Want to prepare for a good start
to internet success?
Don't make mistakes up front!
I did. Free report on hosting realities.
Author Dr. Werner Stürenburg
 |
Will you profit from this?
Start reading and see if you can profit. If you do, print it or save it to
your disk: This report is long. It may cost you too much if you pay for online
access. You will learn not only about hosting. You will learn about design,
ftp, cgi, and, what's more, you will learn about yourself.
What do you want?
What kind of a web user are you? What are your expectations? At which of
my landmarks will you rest and be content? What will be your choice? Will
you have to make your own experiences or will you be able to profit from
mine?
Starting as a newbie
I'm on the net since February 1998. That is just half a year as of time of
writing, a long time in internet terms. I had some knowledge of PCs and software,
even made some Compuserve experience back in the eighties, but after all
I had found out so far, I was extremely critical with respect to the Internet.
Determined to make money
And, what's more: I had some time but no money, certainly no money to loose.
On the contrary, I had to make money and was determined to find out if the
net was the place to do serious business.
Lots of experiences to share
I will tell you some of my experiences in detail as I hope you will profit
greatly from them. And I think you will learn a lot about web design, too,
as many things are not done right even with professional looking sites. You
will detect all the common mistakes yourself every day when you have read
this article.
AOL to find out
I did some research up front, but nobody could give me valuable advice. I
was on my own. So I started with AOL. They had
a starter kit, some 50 hours free, they had 2 MB for a homepage. That was
twice as much as I could get with other providers, but what's more: They
got 2 MB for each user name admissible, and they grant 5 of them. Kind of
confusing, I don't understand their policy to this day, but anyway: That's
a total of 10 MB free with the standard package.
10 MB homepage
Now is that much? How much do I need? Can you use all of this space from
one account or will navigation be troublesome for the visitor, switching
between 5 sites? I talked to a former employee who had set up a site two
years ago, but he did not know either. We figured out how to possibly do
it, and it worked.
My first site
I am no longer working with AOL, but you can still see it
here. It was my first site,
and it turned out that I needed more than 10 MB. Not everything was wrong
what I did there, many things were fine, but I sure made a lot of mistakes
which you can still see as I abandoned it as it was. I redid the whole site
at a different place, and you can even see the AOL heritage at this new site
from the queer directory structure originating from the 5 user names. I will
tell you in a second about my second site.
Hours sum up fast
AOL was fine. Why am I no longer there? Well, it was a great place to start.
Those 50 hours were not too much - when I had used them up, I barely had
a valid impression of the net.
Said employee had decided to change his provider, from being charged by the
hour to a flat monthly rate. This is a good point to see how drastically
my estimation changed: I could easily figure out that if I would surf for
more than 6 hours per month, AOL would be more expensive than the independent
provider.
Wrong estimate
I had no idea how much time I would spend on the net. I thought it would
be far less than 6 hours. So I stuck with AOL. The fixed rate is the equivalent
of $ 19.95, and this small amount seemed to be too much a risk for me back
then.
Really expensive
Now when I looked at my AOL account the first time, it read $ 66, and half
of the month was yet to come! Now this was really expensive! The very next
day I switched over to the independent provider. I did never regret that
decision.
A place to learn from mistakes
I did not cancel AOL, so I still pay my minimum of $ 4,95, just to not frustrate
people who might have bookmarked my page or find it through a search engine.
But I guess, no one will visit this place anyway. Maybe you will to learn
from my mistakes if you go
there.
Proud of my first site
When I set up my first site, I used frames, javascript, sound, background
images, animated gifs. The animated gifs were slide shows of sculptures,
no gimmicks, and they still make great sense. The overall impression is stylish
and professional. The frames have no borders, and with a 17" PC monitor no
scrollbars (both common design flaws you see very often, giving an awkward
impression). It supports switching of languages, has an index and a site
map, features not found normally on homepages. There are no superfluous images,
at least I thought so (I was wrong, but it took me a long time to realize
that).
