My first experience with the online community which now uses the name “Internet Marketing” was in 1998.  Here was a thriving community of Internet businessmen who seemed to know all of the answers.

I quickly learned that 99% of the rubbish being spouted by this “community” was just that… rubbish.

They were talkers, not doers.  They had no idea if what they were teaching actually worked.  They were just “learning” from each other and then “teaching” the same old rubbish that nobody had ever tried.

However, I did meet a few of the 2% crowd who were actually making a living on the ‘net.  They weren’t doing much better than I was at the time.  Most made less than $100K/year, but that earned them bragging rights to speak at all of the seminars where they made 80% of that $100K/year.

Over the years, many of them graduated to legitimate millionaires.  Most of them were forced to stop hanging out in the same areas of the Internet where the rubbish was being taught for a very simple reason.

They either had to teach that same rubbish or they had to teach what actually works and become ostracized by the community.  It was interesting to watch that evolution.

Some of the rubbish seemed to stick with the crowd who graduated though.  They didn’t know because they had never tried the opposite.

I didn’t often hang out with that crowd, but I recently realized that something had “stuck” in my brain that just wasn’t true.

I was taught to avoid catalog sites.  I was taught:

1) Products should be sold on a sales page on a dedicated domain.

2) Never confuse or distract the prospect by showing them another product.

Of course we were also taught that you needed multiple products and back end sales to make a successful Internet business.  That’s true.

It is even actually true that distracting a customer with multiple products on an order page is a bad idea, but that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that you shouldn’t have a catalog site.

I came to this conclusion the hard way.  I was following a method taught to me by the predecessor of this newsletter (someone near and dear to many of us) and had a blog on the home page of a site of mine.

I was following Aaron Brandon’s advice of using iframes to test the optin form and other areas of the blog.  I even had mini sales pages in the upper-right corner of the blog being powered by TestiVar in iframes.

I finally asked myself the question about whether I should even have a blog on the home page.  I used a frame to find out.

I thought about all of the alternatives:

1) A blog using something other than Wordpress.

2) A random sales page of one of my products.

3) The most popular sales page.

4) A catalog of my products (which we were taught was wrong)

5) The most recent article from the blog.

6) An email signup page for a free report.

7) An email signup page for a free product.

A primer showing how each product should be used in a business and what order to purchase them in.

9) Some other options.

Guess what won?

That’s right.  A catalog site won!

Having a list of products pointing to their order pages won over every option I could think of testing.

It’s obvious once I saw the results.  What are we doing here?  We are trying to sell products.  How is a blog going to sell products better than listing the dang products and letting people get to the sales pages?

Duh!

Then as I optimized the catalog page, I found a few more “duhs” as I found what format was more popular.

TestiVar started showing pages that looked more and more like Amazon.com as the testing continued with variables like background color, page style, logo size and location, pictures or no pictures, fonts, etc.

In fact, one day I woke up and it looked a lot like Amazon.com.

It has since shifted away to a more clean look than Amazon.com, but the basic format is still the same.

In fact, as I looked around at ALL of the most successful sites on the Internet that sell things, I noticed the exact same format.

Look at these sites:

http://www.Walmart.com

http://www.Target.com

http://www.Amazon.com

http://www.Ebay.com

Even new successful web 2.0 sites that don’t directly sell things get in on the act.  Check out this site:

http://www.Allvoices.com

Do you see the common parts of the layout?  The common elements including a signin link, a register link, small logo in the upper/left of the page, a completely white background (at least in the middle of the page), pictures along with text in lists or groups of blocks, etc.

These sites have a ton of testing behind them.  They are all “catalog” sites.

How could we have believed this huge lie from the gurus?  Of course catalog sites work.  Every major site that sells things on the ‘net is a catalog site!

Ideally, you should always pay employees out of profits in your business.

To do that, you must have a profitable business.  That creates a bit of a catch-22, but only temporarily.  The catch-22 can be resolved by working in your own business if you don’t have a source for seed money.

To have a profitable business, you must have:

a) At least one product to sell.

b) A method of generating traffic to your product sales pages.

c) Effective sales pages for each product being sold.

You can generate the procedures to create products, generate traffic and improve sales pages in one of several ways depending on how much seed money you have:

1) You can develop the procedures yourself.  This costs only time.  It has a disadvantage though.  Once it is profitable, it still may not be profitable when you turn it over to employees.  Often employees are less productive than you are although that is not always the case.  Sometimes employees will be more productive than an entrepreneur.

2) You can hire employees and assign them the task of creating profitable procedures.  Only one of our staff has done this successfully, but it appears to be the absolute fastest way to a 7 figure income.

3) You can purchase procedures that are already proven and implement them in your business system.

You get a head start with proven profitable procedures.  You can then make changes to suit your own desired business model and the software checks to make sure your changes will be as profitable or more profitable than our own model.

That’s the best way to get to profitability the fastest way possible.  Start with someone else’s proven and already profitable business system!

Stop Spending Money And Start Making Money With Your Own Internet Business Starting Right Now… 100% Guaranteed!