things. And you learn it, by doing it. Ingenuity is the by-product of always working at finding new angles, new ways to say things.

Ken McCarthy:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that may seem so simple, or like a hackneyed saying, but spend enough time marketing and you’ll realize the wisdom of it.

The mail and the Internet – they’re really just tools for us to be able to do that with more and more people. Demonstrate to our prospects and customers that we are their sincere friend.

The miracle of direct marketing is that you can demonstrate your reliability, and your worth, and your sincerity, to lots of people, as many as you can reach, in print or via the Internet, whereas in the old days – pre-Internet, pre-print,– you had to go door-to-door literally. There was no other way.

Now, with direct marketing, we can literally stay at home and make all the money in the world.

I’m in my home office right now. I’m looking out over our garden. I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt. It’s a very nice, very comfortable environment. And I’m able to sell to tens of thousands of people all at once. Direct marketing is a miracle and the Internet’s just made it even better.

Ken McCarthy:

Well, we find that there are basically four different kinds of people that come to us who we can help.

First, people who already have successful, or very successful, Internet marketing businesses. They already know a lot. We’re able to give them that extra edge to take their businesses even further.

Second, people who have businesses, but they don’t have any online component at all. My advice to those people is please, please, please – start doing something with the Internet right away. You have no idea how much money you’re leaving on the table by not adding an Internet side to what you’re doing.

The simplest way for business owners to start is to start collecting the e-mail addresses of your customers and your prospects, and start familiarizing yourself with what’s called an auto-responder, which is a software program that lets you send messages to your list at regular intervals.

Ken McCarthy:

Exactly. They call it the Web, and one of the things I always think of when I would hear the word Web is a spider web.

The purpose of a spider web is to catch things.

So if you’ve got a website and you’re not offering something to visitors in exchange for the e-mail address – for instance, if you’re a restaurant, offer them a free drink with dinner if they’ll give you their e-mail address. If you’re a shoemaker – I’m just thinking of every conceivable kind of business – offer them a free shoeshine, or free shoelaces or something in exchange for their e-mail address. Whatever business you’re in, there is something that you can offer your prospects and customers so that they will gladly give you your e-mail address for. Do it. Please do it.

And then once you get that e-mail address, try to come up with interesting, useful info to share. Not hard sell stuff, just good stuff, stuff that people would want to receive. Be the welcome guest in their e-mail box and open up a channel of communication so when you do have something to offer that’s business-related, they’ll be predisposed to open the mail and listen to you.

If you already have an existing business, you are very close to adding 20%, 50%, 100%, 500% to your sales just simply by embracing the Internet and starting to use it a little bit. We’re not talking about sophisticated stuff here. We’re talking about building a new list. We’re talking about being in regular touch with your customers. Easy stuff, but the results can be financially miraculous. I’ve seen it over and over again.

A lot of businesses run hot and cold. The Internet can help you even out your income.

If you have an e-mail list, you can send out special sales announcement. Hey, we’ve got our month of June sale. We’re honoring fathers, and we’re honoring Flag Day, and we’re honoring graduates. Come on in the month of June and get your haircut, or your whatever it is, for 50% off, or 30% off – whatever.

You’ve now turned what would have been a total loss – dead zero – into cash. And it’s cost you the total effort of taking your index finger and sticking it out and pressing send. Anybody who’s not willing to pick up money that’s lying at their feet like that, should consider retiring, or going to work for the motor vehicles bureau, or something.

Daniel Levis:

Well, you know, it sounds ridiculous, but it’s so true. I mean, that kind of – you know, make a friend before you make a sale approach is so critical to referral business as well.

The average auto dealership sells a family one car. Well, the average family buys two and a half cars. The big reason is because they just don’t keep in touch.

Ken McCarthy:

Exactly. If they just added an Internet component to their business, keeping in touch would be a breeze.

Now let’s talk about the third group of people we’re able to help: people who don’t know the Internet and they don’t know business.

I’ll tell you – theses folks have got the highest mountain to climb, but they’ve also got some advantages in that they’re not tied down by an existing business. It’s great to have a business that’s making money, but a business can demand so much from you can’t see the opportunities that are right in front of you.

If you are in the situation of not having a business and not knowing much about the Internet, I firmly believe the #1 way to maximize your economic potential today is to master the Internet marketing basics. Once you do that, you can literally go to any business, any industry, any field, and become a player almost overnight.

Why? Because even at this late date, only a small fraction of business people really appreciate and understand how to use the Internet as a business and marketing tool. As you mentioned, most of them put up a website – it’s a brochure – and they think they’re done. They’re missing 99% of the game.

So simply by educating yourself in Internet marketing basics – and I’m talking about basics here. I’m not talking about some elaborate, post-graduate, MIT, Ph.D. course in E-commerce. I’m talking about just learning the basics. You’d be amazed by the mileage that you can get from the basics.

