Business Building Basics Ebook

(PDF Transcript)

How To Build A Super Successful Internet Business One Step At A Time

Business opportunity seekers run after the next new business fad, while business developers build their successful businesses on solid principles. Prepare yourself for a solid plan for success from one of the internet's premier developers.

Terry:
Hi! You're listening to Terry Telford from thebusinessprofessional.com, and today we're very fortunate to have Mike Filsaime with us. Mike's been online basically since 2002, and he really knows how to build and run a profitable online business.

Today, Mike's going to take us on a step-by-step tour of the business building basics, starting off with the development stage and the concept of how you come up with an idea to go ahead with, right up to the marketing side of things. Before we begin though, I'd like to say thanks very much for taking the time to be with us today, Mike.

Mike:
Terry, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.

Terry:
Thank you. Maybe we can start off, Mike, and you can tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up getting where you are today.

Mike:
Okay sure. What happened was, back in 2002, I was the sales manager for a Toyota dealership - we were a large volume Toyota dealership - and I was doing a lot of training for the organization. At that time, I was doing some surfing on the Internet trying to find some free resources that I could put together, print out, and make a guide for the training classes that we were going to be holding for the students.

I was working on this for about three weeks, and everyday, with all the spam you get, whether it's "You won the lottery," or porn, or the secrets to wealth, or whatever, I just kept seeing the same thing come to my inbox at MSN. It kept saying "The secrets to online profits" and I'd delete it and the next day it'd be there again and I'd delete it and the next day it'd be there again and I'd delete it.

One day I looked at it, and there was a little image in there of a guy with his hands in the air. I still remember it today because I copied the image and used it when I tried to get online. I clicked on it, and it went to a sales page, and it turns out it was Frank Kern's, "Instant Internet Empire" which was very successful back then, but then it had a little problem, we won't go there. But, just to let you know the effect that it has on a non-Internet marketer when we see a sales letter like that, I actually printed it.

You know, we see these things all the time that say, "Print this page" and we never print these sales letters anymore. But at that time I actually printed it, and I don't know, maybe it was about 14 pages, and I sat on the floor and I read it and it said, "You can have your own website #1, you can have your own website #2, your own website #3, and then you get your very own copy of this site, and you can keep all the profits and all the videos to show you how.

I remember being so excited that I got up and said, "This is my chance to finally make it." I've always been that type of entrepreneur that always saw a little bit of opportunity, even when I knew it was too good to be true, and I wasn't afraid to try it.

I ordered it, and continued working at the car dealership. For the first four or five months online, being a real newbie, didn't know how to get traffic into my site, joined all the different traffic exchanges and stuff like that.

One day it hit me. One day I went to the site called autoresponseplus.com. And I have heard of these things called autoresponders, but I didn't really know what they were, I thought they had something to do with, someone clicks a link on your website and you get an e-mail. I didn't really fully understand how it worked and I thought it was just about sending out automated e-mail series.

I studied that page and there was something on the page that said, "The average person comes to your website 4 to 5 times before they buy, so you need to concentrate on capturing their e-mail and not making the sale." That was probably in... I started online in around October of 2002, and I would say that was sometime in January or February when I stumbled across Auto Response Plus.

When I installed that, that's when everything started to change for me, and I realized that I needed to be in the business of list building. So, my background was in the car business, and I just stumbled, by accident, onto Internet marketing, about two and a half years ago.