Why ER Still Doesn’t Have an Internet Marketing Program
It was just before lunch when I saw Stephanie, our marketing intern, angrier than I’d ever seen her before.
She had just stormed out of Michael Masterson’s office. “What happened?” I wondered.
“I spent a month working on this thing!” she told me. And now it’s all gone to hell.”
“S&%#!”
I felt really bad. It was all my fault.
You see, a month earlier, Stephanie had brought me a new “Doing Business on the Internet” product to look over.
“We’re thinking of recommending it to ETR readers,” she said. “What do you think?”
I spent about an hour studying it. The author had very good credentials. And the course was packed with information. I’m not an expert on Internet marketing per se, but the course was filled with buzz words that I recognized – like “viral marketing” and “Web optimization,” and so forth. I told Stephanie I thought it would be fine.
And that’s where I made my mistake. Because I never asked Michael what he thought. Michael and I share many views about business and are almost always compatible when it comes to making decisions. But he has actually overseen hundreds of millions of dollars in Internet business, whereas I have been pretty much on the sidelines.
When he saw the course that Stephanie brought him, it took him five minutes to toss it back at her.
“There is nothing in this course that I know to be true,” Michael told her. “I don’t trust it, so I’m not going to recommend it.”
“But you don’t know that it’s wrong,” Stephanie countered.
“Yes, but our policy is to recommend only products that we know, from our own business experience, to be truthful and valuable. This doesn’t meet that test.”
Stephanie was devastated, so I went in to talk with Michael and try to convince him to at least test the product.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to me. “You’ve seen tens of millions of dollars worth of Internet business transacted since you began working with ETR and the Agora Learning Institute. Right?”
I agreed.
“And in that time, have you ever seen us use any of the ideas this course is talking about?”
“Well, no…. but…”
“But, nothing,” he said.
“Bring me a program that we know works. Bring me a program that you can feel 100% confident will work for ETR readers. Bring me a program that gives the ordinary amateur… the regular guy without a lot of money, with no expertise, and with very little marketing knowledge… the tools he needs to get in on the Internet bonanza.”
“But…”
“We did that, didn’t we? We started ETR from scratch… on a budget of less than $2,000… and now it’s a $3 million business. Isn’t that so?”
“Well yes, but…”
“And you’ve seen what AWAI has done and what so many of the other companies we’ve worked with have done… dozens of ventures, each making millions of dollars. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Well…”
“Right. It tells you that we have to find a program that tells all our secrets… all the specific tricks and techniques we’ve learned. A course that our readers can understand immediately, put to use immediately… get going without spending a lot of money. Yet one that will give them a good chance of making it big.”
“Okay. We’ll get on it.”
This was late in 2004 and, once again, Early to Rise still didn’t have an Internet marketing program to recommend. We kept looking, but every time we found one and asked, “Would we actually do this ourselves?” – the answer was “No!”
And that’s when it hit us.
In just the past six years – while dot-com companies were failing left and right, while Internet “gurus” were popping up everywhere and handing out all kinds of bad advice – our parent company (our very own company!) had quietly made nearly $200 million on the Internet. When this current year is in the books, we’ll have reached almost a quarter of a billion dollars in sales online.
It had been sitting there all along, right in front of our faces:
- We’re the ones that know Internet marketing better than most of the so-called experts.
- We’re the ones who’ve flown in the face of the flashy trends and instead stuck with our unique (but solid) marketing techniques that just plain work, Internet or otherwise.
- We’re the ones who actually know how to make millions on the Internet. (2002: $27 million. 2003: $49 million. 2004: $65 million. 2005: $80 million projected.)
And if you think those numbers are only possible because we started out as a large “brick and mortar” company, just take a look at what a few of our individual “intrapreneurs” have done online in the past few years:
1. One former product manager applied our Internet marketing strategies to a line of health products that quickly grew into a $35 million a year business.
2. An assistant editor, making $19,000 a year at the time, used these same techniques to start and grow his own division. And in just a few short years, he built an Internet business that made him a millionaire.
3. While working for us as an intern, a former college philosophy major used our formula to market financial information over the Web. Just last year, his business generated $5,000,000 in profits.
4. A colleague and close associate of ours applied our model to his business – increasing his subscriber list to over 1,000,000 names… and more than doubling his profits.
5. Another colleague earns a multiple six-figure income from an e-mail list of less than 7,000 names – proving that you don’t need tens of thousands of names to make a fortune online.
Since we realized that perhaps the most successful Internet marketing “program” in the world has been sitting right in front of our faces all this time, here’s what we’ve done:
- We’ve spent the past two months reviewing all of the best Internet marketing successes in the company, laying out exactly how and what made each one work. We then honed all these techniques into an easy-to-follow cash-generating system – just like the $10 million+ systems used by the five people I just told you about.
- We’ve turned that system into what is pretty much a turnkey program that you will be able to use to sell just about any product or service online.
- We’ve lined up some of our in-house marketing superstars and asked them to tell you their stories of how they did it – and show and explain exactly how you can do it too.
If this no-B.S. plan for making serious money on the Internet sounds like something you might be interested in, there are two steps you should take right now.
First, go ahead and make a note on your calendar for May 24th. That’s the date of our first-ever Internet marketing teleconference, where we will give you more useful information about Internet marketing than you’ll ever get from 99% of the books, seminars, and programs out there.
Listen in on this teleconference, and you’ll find out how to market your own products the same way we market ours. You can reserve a space for this one-hour event for a token fee of about $20.
The second step you should take is to make another note on your calendar, this one for July 22-24 when we’ll be hosting an extraordinary 3-day seminar near our corporate headquarters in Baltimore.
On that weekend, a small group of future Internet marketing geniuses (you can be one of them) will be learning the ropes – live, in-person, and hands-on – from some of the top master marketers at our company.
We have never done anything like this before. But it’s the only way we can in good conscience (and with Michael Masterson’s approval) finally present an Internet marketing program that we are proud of.
It has to be, as Michael demands, a program that we would actually do ourselves. And it has to provide huge and genuine and unique benefits to everyone who participates in it.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s almost like we’re “giving away the store.” But, of course, we’re not going to be giving it away. In fact, the Baltimore seminar is going to be top-shelf all the way. That means expensive. (But I think you’ll agree that it will be well worth it to learn from real people who are really making millions of dollars themselves.)
One other thing…
Many of the folks from our company who will be presenting at this seminar not only will be giving up their weekends but, more importantly, already have their own million-dollar businesses to run.
So I’m telling you in all candor… we may never be able to talk them into doing this again. In fact, we had to call in some pretty hefty favors to get them to agree to doing it just this one time.
We’ll give complete details on the Baltimore seminar at the upcoming teleconference. But if you are even thinking about reserving a space for Baltimore, you should do so now. ETR goes out to over 400,000 people. And while we are expecting (and are prepared to handle) a huge turnout for the teleconference, the exclusive in-person Baltimore seminar will be strictly limited to only 100 attendees.
If you wait, it could be sold out before you even have a chance to register. So your best bet is to call our Customer Service Executive, Charles Delvalle, at 866-565-1117, Ext 1.
I’ll be listening in on the teleconference, and I’ve already made plans to fly up for the Baltimore seminar. After all, I wouldn’t mind building one of those $10 million Internet companies very soon myself.
(I’m so sure this is going to be the most valuable weekend of my summer that I begged my Aunt Eleanor to change the date of our big family reunion. It was scheduled for the same weekend. She did. Thank you, Aunt Eleanor!)
It’s been a long time coming, but very soon now, we’ll finally be able to say, “Yes, ETR DOES have an Internet marketing program.”
And you can be sure it will be the best one out there.