For example, I started putting on public seminars again after taking a long break from it. Nearly six a year. We put on a lot of seminars back in the mid-nineties, but my other businesses got so demanding, I just dropped them.

In 2002, I started offering seminars again. In spite of all my background, as far as the market was concerned, I was starting from scratch. Internet pioneers knew me, but new people didn’t know me at all.

With nothing more than e-mail and a web site, we built a new business that makes … let’s just say I would not be embarrassed in any setting, with any group of people about how much money I make. And I’m just using the most fundamental tools.

I don’t have any secret techie tricks up my sleeve. I have my ability to write, and my ability to craft offers, my ability to build, and a website to take orders.

My big advice to beginners is to realize that this is a business of fundamentals. If you master the fundamentals, you’re 95% of the way there. You’ll have a foundation that will allow you to leverage yourself into really almost any situation you can imagine.

Obviously, always be working on improving your selling skills. Always work on creating better ad copy. These are tremendously valuable skills. Learn how to work with lists. Learn how to use an auto-responder. Learn how to get a Web site up, whether you do it yourself or find a reliable vendor who can do it for you. It’s not rocket science.

One other very important skill to master is to learn how to use the Internet to find opportunities. This is one of the most overlooked features of the Internet.

In the old days, market research was a real bear. Days and days in the library just to investigate one idea. Testing even the simplest idea could set you back thousands of dollars.

You don’t need to do any of that anymore. You can sit on the Internet and Google ideas.

For example, the other day I discovered that – believe it or not – chocolate fountains, of all things, are all the rage.

Ken McCarthy:

In the old world, you’d have a bowl of melted chocolate, and you’d stick a strawberry or whatever into it. Now they have these new devices that pump the chocolate up so that it flows down like a fountain. If you want to cover a strawberry in chocolate, you stick it into this little ever-flowing waterfall of chocolate.

I didn’t even know such things even existed until I happened to stumble on one on the Internet.

Within minutes – and I’m not exaggerating here, just minutes – using some of the tools I teach, I was able to determine how much search engine traffic there is for the term “chocolate fountain”. I was able to identify all the players in the field and what their offers are. I was able to figure out what it’d cost to get a visitor to my site to sell him or her one of these things, and I was able to pencil and paper out a business strategy, almost as fast as I’m explaining the process to you right now.

Oh, and I was also able to begin to source wholesale and below wholesale sources of chocolate fountains –

Ken McCarthy:

See. I may ultimately decide not to go into that business, but – from the comfort of my own home, without spending a nickel, in about 15 minutes I was able to get a complete business snapshot of what’s going on in that market and start to think of ways I could enter it.

I have a lot of opportunities on my plate right now, but if I were running an opportunity deficit, and I were looking for a opportunity, here’s how I’d analyze it.

My first question always is this: is it a big enough market to bother with. This one clearly is.

My next question is: Who’s already in the market? How smart is their marketing? This is where knowing your fundamentals comes in. Because I know my fundamentals inside and out, I can size up potential competitors very fast.

I can tell if someone knows what they’re doing and taking advantage of all the marketing tools that are available or if they’re just stumbling around. Obviously, I’m looking for competitors who are weak.

Funny, we just did our big event – The System Seminar, it’s our big annual conference and I get home, and I’m reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, coincidentally, they happen to be running long articles on entrepreneurship – small business entrepreneurship.

The stories they recounted sounded to me like horror stories. A guy has an idea. He mortgages his house.

Ken McCarthy:

He borrows $100,000 from relatives. He gets his prototype made. He goes to Bentonville, AK and on bended knee, and begs Wal-Mart to carry it in a few stores. And Wal-Mart says sure, but you have to provide it for three cents a unit. And not only that, you have to do all the work to drive the people to the stores. And if it doesn’t sell, it’s “game over.”

I’m thinking, this is murder. What a horrible, stressful, low probability way of succeeding in business. It’s just not the right way to go about it. Yet, when you go to the business schools, or you read magazines or newspapers, the models they always present are novices who bet everything on one idea that by its very nature can’t be tested until you’re fully invested.

You don’t do that in the Internet marketing world. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.

You can do your research fast. And if I wanted to go into the chocolate fountain business for some reason, I’d be able to put a page up in an afternoon. I’d be able to buy some traffic and see right away: Is this a promising market? Will I be able to tap it?

I would have my answer in a matter of days for maybe a couple of hundred bucks, tops. I would not have to mortgage my future and bet the farm on an idea that won’t give me any feedback until I’m three or four years down the line and so deep in it’s do or die.

I am completely oriented to the small guy. What I call the bootstrap entrepreneur (a term I coined, by the way.)

Even though I’ve dealt with big companies, like Netscape, and NEC – my passion is small business.