Background lesson
The background images ease the overall impression, plain colors are really
hard and harsh (another common design flaw), and I learnt to set the background
color to a middle color of the background image to avoid hard switching of
color values when the background image is finally loaded and displayed (very
common mistake). Some backgrounds are quite dark, generally they are only
slightly textured to support easy reading, a technique I still use today
(choosing wild backgrounds is another common mistake).
Index and site map
But I have dropped sound altogether. Why did I implement it in the first
place? I installed an index and a site map to give some orientation in this
huge site with 900+ files. This is rather unusual and was really hard work
to develop, so I looked for ways to inform visitors to not have the effort
be overlooked. You can use blinking text, but that is really bad style.
Alert the visitor
I worked out this sound thing to inform the visitor without doubt, if only
he had a sound card and not sound turned off (oh, could also be he needed
a plugin for his browser so I even took care for that), wasn't all too easy,
you see, spoke some words to inform the visitor, was proud of it, and found
out later that others only have trouble with it.
May I talk to you?
Sure it is fine to hear the author talk, that's just as much information
as an image of the author, both of which are usually missing, so it could
be advocated even if it takes up considerable amount of bandwidth and time,
but I did not realize the actual costs.
No sound, please
One day I went to my printer to see how things look on a Mac. Now I was surprised
that the background image did not look like marble, rather like tiles, but
what was really frustrating was: The Mac realized that there was sound only
to come up with a message box to tell it could not play it! Hell no!
That was a lesson indeed. I was granted another one. Surprisingly, I only
made acquaintances with Americans, so I realized soon that I had to translate
at least some of my texts. I had some poems, too, and I was not quite sure
if I got the poetical images correct.
Give me feedback
So I asked a Californian web
friend, a 70 year old lady, to proof read it. And she told me she could
not even read it nicely, having a 13" Mac monitor. Reason was I put everything
in frames, fixed their width to get it look nicely on my 17" PC monitor,
which forced her to scroll tediously back and forth.
First browser bugs
The reason I resorted to that technique was that I hit upon bugs in the most
eminent browsers, Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. I wanted images
to align right. When resizing the windows, there were serious errors. I can
show you the professional site of the largest museum in Duesseldorf, Germany,
showing exactly that error. You can't read the text, the image floats on
top of the text.
It's on the Mac, too
Hence I resorted to frames to fix that bug. Really big mistake. I should
have let the images align left to get around this bug, but I valued layout
higher than functionality (another common desig flaw). The Mac showed this
same error with Netscape even with the frames trick. Now I spent these endless
hours in front of my machine to get it right only to see that another system
spoiled everything. A very basic lesson.
Top rule: KISS
Also my friend had troubles using those frames, and told me that one of the
first rules she learnt programming html was KISS, keep it simple stupid.
(It's a good rule for just about everything, not just html programming.)
My first shock
Now I was deeply shocked. I had spent some 2 months of hard work, produced
around 950 files, hence had a complex site management, supplemented with
an index resulting in some 40 plus pages when seen in WinWord, only to find
out that I had overdone the whole thing! But there was more to learn.
Geocities
In the meantime I found out about
geocities, one of many sites giving
you free mail services and space for a homepage. Back then they gave 3 MB,
and I used that space to set up an entry page for American visitors offering
them a choice of languages first.
No large image on the entry page
On that entry page I put an image of a painting
and an animated gif of a turning sculpture. I would not do this anymore.
The visitor has to wait too long to see what's offered. In fact there are
few clues as to what awaits him. And the search engines get no clues either
from those images. But I was proud and didn't know better. See the
entry page of this site to find out
how I improved.
Page here, image there
I used this space for a second purpose, too. I told you that I ran out of
space with AOL. I tried to deposit a large animated gif (sculpture with 5
side views) there and read it from the page located at AOL. I had no idea
if that worked. It did. You even don't realize that the sources of this page
lie on different servers in different states, maybe even continents. See
for yourself, click
here! You'll
see a frame with three windows, lower left some thumbnails, right an animated
gif, everything is on AOL except the gif which is on geocities.
