How to Earn $24,000

lars' worth of stuff is being sold on the Internet, or about how the Internet is changing the world—yadda, yadda, yadda—let's just cut to the chase.
Let me show you the money ... or more precisely, the e-money.
In this chapter, I describe how, using the principles in this book, I earned almost $100,000 cash in only 24 hours using the Internet. Then I will show you how you can do exactly what I have done. Does that get your heart racing?
In my previous three New York Times best-sellers, Nothing Down, Creating Wealth, and Multiple Streams of Income, I've helped thousands of people to achieve financial freedom—even to become millionaires and multimillionaires. Now it's your turn.
Your Next Fortune Is Only a Click Away
Although I've been in business for over 20 years, I was slow to adopt the power of the Internet to market my own seminars and information prod-ucts. I wasn't alone. Even today, tens of millions of businesses, small and large, still haven't tapped into this power. For me, it took something dra-matic to open my eyes.
In the fall of 1998, a friend, David LeDoux, called excitedly to tell me how he had stumbled onto an interesting method of marketing using the Internet.
"Bob," he said, "I made $13,000 in one day!"
I was intrigued. "How did you do it?"
"Rather than tell you, let me show you."
A few days later, sitting at the keyboard of my home office computer in San Diego, California, David explained how he was attracting visitors to his recently launched Web site. Many of these visitors registered for his free Internet newsletter. After only a few short months, he managed to accumulate about 1,500 subscribers. Every week he sent an e-mail to his growing list of subscribers sharing his latest research. In each e-newsletter (called an e-zine}, he included advertisements for other products or ser-vices. He explained that because the e-mails cost him almost nothing to send, the sales he made were extremely profitable: "Let me show you how it works. Right now, before your very eyes, I'm going to make some money for you."
Yes, he had my attention.
Using my computer, he composed a short e-mail message. It read something like this:
asked me to verify the exact time. Then he sent the message to his 1,500 subscribers. I had no idea what to expect.
Sixty-one seconds later, the first response arrived. Ding! (Does your e-mail make a sound when you receive a message?) This first response included a full address and complete credit card information. Over the next hour, as David was trying to explain to me the benefits of marketing over the Internet, I could hardly pay attention. I just kept listening to the sound of each e-mail response—Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Hundreds of dollars of orders. I was amazed. In front of my eyes, with very little market-ing cost and almost no effort, he had generated a tidy profit for me.
But it wasn't the instant profit that excited me. It was the potential for huge streams of cash flow with almost zero marketing costs. Do the math with me.
Suppose you want to market a $100 audio program in the bricks-and-mortar world. You rent a mailing list of 10,000 target prospects, create a direct mail letter, and pay for postage. All told, it will cost in excess of 50 cents per letter just to drop the letters in the mail. In other words, it will cost a minimum of $5,000 to mail 10,000 marketing pieces.
However, the response rate through direct mail is usually less than one-half of 1 percent, which means that these 10,000 letters may generate only 50 paid responses. Fifty customers at $100 apiece is $5,000—just enough to recoup your mailing costs. There's no money left to pay for the tapes, the packaging, and the postage to send the product to the customer via snail mail. You've lost money!
Now, let's assume we do the same mailing using the Internet. This time, however, instead of marketing an audiocassette program, we offer a package of powerful information—digital special reports, digital books, even digital video and audio in a powerful multimedia presentation. Since the information is digital, it can be delivered over the Internet instantly at almost zero cost. Now let's send 10,000 e-mails to a list of targeted e-mail prospects assuming the same one-half of 1 percent response rate.
We generate the same 50 orders at $100 apiece, except this time the marketing costs and the product costs are nearly zero. The entire $5,000 in proceeds is almost pure profit!
Did you get that? Let's do a profit and loss statement for our new Internet business:

Marketing costs 0
Product costs 0
Shipping charges 0
Credit card charges 5%
Profit 97%
Now, let's think big. If 10,000 e-mails generate $5,000, then 100,000 e-mails produce $50,000, right? And a million e-mails could generate a $500,000 profit! Talk about a bottom line! What if you did this once a month? Heck, once a week?! Now you can see why I was so excited.
I began immediately to develop my own Web site. After several false starts, we finally launched www.robertallen.com during the first week of August 1999. Using various methods (which I'm going to teach you), during the next nine months we gathered an opt-in list of over 11,500 subscribers to my free Internet newsletter. (Just to set the record straight, I don't believe in sending unauthorized e-mail, or spam, and nothing I teach you will resemble anything illegal, immoral, or in violation of the spirit of the Internet.)
People often say that those who ask for free information are not willing to spend money. They're just "looky-loos." This is generally correct. The vast majority of the "free" subscribers to my Web site are not willing to spend a penny on any of my products or services. They are perfectly con-tent to sample my free offerings. However, I also know that if the offer is right, a small percentage of any interested audience (free or paying) can