I’m a small businessperson. I love small business. I love the idea of taking nothing and turning it into an income. The Internet is the best tool that’s ever come down the pike for doing this. I can’t imagine it getting any better. And this is the right time to get in because the market’s big, the tools are simple. It’s basically all laid out for us. If anybody reading this is waiting for things to get easier – don’t.

As I mentioned, I host an annual seminar for Internet marketing pros called The System Seminar.

This year we had 23 expert speakers, and we had 25 specialized workshops. This is primarily for people who are in the business, they’re already making money, and they want to make a lot more. They want to go from $100,000 a year to half a million a year, or they want to go from half a million a year to a couple of million a year. They want to really make their next big move. Tuition is reasonable, but steep. For people who miss the early bird deals, it’s $4,995.00.

We also have a home study course called System Smart Beginners. It’s specifically designed to convert absolute newbies into well-grounded Internet marketing pros in 30 days or less.

Ken McCarthy:

I know that sounds amazing. And it’s a fact that the longer you’re in the business, and the more experience you have, the better you’ll get, but when it comes to learning the fundamental skills you need to have to start making money – there really are only a handful of things you have to master. And those are the things we focus on in the Smart Beginners program.

I created this course with two of my students who personally made the transition from zero to successful Internet marketer.

They reminded me of all the things that they had to learn to make the leap, and I added my experience and my insight to the mix, and we laid out a very, very simple course that literally takes you from zero – you can know nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, not even know what e-mail is – and by the time you’re done, you are good enough to walk into any business situation and bring major value into it based on your Internet knowledge.

If people want to know more about this, they can go to http://www.smartbeginners.com – and find out more about it.

It’s a very interesting deal. Like all things that are sold this way, we guarantee the course, and you can keep it for up to a year. If it doesn’t do what we promised, by all means, return it. I don’t need anybody’s money who is not happy. So you can work with it for a year at my risk.

I really think, though, you should jump into it right away and really work it for 30 days because the sooner you get into it, the sooner you’ll start seeing results.

The other thing that’s interesting about this course is that, when you buy it, you’re basically creating a bank account with us for the same amount of money.

Here’s what I mean. The course is $495 and when you buy it we open an account for you for $495.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, and you might want to go further – specialize in a particular area - we have a lot of specialty courses, or you might want to come to our annual conference – there will be $495 is in your account with us that you can apply to any purchase from us in the future.

Also getting System Smart Beginners makes you eligible to become a member of The System Club. The System Club’s a pretty elite thing. You won’t see it advertised anywhere. It’s not something that’s open to the public. It’s primarily for graduates of the System Seminar and other top players in the Internet industry.

Our members are phenomenal. We’ve got $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 a year producers as our members. So it’s a great organization to network with people on all different levels of Internet marketing. One of the only ways to be eligible to join the System Club is to have either attended a the System Seminar, or to gotten the System Smart Beginners home study course.

So, there are lots of good reasons to look at System Smart Beginners.

Ken McCarthy:

Well, you know, I am a writer first and foremost. If anybody ever asks me what do you do, I say primarily I’m a writer, but – and then I throw in all the other stuff I do.

When I was just out of school, I lived in a one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a five-floor walkup on the Upper West Side in one of the old slum buildings that still hadn’t been renovated. I forget the dimensions of the room, but I would be shocked if it was much bigger than 12 by 12. No air conditioning, no elevator, bathroom in the hallway.
I was on the meal-a-day plan.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write. I loved writing and I didn’t care what it was going to take. I was going to figure out how to support myself as a writer.

The thing that allowed me to move to the country, and have a nice place to live, and a business that lets me to do all the wonderful things I’m able to do now is that I took my writing beyond writing, into the arena of business – specifically marketing and, very specifically, copywriting. I want to really encourage everybody out there who is a writer. If you’re working towards being a copywriter – keep at it, because it’s a fantastic skill to have.

And I want to recommend one more thing.

The next step is to start your own business using your copywriting skills. For me, that’s when things started firing on all eight cylinders.

You’ve learned how to sell. You’ve learned how to market. You’ve learned how to write copy. Now use the skills that you developed to build a business of your own.

And the Internet – I’m telling you guys – once you learn the fundamentals, you’ll be stunned at how easy it is to take an idea and use your writing ability to build a lucrative business around it.

Ken McCarthy:

You’re exactly right. Internet marketing really is the moonlighter’s dream. And by the way, I want to say something. I encourage people to keep their jobs and start their business on the side. You know, there are many times in my life when I was getting started when I’ve worked an eight-hour day at a job, and then I’d come home and work an eight-hour day in my business.

Now, that’s not even necessary anymore because the Internet’s simplified things so much, but if there is a period when you’ve got to work a job and develop your business, do that, I want to encourage you to do it. You’ll never regret it

The day will come when it doesn’t make sense for you to go to work anymore. When it’s too expensive for you to go to work because what you put into your business is paying you so much more. That’s when you say to the boss, hey, this has been great. Thank you very much. I’m a free man now. Bye. {Laughter)