Distribute your workload
That's internet. Things work so fast, you can compose your page of just about
anything located anywhere. I don't know if anybody else does it or if it's
common practice. I didn't need it a second time either. But if you run out
of space somewhere, you know what to do: Get yourself space somewhere else
and that's it. Nobody will find out if your pages are located at your main
site. This could be especially handy with images, as they really take space.
If you are looking for free space,
email me. There is
plenty available.
Counters and guestbooks
I was proud and thought I was ready to go. I did have lots of trouble with
cgi programming. CGI is usually not possible with providers like AOL. But
counters and guestbooks are not available without and much sought after,
so AOL eventually provided these. It took me much time to get it working.
And when I had it, I switched to geocities. Same thing over there. But totally
different. Had to work through all this stuff again to find out how they
did it. And I did not like it the way it looked. I had figured it out so
nicely with AOL. No use any more.
No real CGI
To be sure, you generally can't use CGI at these places. They provide some
single prefabricated gimmicks you can't alter the way you want. Either take
it or leave it. And if you need more than that, you're done. You can't have
it there at any price.
Counters on business sites
I wanted to do business and thought you ought to have counters and guestbooks
at least. But I wasn't finished with AOL yet when I realized that actually
counters are not supporting my interests. Whenever I enter a site with a
counter, that counter gives me some clues to the success of that site. Especially
if the counter is low. In this case it is most likely accurate. If it is
ridiculously high, then it's faked for sure.
Invisible counters
But if you really want to know don't tell your visitor! Use an invisible
counter instead. At least with AOL there was an option to write the counter
to disk and call it from some secret page the address of which only you have.
You can set up counters for all your pages, and read them all from one secret
page.
Quantity vs. Quality
I didn't take the pain at all. I don't care how many people visit my site.
It is not the quantity but the quality that counts. I'm in for business.
I'm interested in revenues. If there's 100,000 visitors not buying a thing
I'm done. If there's one visitor buying for big money I'm fine. Same in everyday
life. People crowd museums. If they'd crowd the galleries alike, the galleries
would be in deep trouble. All those people don't buy a thing but have to
be watched at. Same with guestbooks. Boost my ego only, seduce to answer
an entry merely wasting my time. Too many people out there to cope with.
FTP - a must
Both providers had mechanisms for file upload, too. Well, that sure was a
drag! It didn't take me long to realize that I had to get me a power tool
for that. People recommend WS_FTP throughout, but I found it clumsy. I tried
several others, there are lots out there. Kind of work to find the right
one, most are just a nuisance. Finally I found a shareware program which
was really fine.
Shareware woes
I used it long enough to witness trial time expire. I paid and got a registered
licence. It did not work anymore. I asked for support. I got none. Really
nice! I decided to forget about that in order to not increase loss. Don't
even remember the name of the program.
Really great software
Started looking for another ftp client a second time. Found
FTP Voyager, tried it, was pleased.
Trial time expired, I bought it. They upgraded twice in the meantime, I was
pleased. Use is very comfortable and easy. I was delighted. Then I got a
problem. Investigated it, thought it was my fault. Finally decided it must
be their fault. Was really angry in the meantime. Called for help at last.
Great support
They responded immediately, solved the problem at once. Now imagine how I
was pleased again! Highly recommended. If you do serious work you
will need a good ftp client. Take this one. I'm biased only by good experience.
ASCII mode
The reason of my troubles was easy. You'll have to learn this too, so I better
tell you here. If you want to use CGI and have a professional provider where
you can do it, you will upload for example Perl scripts. They won't work
if a) they aren't marked executable (can be done nice and easy with FTP Voyager)
and b) if they aren't uploaded in ASCII mode which does some translation
of line feeds / carriage returns. Now I had to turn this switch on and left
it turned on all the time.
Compressed images
When uploading images however, this proves to be fatal. Why? You will use
gif or jpg format for images. Anyway, images are bits and bytes like anything
with computers. If you change something in there what happens then? Especially
with jpgs which are compressed and have to be decompressed when shown.
A mistake made visible
If there is a byte changed by the upload process (which is the case with
ASCII mode) and this byte is by chance sitting right in the middle of your
image through compression then you can guess what happens if that thing is
decompressed! Awful images, really damaged. You can see the pixel where it
goes wrong, and then it only gets worse. Once you have understood what happens,
it is no problem to fix it. Uncheck ASCII mode and that's it.
