Your,Web,Business,Worth,300,Mi DIY Is Your Web Business Worth 300 Million Bucks?

When starting a new work at home business it is very easy to become consumed by it. We spend so much time trying to get the business up and running that we may end up becoming burned out and lose our motivation. There is so much to learn and Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in

Probably not, eh? To tell you the truth, neither is mine.(Yet.) But let me tell you about one that is.Mirabilis. (Means "wonderful, notable, or remarkable")Mirabilis was purchased in 1998 by AOL for around 300million bucks. Mirabilis was a small business with only onesoftware program, but it was worth millions to America OnLine.So what was Mirabilis' software?ICQ.ICQ (I Seek You) software, as you probably know, enablesanyone on the Internet to engage in chats or to personallycontact anyone else who is online at the moment and a userof this software.The most interesting part of the story is that Mirabilisdoesn't sell ICQ software. They give it away! For free! Itis available to anyone who wants it. All you have to do isgo to their site or a multitude of other sites and downloadit.As a matter of fact, Download.com reported that for the weekof January 27, 2002, 1,044,176 people download ICQ. Andthat's just from their site!That means that by providing ICQ software for free,Mirabilis receives over 1 MILLION new contacts for theircompany through Download.com alone.What if your Internet business could get just one tenth orone hundredth of those results? What if you could receivejust 10,442 new contacts weekly without having to spend apenny in advertising? Would that help your bottom line?(Duh!)Mirabilis is an Internet success story if there ever wasone. They can also be an example of success to us in our ownonline businesses.Although there are lots of web marketing techniques (ezineadvertising, banner ads, Goto.com, et al), the most cost-effective marketing is free advertising.The absolute best thing that you can promote online issoftware. It is the easiest thing for any small business toget involved with and possibly achieve the proverbial"overnight success".Think about it for moment. What does absolutely everycomputer user need? They need software! What has made BillGates the richest man on the planet? Software! If you own acomputer, you buy software!However, writing software may not be your cup of tea.Perhaps staring at thousands of lines of programming codefor hours on end doesn't appeal to you. No worries. You arein good company. It doesn't really appeal to a lot of otherpeople (including me) either.The product that runs a close second to software isinformation. Information can have a high value and islow cost to produce. Information can sell for 10 times ormore its cost to produce an distribute. People don't payfor the number of words you write. They pay for the valuethat the information represents to them.Now, with the Internet, you can sell downloadableinformation products. You can set up your site so that whensomeone orders online the product is immediately madeavailable to them for download. Your customers don't have towait days to receive their products. They can have them NOW!The Internet is the greatest instant gratification machineever invented!The value of downloadable information sales doesn't end herethough. By offering the information online, it makes it mucheasier to update your products and it eliminates potentialshipping problems.One advantage of electronic information products is that youcan use a downloadable information product as a freebie onyour site to constantly attract thousands of new prospectsfor your paid products and services.Follow the example that Mirabilis has set: create a freeinformation product and offer it to thousands of webmastersto use as a lead generator for their own businesses.You can come in contact with thousands of potentialcustomers every week while these webmasters are generatingadditional leads or even sales at their site using yourinformation product as a free bonus. It can be a Win-Winsituation for everyone involved. The webmasters win byadding more value to their sites. You win by being able tocontact more potential customers.Nearly 35% of our current business is still being generatedby our free information products that are being given awayon hundreds of sites. It has turned out to be the mostvaluable promotion we have ever done.What does this mean for you? It means that you need to getto work ASAP producing your own free traffic generator foryour site. Create something that your prospects would beinterested in and offer it for free from your site. I havetested many different free traffic generators and none ofthem have even come close to the results produced by thisone.What information products to offer? Free eBooks, while sopopular as to be ubiquitous, are now so commonplace thatthey're losing their effectiveness, much like banner ads,whose clickthrough rates have dropped 1600% in the lastcouple of years.An emerging promotional tool that bears investigating is thee-seminar. Article Tags: Information Products