Promote it or die
During this little time span of 6 months there was a considerable shift in
rating of search engines. I bought Jim Daniels' book Insider
Internet Marketing. There's a whole bunch of tips and strategies related
to search engines. Tons of advice. Highly recommended. Recently Jim
declared he gave up the battle with search engines and this was the best
decision he ever made. I agreed.
Search engine race
When I finished my first site with AOL, I thought I'd done it and was ready
to promote. I didn't know how to do it and didn't want to waste my time,
so I paid some $30 for a service to do it for me. I never knew if this investment
paid off. I tried some time to catch on with discussion of search engine
ratings. I quickly gave up. You can do something useful for search engines
but I agree with Jim, don't fool yourself into their game. It doesn't pay.
Geo Plus
When I switched to geocities, I was ready to spend more money. 3 MB were
by far not enough for me as I knew by now, but for another $ 4,95 or something
I could get 15 MB and additionally get rid of their advertising. Geocities
isn't really free, nothing is really free, in most cases you pay with advertising
opportunities. They use your site to advertise for themselves and others.
I didn't want that. I wanted to do serious business. Times changed, now you
get 6 MB "for free" and 25 MB for fee.
Domain names
At that time, geo had a new offer, and I used it right away. I had learnt
already that you got to have a virtual domain name if you want to signal
business on the web, and I realized that the price was small (I had expenses
of $ 20,000 a month offline, so I was used to bigger numbers). It dropped
since from $ 100 to $ 70 for 2 years - if you really mean it get yours soon!
And think about a good name! I choose art-joe.com, and I'm not really happy
with it. But I could not think of something better yet. If you got one and
want to see if it's free for you, click
here.
Does this site sell?
I rewrote my first attempt, added some more files, ended up with more than
1100 and 15 MB. I got rid of all frames except where absolutely feasible,
realized that this site was far too big to be practical, developed three
tours: small, middle, large to give people a chance to work their way through,
translated some more, then finally gave up. I realized that this site would
never sell.
Is it obsolete now?
Consequently I did not even promote it. It is a good
personal site, you can read lots of things
if you want to, you can see lots of images, too, but you probably wouldn't
give it a try. I developed something new. I had learnt a lot, and that was
it. Well, not quite. With my new site, I refer frequently to this one. There
is lots of material to be used otherwise when appropriate. Would only clutter
my new site if included. Is best left here. You see, nothing is really lost.
But the price to get there might be too high. I had no choice. You can learn
from my experience.
Email address
When I joined AOL, I faced the option to leave them. So I got me an additional
independent email address very soon and used that. In case I had to leave
AOL I would have no trouble with my email address. This was a wise decision.
I choose a German service and found that
they prosper, struggle with growth problems, fight spam, but they seem to
be reliable. I even got several addresses there.
Mail program lessons
AOL has its own mail program and browser. You have to take them as they come,
and they are not the best. You can't get your AOL mail into an independent
mail program. I didn't know what I was into. I got an inquiry from a
visitor of my guestbook, he
asked about painting his plane. I told him where he would be better off,
dropping a note that my father flew during WW II. He asked me to send some
pictures. I did and informed him how to proceed to view them, having experienced
all kinds of troubles with AOL. He replied he could see them in his mail
without any effort. This was the first lesson. Not all mail programs are
created equal. (Later he urged me to put up a site for my father.
I did. You can see
that I got rid of the navigation icons on that page as he had problems with
them - here I learnt my lesson with icons.)
Mail future
I use Netscape Navigator as browser, am content with it and haven't found
anything better. They have a mail program, too, and the same applies to it.
I tried others, but they could not convince me although I know that there
are fanatic fans to each of them. Netscape invented html mail which is a
natural thing to do. I publish several html newsletters and guess that this
will be the future just as the web was the future of the internet, the latter
being text only.
Mail servers
When I abandoned AOL as a mail server to send and receive mail from, I had
to make my choice. I could have used my local ISP. I didn't know. I choose
geocities. I thought they would be reliable, having a base of 1,5 million
customers then. Now they have over 2 million, and I had to first change to
a different outgoing mail server, then incoming, too, because of problems
not tolerable to serious work. I'll tell you in detail because I was warned
and did not realize I was in real danger.
Fighting spam
I don't consider spam that much of a problem personally. The delete button
is handy and fast. But geocities has got problems like all others, too. Imagine
not getting mail form a friend because he's on Yahoo and your mail server
doesn't accept Yahoo as an anti spam rescue! Now you see why spamming is
really dangerous. They clog your mail server and innocent people suffer.
Geo introduced a better method, but made mistakes.
Identify yourself
The idea is this: To send mail, you got to get your mail first, so they know
you are a legitimate user. Then you can send your mail. I had to test things,
sending mail often, and it did not work. I had to fetch mail 4 or 5 times
before I was able to send once. That's why I switched to my independent mail
provider to send from there. But they got spammed, too, so they introduced
the same measure. But it works as it should, so that's ok.
Losing mail
If you want to do business on the net, mail is an important tool. You can't
afford losing mail. This is what I experienced. I read about it in Jim Daniels'
book. He advocates a Plan B, to be executed when the unthinkable happens:
Your system breaks down. Nice to read. Won't happen to me. Well, I have to
confess: It did. In fact twice. But I didn't wise up the first time.
Lost without service
The second time it hit me really hard. I realized something was wrong when
I fetched mail and got the message: no new mail. Funny. I get around 100
new mails daily, so this was unusual. When it kept saying this all day I
knew something was wrong. I found out they keep messages 7 days only. Well,
I haven't been able to retrieve my mail within this time span. There is no
support, no help, just volunteers, and those got no means to get to their
system. Never do any mail business with a low cost provider.
Newsletters
If you want to do business, you will probably want to issue a newsletter.
You'll find valuable advice at Jim Daniels' book. I even invested much more
money in Corey Rudl's
course. And as was to be expected, I got more for my money also. Highly
recommended, too. I'll tell you more later on. I set up my newsletters
manually at first. Big mistake. Corey told me so. I didn't believe. Cost
me lots of extra work.
Corey's advice
Corey holds that you should invest your time and effort in marketing and
automate everything else. I didn't listen. Some have to learn the hard way.
I regret I ever did think about doing it manually. Happens all the time.
Got a mail today of a seasoned expert in newsletter moderating telling me
he sets up a new newsletter manually. Ok, none of my business. I tested several
mail programs to ease my workload while doing it manually. Stuck to Netscape.
Drowned in work. Finally switched to automated service. Sigh.
Next commercial project, next big mistake
I got a domain name all right with geocities, but they actually fake. If
you look at your browser, you can see my geo name there. I did not like this.
The next project ought to be a database system, I had to have database support
which you can't even get at geo's. I learnt enough to look for my first
professional ISP.
Strong guarantees worth nothing
I invested time and energy to find out I was going to make a contract with
a company having the strongest guarantees and best technical support available
at really amazing prices. I should have been warned, though. I was hooked
by the low price. And victim to fraud thereafter. I won't publish their name
here, though. They got to have their chance, too. If you want to know to
protect yourself, email me. I'll give you details.
Another small business
They have lots of information at their site, done quite professionally. I
did not investigate thoroughly. On the entry page they boasted to support
MySQL. I did not read properly. I was looking for mSQL. Before contracting,
I asked for database support. The sales person answered, but short. "Do not
expect us to support. We don't know." I knew myself, so this did not seem
to be a problem. Well, it was. At least I should have realized that the statement
from the front page was blatantly false. The lied to make business.
Database support
Later it took me some time to find out that they did not mean mSQL but MySQL.
The support person I wrote to did not even mention the difference, maybe
did not know either. After this first obstacle was overcome, I wanted to
create my first database. Big troubles. Turned out only they can do it. That's
all right, they should have told me. Would have saved me hours. So this person
did it. I could see it. The database was set up. It was not the only one.
I wanted to start working with it and realized I had to supply username and
password. Nothing unusual about that. Only that I had no password and username
other than that of my site. And that did not work. I asked for it. They never
answered this simple question. I don't understand to this day. I was completely
stopped.
Clues overlooked
I went outright furious after a week. The boss took care personally, as it
turned out. Guess his name! Murphy! I only realized I knew 3 persons by then,
the sales person, the support person, now another. This last person never
answered any question. I felt fooled. Nightmare. When I had another look
at their site, I found that they had a forum and I was not the only person
complaining. I witnessed a downtime of at least 10 hours. I complained. They
admitted to have taken the server down for 2 hours. I would have accepted
that if they would have announced it. I did not realize I was deceived all
the time. I found the personal page. They stated to be a 4 person company.
The boss was studying, trying to get his degree next year. Furthermore it
turned out that they charged me twice. I raged, but nothing helped. They
didn't even answer my mails any more. They manipulated their system so that
I still could enter my control panel with the supplied password, but telnet
and ftp did report "wrong password".
Report to fraud
Finally I reported to the Anti Fraud
Society, but they only acknowledged to have received the report. I tried
to get my money back at least. Turned out that my Credit Card company would
not and could not do it. They advised me to call the ISP. They had their
phone number on the receipt. It was a fax machine. I found a number on their
web page. It was an answering machine. Now turn this horror movie off, please.
Next host, getting better
I was not cured yet. Fortunately, or better: Unfortunately, the project did
not succeed anyway, so financial loss was limited. I had another project.
I looked for the next host. I was not wise yet. I choose one that I am quite
content with. I experienced that management is totally different from the
first one. I did not need database support. I wanted autoresponders. They
supply 2 systems both of which have severe drawbacks so that I cannot use
them. I had several technical questions. They did answer, but not to my
satisfaction. I called them. There was an operator. I asked for the support
person. No problem. He was polite. Promised to help. He did. But he was not
competent. I gave up after a while. I realized I made another mistake. Some
people really learn hard. Seems I belong to them. But I wised up.
A recommendation
If you want to learn about a reliable, competent host, visit my page at
Virtualis. To inform
you about all there is to know click the following links:
All big guys recommend Virtualis. Virtualis is safe and reliable. No small
business. Professionals. Reasonably priced. Highly recommended.
Virtualis referral system
You can even earn money by
referring them.
Don't get confused about this. If you are a merchant you know that all costs
have to be calculated. Marketing and advertising costs have to be considered,
too. Nothing was ever sold just by its very existence. You got to spread
the word. This will cost you some money any way you do it. If you spend that
money on banner ads or offline ads or whatever, these costs have to be included
in the price of the product or service.
Commercially sound decision
Any referral or affiliate system does just this. It spends money necessary
to be invested for sales on real people like you and me, not huge organisations
like newspapers or tv companies. The advantage for the owner of the system
is huge. The money has to be paid only if a sale has been closed and money
has been earned already to pay from, not in advance disregarding success
or failure. So any of these systems are commercially much more sound than
usual marketing.
Image tips
To round up our tour, some more tips. Use images sparingly. Keep images small.
Use jpg mostly for images with the full range of colors, sizes can be adjusted
with good graphics programs like Paint Shop Pro through selecting compression
rate. You trade between size and quality. Most images will look good at 15
- 50 % compression. A monitor sized image should come around 150 KB at most.
Thumbnails 5- 10 KB. Thumbs must be sharpened to give a good impression.
Try sharpening anyway, most large pictures improve, too. I see blurred photos
often and sent their sharpened personal images back to several business people
- they were always delighted and thankful. I set the sizes of large images
to 480 pix max height and 740 pix max width to avoid scrolling with 800*600
setting.
Navigation by icons
If you compare my most current site with the last you will find that I have
no graphic navigation icons anymore. I was proud of them and invested much
time and effort implementing them, and it took me a long time to realize
that they are not useful. Why? Everybody uses them? Well, icons are signs
and signs are not self explanatory. That's why I felt obliged to add a legend
to the signs on one of the first pages. I did not realize that this indicated
a design flaw. If you have to explain something then this is overkill. Also,
the meaning of the right or left arrow with next or previous for navigation
was too narrow. I added "Alt" tags to indicate which page would be the next
or the previous in each case.
Images don't pay here
This was a lot of work, and what's more, you can't even see it. You have
to move the mouse over the icon and wait long enough that the hint will show
up. You will see images which are nothing else than text transformed to an
image everywhere to overcome these problems. They sure look swell. But they
cost a lot of work to make and a lot of time to load. There is no sense in
doing it. No visitor will come back for the navigation images. Everybody
will be glad to have easily readable links. Business advisors refer to sites
like Yahoo. Lots of traffic, no bells and whistles. Strictly business oriented.
They keep saying: This is what we do. What do you want? You get it. Click
here.
Page design
If you don't want to get into all that programming and design stuff, that's
all right. There are good reasons to do it yourself, but you don't have to.
There are good reasons to call professionals for help, too. Try
SasEz! Design, Tucson, Arizona. Tell
Kathy Burns I recommended her. She will be pleased.
Conclusion
If you know you want to do serious business, you will need the following:
-
flat rate dial-up service
-
professional host
-
reliable mail service
-
sound page design
and some more you can learn from Jim Daniels and
Corey Rudl. This is
one of Corey's famous banners (you probably saw them
before):
Well, Corey is famous, too. I just read an interview
with him where he confesses to make 2 million this year online. I hesitated
to buy his course, though. His copy was impressive 18 pages long, but the
course wasn't really cheap, some 200$. I was not ready yet.
30$ pay off
Instead, I bought Jim's book. Those 30$ would not hurt me. When I read the
first lines and pages, I thought I wasted my money. I knew all this from
free newsletters and the like. But the more I read the more I realized that
this book was in fact more than I could expect. Good buy indeed! And certainly
well worth the money. You won't regret the expense. Jim delivers to his promises.
Jim Daniels
Jim is a famous person on the net as I know now, he has proven very early
that it is possible to quit your 9-5 job for work at home. Millions are dreaming
to do the same. He shows how. He writes very interesting and delivers fresh
ideas every week with his
free
newsletter. I am very impressed by Jim and have even adopted his style.
This report is modeled after his.
Corey delivers more
When I realized that this buy was great, I wondered if the investment into
Corey's course would turn out equally sensible. Now if you plan to buy I'll
have to warn you: Take a week off to get the time working through it. It's
not a small book like Jim's. It's two large spring covers plus several diskettes
plus an audio cassette.
Take your time
I did not take the time and got stuck after a third of the volume: Corey
stuffs you with that many ideas and experiences and tips and tricks you will
jump and start your thing - which is what I did. Now I'm in a race and can't
afford the time to finish my course. Got to find a way, though. He energizes
you, you feel strong after a few lines, it's amazing!
Selling products or information
The main difference to me aside from shere volume between Jim and Corey is
that Jim sells his experiences whereas Corey sells products. If you got a
product like me Corey will give you more hands on experience. If you ain't
got a product, no matter, you will be experienced in some field. Both Jim
and Corey market experiences, too, Corey's course is experiences put into
a product just as Jim's book is. Jim holds that selling experiences or
information, as he puts it, will be a major industry these days.
You can make money, too
So whatever it is, you may already have something to sell. If not, both help
you with affiliate programs. There is an interview with
Corey and a
review by Allan Gardyne, owner of
AssociatePrograms.
By the way, I got one, too.
Promote my free journals with a banner and you'll profit from every purchase
your subscriber does in any future (you can do some more, too, if you wish).
I even got a free journal on marketing art. Subscribe
here. My Affiliate Program
is listed with
 and
 , rated best by the latter,
unrated yet by the former.
Email me
I hope you enjoyed my report and did profit a lot. If you got any questions,
don't hesitate to email me personally:
ws@art-joe.com.
I'll be glad to do my best to help you get along. I experience help on the
net all the time. I'll pass it on to you.
Truly yours
 |
Dr. Werner Stürenburg |
PS: Here are more tips on PCs and the web.
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